Cycling 2019 preview: Chris Froome and Geraint Thomas resume friendly rivalry in Team Sky’s final season

The Tour de France is lining up to be another dominated by the British team after their leading duo both committed to giving their all to the race in July

This may be the final year of Team Sky as we know it, but that won’t stop Dave Brailsford’s team from taking centre stage once again in 2019.

If anything it is likely to have the opposite effect as they look to go out on a high, and the Tour de France is lining up to be another dominated by the British team after their leading duo, the four-time Tour winner Chris Froome and incumbent champion Geraint Thomas, this week both committed to giving their all to the July race, which this year begins in Belgium as a celebration of the great Eddy Merckx’s first Tour de France victory, 50 years ago.

How Brailsford manages Froome and Thomas will be fascinating to watch. The situation will be different to last year’s race, partly because this time they will begin on an equal footing rather than Froome as the designated team leader, and partly because they are both likely to be fit and fresh, having revealed they will skip the Giro d’Italia in May – the effort Froome expended winning in Italy was something he hinted held him back in France a few weeks later.

Geraint Thomas superceded Chris Froome as Team Sky leader (AFP/Getty)

This in itself makes the Giro all the more interesting, as Team Sky’s elder statesmen make way for the exciting young Colombian Egan Bernal to lead. To win his first grand tour he will have to overcome a deep field including the winner of last year’s Vuelta a Espana, Simon Yates, and the 2017 Giro champion Tom Dumoulin, who will be encouraged not only by the absence of Froome and Thomas but also by the the three individual time trials, two of which bookend the course, making it perfectly suited to his strengths.

August’s Vuelta a Espana ends a week before the start of the 2019 Road World Championships in Yorkshire, where organisers will hope to persuade a cohort of big names to prioritise the latter over the Spanish grand tour. Yorkshire has been a hotbed for cycling since the Tour de France swept through its streets in 2014, and thousands from around the world are expected to pack the roads once again, in an event where men and women will race in a mixed world team time trial for the first time.

On the track there’s the National Championships at the end of January to look forward to ahead of the worlds in Poland in February, while online the sport continues its push into esports, with British Cycling setting up an eRacing Championships as it searches for new ways to connect with fans and discover talent.

But it is inevitably the Tour de France which will garner the most attention, as the most watched annual race of any kind on the planet. Thomas and Froome will take different roads there, with the Welshman heading to the Tour de Suisse while his team-mate is likely to prepare at the Criterium du Dauphine, but their coming together in Brussels is likely to be the beginning of one of the most intriguing stories of the year.