The Climb: The Autobiography

by Chris Froome

  Chris Froome

  with David Walsh

  THE CLIMB

  Contents

  PART ONE

  Africa

  PART TWO

  Europe

  PART THREE

  The Tour de France

  Illustrations

  Glossary

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  ‘After climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb.’

  Nelson Mandela

  To my teammates for their hard work and dedication, and for helping me achieve my dreams, and to Mum and Michelle for the endless supply of motivation.

  Part One

  AFRICA

  1

  We have come out of Mai-a-Ihii, leaving his tin house behind us. We have come down the Dagoretti road inhaling the blood scent from the market and from its four death-house abattoirs. I hold my breath as we pass a heap of rotting discarded carcasses. Sometimes in Dagoretti the blood runs down the sides of the road and into the drains. Today we are for the hills and the open road and we don’t care.

  We have skirted the Kibiku Forest, pedalled a right on to the Ngong road and down past the sad little Ngong Stadium, where the only facility is the grass that the cattle graze on. We have sped past the Kenya Power and Lighting Distribution Centre, which keeps us buying candles for the ambushes of darkness that are sprung on us by the power company. We have raced down to the Forest Line road and cut right past Ngong town, dodging the stray goat crossing the road and the colourfully painted matatus that grind to a halt at a moment’s notice to collect or drop off their passengers. The chaos passes, and we’re on to the open road and into the Ngong Hills.

  One last ride before I die?

  It will be in these hills, for sure. The canopy of blue sky barely above me, the world transforming itself from urban grime to rural safari below me. You can lift your hands up and away from your handlebar grips and stretch your arms skyward in triumph like a stage winner. Your hands will be breaking through the floor of heaven. One last ride before I die? Take me here.

  He is Kikuyu and I am chasing him. As always. The land of the Kikuyu people runs out at an invisible seam and this is now Masai country. The Masai named the Ngong Hills. A giant was stumbling, as their legend would have it, from Kilimanjaro with his head in the clouds. He fell heavily and left the indent of his four knuckles in the earth. The Ngong Hills. These four summits. We are riding down the spine of them now, he and I, chasing each other over the giant’s knuckles. I am sixteen. My head is never anywhere else but in the clouds. I dream of the great races. But first, I must catch him.

  Twenty kilometres we race along this brown, arid, corrugated spine. The best views, where you can see the road snaking down for miles ahead of you, come at Point Lamwia where Karen Blixen, the famous author of Out of Africa, buried her lover Denys Finch Hatton. Lucky man. What a place to settle in for eternity. Salute. Then we are heading down into the Great Rift Valley.

  For a while in the hills I thought I might get one over on him. I am mad for the climbs. He let me spin away once or twice but always he reeled me in.

  Down. Down. The Magadi road has looped out of the green suburbs of Langata from near my old school, the Banda, but coming from Mai-a-Ihii we only join it down here past the bustling, street-side markets of Kiserian. We are on our plunge down into the Rift Valley. Lower and lower. Faster and faster. Past the busy town of Ongata Rongai. Onwards. The road ribbons and twists around the countryside, long straight stretches and big loops which will take us from two thousand metres and set us down on the Rift Valley plains at six hundred metres.

  Downhill. No pain. Our calves will complain on the way home but, right now, this is fun. The addict’s rush. We are the happy slaves of our own rhythm. We exist in our cadence.

  We might see anything here now that the city is behind us. It’s clear that we are in Masai territory. Passing through the village of Oltepesi, we stand out like a sore thumb among the local people wearing the traditional red shúkà. We ride on.

  The road is nature’s audition reel. Look! Waterbuck. If we’re lucky we might see a leopard. Dik-diks, the small antelope found in these parts, bound out of sight into the thorny undergrowth. Warthogs and baboons. Eland, monochrome zebras and elegant giraffes.

  People still claim to see the odd lion in this area. Not today. Apart from the dreadlocked one in front of me. Leone Nero they called him in Italy. Black Lion. I am chasing the Black Lion.

  We pass ostriches with long legs no more muscular than my own. If I point that out to Leone Nero and the boys they won’t let me live it down. It’s true though.

  We are only cutting through this world, he and I. This is no Rift Valley tourist cruise. We are racers. I am chasing him. He is my prey. He is cackling like a hyena because he knows I will never catch him. I don’t have it in my haunches. He has thousands of miles of roads and hills packed in there, all compressed into clenched muscle. Teasing me with his back wheel. Now you see it, kijana, now you don’t.

  I can’t win, but he stays close enough to taunt me.

  Down we go. It becomes stiller and it becomes hotter. The further into this dimple in the earth’s skin we ride, the more it is like a furnace.

  We will rest and laugh together when we get to the end. The end is the moonscape of Magadi with its salt-crusted shores and boiling soda lakes. There will be candy cotton pink clouds of startled flamingos. And my mother following an hour or two behind in the car will bring food to restore and recharge us before we turn back for home.

  I know him. He will say, ‘Put your bike into your mum’s car and go with her. The long climb home is not for you, kijana.’

  He knows me. Never.

  We race on. There are two dangers: homicidal drivers and potholes. This is Africa. Do we worry? Never.

  In fact, I have taken my helmet off. I shouldn’t but the heat is my alibi. The helmet is tied round my handlebars, clipped on. He is not even dressed to race. He has a T-shirt and gym shorts on. And a pair of sneakers. I am in full bloody racing gear. He loves that.

  People in cars stick their heads out of the windows. Look at that skinny cyclist kid trying to catch up with that Rastafarian on a bike! Aw, God help him! Look!

  I’m thinking that I didn’t pop him on the Ngong climbs but maybe I put some ache into his old legs. If I surprised him could I get away from him on the long downhill?

  I make my moves and each time he responds. I get close enough so that he drafts me but when I press the gas he has already pulled away.

  We hit a pitted stretch of road. Potholes and fissures and lumps. We hit it fast. If one slows then the other wins. We push hard. Then pop!, my helmet unclips as I hit one of the little speed bumps that wear and tear has made for the battered Magadi road. The helmet falls a few inches and catches my front wheel, sending it jolting sideways, towards him.

  He rides straight over it. The helmet jams into his front wheel. The front wheel stops dead and the back wheel buck-jumps from the road. He says goodbye to his bike. He is launched down the road at over sixty kilometres per hour, flying like a missile with dreadlocks.

  How far? He says fifty metres. I’m not so sure. That might have brought him into Tanzanian airspace. The flying isn’t the thing anyway. The landing is the issue here on the downward grooves of the Magadi road.

  He lands first on his elbows and his knees. The road seizes huge patches of his skin from the joints and from the front of his body. There is blood everywhere. His knees alone are a horror show. They look like the grafted-on asses of two young baboons.

  I am scared and I feel guilty. Stupid. Sick. Any water I have left in my bottles I use to try to clean his w
ounds. I might as well try damming Lake Magadi with sticking plasters. He is calm but we are both sweating in the dead heat and I know that his sweat is running freely into his raw, vivid wounds.

  We sit there on the side of the road for ten, twenty minutes. I apologize. He waves it away. Every time, he waves it away.

  Maybe Mum will drive past and save us. Let it be.

  We sit there and finally he stands up gingerly and gets back on his bike. A wounded John Wayne climbing back on to his horse.

  This is too much.

  ‘Stop. I can carry you on my bike. I can hold you.’

  His laugh scolds.

  ‘What are you now? An acrobat? Let’s ride.’

  Hours later Mum finds us in Magadi. Her son, the wading bird, and his mentor, the wounded lion.

  She wants to drive us back to Nairobi straight away. He negotiates a compromise. We go to the hospital in Magadi. The soda lakes have given birth to a company town and the town has a hospital where they mummify him in bandages. We ‘camp’ for the night near the lake in a basic hotel.

  In the morning he won’t get into the car, so he and I saddle up. I have a hangover of such guilt that I swear I can actually feel some of his pain.

  He rides hard though, the bandaged bastard. Hard up the long, long climb to Kikuyu and home. Hard enough to show me what it takes. Hard enough for me to forget the guilt and want to beat him again. He takes me on the hills. We do some sprints. He takes me on them too. He schools me. For hours he schools me.

  We hit Mai-a-Ihii. We lift our bikes into his two-roomed tin hut on a corridor of two-roomed tin huts.

  I should go home but he knows that I don’t want to.

  We sit and talk into the night about old races and racers.

  ‘Tomorrow again?’ David Kinjah says to me before he sleeps.

  ‘Okay! Sure.’

  Yes.

  My name is Chris Froome. I am a professional cyclist. Before that I was a skinny kijana with big dreams.

  Boyhood happened to me in a house just outside Nairobi, twenty kilometres south-west of the city, in a genteel suburb called Karen. The most famous resident Karen ever had was Karen Blixen and, although there are minor protestations that the suburb was named after a different Karen entirely, most people believe the place was named after the Danish woman who married her cousin, coming to Kenya to run a coffee plantation.

  The homes around us were stately and elegant and secluded by means of long driveways and secure gates. In Out of Africa, Karen Blixen described the very land I grew up on as ‘Africa distilled up through six thousand feet, like the strong and refined essence of a continent’. She was right about the land, but what was built on it, and those who live in the town, are very un-African.

  Karen was once predominantly British but in the last couple of decades many Americans, Germans and Japanese have come to live there too. A few outliers from the emerging black middle class live in the town, but the place is primarily a colony of wealth, an enclave shielded from the sprawling city and its epic slums.

  My earliest memories are from our big house in Karen called Windy Ridge. We had a pleasant, decent-sized home, and I had my own bedroom, as did my two brothers, Jonathan and Jeremy, who are seven and nine years older than me respectively. When they were fourteen my brothers were sent off to England to attend Rugby School. We were relatively well off, at least when I was young.

  My mother, Jane Flatt, was born in Kenya in 1956 and raised in the highlands of Limuru. Her parents, my grandparents, Patrick and Patricia, had followed a similar path to Karen Blixen. They came here from Tetbury, England, early in the last century, drawn to the coffee plantations like filings to a magnet.

  He was an archetypal character, my grandfather. The sort of grandfather you might see in films or read about in books. He won the war, or so he would have us believe. He had served in World War Two, and in Kenya he had fought for the British against the Mau Mau, a militant group made up of Kikuyu rebels.

  He passed down funny stories that weren’t really meant for kids. They were contraband, slipped to us from the adult world, and we loved them all the more for it. My favourite tale was about how Grandfather ended up eating his donkey in the jungle because he got so hungry. Some comrades found him there in the middle of nowhere. They were starving too and they all ended up tucking into the donkey. This upset Grandfather because his donkey had been his companion through the whole war. I was never quite sure what rank he held or what role he had played during that time, travelling with a donkey – probably not espionage.

  Grandfather was an aficionado of hunting and fishing. He taught us both of these but duck hunting was his main bag. God knows what he was shooting with back then when he scoured the forests of Kenya with his donkey but it had left him deaf. He had a hearing aid and, poor man, my brothers and I (mainly my brothers, as I was timid) would have some fun at his expense. We would sit at the dinner table silently mouthing words to each other, making a great play of laughing heartily. Grandfather, excluded and frustrated by his impairment, would be frantically trying to tune in his hearing aid. It would be whistling with feedback as he tried to adjust it. Once he had turned it all the way up we would start talking at the top of our voices.

  He would recoil as if our words were sudden gunfire.

  ‘Stop shouting. No need for shouting.’

  Growing up in Karen, we didn’t have the usual activities or even the usual range of family pets. When I was six years old I remember crossing by my brother’s snake enclosure, which was basically a waist-high pit covered with chicken wire, and I noticed that the back legs of my favourite pet bunny rabbit were hanging from the mouth of Jeremy’s twelve-foot python. I had quite a few rabbits, but this was the one I had tamed, the one I could pick up and carry around with me. He was close to being my best friend. I would have known his hind legs anywhere but this was the last place I expected to see them. In fact, it was the last place that I would see them. Like most of our pets, he had a Swahili name but now he was just ‘Lunch’. There he was, about to be digested. I knew he couldn’t have found his own way into the snake pit. He must have been served up by my brother.

  I got so angry with Jeremy that I picked up a wooden plank and started battering the snake enclosure. I managed to puncture holes in the chicken wire covering the cage. I wasn’t a bad kid but I could throw a good tantrum if I didn’t get my way or if somebody crossed me. Or if my favourite rabbit was used as snake fodder.

  My brothers always did their best to knock that out of me. For my own good, of course – they were only ever cruel to be kind. They’d both give me a hard time in generous measures. We had some dog kennels, and when the dogs came into heat they would have to be put into cages to keep them away from each other. We also had a huge male turkey which my brothers would terrorize if I wasn’t around to provide them with some fun. And then one day they found a way to combine the dog cages, the turkey and me into a new, ground-breaking form of entertainment.

  We had air rifles and the boys would shoot at the turkey with the pellets that I fed my rabbits with. The pellets would fit comfortably into the barrel of an air rifle. So they’d sting the turkey with the pellets and make him angrier and angrier. One day that didn’t provide enough amusement so Jeremy and Jono had to improvise. When the turkey was sufficiently demented with rage they caught him and put him into one of the dog cages. Then they caught me and put me in the dog cage with the lunatic turkey.

  The ceilings were closed in and the cage door had a bolt that they jammed with a stick. The turkey and I were the same height, or maybe I was a little bigger, but that turkey could punch above its weight. I remember being absolutely petrified because he was so aggressive. He ducked his head down and came charging at me, his feathers puffed out in anger. I ended up huddled in the corner of the dog kennel with the turkey jumping and grabbing at me with its feet, whacking me with its wings and pecking at me all at the same time.

  This was so funny for my brothers that they had to try i
t again and again. It was hysterical and they loved it. Only when I was in absolute floods of tears would they open the cage up and let me out. My sparring sessions with the turkey were usually two or three minutes long. Time enough for both of us. Victory inevitably fell to the feathered one in the red corner. Luckily my brothers never thought to feed me to the python for a laugh.

  The turkey lived to be the fall guy in my own entertainment when Jeremy and Jono had gone back to school. The turkey stopped growing, while his partner from the dog cage didn’t. No. I finally got big enough to traumatize the turkey myself. I would sneak up on him – boo! – then let him chase me. Repeat. Repeat again. Tease the turkey, let him chase, on and on. I thought that was a great game. Payback at last!

  My father, Clive (or, as we all call him, Noz), grew up in England. He had been a good hockey player and had played internationally at Under-19 level but left it all to build a new life in Kenya. Noz started in the tourism trade, and soon established a successful company, Flamingo Tours, which specialized in beach holidays and safaris in Kenya, bringing people to the Masai Mara and to the perfect beaches and blue waters of the Kenyan coastline. Noz would organize the entire trip for holidaymakers, from start to finish.

  Aside from the company and the house, we had some land: maybe ten acres, two or three paddocks and a very generous garden with a tennis court. As well as our menagerie of pets, we had Jersey cows. My mother ran a bit of a dairy on the property so we had a barn where all the feed would be kept for the cows, a milking area and stables. We had two ayahs (nannies), an askari (a night watchman) and a couple of shamba boys (gardeners) who helped out with the milking of the cows and the feeding of the livestock that we had on the property.

  The Ngong racecourse is a feature of life in Karen and Noz kept racehorses, two at a time when I was quite young. The horses are a vanished memory as I was only three or four years old when they left, but the cows stayed and we had a bull too (no tease and chase with him). There were ducks, geese and chickens, and that turkey. We were comfortably well off, but our lives still had the wildness of Africa in them. Kenya was a magical place to grow up. Then suddenly it all ended.