Today we take another look at some of the main participants in this years Sports Personality Of The Year 2015.
TYSON FURY
Tyson Luke Fury is a
professional boxer who fights at heavyweight. In November 2015, he defeated
Wladimir Klitschko to become the WBA, IBF, WBO, IBO and The Ring magazine
unified heavyweight champion. Fury was subsequently stripped of the IBF title
for choosing not to fight their mandatory challenger, Vyacheslav Glazkov, upon
agreeing to a rematch with Klitschko.
Having initially been denied the opportunity to fight for
Ireland at the Olympic Games, he was permitted to represent both Great Britain
and Ireland after tracing his family lineage to relatives in Belfast and
Galway. Fury has represented both England and Ireland as an amateur, winning
the ABA championship in 2008 before turning professional later that year.
Currently undefeated, he is a two-time former British and English champion, a
former European, Commonwealth and Irish heavyweight champion, as well as a
former WBO Inter-Continental and WBO International heavyweight champion.
After winning the world titles he was nominated for the BBC
Sports Personality of the Year 2015 shortlist, but attracted significant
criticism relating to statements he had made which were considered sexist and
homophobic.
Background
Born and raised in Manchester, England, Fury was born into a
family of Irish Traveller heritage. His paternal grandfather was from Tuam,
County Galway, which is also the birthplace of his father John Fury. His
maternal grandmother is from County Tipperary and his mother was born in
Belfast. His family has a long history in boxing; his father competed in the
1980s as "Gypsy" John Fury, initially as a bare-knuckle fighter and
unlicensed boxer, and then as a professional boxer. He is a cousin of Irish WBO
Middleweight World Champion Andy Lee He is also a distant relative of
"self-styled King of the Gypsies" Bartley Gorman. His father named
him "Tyson" after then-world heavyweight champion Mike Tyson. In a
double international duel against an experienced Polish team in 2007, the Irish
team lost 12–6 overall; Fury, however, was victorious in both his fights in
Rzeszów and Białystok. In another Irish match against the US, Fury won his bout
by knock-out. He won a bronze medal at the AIBA Youth World Boxing
Championships in 2006.
In May 2007, he won the EU Junior Championship representing
England, and later lost to Maxim Babanin in the final of the European Junior
Championships. As a junior, he was ranked number three in the World behind the
Russians Maxim Babanin and Andrey Volkov, but lost out to David Price for a
place at the Olympic Games in Beijing representing the United Kingdom.
Price was chosen for the 2008 Olympic team ahead of Fury due
to Olympic rules restricting each country to one boxer per weight division.
Fury also unsuccessfully tried to qualify for Ireland, and attributed his failure
to qualify for the Olympics as his reason for turning professional, instead of
waiting for a chance that might not have come in 2012.
This win gave the 24-year-old Fury a world ranking of 7
according to Boxrec,
Haye negotiations and fallout. Fury was due to fight David Haye on 28 September 2013.
However, Haye pulled out of the fight on 21 September after sustaining a cut,
which required six stitches, above the eye during training. The fight was
originally postponed to 8 February 2014, however, Haye was forced to pull out
of the fight with a career-threatening shoulder injury, and hinted at his
retirement.
Fury vs. Chisora II and Hammer
Fury was due to fight rival and heavyweight contender Dereck
Chisora for the second time on 26 July 2014. However, on 21 July, Chisora was
forced to pull out after sustaining a fractured hand in training. Belarusian
Alexander Ustinov was lined up as Chisora's replacement in the bout scheduled
to take place at the Manchester Arena, Fury pulled out of the fight after his
uncle and former trainer Hughie Fury was taken seriously ill. However, Fury and
Chisora rescheduled the rematch for 29 November 2014; Fury won the rematch.
Fury then went on to face Christian Hammer on 28 February
2015, and also won the fight when the fight came to a halt in the 8th round via
RTD.
Title showdown with Wladimir Klitschko
In July 2015, it was confirmed that Fury would take part in
a World Heavyweight title showdown with Wladimir Klitschko for WBA, IBF, WBO,
IBO and The Ring Heavyweight titles. Although the fight was meant to take place
on 24 October 2015, Klitschko sustained a calf injury and so it was put back to
28 November 2015. For this match, he trained together with the highest ranked
heavyweight kickboxers in GLORY, Rico Verhoeven and Benjamin Adegbuyi.
The fight took place in Düsseldorf, Germany, with Fury
winning after twelve rounds by a unanimous points decision, with scores of
116–111, 115–112, 115–112. On 8 December 2015, the IBF stripped Fury of his
title after he had signed a rematch clause against Klitschko prior to their
fight which precluded him from facing the IBF's mandatory challenger Vyacheslav
Glazkov, which meant he held the IBF belt for only 10 days.
Personal life
Fury and his wife Paris married in 2009.
He is a supporter of Premier League football club Manchester
United. He is a practicing Catholic.
In September 2015 Fury expressed a desire to run as an
independent candidate to be the UK Member of Parliament for Morecambe and
Lunesdale, opining that the government were too focused on immigrants and not
enough on homeless people and those with drug and alcohol problems. He also
suggested that Britain should leave the European Union.
Controversial comments
In 2013, Fury told an interviewer before his first fight at
Madison Square Garden that he would “hang” his own sister if she was
promiscuous. That same year he was fined £3,000 for calling fellow boxers David
Price and Tony Bellew "gay lovers". After the 2015 controversy
emerged, Bellew said that he was not upset by Fury and considered it wrong that
people were pulling him down.
Shortly before winning the world titles in November 2015,
Fury publicly argued that performance-enhancing drugs should be permitted in boxing and other
sports. He said: "Why don't they just make drugs totally legal in sports,
then everybody would be taking drugs and then it would be fully fair then,
wouldn't it? ... It's none of my concern really, but if the governing bodies
want to do that then I think it would be a bit fairer because you've got all
them people taking drugs and when you face a man who is not taking drugs it
becomes unfair, doesn't it?”
After the world championship fight, he stated that he had
been cautioned against potential cheating tactics by the Klitschko camp, of
which he provided no evidence, and he would not even drink water in the locker
room post-fight because of fears that he would be drugged.
The British Boxing Board of Control met on 9 December and
agreed to summon Fury to explain his recent comments.
2015 BBC Sports Personality of the Year award
nomination
After winning the world title he was named as a finalist of
the 2015 BBC Sports Personality of the Year. His nomination ignited a lingering
controversy which began even before the Klitschko fight, when Fury said:
"There are only three things that need to be accomplished before the Devil
comes home. One of them is homosexuality being legal in countries, one of them
is abortion and the other is paedophilia. So who would have thought in the 50s
and early 60s that those first two would be legalised. … For me, people can say
‘oh, you’re against abortions and you’re against paedophilia, you’re against
homosexuality, you’re against whatever’ but my faith and my culture is all
based on the bible. The bible was written a long time ago, wasn’t it, from the
beginning of time until now so if I follow that and that tells me it’s wrong,
then it’s wrong for me." Later, over 124,000 people signed an online
Change.org petition saying that what they saw as his homophobic and sexist
views made him an unsuitable recipient for the award. Asked directly if he was
homophobic, Fury said: "No. Definitely not. I wouldn't be a very good
Christian if I hated anybody. If Jesus loves the world, I love the world.”
Fury also stated that Olympic and world champion
heptathlete, Jessica Ennis-Hill, a fellow contender for the BBC award,
"slaps up good" and that "a woman’s best place is in the kitchen
and on her back – that’s my personal belief." Fury responded to the controversy
by denying he was homophobic and telling iFL TV that his critics could
"suck my balls" - and labelled those who signed the petition as
"50,000 wankers".
On 9 December, BBC bosses were fighting a frantic battle to
save the Sports Personality of the Year awards, after a leading contender,
Olympic athletic Greg Rutherford, threatened to pull out because of the
controversy. Despite his disgust at Fury, Rutherford later agreed to stay in
the award show. In a separate development, the Sports Journalists' Association
withdrew an invitation to Fury to attend the British Sports Awards in London.
On 8 December 2015 the SNP's John Nicolson, a member of the
Culture, Media and Sport Committee, challenged the BBC over Fury’s Sports
Personality of the Year nomination. On 9 December Greater Manchester Police
confirmed that they were investigating an allegation of hate crime against Fury
in relation to comments made about homosexuality on Victoria Derbyshire's BBC
television programme. The Police soon reported that no hate crime, but only
what they called a "hate incident", had occurred, so no charge would
be laid.
CHRIS FROOME
Christopher "Chris" Froome is a British professional road racing cyclist
for UCI ProTeam, who competed for Kenya until 2008. A two-time winner of the
Tour de France, he is seen as one of the most successful riders of the recent
era. His mother's parents emigrated from Tetbury, Gloucestershire, England to
Kenya to run a crop farm. Froome has two older brothers, Jonathan and Jeremy,
who went to Rugby School in Warwickshire, England.
After finishing primary school at the Banda School in
Nairobi, Froome moved to South Africa as a 14-year-old to attend St. Andrew's
School in Bloemfontein and St John's College in Johannesburg. He then studied
economics for two years at the University of Johannesburg. It was in South
Africa that Froome started to participate in road cycling. It was not until he
was 22 that he turned professional. Froome competed in the road time trial at
the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, where he finished 17th, catching the
attention of future Team Sky principal Dave Brailsford: "The performance
he did, on the equipment he was on, that takes some doing... We always thought
he was a bit of a diamond in the rough, who had a huge potential." Whilst
representing Kenya at the 2006 Road World Championships in the under-23
category in Salzburg, Austria, Froome crashed into an official just after the
start of the time trial, he finished in 36th place.
Professional career
2007–2010: Early years
Froome turned professional in 2007, aged 22, with the South
African team, Konica Minolta, withdrawing from university two years into his
degree in economics. He competed from April to September for the Union Cycliste
Internationale's World Cycling Centre
team based in Aigle, Switzerland, in the U23 Nations Cup. In May he rode
his first stage race, the Giro delle Regioni, winning stage five, riding for WCC.
In late-May he won stage six of the Tour of Japan, attacking from a breakaway
in the fourteen-lap circuit in Shuzenji. In June he competed at the
"B" world championships in Cape Town, placing second to China's
Haijun Ma in the -long time trial. In July, he claimed a bronze medal in the
road race at the All-Africa Games in Algiers, Algeria. On 26 September, he
placed forty-first in the under-23 time trial at the world championships in
Stuttgart, three minutes and thirty seconds behind the gold medalist, Lars Boom
of the Netherlands.
Froome was introduced to the British-based, South
African-backed, second-tier UCI Professional Continental team,, by South
African Robbie Hunter, signing with them for the 2008 season. Over April and
March, he rode the Critérium International, Gent-Wevelgem and the Ardennes
classics. He made his Grand Tour debut when he was named in 's squad for the
Tour de France – becoming Kenya's first participant, in which he finished 84th
overall and 11th among the young rider classification. In October Froome
finished fourth overall in the Herald Sun Tour in Victoria, Australia. His
performances in 2008 attracted the attention of British Cycling coach, Rod
Ellingworth, who believed Froome had potential. Froome said: "Although I
was riding under the Kenyan flag I made it clear that I had always carried a
British passport and felt British. It was then we talked about racing under the
Union Flag, and we stayed in touch." He then participated in the Giro
d'Italia, in which he came 36th overall, and seventh young rider classification.
In July he won a minor one day race, Anatomic Jock Race, in Barberton South
Africa. In September 2009, it was announced that he was to join British cycling
team,, for the 2010 season.
Froome rode the 2010 Giro d'Italia. On stage nineteen, he
was suffering with a knee injury and on the Mortirolo Pass he was seen holding
on to a police motorbike. He had been dropped by the gruppetto, and intended to
reach the feed zone and retire from the race. While holding the motorbike, the
race commissaire ordered him to stop and withdraw from the race. During his
first season with Sky, his best result was at the Tour du Haut Var, where he
finished ninth in the overall standings. He also finished second at the 2010
national time trial championships, showing his ability in the discipline. In
October he represented England at the Commonwealth Games, in Delhi, coming
fifth in the -long time trial, two minutes and twenty seconds behind the
winner, Scotland's David Millar.
2011: Breakthrough
The early highlights of Froome's 2011 season were top
fifteen finishes in the Vuelta a Castilla y León and the Tour de Romandie.
Froome had a mixed Tour de Suisse, riding with the lead group on some mountain
stages, whilst losing time on others, and finishing ninth in the final time trial.
Froome entered the Vuelta a España as the main domestique
for Bradley Wiggins in the mountains. After being inseparable from Wiggins
throughout the first week, he gained credit for his ride in stage nine, helping
close down an attack on the final climb and finishing in fifth place, three
seconds behind Wiggins, leaving both in the top 20 overall. The following day
in stage ten, however, Froome out-rode Wiggins to finish second in the
time-trial behind 's Tony Martin and to take an unexpected lead in the race.
Froome averaged 405 watts over 56 minutes in this time-trial, proving himself
as a strong time-trialist. During stage eleven he helped his team to neutralise
some attacks, but soon found himself unable to follow the main group. However,
he managed to hang on second in the general classification.
After losing the jersey to Wiggins on stage eleven, Froome
continued to ride in support of his leader, and on stage fourteen helped to
drop rivals including rider Vincenzo Nibali and Joaquim Rodríguez on the final climb. Wiggins credited his lead
to Froome, in a stage which also saw Froome rise back up to second in the
standings. The tough stage fifteen which ended on the Alto de L'Angliru saw
Froome lead the chase to stage winner, Juan José Cobo of, who took the overall
lead at the end of the day. Froome proved stronger than Wiggins, finishing
ahead of him in fourth place but forty-eight seconds behind Cobo, to retain
second overall.
On stage seventeen, Froome attacked Cobo from the summit
finish, but Cobo fought back, catching Froome in the final 300 metres, only for
Froome to attack again to win the stage and arrive one second in front of Cobo.
As a result of time bonuses, Froome reduced Cobo's lead to thirteen seconds.
Froome was unable to reduce Cobo's lead any further and finished second overall
in the Vuelta, equalling Robert Millar's second places in the 1985 and 1986
editions of the Vuelta and the 1987 Giro d'Italia, as the best finish by a
British rider in the Vuelta and the highest finish by a British rider in a
Grand Tour.
After the Vuelta it was revealed Froome had suffered
throughout the year from the parasitic disease bilharzia, having been diagnosed
in 2010. It has since been speculated that Froome may have had the parasitic
infection for much of his adult life and during his early cycling career. The
discovery and subsequent treatment of the illness has been used to explain
Froome's rapid rise to form during 2011. On 16 September 2011, Froome signed a
new three-year contract with Sky. He was part of the Great Britain team that
helped Mark Cavendish win the world road race championship. In October, Froome
finished third overall in the first edition of the Tour of Beijing, 26 seconds
behind overall winner, Tony Martin.
2012: Super-domestique
The early part of Froome's 2012 season was wrecked by
illness. He withdrew from the Volta ao Algarve with a severe chest infection,
and blood tests showed his bilharzia parasites had returned. In March, Froome
was involved in a collision with a 72-year-old pedestrian on a training ride.
He returned to racing in May, for the Tour de Romandie, where he helped Wiggins
win the race overall, before participating in a training camp on Mount Teide in
Tenerife with several of his teammates.
Froome was selected in the Sky squad for the Tour de France.
After placing 11th in the opening prologue, he suffered a punctured tyre from
the end of stage one and lost over a minute to overall leader Fabian Cancellara
. On stage three, Froome was involved in a crash on the hill-top finish in
Boulogne-sur-Mer, and was sent flying into safety barriers, but was unharmed
and was given the same finishing time as the winner, Peter Sagan of . On stage
seven finishing atop the Category 1 climb to La Planche des Belles Filles, he
protected his leader Wiggins and was part of a small group that came in sight
of the finish line. Cadel Evans
attacked, Froome jumped on his wheel and won the stage with an advantage
of two seconds over his leader and Evans. Froome took the lead in the mountains
classification. With that operation, he took the polka dot jersey, but lost it
to Fredrik Kessiakoff of the very next day. Froome finished second to Wiggins
on stage nine, an individual time trial, and moved up to third overall.
On stage eleven to La Toussuire, Froome rolled all day in
the mountains in front of the pack or near it, setting the pace for his leader
Wiggins but was forced to take two rests during the flatter, faster sections,
dropping in behind Wiggins' group leaving Wiggins out in front. Froome recovered
well however and in a surprising event, due to what appear to be confused team
orders, he attacked the remaining group on the last climb, just as Wiggins was
easing off after the hard chase to catch Nibali away from the finish line. He
subsequently received the order from his team manager to hold back and wait for
yellow jersey Wiggins. He finished third of the stage after a late burst of
speed. For his efforts in assisting Wiggins, Froome was lauded in the media as
a super-domestique. On stage seventeen, Froome and Wiggins finished second and
third respectively on the final mountain stage to further cement their general
classification positions, although Froome repeatedly waited for Wiggins on the
final climb, costing him the chance of winning the stage. On stage nineteen, a
time trial, Froome finished second to Wiggins, mirroring the overall standings.
Wiggins went on to win the tour with Froome second, becoming the first two
British riders to make the podium of the Tour de France in its 109-year history.
Froome, along with Sky teammates Wiggins, Cavendish and Ian
Stannard, as well as Millar were
selected for Team GB's road race at the Olympic Games. Froome and Wiggins also
contested in the time trial. Froome won bronze in the time trial, with teammate
Wiggins taking gold. Froome was selected as Team Sky's leader for the Vuelta a
España, where he aimed to go one better than 2011 and win his first Grand Tour.
He lay third after the first mountain finish on stage three, and moved up to
second on stage four after leader Alejandro Valverde crashed, losing 55 seconds
to the chasing group. Froome moved down to third during the stage evelen time
trial siteen seconds off leader Rodriguez. He lost another twenty-three seconds
on stage twelve putting him 51 seconds down. He struggled through the rest of
the second half of the race. He ended up finishing fourth overall, finishing
over ten minutes behind the race winner, Alberto Contador.
2013: First Tour de France victory
Froome's 2013 season began at the Tour of Oman, where he
took the race lead on stage four, finishing second to Rodríguez on the summit
finish of Jebel Akhdar. He finished the race taking the overall classification,
his first stage race win of his career, 27 seconds ahead of Contador, with Cadel
Evans twelve seconds further back. He also won the points classification.
Froome then led at the Tirreno–Adriatico in March, where he won the fourth
stage after countering an attack by Contador, rider Nibali and 's Mauro
Santambrogio on the final climb to Prati di Tivo. Froome lost time on eventual
winner Nibali on the penultimate stage, finishing the race in second place.
Froome returned to action, and to the top step of the rostrum, in the Critérium
International. After finishing fourth in the short second stage time trial, he
powered away on the last climb of the third and final stage to win, and
overtake teammate, and second place on the stage, Richie Porte in the general
classification.
In late April, Froome won the prologue of the Tour de
Romandie in Le Châble, Switzerland, taking the leader's jersey, with a
six-second gap over Andrew Talansky of . He remained in the yellow leader's
jersey throughout the entire race, increasing his advantage over his rivals to
almost a minute with a strong performance in the penultimate queen stage. Near
the end of that stage, after losing his support riders in the peloton, Froome
gave solo chase to breakaway rider Simon Špilak and after catching him, worked
with the Slovenian to maintain and extend their lead on the peloton and improve
their general classification standings. Špilak won the stage, which catapulted
him into second place in the overall, with Froome on his wheel in second. In
the final individual time trial stage Froome took third place, increasing his lead
and winning his third race of the season.
Froome's final warm up race before the Tour de France, for
which he was favourite, was the Critérium du Dauphiné at the beginning of June.
He sat second overall behind 's Rohan Dennis after coming third in the time
trial on stage four. Froome won stage five after countering a late attack by
Contador, to take the race lead by 52 seconds over teammate, Porte. Froome
helped Porte solidify his second place on stage seven, and on stage eight the
pair rode away from their rivals on the final climb, with only Talansky able to follow. Froome took second on the
stage behind Alessandro De Marchi of, who had attacked earlier, to secure
overall victory, with Porte completing a one-two, 58 seconds back. This was
Froome's fourth major stage race victory of the season, out of the five he had
entered.
Froome's Tour de France got off to a nervy start as he
crashed in the neutralised section of the first stage on the isle of Corsica,
but he was unharmed and avoided going down in the large crash towards the end
of the stage. After staying out of trouble for the rest of the first week,
Froome won stage eight, the first mountain stage of the race, finishing on Ax 3
Domaines, by launching an attack after teammates Peter Kennaugh and Porte had
brought back an earlier attack by 's Nairo Quintana, and distanced most of
Froome's rivals. Froome's winning margin on the stage was fifty-one seconds
over Porte, and one minute twenty-five seconds to Valverde in third. This gave Froome the overall lead
in the Tour for the first time and the lead in the mountains classification. On
the following stage however, Froome was left isolated as no teammates were able
to follow repeated attacks early in the stage by, and riders. Despite being
without any team support for most of the stage, Froome was able to successfully
defend his lead by following several attacks by Quintana and Valverde. Froome
then finished second in the individual time trial on the twelfth stage, twelve
seconds behind Tony Martin, to put further time into all of his rivals.
However, on stage thirteen Saxo-Tinkoff caused a split in the peloton due to
strong crosswinds, which Froome missed. 's Contador and Roman Kreuziger, and
Laurens ten Dam and Bauke Mollema of all made the selection, and took 69
seconds out of Froome's lead, although Valverde lost over ten minutes and
slipped out of contention.
Froome won stage 15 finishing on Mont Ventoux. Kennaugh and
Porte dropped all of the leading contenders except Contador on the early part
of the climb, before Froome surged clear of Contador with remaining and caught
Quintana, who had attacked earlier in the climb. The pair worked together to
put time into their rivals, before Froome dropped Quintana with remaining and
soloed to the finish. This gave Froome a lead of four minutes and fourteen
seconds over Mollema in second place, with Contador a further eleven seconds
back. Froome also regained the lead in the mountains classification. He won the
stage 17 time trial, finishing the course from Embrun to Chorges in 51 minutes
33 seconds, with Contador coming in nine seconds behind him, in second place.
Froome defended his lead during the Alpine stages, extending his overall league
as Mollema and Contador dropped back.
Froome won the general classification on 21 July with a
final time of 83 hours, 56 minutes and 40 seconds, 4 minutes and 20 seconds
ahead of second-placed Quintana. He was also King of the Mountains for six
stages, however he ultimately finished second to Quintana in that classification.
Froome's overall win and stage victories in the Tour win put him at the top of
the UCI World Tour ranking, with 587, ahead of Sagan on 409. Partly because the
2013 Tour was the first since Lance Armstrong's admission of doping, such
questions were asked of Froome. He insisted that he and his team were clean and
stated that the questioning saddened him. Froome was drug tested 19 times
during the Tour
In October Froome was named winner of the prestigious Vélo
d'Or award for the best rider of the year.
2014: Defending champion
As defending champion for the first time, Froome started his
2014 season by again winning the Tour of Oman. After some minor illnesses and
back problems, which meant he missed Tirreno–Adriatico, his next stage race was
the Tour de Romandie, again as defending champion, which he won by twenty-eight
seconds ahead of Špilak, with the two riders placing first and second in that
race for the second consecutive year. He also won the final stage of the race,
an individual time trial, finishing a second faster than three-time time trial
world champion Martin. To celebrate the Tour de France moving from Britain to
France in July, Froome rode a bicycle through the Channel Tunnel, becoming the
first solo rider to do so, and one of few cyclists ever to have done the
journey. The Crossing took under an hour at a top speed of 40 mph — faster than
most cross-channel ferries.
Froome crashed out on the fifth stage of the Tour de France
after falling three times over two days, putting an end to his defence of his
Tour de France crown. He came back in time to duel with Alberto Contador on the
Vuelta a España, being very competitive in the mountains but losing some time
on the first individual time trial. Before the last stage, a short flat time trial, Froome was in second place
with a deficit of 1:37 on the Spaniard. He finally finished second.
2015: Second Tour de France victory
Froome decided to begin his 2015 racing season in February
at the Ruta del Sol in Spain, after winning the previous two years of the Tour
of Oman. He was joined there by Contador, both riders competing in this race
for the first time. Having lost eight seconds to Contador in the first day's
individual time trial, Froome ceded even more time to him on the third stage,
when the Spaniard broke away from the peloton during the uphill finish to win
the stage. Now 27 seconds behind Contador, with only one mountain stage
remaining, Froome seemed likely to end up second. But on the penultimate fourth
stage, which had a steep uphill finish, Team Sky worked hard and dropped all of
Contador's Tinkoff-Saxo teammates as the leaders reached the final climb. After
some punchy moves by his support riders, Froome began a solo attack. For a
short time Contador was able to follow, but he soon fell away. Froome won the
stage and was able to open a 29-second gap on second-place Contador by the
finish line, enough to overcome his deficit and take the overall race lead by
two seconds. The final fifth stage was relatively flat, with no likely chance
for Contador to make up his deficit, allowing Froome to collect his first stage
race victory since May 2014. This was the third year in a row that Froome won
his season opener stage race. He later participated in the Tour de Romandie in
hopes of winning it for the third year in a row, but had to settle for third
place in the general classification after winner Ilnur Zakarin and second-place
Simon Spilak, both of.
In June, he was in full preparation for the Tour de France
as he participated to the Critérium du Dauphiné. He won stage seven, the queen
stage, thanks to two consecutive attacks on the last climb of the day, one to
shed the leading group and another one to get rid of Tejay van Garderen, who
had resisted the first one. On the stage, he repeated the exploit of winning
solo while putting enough time into van Garderen to win the overall
classification as well.
Froome entered the Tour de France as one of the favourites
for the overall win. After a strong performance on the Mur de Huy Froome took
over the race lead by one second from Tony Martin, although he subsequently
lost the jersey to Martin on stage four to Cambrai. Froome refused to wear the
yellow jersey after Tony Martin abandoned the race whilst still leading due to
a broken collar bone sustained on stage six. Froome then received the yellow
jersey at the end of the seventh stage by virtue of being in second place
overall. During the evening of the first rest day of the Tour, it emerged that
the team had had some of Froome's data files hacked and released onto the
internet. As the Tour entered the second week of racing stage ten saw the first
mountains stage, the summit finish of La Pierre Saint-Martin, where Froome
would go on to take the stage win, putting significant time into his general classification
rivals. During the remainder of the race the team faced intense scrutiny
regarding their dominant performances; Porte was punched in the ribs by a
spectator in the Pyrenees, and Froome had urine thrown at him by another
spectator. Much of the blame for the poor spectator behaviour has been levelled
at the French press for 'irresponsible' reporting. Team Sky then released some
of Froome's power data from stage ten in an attempt to calm claims of blood or
mechanical doping. Froome maintained his lead during the final week's Alpine
mountain stages, although he lost 32 seconds to Quintana, who had emerged as
his principal rival, on the penultimate mountain stage to La Toussuire, and
another 86 seconds on the final summit finish on Alpe d'Huez, giving him a lead
of 72 seconds over Quintana in the general classification. In addition to
winning the race overall he clinched the mountains classification, becoming the
first British rider to be crowned the Tour's King of the Mountains since Robert
Millar in 1984. He was also the sixth rider to take the yellow and polka dot
jerseys in the same year and the first to do so since Eddy Merckx in 1970.
In August, Froome confirmed that he would follow up his Tour
win by riding in the Vuelta a España, becoming the first Tour winner to take on
the Vuelta in the same year since Carlos Sastre in 2008. Froome lost time on
his rivals on the first summit finishes, though he gained back some time on the
summit finish of stage nine. Stage eleven was a mountainous stage in Andorra
that Froome had described as "the toughest Grand Tour stage I’ve ever
done". He crashed into a wooden barrier on the approach to the first climb
of the day; he continued to the end of the stage, though he lost significant
time on all his rivals. The following morning, an MRI scan revealed that he had
broken his foot in the crash and he withdrew from the Vuelta.
Personal life
Froome met Michelle Cound, a South African of Welsh origin,
through South African rider Daryl Impey in 2009. Froome and Cound moved to
Monaco together in 2011 and got engaged in March 2013. The couple married in
November 2014. On 15 December 2015, the couple welcomed their first child, a
son named Kellan. Froome dedicated his 2013 Tour de France win to his mother,
who died of cancer five weeks before his Tour debut in 2008.
Tipster Street.
Britain's Anthony Joshua retained
his IBF world heavyweight title with a third-round stoppage of American Eric
Molina. The bout was stopped shortly after Joshua had sent his opponent to the
canvas. Joshua can now look forward to a showdown with former WBA, IBF and
WBO champion Wladimir Klitschko at Wembley Stadium on April 29.
