I was about to make a whole post in reply to Red Rick about how back in june 2019 when Froome had the crash there was kind of a power vacuum. And Froome was really the only available rider that looked like he could potentially challenge Ineos.
Then I looked it all up again and saw that Israel Start-Up Nation bought Froome after a disastrous 2020 where we had since seen the rise of Bernal, Roglic and Pogacar. Yeah that's a stupid bet.
Look, in hindsight it was - obviously - a bad bet.
I'm just saying it might have worked.
They spoke at length about it on the Danish TV2 broadcast today, with Rolf Soerensen making the interesting point, that for a GC rider the build back after such an injury is very difficult.
The point he made was, that after losing a lot of muscle mass (by prolonged inactivity), you need to build back all that muscle from the ground up (so to speak), usually by doing a lot of work with weights.
But doing that (while necessary for recovery) in fact makes you overweight (in terms of muscle mass) for a climber, so you then face a secondary long process of making your muscles "leaner", before you can even hope to reach your former level.
He pointed to Froome being a visibly "bigger" (in terms of muscles) rider now, than he was when he was at top level, as an example of the problem.
It's a specific problem to climbers/GC riders, because heavy rider types can "just" build back up from injury, and avoid the second part.