Froome's Tour de France began under a cloud and only got worse

PAU, France — As the start of the Tour de France loomed earlier this month, Chris Froome, the four-time champion, was still under investigation after testing positive during last year’s Vuelta a España for an excessive amount of an asthma medication, which he is allowed to use at certain levels under a doctor’s prescription.

He was cleared to race, however, when the International Cycling Union dropped its investigation and the World Anti-Doping Agency concurred. But that may have been the last bit of unalloyed good news Froome has enjoyed this month.

As Froome has made his way down the Tour route this year, jeers have followed and signs attacking his Team Sky have popped up. In the most extreme cases, spectators have spat on Froome and his teammates, doused them with liquids, and attempted to punch them.

In a sport with a long history of doping scandals, many fans concluded that Froome escaped punishment because of his status within the sport and the costly legal defense provided by his team.

“What’s even more unfortunate is that this may be exactly what should have happened given the facts of the case,” said Travis T. Tygart, chief executive of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency. “But now an athlete is unfairly and publicly questioned without the details to show the decision was the right one for justice.”

Froome is also facing what may be the biggest sporting challenge of his career. He has yet to wear the yellow jersey of the Tour’s race leader this year, while his Sky teammate, Geraint Thomas, has been awarded the jersey after the last eight stages. It was widely assumed that Thomas would drop back and yield the jersey to Froome, the team leader, perhaps as soon as Friday, the last mountain day in this year’s Tour. Or, if not then, on Saturday during the first and only individual time trial of this year’s Tour.

But after Thursday’s stage, Froome is far from assured of his fifth Tour victory. At 65 kilometers, about 40 miles, Thursday’s was one of the shortest Tour stages, excluding time trials, in decades. But it was loaded with three mountain climbs, with the final one to the finish at Saint-Lary-Soulan said to be among the most difficult in France.

During the final 5 kilometers, Froome fell apart. His tongue stuck out at times and he was unable to stay on the wheel of Egan Bernal, the 21-year-old Colombian who was there as Froome’s assistant. Thomas, by contrast, showed no such weakness. Froome slipped from second to third overall, 2 minutes 31 second behind his teammate.

L’Equipe, the French sports newspaper, declared with many others Thursday that Froome was out of contention and that the contest was now down to Thomas and Tom Dumoulin, the Dutch rider who is in second.

If the lost ground wasn’t enough Thursday, Froome also had an unfortunate incident after the stage. As he was riding back down the mountain to the team bus while wearing a raincoat, a police officer, assuming Froome was a fan trying to enter the closed-off race circuit, knocked him to the ground.

Froome has managed spectacular comebacks before, however. In May, he came out of nowhere to win the Giro d’Italia in its closing phase. (The drama of that comeback also helped fuel skepticism about Froome among fans who have seen too many spectacular performances that proved to be a result of doping.) But Froome’s comeback, if one is coming, would have to happen Friday during a long and difficult mountain stage in the Pyrenees.

Thomas, who had been deferring to Froome as the team leader despite racking up the stage wins, shifted in tone during a news conference Thursday as he began talking about Froome as one of his support riders.

“Having Froome at my disposal, so to speak, is just phenomenal, but hopefully, like I said, he won’t have to do much anyway,” Thomas told reporters.

The disappointing race for Froome, and the suspicion surrounding him, comes on an anniversary the Tour organizers are doing their best to forget. Twenty years ago French police stopped Willy Voet, a trainer with the French Festina team, as he crossed the border from Belgium in a car that was a virtually a mobile pharmacy. The series of raids and arrests that followed nearly brought that year’s Tour to a premature close, and in some ways set up Lance Armstrong’s post-cancer return a year later — which was portrayed as a fresh start for the Tour — and all the scandal that eventually flowed from Armstrong’s dominance and doping.

It says something about the state of cycling that there is still a role for a group known as The Movement for Credible Cycling. In 1988, Roger Legeay, the group’s president and founder, was the head of the French GAN team, a direct descendant of the Peugeot team that was long considered cycling’s version of the New York Yankees.

Sky conspicuously does not belong to Legeay’s group, unlike seven of the 18 World Tour teams. But if Sky had been among its members, the group’s rules would have forced it to voluntarily suspend Froome until the cycling union released its decision.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.