Should Froome be worried?

During last year's tour I wrote a blog post titled 'You are only as strong as your team.........leader' where I wrote about how Chris Froome almost tore the tour apart by almost upstaging his team leader and eventual winner Bradley Wiggins. Fast forward twelve months and this week we saw the brilliance of Chris Froome during stage 8, where he took a stranglehold on this years race, with amazing support of his team, notably Australian Richie Porte.

But....Stage 9 saw things take an unexpected turn and I could have very well titled this post 'You are only as strong as your....team.' Full Stop.

Poor Richie Porte had a tough day and couldn't keep the pace and ended up losing a huge chunk of time and team Movistar worked well to isolate Froome from his team and really test the waters of possibilities, although disappointingly not doing much more than that.

So the question needs to be asked...Should Chris Froome be worried?

Well, firstly it is the Tour de France and anything can happen. The race is three weeks long and there is so much to come.

Secondly, Chris Froome was, coming into this years race, a red hot favourite. The tour is Froome's ultimate goal this year and his form has been great. But is Team Sky the Team Sky we saw powerful and dominating at last year's race? On paper the answer would have to be no. And although they are certainly a strong team they have shown that they are far from unbeatable.

Stage 9 has certainly opened up the race once again. Katusha (Rodriguez), SaxoBank (Contador) and Movistar (Valverde) will all be bouyed by the events of yeserday which in turn will hopefully lead to some motivated attacks in the mountain stages to come.

All bodes for an exciting next two weeks, in which yes, Chris Froome should be worried right up until he is standing on that podium in Paris!