The Climb: The Autobiography

by Chris Froome

  I was five or six years old when my parents’ marriage hit a reef and at the same time Noz lost control of the company.

  The details are vague to me. Noz blamed the business setback on a very large loan that someone had taken out in the company’s name without his knowledge. Money had been sifted away from the Flamingo accounts. Noz thought that it was being taken for an overseas branch but the money had just disappeared. It’s blurry. My parents were divorcing at the same time, but the bank showed no sympathy when it came after the family to pay back the loan.

  First they eyed up the house and the cars, and then came the bailiffs. They took furniture and anything they could from the house.

  I have quite a vivid memory from that time. I had a little black bike that I would ride around our place and I was practically welded on to it. All day, every day, I would ride up and down our driveway and around our garden, pedalling backwards to apply the brake. There was a narrow dirt road that led to our drive, and I would be there raising dust until my mother summoned me for whatever meal was next. My brothers had gone off to school in England. Noz had already left by this time and moved in with his new girlfriend, Jenny, whom he later married. I was left to my own devices.

  On this particular day I remember the gates being locked.

  It was as if Mum knew what was coming. I don’t know if it was the bailiffs or merely that Noz wanted to collect his possessions after the divorce, but I know that we had chained the gates because some people were coming to take our belongings from the house. It was a weekend and I was supposed to be going to a friend’s birthday party up the road.

  Outside the locked gates there was a big lorry, and people ready to do the lifting and shifting. My mother refused to let them in. There was a stand-off. I knew better than to whine about the birthday party. I recognized the man overseeing the operation as someone from Noz’s company. I was the messenger boy in the negotiations, riding up and down on my bike, ferrying between the gate and my mum, relaying news of what was going on.

  ‘Listen, open up,’ said the man. ‘Tell your mum we need to come in.’

  I conveyed the message and my mum was very upset. She was crying. She threatened to call the police to intervene. I remember cycling down to the gate and saying gravely to the man, ‘She’s calling the police.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said finally, ‘tell your mother that if she doesn’t open up we’re going to pull the gate off.’

  And that’s what they did. They attached strong ropes and big chains on to our gates and ripped them off their hinges.

  My mother was a remarkable woman. As soon as they breached the broken gates she said to me, ‘Right, don’t worry about it. Get in the car.’

  And we left. She took me to the party I’d been invited to.

  ‘Don’t worry about that,’ she said again as we drove. ‘We are fine. It’s only “stuff”. We’ll go home and we’ll sort it out. I’ll sort it out.’

  2

  With Noz gone, we were on our own. Just Mum and me. Jeremy and Jono both continued with their schooling in England. When things started getting difficult in terms of finance, other members of the family stepped in to help with their education. By then Jonathan had finished at Rugby and was at university. Naturally, they have different memories of those times.

  My immediate family may have been reduced to just me and my mum but, growing up, I was always really close to the ayahs. Ayah is a word used in Kenya for babysitter or nanny, and that’s what we called them. We had two ayahs, Anna and Agnes. They were second mothers to me and it was Anna and Agnes who taught me to speak Swahili. They were both Wakambas, a large Kenyan tribe. They taught me to speak certain Wakamba words, but mainly we spoke Swahili.

  Anna had a daughter called Grace. Grace was three years younger than me and I remember the two of us would often play after school. I’d be climbing trees, trying to set up a rope, slide or swing for us, and we would do all sorts of things together. Poor Grace. I would soon play the same kind of tricks on her that my brothers had on me. It must have been some sort of revenge. I’d terrorize her a bit but we were good friends. I gave her my bike when it was getting too small for me and taught her how to ride.

  Apart from Karen, the other affluent area in Nairobi is Langata and I was sent to the Banda School on the Magadi road in Langata. It was a little piece of the British public school system set down in Kenya. The Banda School is set on thirty acres beside the Nairobi National Park. Twenty of those acres are playing fields. We had four rugby pitches, many hockey pitches, squash courts and a six-lane swimming pool. All very English, apart from the odd warthog escaping from the National Park and waddling across the pitches. Banda wasn’t an all-white school; it was maybe seventy per cent white. It was quite expensive though and the other kids were all well off.

  No matter how much some people might wish it to be otherwise, wealth or colour will never insulate you from the fact that you are surrounded by Africa. I remember one occasion when I was twelve years old in Banda and we were coming back from a school rugby game after playing up at Turi. We would always come back on the six-hour drive via Dagoretti with its abattoir, lines of hanging animal carcasses and bloody roads. We were on a school bus, just a bunch of pupils, one master and a driver. There was trouble in Dagoretti. The road was blocked and there was a riot in progress.

  Our bus was trapped and there was traffic behind us and in front. There was nowhere for us to go. We had managed to get right to the front of the queue when the mob surrounded us. Suddenly people were shaking our bus backwards and forwards, an angry crowd rocking and banging the side of the bus.

  I am back there. I am sitting in an aisle seat. The crowd doesn’t break any windows but they’re trying to push in the door, the main door, and our big rugby coach has wedged himself in on the stairs, pushing backwards against the door to stop anyone opening it. Then our driver’s door is suddenly flung open. Someone pulls him out. He’s a Kenyan guy from the Wakamba tribe, and this could be bad for him. As he is being dragged from the bus he pulls a weapon from underneath his seat. In Kenya we call it a panga, a machete kind of thing with a big wooden handle and an even bigger blade on it. One swing and you could do a lot of damage. We never even knew it was there. They pull him out, he instinctively grabs his panga and very quickly they let him go again.

  He jumps back on the bus, turns round and has this huge grin on his face, really proud of the fact that he’s scared them off. We kids, we love that the driver did that. We cheer and applaud and we are on our way.

  At Banda I noticed one thing which puzzled me. Everyone seemed to have ayahs but hardly any of my friends could speak Swahili as well as I could. I always found that strange. Some of my friends couldn’t put together two words of Swahili. I suppose it was a sign of how sheltered life could be in Karen or Langata.

  ‘Wow,’ I’d say, ‘you’ve lived all your life here and you don’t even speak …’

  Anna and Agnes could not speak English so it was always natural to talk with them in Swahili. Other people had English-speaking ayahs, or ones with a bit of English, but in our house my mum spoke Swahili, as did Noz and my brothers. In my life now people find it unusual that I speak Swahili but growing up it was never a conscious thing, no one ever told me that I had to learn. It just came naturally. When I came home from school, for instance, I’d be straight down to the stables or hanging out with Mutheke, the shamba boy, helping with milking a cow or just chatting to him about life. We always spoke Swahili.

  Anna and Agnes were always very protective of me when times were difficult, and sharing a language allowed them to speak softly to me sometimes about hard things.

  Everything had gone bad very quickly for my parents, both professionally and personally. There were huge debts to be settled with the bank, and the house and our possessions didn’t cover it. It is hard to imagine how Flamingo Tours sunk so rapidly. There were, at a guess, over a hundred employees, who were suddenly all out of work. Noz spent a couple of nights in priso
n. They took him in to ask about the accounts; I think they thought that he might have had the money salted away somewhere. There were no charges but the collapse of the company was big news at the time and affected many people.

  Mum and Noz divorced while they were still living under the same roof. It was a tough period. My bedroom was closest to their room and before Noz moved out there were times when I would be woken up in the middle of the night to the sound of my mum yelling at him. I know that Noz would never have hit my mother but they would argue viciously. We had quite a few meals that descended into chaos. I remember a shepherd’s pie dish being thrown at Noz once. And wine glasses. Things would flare up and Anna and Agnes would swoop in and take me away, leaving my parents to it.

  At the time I didn’t really understand much of it. I was angry with my mother because she was the one who did most of the screaming. They were both having a hard time but, to my eyes, she was the one being emotional. Noz would always stay quiet. He isn’t a confrontational man but I think he could stir her up just by saying very little. He wouldn’t shout or get worked up and I think that made Mum even angrier.

  For a while after they split Noz still lived in Kenya but in a different house. I would go and see him sometimes on weekends, or spend a week with him every now and then. It was always quite uncomfortable. I never really wanted my parents to see each other, and I always asked to be let out of the car a little bit further down the road when I was getting dropped off so that I could walk the rest of the way.

  I knew that if they were together there was going to be some kind of confrontation.

  For years afterwards I used to get this sick, sick feeling whenever people raised their voices. I can still remember that horrible churning sensation in my stomach any time I heard people shouting.

  When I was seven years old Noz moved down to South Africa to start his life again. It must have been hard for him to do that. I know my mother always thought Noz had taken money from the company, but I can’t believe that he had. When he moved to South Africa there were a few really tough years for him and my new stepmother, Jenny. He had nothing and had to start all over again. He lived with his mother at first, who had sold her property at an old-age village in order for them to buy a small place there. They started a new conference management business from scratch, running it from home for the first few years.

  The day Noz left Kenya, my stepmother and I went to the airport with him. By the time we arrived I had fallen asleep in the back seat. He says that it was the one moment in his life when he actually cried – leaving Kenya, not wanting to wake me up and not knowing when he’d next see me. More than a year passed before we saw each other again.

  After Noz left, my mother and I agreed that we wouldn’t ever shout, or at least that she wouldn’t shout at me if she was angry. If she did raise her voice I always got that memory back in my gut. The agreement was that if she was angry with me she would tell me she was angry with me. She would talk to me and tell me why she felt that way, but she was never allowed to shout at me.

  If I am honest, when Noz left I was slightly relieved. This was life and we could get on with it now. There would be no more shouting. It wasn’t easy. Mum didn’t really have any qualifications and money was scarce. We stayed with my mother’s parents for a while in the spare room of their house. We lived out our lives between Karen and Langata, and although most of the time the great yawning slums of Nairobi, places like Kibera, never concerned us, we had our own struggles.

  Mum earned some money by house-sitting for people when they were away. Sometimes we would rent a modest cottage in the grounds of a bigger house. One of the places that we stayed in while we were house-sitting had a vast garden but it was completely overgrown. I spent ages with Grace cutting back the grass and making a cycling track through the garden so that we could ride our bikes around.

  Mum needed a qualification and she decided to study physiotherapy. She would spend long hours interning at the Kenyatta and Kajiado public hospitals. And when she was home, it felt as though she spent all her free time studying for upcoming exams. I would sit for hours intently colouring in her workbooks, shading all the different muscle groups in different colours.

  I learned how to amuse myself. Because of Mum’s hours at the hospital I had to be dropped off at school very early each morning. School didn’t start until half past seven but I would be there on my own at 6.00 a.m. every day. Mum would always pack me a bacon sandwich or a pot of yoghurt and fruit, and I would sit outside the classroom, on the step, and wait. After a while, the security guards started opening up the classroom earlier for me, so I could go in and sit at a desk and do my homework before school.

  Academically, I wasn’t great. I loved numbers and maths – they had a logical sequence that I could appreciate and enjoy. But I am dyslexic and a really slow reader. I would have to gaze at each word for a while, desperately hoping to recognize it. I dreaded having to read out in class. I couldn’t do it fluidly, it would be, ‘and – the – man – went – to – the –’

  Because of the dyslexia I went to classes on Saturdays with a special needs teacher. I would try to work through exercises to improve my skills, but even then I found that I would read stuff painstakingly slowly and still not be able to remember a word of what I’d just read. The process of concentrating so hard used up all the available space in my brain. English and history, or anything that required a lot of reading, was difficult and I would struggle with the time limit in exams or class to read everything through.

  My concentration span wasn’t great either. I was a dedicated daydreamer. I would always be off in the clouds, thinking of whatever hobby I was fanatical about at the time. Butterflies were an early obsession. There was a famous butterfly collector not far down the road from me, a man called Steve Collins, who founded the Nairobi Butterfly Centre in Kenya. He got me into butterflies and I used to go along to his place and learn all that I could.

  I used to love the detail of it. And the ritual. I would go off and catch a butterfly, and once it was dead and stiff, I would inject it with hot water to soften it again. Next, I would display it carefully on a board, knowing how to spread the wings properly and pin it securely. I would spend a lot of my time chasing butterflies and trying to find different varieties from all over Kenya whenever we travelled anywhere. If Mum and I took a trip I would take the net with me, down to the coast or to the Mara, wherever we were going.

  I really enjoyed collecting, and I got to know most of the different names, the Latin ones, for the butterflies. The most rare and hardest to catch were the different types of Charaxinae, which I would lure into traps using rotting banana and mosquito netting. It was something I was passionate about. I’ve found that every time I go through a phase with a hobby or something I enjoy doing, that’s all I want to do for a while. I get completely obsessed with things. That’s how cycling would be for me. Still is. I’m lucky to have been able to turn an obsession into a career.

  The butterflies lasted quite a while though, a couple of years at least. Cycling had always been part of life too and I had always had a bicycle, as far as I can remember. No matter where we moved, all those different houses with Mum, I would always get to know the maze of back roads and footpaths. Every single one. When we moved to a different house I was the pathfinder. It was an adventure for me to go out and explore the byways, learning all the back routes. I knew quickly how to get to places faster and which path was the most direct, or which road went where. These days I get lost sometimes on training rides – I’ve lost that gift.

  I had the same little bike for a long time until I finally outgrew it. I then went through a stage of riding my mother’s bicycle. I was the coolest kid in Nairobi. It was a big shopping bicycle with baskets on the front and back. I would ride it around, and although it was old-fashioned, the bike gave me my first taste of making a living from cycling when I went through a phase of being a kid entrepreneur. We were still living at Windy Ridge at the time, where we ha
d a huge avocado tree that grew right on top of our barn. It was not one tree really, but two or three avocado trees that all came together in the one spot. I spent hours climbing up and gathering the avocados that were ripe. I would collect baskets full of them.

  I couldn’t stand avocados at the time. I would put them into the basket on the back of the bike and cycle up and down the streets at our end of Karen. I would ride up to people and ask them if they wanted to buy them. They were five shillings (35p) each or thereabouts – my pricing structure was fluid. Sometimes I would take my stock down to a small kiosk owner who sold the basics. It was just one guy in a wooden construction on the side of the road selling sweets, bread, milk and other staples. I would go to him and swap the avocados for sweets, or have him take the avocados on consignment for me. Some days when sales were good, and I was able to get a few notes together, I’d sneak them into my mum’s purse.

  My two brothers are accountants and as a kid I felt myself slipping towards that abyss. With Noz gone, I was often more conscious of our financial situation than a child should have been. There was a school car-pool and a few of the parents would share lift duties as the school was twenty minutes or more away, depending on traffic. On Fridays, the gang of us in the car would be allowed to stop for ice creams on the way home. If it ever fell on my mother’s day to pick us up from school I would fret that she wouldn’t be able to buy the ice creams and the other kids would find out that we were struggling. I really worried about that. I remember going into the shop with my friends and picking up the locally made ice cream because the fancy imported ice creams were six or seven times more expensive.

  I would grab the local ones and offer them. ‘Here we go, guys!’