Chris Froome allegedly the target of data spying, hacking as Tour de France tour de force continues

As the Tour de France enters its mountain stages over the next two weeks, threaded through high terrain of the Pyrenees and the Alps, things are bound to get a lot tougher for the riders. Chris Froome, meanwhile, continues to turn in one solid performance after another, having just increased his overall lead with his stage win on La Pierre Saint-Martin.

If he or any other rider continues to do well, questions of doping—as they do—will invariably follow. Team Sky was hoping to be able to address such accusations with training data they’ve been collecting.  Team Sky’s general manager David Brailsford, however, says that data has been hacked.

“We think someone has hacked into our training data and got Chris’s files, so we’ve got some legal guys on the case,” he Brailford said to The Telegraph. “If he does well [Tuesday], the rest of the Tour is, ‘How do you know he’s not doping?'” Convincing those with doubts, he argued, would inevitably come back to talking about physiology and power data—information Brailsford believes has been digitally compromised in an attempt to discredit Froome.

He stopped short of pointing fingers, but had no qualms about offering pointed words. “Ethically and morally, if you are going to accuse someone of doping, then don’t cheat.”

Beyond being a matter of idle suspicion, the controversy came about after the posting of a video to YouTube on Monday night. The video, which was quickly taken down by the user, depicted Froome’s climb of Mont Ventoux in the 2013 Tour, with data about his heart rate, power, cadence and speed laid across the footage. Essentially, the video appeared to suggest that Froome was going too fast, with too much power, for such a challenging alpine climb. It’s an example of a frequent discussion on social media, reducing a good athletic performance in cycling to doping—something Froome himself has dismissed as the conduct of “clowns.”

“It can’t paint the full picture,'” Froome said before the Tour, as reported by The Telegraph. “If the UCI wants to collect power data and a way of explaining what’s humanly possible or not without doping, then I would be very happy. But to release it into the world for people to rip apart and say, ‘On this 15-minute section he was too fast,’ you don’t get wind speed, temperature, how hard you’ve ridden, all those variable factors.”

The alleged compromise of his training data seems to evince how deeply some are digging in order to taint the Sky rider’s performance.

But it’s all to be expected, Brailsford concedes. Regardless, he said, he would rather be contending with accusations of doping than worrying about a poor team performance. “I’d much prefer to be sitting here this year thinking, ‘We might get some s–t about this,’ than last year thinking, ‘We’re not good enough.'”