Chris Froome, Skoda Ambassador: What the Four-Time Tour Winner Is Doing Now

Curated by Gary Edgington · Rider News

When Chris Froome finally stepped away from professional cycling in the summer of 2026, he did it not from a team bus but from a corporate stage — confirming his retirement at an event unveiling his new job as a cycling ambassador for the car brand Skoda. It was a fittingly understated exit for a rider who spent a decade as the most successful, and most scrutinised, stage racer of his generation. The four-time Tour de France champion had not raced all year, and, as he admitted, had known the end was coming for some time. Here is how one of the great Grand Tour careers came to a close, and what Froome is doing next.

A career that defined an era of the Tour

Born in Kenya and raised partly in South Africa, Froome came to European racing as an outsider and an unlikely prospect, a raw and often erratic engine who spent his first years as an unheralded domestique. He turned professional in 2007, and few would have predicted what followed. The transformation arrived at the 2011 Vuelta a España, where an astonishing second place announced him as a Grand Tour contender almost overnight — a result later upgraded to the overall victory when the original winner was stripped of the title in 2019. From there he became the engine of the sport’s dominant team, winning the Tour de France four times, in 2013, 2015, 2016 and 2017. He added the 2017 Vuelta and then the 2018 Giro d’Italia, the latter sealed by one of the most audacious rides of the modern era: an 80-kilometre solo attack over the Colle delle Finestre that flipped the race on its head. That Giro completed his set of all three Grand Tours, and for a spell he held all three titles at once — seven Grand Tour victories in total, a haul bettered by only a handful of riders in history.

His was a very particular kind of greatness: metronomic climbing, real strength against the clock, and a supporting cast built to control races from the front. It made him relentlessly effective and, to some, relentlessly divisive — but the palmares is beyond argument. If there was a gap, it was the one-day classics, a discipline that never suited his diesel engine. Grand Tours were his canvas, and few have painted on it so completely.

The crash that decided it

Froome’s decline began not with age but with a wall. A high-speed crash while previewing a time-trial course at the 2019 Critérium du Dauphiné left him with multiple fractures and nearly ended his career on the spot. He fought back over years of rehabilitation and a 2021 move to Israel-Premier Tech, but never again reached the summits he once owned. The definitive blow came in August 2025, when a training accident left him with a collapsed lung, fractured vertebrae and a tear to the lining of his heart that required surgery. Racing after that was never realistic. “Unfortunately, there was that fall last summer,” he reflected. “That wasn’t the way I wanted it to end. But even then, I knew it was over.” He left Israel-Premier Tech at the close of 2025 and did not race in 2026, making the July announcement a confirmation of what the sport had already quietly understood.

From the podium to ambassador

The stage on which he chose to make it official was telling. In June 2026, Skoda — a fixture of professional cycling for two decades, and the brand behind the familiar red lead car that heads the Tour de France convoy — appointed Froome as its Brand Cycling Ambassador. The role is a deliberate pivot away from elite competition and toward everyday riders: Froome attends the company’s cycling events through the season, and rather than racing he now rides with the public, joining fans on a special ride at the Tour to share his experience with amateurs and newcomers to the sport. His duties also take him to La Vuelta, the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift and a string of local European events. It is a striking second act for the most machine-like champion of his time — the great controller of Grand Tours reinventing himself as a companion to weekend cyclists — and it was at one of these Skoda events that he drew the curtain on his racing life for good.

A complicated, unarguable legacy

Froome rose through cycling’s uneasy years after the Armstrong era, and his dominance attracted its share of suspicion and roadside boos, as well as a 2018 anti-doping case that was ultimately closed in his favour. But strip away the noise and the record stands on its own: four Tours de France, victories in all three Grand Tours, and a run of sustained supremacy that few riders in any generation have matched. His long, stubborn attempt to climb back after 2019 — well past his peak, and never close to it again — earned a grudging respect even from those who had never warmed to him. He retires at 41 as one of the defining stage racers of the twenty-first century — and, in a sport that rarely produces them, a genuine rags-to-riches story, from overlooked domestique to a man who held all three Grand Tour crowns at once.

What’s next

The Skoda role is not his only new venture: Froome has also taken a part-time innovation role with a French technology company, and his young family and long-standing interest in the business side of cycling suggest a comfortable landing outside the peloton. For fans, the ambassador job is the more visible legacy — a way of keeping one of the sport’s biggest names in and around the races he once ruled, now on the other side of the barriers. If you want the context behind his greatest days, our primer on how the Tour de France works lays out the jerseys and tactics he mastered, and our guide to the Vuelta a España covers the Spanish Grand Tour where his rise began and where, as an ambassador, he will be seen again.

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