macbindle said:
It's been a tough month for him. Hes learned that he might be retrospectively declared winner of the '11 Vuelta...which if he had won at the time may have put him as leader of team in '12 TdF, which he would probably have won.. .giving him 5 TdF wins and putting him in the history books. Some may view his fate as natural justice, but had he got his names into the history books it would have sat very comfortably next to that of Miguel Indurain.
He is one of only 7 riders to win all 3 Grand Tours. His name would already be in the history books regardless. I don't think he would have got leadership over Wiggins in 2012, in fact, had Cobo not been there in the Vuelta Wiggins would probably have won it because the team would have subordinated the complete unknown Froome to a much more known quantity in Wiggins, who had at least some pedigree in difficult stage races with his (then) 4th at the 2009 Tour, 3rd at Paris-Nice and win at the Dauphiné, and after Froome ceded the lead to Wiggins on La Manzaneda they'd have been wary of him cracking again (because his form was a complete unknown, having not completed a grand tour for two and a half years).
I mean, as long as we're being conjectural, if he hadn't had the positive test at the 2017 Vuelta, he'd probably not have that position as one of the 7 riders to win all 3 Grand Tours, because he wouldn't have gone to the Giro in 2018... but then he would perhaps more likely have won a 5th Tour de France because he wouldn't have been going there racing both back to back.
But regardless of what happens, Chris Froome has a place in the record books. A large proportion of the fans right now do not treat him with the level of respect that his palmarès ought to command, and there are a multitude of reasons for that (many of them, but not all of them, at least partially justified), but unless something happens that necessitates an Armstrong-esque rewrite of the whole period of his success, when he's long retired and the circumstances under which he turned from barely even justifying the designation "also-ran" to "superstar" have been forgotten, and a whole new generation of fans have grown with the sport who never saw him when he was active or, if they did, only saw him when he was already a highly decorated superstar so either did not understand, or did not recognise, the howls of derision with which his every achievement were greeted by large sections of the fanbase, people will just look through the records of stage races and Grand Tour winners, and see Froome's name crop up throughout the 2010s, and simply list him as an all-time great the way we rattle off the list of names of people we never saw race and whose exploits have long been romanticised, as people disappointed in the current spectacle often do with the past, remembering the good bits and forgetting the bad.
I don't think Froome will ever be loved or lionised in the same way as, say, Coppi and Bartali were; I don't think - unless something terrible happens, which I hope it doesn't - he will be romanticised and his flaws airbrushed away like we've seen with Simpson or Pantani; his personality (and more so Brailsford's) doesn't lend itself to the kind of mythologizing we've seen around Indurain. There are perhaps fewer fantastical exploits that fans will regale younger viewers with in generations to come than his peers who've won all 3 GTs (Contador and Nibali)... but he does at least have one - Jafferau (this was something that was perhaps missing from the jigsaw of his place in history - a signature ride that would hallmark his career; until then things like Peña Cabarga and Pierre Saint-Martin were the best we could point to - but with the Bardonecchia raid, even though from many quarters it was greeted with derision and as a great big FU to fair play, his supporters finally had that signature moment that they can point to in the same way, say, Contador's supporters point at Fuente Dé). Chris Froome may never fully succeed in convincing the entire fanbase that he deserves a seat at the pantheon of the legends of the sport, but to deny he has long since earnt himself a place in the history books is crazy.