HOW TO PLAN A WIN
The stage victory of our times came on the 19th racing day of the 2018 Giro d’Italia. Saddle sores and indifferent form meant Chris Froome sat uncomfortably fourth on GC, 3:22 down on fellow Briton Simon Yates. Yates’s tempo, cadence and tactics had been metronomic. He was doing a Team Sky to Team Sky. Then with 80km to go, everything changed. Froome attacked on the hour-long climb of the Colle delle Finestre and, as the world would hear later, enacted phase one of the team’s threephase plan: destroy Yates. Phase two required similar treatment to Tom Dumoulin. As Froome flew, Dumoulin scrambled. Phase two complete. The third and final phase? Stretching the stage lead enough to propel Froome into the GC lead. As we know, he completed all three phases and with it his last grand tour triumph to date. The secret of Froome’s success? “When Chris does a big performance, he visualises, and he plans, and he thinks about it,” team principle Dave Brailsford reflected at the time. “He builds himself up emotionally. And on the day, he can go so deep, he can suffer so much, that it’s quite something.”
The team had recced Finestre the year before after being in nearby Sestriere to look at some of that year’s Tour stages. Froome and his
