The Road Beyond
‘Well you can run all you like but the rules state you have got to have your bike with you. He hasn’t got his bike.’
‘Well this I have never, ever seen before.’
‘Neither have I, but you’ve got to carry your bike, you can’t just go for a hike up the country lanes of Mont Ventoux.’
‘Well this is bizarre, this Tour de France…’
Paul Sherwen and Phil Liggett can’t believe their eyes: with just two kilometres to go until the Giant’s scree-slope finish, a TV moto unexpectedly braking causes Richie Porte, Chris Froome and Bauke Mollema to pile into the back. Porte is able to wrestle his chain back on while Mollema disentangles himself, but Froome’s bike is finished. And so he runs. And runs.
It’s an enduring image that has come to define the 2016 Tour and yet Froome’s mad dash had no direct impact on the result – the incident left the general classification in such a mess that race officials took the leaders’ times at the point of the pile-up.
As we know now, Froome would go on to win his third Tour in emphatic style and Sky would cement their position as the dominant team of the era. And the Émosson Dam? It would appear later in the race on Stage 17, slipping in and out of view, a backdrop to the action as Katusha’s Ilnur Zakarin soloed for 6km to take his first and only Tour stage win, crossing the line near the dam’s edge.
The shimmering lake looked quite pretty in the aerial shots, even with a cavalcade of team buses parked along its wall, yet
