When Chris Froome took the yellow jersey, everyone seemed to expect that the rest of the race would end up looking pretty similar to the Tour de France of 2012 with Team Sky completely dominating the race. However, stage nine showed that even Sky can have bad days. After the impressive one-two finish for Sky on stage eight, Richie Porte lost about 18 minutes on stage nine, putting paid to his chances of a podium finish. Not only that, but Sky lost a key domestique in the form of Vasil Kiryienka who finished outside the time limit, having worked hard to try to bring Porte back to the lead group. Peter Kennaugh had crashed earlier on in the stage, whilst Geraint Thomas was still nursing an injury. Chris Froome therefore found himself isolated, riding behind a very strong Movistar team.
Movistar were keen to push on, as they wanted to consolidate Valverde's second place position, which meant trying to prevent Porte from getting back to the group. Consequently, none of the riders really had enough left in the tank to put in a sustained attack. It was left to Dan Martin and Jakob Fuglsang to set the race alight, but with Martin and Fuglsang not too far down on the GC, nobody was going to let them get too far ahead. Having won Liege-Bastogne-Liege, it was clear that Martin was in good form and, ultimately, it was he who went on to claim the victory, finishing just ahead of Fuglsang and coming across the line 20 seconds ahead of the next group of riders which included Kwiatkowski, Rodriguez, Valverde, Schleck, Froome, Mollema and Quintana amongst others.
It is funny that so many people were disappointed at Sky's dominance, believing that the race was already decided when there are still two weeks of racing to go. Cycling is an unpredictable sport, though, and so anything could happen!
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