Team Sky rider Chris Froome said the 2015 Tour de France presented Wednesday "is about the mountains" and that he "could skip the race in favor of the time trial-heavy Giro d’Italia and the Vuelta a España," according to Gregor Brown of VELONEWS. Froome: "There’s no two ways about it, next year’s Tour is going to be about the mountains." The Briton and '13 Tour champion "is with Sky at a team building camp and did not attend the presentation in Paris, where organizer ASO presented a route with six summit finishes and only one 13.7-kilometer individual time trial."
Froome said that "the race suits Spain's Alberto Contador." Froome: "We’ll have to see who’s going to be there but I think Alberto Contador will be the man to beat."
Organizer Unipublic "has yet to present the 2015 Vuelta route," but RCS Sport revealed its Giro course on Oct. 6. Besides the "usual mountaintop finishes in the final week, it includes a 59.2km time trial on stage 14."
Froome: "The team and I will have to give it some careful consideration before we make any commitments to which of the grand tours I will compete in" (VELONEWS, 10/22). In Paris, Xavier Coffin reported that "in conjunction with the presentation of the route," French sport apparel company Le Coq Sportif unveiled the Yellow Jersey of the 2015 Tour de France. The color "remains the same, but the design looks different." In a statement, the brand said “it has been reworked to obtain a modern performance of the original 1975 jersey: a unique collar and shape dressed for the occasion with a watermark design of the Arc de Triomphe, one of the most famous Paris monuments which will welcome this summer, for the 40th consecutive year, the leaders of the 2015 Tour de France” (SPORT 24, 10/22).
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Source: ASO |