An entertaining, arrogant non-cheater would be best. Even if that means he cannot possibly win the tour.
Eh. That's the type of people the French have settled for for ages.
But as long as the sport is so geared towards a single event with athletes not competing at all for most of the year, the battle to get drugfree people into the top five will remain hilariously chimaeric and utterly impossible to achieve. And that realization is largely why I copped out of watching entirely, some years ago now.
Well, not all of the sport is geared towards this one competition. It's just that it's the only one that gets a lot of attention outside of the sport's core area.I for one just finished watching a disappointing Giro (Sorry, Hatman) and remember some phenomenal spring classics and a devastating Vuelta last autumn.
I suppose there aren't much more than 10-15 riders who are focussed entirely on the Tour, and even those aren't all as pathetically obsessed with it as the Schlecks, who really only ride one and a half race a year (, and they tend to fail miserably in Liege-Bastogne-Liege.)
Well yeah, but a lot of people who know they can't win the tour focus on the Vuelta and/or the Giro instead, often bypassing the Tour entirely. Etc. And how many races do the favorites' core sidesmen seriously compete in over the year? I've no idea.
Contrast football - while non-core admirers of the sport watch only the World Cup and maybe the Euro and maybe the CL (and usually make the mistake of thinking these to be more important than the national Leagues, lol) no player could possibly afford to make the same mistake.
