Originally Posted by Mark F:
“How many more can Froome win?
Where does he stand against the likes of Cav and Wiggins who are maybe more popular than Froome?
Well done to Yates - great achievement to be 4th in his 2nd tour.”
Wiggins stands out because he is the first British TdF winner. Something that Froome can never be. But Froome is the better rider, and so will ultimately be ranked higher in Tour terms when we look back in years to come. Although Wiggins has track credentials as well.
Cavendish is up there in the record books because of the number of stage wins, but of course he would never win the GC. Generally, most of the other top stage winners were also serious GC performers, which shows how great these others were.
I think ultimately it is GC performance that matters. The other jerseys and stage wins are "nice to haves", and help to keep sponsors and teams interested, but it is GC that rules.
Part of me thinks that more should be made of the runner up placings in GC, but I also realise that there are many potential GC contenders who do not get anywhere near the top of the GC standings simply because they have been sacrificed on some stages of the tour, used up in order to help the team leader succeed in GC. Also, they have treated time trials as a training ride only, in order to save themselves in readiness to help their leader on the hext day. So in any year, the final GC standing is still false in terms of the runner up places.
The same happens in the case of sprinters, where potentially good mass sprinters are relegated to being lead out men only and will never get the chance to win a stage.
This happens across the board - the best team (Sky) doesn't win the team prize because in concentrating on GC, their others riders are used up and then spat out of the back, and so a poorer team wins the team award.
Out of all the awards, GC and stage wins seem to be the most important. The polka dot and green jerseys are a little too false, IMO, contrived purely to add a bit of interest in the middle of a boring stage. I think they should try and sway the points in each more towards the finish of the stage, and less on the intermediate. (Just as an aside, I wonder if the scoring has changed over the years, as we don't seem to see GC winners picking up other jerseys, such as Eddy Merckx did, or is it just that Merckx was so exceptional?)
Edit. Just been on Wikipedia. Other than last year when Froome won KoM, Sastre was the last GC winner to win KoM, in 2008. Before that, we go back to Merckx. The scoring system does get tweaked over the years.