Froome is aiming to reclaim the maillot jaune he won in 2013. Pushing him along is the pain and the heartache of 12 months ago, when his title defence ended on the slippery wet tarmac of a non-descript village just before the cobbles of Stage 5.
"My journey to the Tour this year started when I crashed out of the Tour last year," Froome said recently. "Already then it was that burning desire for me - that hunger to want to get back to this year's edition in the most competitive way possible."
To judge from his performance at the Criterium du Dauphine, Froome is in very competitive shape. To prove it, though, he will need to survive nine days of cobblestones, crosswinds and stressful, elbows-out racing. And he will need luck.
"That first week is going to be crucial," he nods. "The first nine days actually, until we get up into the mountains on Stage 10. In my mind, it is almost as if each one of those nine stages is like a classics stage in its own right. And before you get through those nine classics, you are not even entered into the GC race."
If and when he does get down to the Pyrenees, and assuming Contador, Nairo Quintana and Vincenzo Nibali join him there, then the fireworks can really begin. The world's best climbers going mano a mano in the mountains.
No doubt the more eye-catching performances will lead to questions of a darker nature. That is as it should be. Cycling, improved though it is in this area, has not yet reached the stage where it can expect to be given a free pass where doping is concerned. Not while riders continue to be popped for the banned blood booster EPO - as former Team Sky rider Davide Appollonio was this week - or when Nibali's Astana team-mate Lars Boom recorded a low cortisol level (low cortisol levels can indicate cortisone doping but are not conclusive proof of doping) on the eve of last night's first stage.
Froome is confident the performances we see over the next three weeks will stand the test of time. He believes the faster times we are seeing up climbs these days - in many instances faster even than those at the height of the EPO era - are not due to doping but rather to more sophisticated training and recovery techniques.
And sleep. Froome may have been denied the opportunity of staying in a deluxe camper van at this year's Tour but Team Sky's bid for marginal gains never rests. Froome now wears a special watch at nights to monitor his sleep, something which is likely to take a bit of a hit when his wife Michelle gives birth to their first child later this year. "Yeah, that's when I buy my own motorhome," he laughs.
Not bad for a kid who learned to ride on mountain bikes in Kenya and who only took up professional cycling late in the day.
" If you'd have said to me when I was growing up, or still back in the boarding house in South Africa [where I went to school] that I'd be over racing the Tour de France every year trying to win it I would have said ... 'yeah you can wake up now'."
