Pole Rafal Majka won the polka dot jersey for the mountain classification and his Tinkoff team-mate, world champion Peter Sagan, clinched a fifth green jersey for the points classification.
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Sir Dave Brailsford said he is already excited about the 2017 Tour de France after Chris Froome sealed victory in the 2016 edition on Sunday.
Froome himself described it as “a climber s Tour” but the man widely lauded as the best climber in the world and expected to push him to his limits, frustrated with his timidity.
“It’s a strong sign that life goes on”, he said referring to the recent incident in which a delivery driver killed 84 people and injured many more when he drove a truck through Bastille Day crowds on the seafront in the Riviera city. These things will never change.
The last day of the Tour de France is always a sociable, relaxed affair.
Froome survived two crashes and even a jog up a mountain road on the way to his third title.
The mostly flat 113-kilometer (70-mile) stage concluded with eight laps of a circuit in downtown Paris, finishing on the cobblestones below the Arc de Triomphe.
They’ve been there for me every step of the way and I couldn’t ask for more.
They finished in the back section of the peloton in which 169 riders were all credited with the same time behind stage victor Andre Greipel of Germany. His teammates had yellow stripes on their jerseys and yellow handlebars on their bikes.
Seeing that Froome, who wore a bandage on his right knee on the podium after the stage, was struggling, several rivals attacked but the Briton gritted his teeth and limited the damage, losing only 10 seconds or less on Italian Fabio Aru and Quintana.
Froome finished the race with a margin of victory of four minutes and five seconds ahead of AG2R La Mondiale’s Romain Bardet, only the third Frenchman in 20 years to finish second as the race awaits its first home victor since Hinault in 1985.
It’s a British success story, I would like to think, and the team was ideal.
Aru’s troubles freed Nibali to go after a stage win that would have saved his dire Tour.
“I’ve won it three times and I can categorically say the novelty is not wearing off”.
‘It would be my dream to keep coming back for the next five or six years and give myself the best opportunity of winning again, ‘ Froome said just before the final stage.
“If anything it shows my will to win, how badly I wanted it”, he said.
Tour director Christian Prudhomme complimented Froome for showing “panache” after his downhill attack in the Pyrenees, and the fans have treated him better, too.
Just 113km – the first part of which will be ridden at something of a trundle – separate Froome from his crowning glory after 3,500km crossed over three weeks covering all sorts of varied French terrain. But credit to the French public, the race continued.
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Sir Bradley Wiggins, in 2012, was the first Briton to win the race.
