Chris Froome is certain he is on track to contend for a fourth Tour de France victory next month despite his not managing to win the Critérium du Dauphiné, traditionally his warm-up race for La Grande Boucle. The Team Sky leader won the eight-day race in France each time before his Tour victories in 2013, 2015 and 2016 but this year could finish only fourth to the Dane Jakob Fuglsang.

“I’m not the superstitious type, to think that winning the Dauphiné is a precursor to winning the Tour,” Froome says. “It’s certainly good for the morale and the confidence to win your last race before the Tour but I don’t think it’s a prerequisite.”

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The 32-year-old Briton added that. if he was not at his peak in June, that might be explained by the need to keep his powder dry for later in the season. “I have been very light on race days this year – going into the Dauphiné I was on 19 race days – but that has been a conscious decision to keep me fresher for what’s to come.

“Potentially with the Tour and the Vuelta a España afterwards it could be a busy summer of racing. It’s worked in the past going into this part of the season fresher. I feel the Dauphiné was just what I needed in terms of intensity and it was a very intense Dauphiné – especially the back end of it. When we hit the mountains it was a full-on race and it will have moved me on, condition-wise, a lot.”

Unlike in other years Froome has yet to score his first win of the season but that barely seems to worry him. However, he professes fascination with a radical route for this year’s race that includes nine potential sprint stages and only two genuine mountain-top finishes, at Peyragudes in the Pyrenees and the Col d’Izoard in the Alps, with a third, smaller one at Plateau des Belles Filles in eastern France.

“I genuinely think this year’s Tour route presents the biggest challenge to me that I’ve faced in my career to date. It’s an open course and the level of my rivals is higher than it has ever been. It will be a much closer race in July, more hard fought than we’ve seen in the last few years. I think what strikes me most is the lack of time-trial kilometres.”

There are only two time trials in the Tour this year: 13 kilometres on the opening stage, this Saturday in Düsseldorf, and 22 kilometres in Marseille on the final Saturday three weeks later. That is a massive contrast with the 1990s and the noughties when there might be two stages against the watch of up to 50 or 60 kilometres, a prologue time trial and possibly a team time trial.

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It follows a recent trend, as the 2015 Tour won by Froome had an even smaller amount of individual time-trialling. This year, however, the race is short of obvious set-piece stages, as Froome notes. “It’s not as if it’s been made up for with mountain-top finishes, it’s also very light on those. It’s a very open race. Of course there are some mountain-top finishes – the Izoard stage, for example, that’s going to be a straightforward general classification race up to almost 2,500m. You’ve got a very open course, almost begging for riders to be more aggressive, to take opportunities to create situations on the road that will lead to exciting racing.

“It will be interesting to see if that happens or if it’s a more controlled race, because the guys are watching and waiting because there are so few typical general classification days, the [favourites] will get their teams to ride and wait for those rather than going for it. It will be interesting to see who is going there with what kind of tactics.”

That is far from the only source of speculation. Froome will race this year’s Tour against the backdrop of an eight-month long investigation by UK Anti-Doping into allegations of possible wrongdoing at Team Sky in the wake of the Jiffy bag saga. That culminated in the revelation that the team had acquired 55 doses of the corticosteroid triamcinolone between 2010 and 2013, with no paper trail to explain what it was used for. Triamcinolone is banned, unless used under certain conditions with a therapeutic use exemption, and is known to enhance performance.

There have also been reports of dissent within Team Sky over the affair, with the role of the Sky principal, Sir Dave Brailsford, called into question after his appearance in front of the House of Commons culture, media and sport committee in December. When Team Sky members expressed their support for “Dave B” on social media in March, Froome was far from the front of the queue. His contract with the team expires at the end of 2018 and he is in the process of negotiating a new deal.

If Froome can win this year’s Tour, he will join the small club who have won three in a row – Eddy Merckx, Miguel Indurain, Louison Bobet and Jacques Anquetil – and the even more exclusive club to have won four. “I’m aware of those numbers. It’s already been such a big goal to try and win back- to-back Tours as I did last year. To do it again would be massive for me. It seems to be becoming a bigger challenge every year and this year is no different.”