Four-time Tour de France winner, Chris Froome has finally officially announced that he has retired from professional cycling after not racing for the whole of 2026.
Speaking at a Skoda brand ambassador event, according to the New York Times, Froome confirmed his career is over.
“Unfortunately, there was that fall last summer,” Froome said of his serious crash last August that left him with a host of injuries including one to his heart that required surgery. “That wasn’t the way I wanted it to end. But even then, I knew it was over.”
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Froome, 41, had a successful career with Team Sky, now Netcompany Ineos, including winning seven Grand Tours and numerous top week-long stage races, and netting podium finishes in both the World Championships and the Olympics.
While his last victory dates from 2018, Froome remains one of a select circle of just six riders to take four or more victories in the Tour de France.
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Froome’s departure from the sport, long-expected after months of silence about his status, comes after he left Israel-Premier Tech last last year, then added a part-time gig as Chief Innovation Officer for the French AI company Vekta. In June, he announced his attendance at the Tour de France as a Skoda ambassador.
The British stage racing specialist turned pro in 2007 with the small Konica-Minolta team in South Africa. However, his career only really took off a year after he signed with Sky in 2010, when both he and the British squad began a meteoric rise towards dominating Grand Tour stage racing for the best part of a decade.
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While Froome’s first of two victories in the Vuelta a España, in 2011, was only confirmed in August 2019 after Juan José Cobo was stripped of the title for doping violations, his pathway to repeated triumphs in the Tour de France proved to be a very different story.
A runner-up spot in the 2012 Tour de France behind then teammate Bradley Wiggins was subsequently followed by outright wins for Froome in 2013, 2015, 2016 and 2017, in an era when, barring a crash-out in 2014, Froome and Team Sky seemingly brooked no rivals in cycling’s biggest bike race.
Froome’s trademark attack was a blazing series of high-speed accelerations in the mountains, something which netted him notable wins on Tour climbs as prestigious as the Mont Ventoux, the La Pierre Saint-Martin and La Planche des Belles Filles.
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However, he will also be remembered for his impromptu run up the Mont Ventoux in the 2016 Tour, after he was entangled in a collision with other riders and a race motorbike near the finish. Forced to run on foot up the climb before getting a replacement bike, it did not stop him from taking a third Tour de France in four years.
Froome’s relentless run of Tour victories made him just one of six riders to date, including the world’s current number one racer Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates-XRG), to rack up four wins or more in the Grande Boucle. That non-stop success also considerably helped Team Sky maintain its position as the decade’s leading force in three-week racing. But while it was notable that Froome never won a single one-day race in his career, he nonetheless extended his stage racing predominance to three victories in the Critérium du Dauphiné, two in the Tour de Romandie and two in the Tour of Oman.
After his fourth – and what proved to be his final – Tour de France win in 2017, Froome then added a victory in the Vuelta a España to his palmares the same year. In the process, he became the first rider to win two Grand Tours in a single season since arch-rival Alberto Contador took the Giro d’Italia and Vuelta in 2008.
More was to come as in what was arguably his hardest-fought Grand Tour triumph of all in the 2018 Giro d’Italia, where Froome overcame early injuries to stage a late spectacular long-distance attack across the Colle delle Finestre and definitively oust fellow-Briton Simon Yates from the overall lead.
At that point, the first defending champion in all three Grand Tours concurrently since Bernard Hinault 30 years previously, Froome’s ability each July to rise above rivals of the calibre of Vincenzo Nibali through to Nairo Quintana and above all Contador seemed unmatchable.
However, the shadows of suspicion were not far away, either. A long case regarding an adverse analytical finding for salbutamol in the 2017 Vuelta led to calls from figures as well-established as Hinault for Froome not to take part in the 2018 Tour de France. The case was only resolved in Froome’s favour just days before that year’s race.
Froome, and Team Sky too, have always strongly insisted there has never been any wrongdoing on their part, but further questions have emerged over the team’s performances in that era.
Investigations into the use of Therapeutic Use Exemption forms, and the conviction of former team doctor Richard Freeman for ordering a banned substance, as well as other medics employed by the team, like Geert Leinders, have all contributed to the suspicions. In addition, there has been a recent investigation into Froome’s longstanding personal carer, David Rozman, by the International Testing Agency (ITA) for his alleged links to the doctor at the centre of the Aderlass doping enquiry.
Back on the racing front, Froome himself was unable to repeat his Giro success in the Tour de France, where former teammate Geraint Thomas’ rise to yellow proved unstoppable. Froome himself had to settle for third in Paris.
Hopes of a comeback in 2019 were then dashed by a major accident ahead of the Critérium du Dauphiné with massive injuries, including a fractured right femur, a fractured elbow and fractured ribs, making for a lengthy comeback period.
Meanwhile, teammate Egan Bernal claimed his first Tour de France victory in a landslide-curtailed queen stage.
The following year, Froome was then not selected by Ineos – the successor of Sky as sponsors – for the Tour de France for the first time since 2011, and at the end of the season he moved onto Israel Start-Up Nation, which would prove to be his last team.
The final five years of Froome’s career saw the Briton fight a brave, but ultimately very challenging battle against both lingering effects from his injuries, and a sport which had moved on since his domination. There were flashes of brilliance such as at Alpe d’Huez in the 2022 Tour, where he placed third behind Tom Pidcock.
But perhaps fittingly, his participation in the Vuelta a España – the race where it all began for Froome back in 2011 – was to prove to be his last Grand Tour, and a series of major injuries in another training crash last autumn made it even more unlikely he would continue into his fifth decade as a racer.
He suffered a collapsed lung and fractured vertebrae,and later revealed that he was facing another long recovery after suffering a torn pericardium in his heart that was repaired surgically.
On November 15th, hours prior to the Israel-Premier Tech shutting off its social media channels ahead of a name and flag change to NSN Cycling, the team used its final post to thank the Briton and announce his departure from the team.
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