Here's the thing: Froome will never, ever win the hearts-and-minds battle.
And that hurts him. To an extent that's what yesterday was about: this is the first time we've really seen Froome win anything racing from a position of weakness - he's always raced from a position of strength, being the best rider in the race and on the strongest team, laying down a marker early and then controlling everything thereafter. That's always been the Sky way, back since they first started having successes - it was the best way to succeed while Wiggins was leader, and Froome has inherited that template. In fairness, however, if you look at 2008-9 in that Astana team, that was more or less the way that Alberto succeeded, not so much in 2007 as he was still fairly unknown, but if you look at the Vuelta in 2008 and the 2009 Tour, the only intrigue was really created by the fratricide going on within those Astana teams. But ever since then, Alberto hasn't had the best team at his disposal. In 2010 he was still strong enough to get the results with the less strong but still sturdy team he'd assembled with guys like Vino and David de la Fuente alongside his usual running buddies for the mountains, but since then we can safely say that Froome has, almost at all times, had a greater domestique corps at his disposal, and so racing from the front has meant we've never really seen Froome race from behind, and those few times we had have been almost without exception the most interesting races he's done and a far greater proportion of the races won by Froome have been those classed as dull.
Another factor is, Froome just isn't fun to follow. He doesn't cut a very likable or sympathetic figure, he doesn't come across as very personable in interviews, his team is both a lightning rod for fans' disappointment at racing spectacle and associates him with a number of other unsympathetic characters, like a well-oiled collection of obvious movie villains - you've got the calculating bald boss with the slimy media talk, you've got the Orwellian Newspeak PR department, you used to have the po-faced Aussie career criminal, but his part in the parade of villainy has been taken on by the larger-than-life Italian thug. And that's without Froome himself, or the legions of fans who continue to parrot the team's PR and try to fix and contort reality around a story that will exonerate their man.
Because the problem is, while it will always be on his CV, so to speak, Contador's clinic indiscretion is now a footnote. Yes, Andy Schleck won the 2010 Tour and Michele Scarponi the 2011 Giro. But he got a measure of redemption vis-à-vis racing when not on the strongest team or not the strongest individual, and adding an X factor to races because of his never-say-die attitude, the kind of thing that Froome has only done for the first time just now. But it's not like Contador originally winning the 2011 Giro did not raise eyebrows, and it's not like people didn't baulk at a guy who had a CAS case hanging over him riding like that. Froome has the same air about him at this point - he will always draw that criticism that he shouldn't be on the road right now even if he's legally entitled to be - but that's also a problem of Sky's malfunctioning PR department. And while Contador won that Giro in dominant fashion, that wasn't out of the ordinary at the time, as with Froome, but Contador dominated that Giro start to finish. We have grown accustomed to a more human, more flawed Froome in this Giro, only to then be bludgeoned over the head with possibly his most dominant performance of all time.
It's also worth noting that Contador's popularity, if anything, increased when he ceased to be as dominant; his popularity in 2009-10 was artificially inflated by the fact that he stood up to Armstrong in that 2009 Astana team. It was with the 2011 Tour and the Télégraphe attack, and subsequently the 2012 Vuelta, that his popularity really soared. Sure, he still had his fans long before that, but this whole "Contador is an X factor that adds to races" only really came about once he was no longer the dominant rider in the GTs and stage races and he had to seek other ways to win. Maybe that will happen in time with Froome, but I have my doubts, because he and his ongoing association with such an unlikable team (yes, I know Contador rode for Tinkoff) is just beyond the pale for many fans. But for one more reason, which is one he can't help and which is completely subjective, but for many fans absolutely is important, especially from a clinic point of view even though it shouldn't really be relevant to it - and that's that he just looks bad on a bike.
For many fans accustomed to aspiring to elegant, classical cyclists, his inefficient nodding-dog-on-top-of-an-egg-beater style, elbows akimbo and legs whirring jerkily while staring at the stem, is impossible to swallow, because how can we talk to somebody who is new to the sport, and show them a race, and when they ask "so, who's the best cyclist in the world?" have to say "that guy" and point to the guy who looks so inelegant, clumsy and uncomfortable in the sea of riders who look far more graceful and effortless? It's much easier to explain to somebody why other riders - almost any other rider with a modicum of success - are top riders. Look at Dumoulin's (or before him, Wiggins') TT position, effortless, without motion in the upper body, minimal frontal area, flat back, fluid pedal stroke - ideal. Our hypothetical non-cycling-fan friend could then ask "so why can that guy only just beat Froome, who's rocking from side to side with his knees out and his arms and back up like a spider raising its front legs?" and what can we say? Well, he's just got way more power, evidently, otherwise he'd be losing time hand over fist because they would be benefiting from airflow and efficiency of effort and so on. And it's interesting that it was the time trial position - which had that awkward constant shuffling of his position as he slid forward in the seat over and over - that attracted the most criticism about Contador. Look at Contador's, Quintana's or - let's be fair here - Yates' climbing styles (at least in punchy ascents in the latter's case), and our hypothetical non-cycling-fan friend could say "yes, these guys look like they're comfortable going uphill. It makes sense that they be among the best on a climb". And then they could marvel at the spectacle "ah, but they're losing time hand over fist to the guy who's riding with his legs whirring like a blender and jerking his elbows like he's doing an Ian Curtis dance - so why don't the others ride like that if it's so successful?" "Well, because it's far less efficient" "So if it's less efficient, why would they be losing time to him?" "He clearly has a lot more power than them to be able to overcome the discrepancy in the technique with the wasted motion and still be putting time into them". The hypothetical friend could then wonder, well, if Froome did ride in an efficient TT position, or if he climbed like those graceful pure climbers, just how dominant could he be, seeing as he's already the best and he's leaving all this potential performance benefit untapped?
For a new fan, these answers yield questions, but for experienced fans, they're just part of the price of admission. Suspension of disbelief is always an important factor for cycling fans, due to the long history of doping in the sport - and this is based on a number of factors. And one of these is the riding style as mentioned above. If somebody is beating a long list of former dopers, it's much easier to rationalise this if they are somebody who has been putting out incredible power outputs all through their life, and who rides in an efficient style that allows them the maximum transference of their power output to the road, or have shown great tactical acumen to outsmart the opposition. Now, Froome does not fulfil two out of these three criteria; his results were not sufficient for fans to rationalise him as a great prospect before his breakout Vuelta, and his technique appears at least on the surface to actually hinder transference of power output on the road, meaning his power output has to be higher than others just to match them, which then feels doubly strange when he is kicking them to all parts (especially here when he's been suffering for two weeks). The other one, I think he does just about fulfil; the fact that most of his victories have been predicated on a simple bludgeoning tactic: "have strongest rider in race flanked by strongest helpers. Ride on the front until everybody drops" have rather disguised the fact that he has developed a much stronger tactical mind than he usually gets given credit for - stages such as the Peyresourde descent victory or whatever that stage was he gained a few seconds with Sagan off the front in some wind show that he's capable of riding smart. But I'm not going to be praising Jafferau 2018 as a great tactical masterpiece of a stage in the same way as Piau-Engaly '99, Pajáres '05 or Fuente Dé '12, because it wasn't; those were the team and the riders outsmarting the opposition. Sky didn't outsmart the opposition yesterday, they just did their usual technique, further away. It was more like last year's Alto da Torre stage only Froome was solo rather than having a teammate; he won by being the strongest rider and riding away after the team dropped everybody else - he just had to do it from further away this time.
But the thing is, my hypothetical new fan there is naïve. They don't necessarily know anything at all about cycling, so they don't have access to a number of the external factors, some of which Froome has no control over and some of which he does, that also help explain fans' reluctance to take him to heart or give him the place in cycling's pantheon that his palmarès undoubtedly merits.
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