Tour de France 2017 Stage 12: Just when Froome thought he was out of the water

The tagline of the 1975 film blockbuster, Jaws, writes like this: “Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water”. In yesterday’s stage 12, it meant that you thought you had everything under control, and you realized you weren’t.

I like to think that the dinner table of Chris Froome’s team SKY was in a serious, panic mode. How could the yellow jersey lose 22sec in 300 meters? Why did Mikel Landa, Froome’s #1 domestique, did not wait for him? Landa came ahead of Froome by 17sec.

Well, to all those who thought that this Tour was going to be a parade to Paris for Froome, they were wrong and I was part of the “they”. There are three more mountain stages left, two of them will end in a downhill and only one uphill. SKY can probably neutralize the first two stages with downhill finishes but they won’t have control of the last mountain stage if Froome's shows up with the same form. SKY should pray that going into the final 23km time trial on stage 20, Froome should have no more than 45sec deficit to any of his rivals except for Rigonerto Uran, and that’s because Uran can time trial as well as Froome. SKY should pray that Froome had just an, "un jours san” and can take care of business.

Terrorism and the Tour

If there is any sporting event that is vulnerable to terrorism, its cycling. The 2017 Tour is about 3,500km long, and moves from one place to another every day. It’s like having a Super Bowl on a daily basis from different cities for three weeks. No security organization in the world can simply control the ingress of people who wants to be part of the Tour.

Tour security is managed by the French government, which in this years Tour, fielded 23,000 officers including forces on the ground and in the sky. There have been two recorded terror attacks on the Tour- one in 1992, when a car bomb was exploded during a prologue in San Sebastian, Spain and in 2007 when bombs along the race route was exploded. Fortunately, no one was hurt in both attempts. Both attacks were perpetrated but the ETA, the Basque separatist group that wanted to separate itself from Spain, but these days, the enemy comes from someone else and are more brutal and indiscriminate.

With a spate of attacks occurring in London, Stockholm, Berlin, Paris and Manchester, there has never been a time when security of the Tour security has been at its highest.