After the ‘100 days until the start of the Tour de France’ mark was celebrated in Yorkshire, the real countdown to its Grand Depart has already begun and last year’s winner Christopher Froome revealed that it is possible to sense the increasing excitement in the peloton. Team Sky’s leader also admitted that, apart from the broadly discussed cobled stage from Ypres to Arenberg, he expects British opening stages to be extremely nervous and hectic.

“You definitely pick up that buzz on the social media,” Froome told Cyclingnews during the Volta a Catalunya,

“people are really talking about it, and people are getting excited about it and geed up about it now we’ve got 100 days to go. For us riders, it’s the same things, we’re slowly getting the same buzz. It almost feels like the countdown to the Olympics again.”

Asked whether he knows Yorkshire’s routes to be negotiated by the peloton in July, Froome admitted that he is yet to inspect the course but has already races on this kind of parcours during his several participations in the Tour of Britain.

“Not a lot, but I’ve been through it on the Tour of Britain a couple of times, round that kind of area.”

“My initial thoughts are ‘Christ, that’s going to be a tough place to have a bike race, especially the start of the Tour when you’re going to have 200 plus guys on the start line who are really nervous, everyone wants to get into yellow in the first couple days and have the experience of leading the Tour de France.”

“It’s going to be pretty chaotic and we’re definitely going to have our hands full on the riding side of things and trying to take in the experience. It sounds like it’s building up to becoming something incredible.”

Tour de France champion rightly anticipates that a hilly second stage with short steep climbs may be red-circled by some punchy outsiders as a best moment to make a difference, and thus he expects a very early selection to happen on the route from York to Sheffield.

“I’ll build that into the schedule in the next couple of months, two or three days, go and ride those, especially the very hilly second stage,” he told Cyclingnews.

Froome also agreed with his team-mate Bradley Wiggins that British stages of Tour de France 101st edition can wreak more havoc than broadly discussed cobbled affair on stage fifth.

“Certainly. The climbs around there are brutal, not very long, but steep. It’s going to be a very selective stage.”