finished 123rd, at 12:19. He later participated in the Tour de Romandie in hopes of winning it for the third year in a row, but had to settle for third place in the general classification after winner Ilnur Zakarin and second-place Simon Špilak, both of . In June, he was in full preparation for the Tour de France as he participated to the Critérium du Dauphiné. He won stage seven, the queen stage, thanks to two consecutive attacks on the last climb of the day, one to shed the leading group and another one to get rid of Tejay van Garderen, who had resisted the first one. On the stage, he repeated the exploit of winning solo while putting enough time into van Garderen to win the overall classification as well. Froome entered the Tour de France as one of the favourites for the overall win. After a strong performance on the Mur de Huy Froome took over the race lead by one second from Tony Martin, although he subsequently lost the jersey to Martin on stage four to Cambrai. Following Martin's retirement from the race with a broken collar bone sustained in a crash near the end of stage six Froome was promoted to race leader, but declined to wear the yellow jersey during stage seven. During the evening of the first rest day of the Tour, it emerged that the team had had some of Froome's data files hacked and released onto the internet. As the Tour entered the second week of racing stage ten saw the first mountains stage, the summit finish of La Pierre Saint-Martin, where Froome would go on to take the stage win, putting significant time into his general classification rivals. During the remainder of the race the team faced intense scrutiny regarding their dominant performances; Porte was punched in the ribs by a spectator in the Pyrenees, and Froome claimed he had urine thrown at him by another spectator, who Froome described as 'clearly French', and levelled his blame for the poor spectator behaviour on the press for 'irresponsible journalism'. Team Sky then released some of Froome's power data from stage ten in an attempt to calm claims of blood or mechanical doping. Froome maintained his lead during the final week's Alpine mountain stages, although he lost 32 seconds to Quintana, who had emerged as his principal rival, on the penultimate mountain stage