Team Sky's Two Remarkable Riders
Updated: 4:42pm UK, Saturday 20 July 2013
By Paul Kelso, Sports Correspondent
When Team Sky was founded in 2010, Sir Dave Brailsford's stated ambition of winning the Tour de France within five years was greeted by the sound of people laughing behind their hands.
Some did not even both concealing their mirth.
A Briton, after all, had not won cycling's greatest test at all in its 97 years. Three years later, in the centenary running of Le Tour, a Brailsford Brit is about to win it for the second successive year.
There are many reasons for the British annexation of the Champs Elysees but chief among them is the presence in Sky's black-and-blue ranks of two extraordinary athletes.
The first, Sir Bradley Wiggins, was familiar to the public when he won the race last year having developed within the Olympic track team run by Brailsford.
He secured national treasure status a week later in the 2012 Games.
Chris Froome, who come sunset in Paris on Sunday night will inherit Wiggins's title, is a very different character, but his rise is no less remarkable.
Both men have been shaped by bumpy upbringings outside the UK, and both have lost a parent. But there are few other similarities, beyond the bikes.
Wiggins grew up in Belgium, close to cycling's roots, and endured the absence of his father who left the family having planted the seed of cycling in his son's head.
Froome was schooled in the sport as far from its European epicentre as it is possible to imagine.
Born in Kenya to English parents who separated when he was just 11, he learned the sport riding with a cycling club founded for poor black Africans.
It was an early lesson in self-sufficiency that has served him well throughout his career.
His peers and teachers at boarding school in South Africa talk of Froome's fierce motivation, and hours spent on the rollers in his room hammering out static miles that laid the foundations of the astonishing strength and determination we have seen this last three weeks.
He ploughed a lonely furrow, struggling to find a professional berth in South Africa and then in Europe before his talent and promise was spotted by Brailsford, who signed him up to his formative team.
That came two years after Froome's mother Jane died from cancer.
His formative years did not leave him with the purest technique. While Wiggins's flat back and languid leg strokes seem to eat up the miles, Froome strikes a hunched silhouette.
It may not be pretty but it is just as effective, particularly in the mountains that have punctuated this ferociously tough Tour.
It is arguable that in taking victory in this of all years Froome has demonstrated that in the Grand Tours at least, he is a superior performer to Wiggins.
There was evidence last year, which Froome spent as Wiggins's super-domestique, leading him up the most testing climbs and, notoriously, suggesting at times that he had the team leaders' measure.
This year there has been no argument that Froome is the strongest man in the field, and certainly his own team, which has been a shadow of the devastating black road-train that propelled Wiggins to yellow last year.
His strength in the mountains has left rivals in awe, in part because he has often had to defend the yellow jersey above the tree-line alone.
The defining stage came a week ago on Mont Ventoux, when Froome rode away from the peleton and his rivals with a superlative display of climbing.
It was immediately hailed as one of the great stage wins in 100 years of the Tour, and more immediately consolidated his grip on the yellow jersey.
He has not looked like relinquishing it, not on the double ascent of Alpe D'Huez last week or the final mountain stages on the road back to Paris.
On Sunday he will find the Champs Elysee en fete and ready for a floodlit firework celebration of the world's greatest bike race.
And its champion will be a Briton so good even the most partisan Frenchman will have to applaud.
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