The Climb: The Autobiography

by Chris Froome

  Before I started to improve, though, they were incredibly accommodating. The group would often cycle quite a bit faster than me, but at times they would give me a push or they would slow down so that I could stay with them, or ride in their slipstream. They would all be taking turns at the front, each acting as a windbreak temporarily so that the others could draft behind them, whereas I would be at the back barely hanging on, taking advantage of all of their hard work without reciprocating. But they never minded that. Close to home they would finally push on ahead and I would arrive back a good ten minutes after them.

  Kinjah was terrible at time management. He would say, ‘Okay, we’re leaving at nine o’clock tomorrow,’ so I would pitch up at eight. But he would be cooking something and then he would be talking. We would eventually leave the house at one o’clock. Naturally, we would be extremely late for whatever meeting or appointment we were travelling to, so we would be riding extra fast.

  If Kinjah had no meetings or visits scheduled, we would be out all day. We would leave early in the morning, and then ride a good three or four hours before stopping for a meal somewhere, and then ride the same distance back. These were big, long days.

  I say stop for a meal somewhere as if we were clicking our fingers for waiter service. We would stop at a place where we knew we could find food. It wouldn’t be a restaurant as we all know it, but it would be somewhere where we could get a plate of ugali, the white pap. Ugali is maize flour cooked with water into a sort of doughy porridge. It is very popular in Africa and incredibly wholesome but also stodgy. We would have ugali and sukuma wiki, a kind of kale or spinach, or what Americans would call collard greens. Kenyans have a fantastic way of cooking and eating this which is really tasty and simple. We would break off a piece of the doughy ugali with our hands and eat it together with the sukuma wiki vegetables. There wasn’t meat very often because that was generally quite expensive in Kenya and more difficult to procure. However, after a really heavy day of cycling, we would make an effort to source some protein. If we could find some beef to add to the ugali and sukuma wiki, we would make a stew with it.

  One of my favourite meals was introduced to me by Kinjah. It consisted of avocados, which were plentiful, cocoa powder, which you could buy from the local kiosk shops, and a sprinkling of sugar. We would mash it all up and make a brown, creamy, chocolatey paste. After training, when we were low in sugars, we really enjoyed that.

  On other days we would head off together to one of Kinjah’s meetings in the Central Business District and we might end up stopping for a meal of chicken and chips from a local fast-food place. We would all push ourselves even harder on the road home to burn off the excess calories. Chicken and chips wasn’t a normal meal for cyclists.

  It was a Friday afternoon and I was riding home from St John’s. I was fifteen years old. I hit the motorway on my bike. My backpack was filled with my schoolbooks and homework for the weekend, as well as some clothes. I swung into the fast lane and got behind a small bakkie. Sitting behind the slipstream, I was comfortably riding along at around 50 kilometres an hour. I was feeling great. Yes! I had finished school for the week. I was home for the weekend. I even had a race on Sunday. Life was –

  He had a large, angry Afrikaner face perched on top of a large, stocky Afrikaner body. He virtually grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and dragged me across several lanes of traffic on his motorbike.

  ‘Kom hierso!’

  He was shouting in Afrikaans as he dragged me.

  ‘Kom hierso jou klein bliksem!’

  His big, volcanic face was close to mine. He had taken off his helmet.

  I was busted.

  On the weekends, if we were not racing at school, I usually went home to stay with Noz. He lived forty-five minutes away by car in Midrand, halfway between Pretoria and Johannesburg. The easiest way to get there, the way that we would drive to and from school, was on the motorway that connects the two cities. Motorways, it was pointed out to me now, were not for bicycles. The back roads to Midrand would get me there safely.

  I had worked out, however, that Friday afternoon when it was time for me to go home was actually the best time to take a bicycle out on to the motorway. Traffic was generally bumper to bumper most of the way. The cars in the fast lane might reach speeds of 40 to 50 kilometres per hour, the sort of speed designed as an invitation to a young cyclist who was happy to tuck in behind a truck or car. It meant no traffic lights and a quick ride home. Until the police officer, who was now breathing fire into my face, had seemingly identified me as the biggest threat to the quality of life for God-fearing people in all of Johannesburg.

  It had taken much persuasion to make Noz and the school see that cycling home and back to school would be in everybody’s best interests, but most of all my own. With reservations they had both agreed.

  I could understand their concerns. St John’s was in Houghton, which is middle class and expensive. But Houghton borders Hillbrow and Yeoville, tough precincts closer to the central business district in Johannesburg. Hillbrow was once urban hip. Now it teemed with people who had fled the townships to a different sort of poverty. If you look at a picture of Johannesburg, Hillbrow is the area beneath the long slender tower which is a landmark of the city. The tower once had a revolving restaurant in it but now it serves as a geographical warning for those who do not dare risk the hinterland below.

  Yeoville suffered a similar fate to Hillbrow in the nineties, transforming during just eight years of white flight from being an eighty-five per cent white district to ninety per cent black. The whites took their business with them. Banks redlined the area, denying loans to members of the black population, which meant they had to rent and couldn’t buy.

  Hillbrow and Yeoville were areas best avoided by kids on bicycles, but when I was heading home the quickest route was to cycle straight through them – quickly. I didn’t want to puncture. Then there was the motorway issue.

  ‘Is jy fokken mal? Wat dink jy? Op die hoofweg? In die vinnige laan? IS. JY. FOKKEN. MAL?’

  I had no legal training but I knew the tack I must take here.

  ‘I’m sorry. I don’t understand Afrikaans.’

  Mum had said to me once that if you ever got into trouble with the police you should never try to argue with them. It never worked as they would always use their power against you. The best thing to say would be ‘I’m sorry’ and then they couldn’t carry on being angry with you. So, I was working the fool’s pardon stratagem.

  He switched to English but he was a little disarmed now.

  ‘What are you doing on the motorway?’

  I wanted to say something smart like ‘doing the crossword’ but I knew better.

  ‘I’m really, really sorry, officer. I’m really sorry but I’m new to South Africa and I’m going to school now in Johannesburg. When my father brought me here first, he brought me here on this road and I don’t know the way home on any other roads so I have to use this one.’

  I hoped it sounded like my father was a Somalian pirate who had abducted me and brought me here for some reason to the posh school. I was not to blame for my foolishness.

  ‘No, no, you can’t do that. Follow me.’

  He threatened to impound my bike. My most treasured possession.

  ‘I’m taking your bike to the station. Your parents can come and pick you up from there. Or you’re not going home tonight.’

  This was harder work. I had to increase the sob quotient in my story.

  ‘Please. My mum is in Kenya and my father is working. He can’t come and pick me up.’

  He reprimanded me at length and made me follow him to the next exit ramp, explaining to me the route home on the back roads which I knew precisely, but I kept nodding gratefully as he explained every twist and turn. I used the back road for about five kilometres and hit the motorway again soon after that. For safety, I now rode even closer to the car in front of me so I could stay ducked down behind it and out of sight.

  A couple
of times back in Nairobi I joined old friends from the Banda School for parties and nights out. Being teenagers, and fairly affluent, my friends were drinking and smoking joints. With Kinjah and the group I never insulted their intelligence by pretending to be what I was not. I may not have been the wealthy kid they imagined me to be, but at home and in St John’s I still had a life of considerable privilege by comparison. I mentioned the nights out to Kinjah and he was not at all impressed. I was surprised at how strict and stern he was with me. That was not the way to go, he said. It definitely made an impact with me. I realized I couldn’t live fully in both worlds. I would have to choose. Being a good sufferer on the bike, the choice was easy.

  With a role in each place, though, I learned a lot. Even about food. With Kinjah and the boys, we had meals when we were hungry. If we had eaten a substantial meal in the middle of the day we didn’t need to eat again. However, in Karen or Langata we had breakfast, lunch and dinner, and those were set meal times. We had to attend those meals regardless of the energy we had spent in between. It was definitely a different take on the priorities of day-to-day living.

  Kinjah’s family had their own home and some land, which we in Kenya would call their shamba, a plot up in the highlands. I set off with the Safari Simbaz one morning through tea plantations and on a long ride up tarmac into the hills before heading off on a dirt road for a couple of hours. When we arrived at his family’s place, Kinjah brought out the gifts that he had carried with him: an assortment of shirts he had collected from sponsored events. They were new, and would have been expensive, still in their packets. His family loved them.

  At the shamba Kinjah’s brother Dan took us away for a walk through the land to show us what they were growing. They had all kinds of vegetables. They’d live off what they were growing and sell anything extra to the local market in order to buy other foods that they couldn’t cultivate themselves. They had a few acres in total. We walked for nearly twenty minutes around the shamba and Dan took us down a steep cliff where he told us of his plans to grow more crops.

  The land there was fertile and green and very lush, with a small stream running at the bottom. After we walked back up we spent a couple of hours relaxing, sharing food with the family, before eventually heading home. It was a slice of Kenya that very few mzungus get to see.

  When we left we were given a huge load of vegetables, which were very awkward to carry. I couldn’t help thinking that surely we could buy these cheaply ourselves for about five shillings (less than 50p) from the local market near Kinjah’s village, but now we were going to be carrying it all for a hundred kilometres. And there were hills all the way back to the village.

  It was an unworthy thought after their hospitality and, more embarrassingly, the other guys wouldn’t let me carry any of the vegetables myself. They took everything off me and loaded themselves up with about ten kilos each. Then, to my amazement, Kinjah and the group just exploded away on their bikes. They were burning up the dirt tracks, which were incredibly steep and tough. I thought to myself, ‘Okay, I’ve got a real advantage here, I’m not carrying ten kilos of these wretched vegetables. I can get home first today.’

  I could see them labouring and sweating but still I couldn’t keep up. After an hour I could feel jelly legs coming on. I was mortified. Now they weren’t just carrying the food, they were starting to take turns pushing me from behind on my bike up the steep climbs because I was lagging. Once we reached the main road I was content to cycle in their slipstream, and get sucked back to Kikuyu.

  When we arrived back in the evening we didn’t eat much at all. Just a few pieces of bread with avocado and some milky cinnamon tea before we were off to bed.

  I used to wonder how I would ever get the body I needed to get to the world I wanted to end up in. Or whether ugali and the dirt roads would get me there. I knew I didn’t have the muscles; Kinjah had explained to me that it would take years on the bike to develop them fully before I could really push on the pedals properly.

  That became the long-term obsession. The goal. To develop the way Kinjah said I would, by doing these long rides and putting in the hours. Hour after hour after hour.

  St John’s was situated in a wondrous terracotta-coloured building in the middle of genteel Houghton. Nelson Mandela had a home nearby. On Fridays a group of schoolfriends and I would sweep out in a cavalcade of bikes down St David Road, on to Houghton Drive, and we were away.

  We were highwaymen, kings of the road.

  We rode from gladed Houghton to the wealthy oasis of Sandton and then back again. Johannesburg was notorious for many things and its homicidal traffic was one of them. We would hit the most densely trafficked roads in the city, Rivonia Road and Jan Smuts Road, where the cars and trucks would be gridlocked and irritable in both directions. In order to move at all we pedalled straight down the middle of the road. If a car door opened suddenly, one of us would get taken out instantly. If a newspaper hawker or a beggar dawdled in our path, there would be tears.

  We were in the channel between the vein and the artery of Jo’burg traffic, racing each other. One of my friends would be on the inside of the cars while I would be on the outside, pedalling for my life to get past them. We saw fleeting faces of motorists, their eyes filled with alarm, pity and sometimes rage. Who were these wild, senseless kids on bikes speeding down the middle of Jan Smuts Road? Had it come to this?

  For us, it was the best part of the week – pure exhilaration and freedom. I especially loved a stretch near the school, the hill on Munro Drive leading up to Elm Street. It was steep enough to make me yearn for bigger hills and proper mountains. That sinew of imagination linked all of us boys. This was fun but we knew there was a world of professional cycling out there that we were serious about. There was madness but there was love and dedication at the heart of it.

  I had started getting a few results in the races we entered locally. We had changed housemasters and our new overseer, Allan Laing, was an enthusiastic cyclist himself. He was supportive and I also had an ally in Sister Davies, the school nurse, who headed up our cultural activities on a Friday afternoon. She and her husband were very keen cyclists themselves and they liked to enter the mass participation cycling events that were increasingly popular in South Africa. I occasionally saw the pair of them at the races and we huddled to compare times.

  Sometimes the races would have a couple of thousand people riding. On weekends, poor Noz would have to wake up at 4.30 a.m. to get me there on time. He would have to drive me to the start line by 5.30 a.m. with the race commencing at 6.00. One morning, Noz drove me an hour and a half south at 4.00 a.m. to Vanderbijlpark. When we got there I realized I had forgotten my racing shoes. I didn’t want to tell Noz I had forgotten them and considered trying to do the ride in my sandals. Noz, who was always supportive and interested in my racing, figured out my mistake quickly enough.

  ‘Right, that’s it. We’re going home.’

  He swung the car round, back towards Midrand. I learned not to forget my cycling shoes.

  No matter how many people raced, I would have won the prize for being the most earnest. I wouldn’t start in the early groups with the pros but I would race against the clock for the 100 kilometres, record all of my times and would try to better my personal best each week. I went along to more and more of these races all around Johannesburg.

  I was still riding my old mountain bike but I had developed enough to be able to keep up with some of the racers. That was a short-term goal: keep up with the guys with the expensive, fast bikes. I still couldn’t get close to the racing times of the professionals, but my fitness was improving.

  Driving to the races every weekend, Noz and I spent hours together that we probably wouldn’t have had if it wasn’t for cycling. I think it was a challenge for both of us but it was fun. He was learning more and more about what I was doing, and he was proud of my results. Eventually I got the confidence to raise an important issue with him.

  ‘Noz, I really need to get a
road bike.’

  We enquired, we saw the prices, and then we retreated for talks. Finally, we came up with a system. I would start by performing small jobs for him to earn some money. These ranged from washing the car, to a personal courier service on my bike, to admin work for his conference business.

  Next, I was resourceful. School was like prohibition America and I saw an opening, supplying certain goods that were needed. With my growing reputation in the schoolyard as an obsessive cyclist who had influential allies in Allan Laing and Sister Davies, I had far more freedom to be outside the school than most other boarders did. Alcohol was in big demand. I would go out to the liquor stores and get bottles of vodka and brandy for the boys in my year and sell them at double the rate I had bought them. It was a tax to justify the risks for the mule. I could put cigarettes and other small items of contraband into the handlebars of the bike and bring those back too.

  I was a teenage bootlegger. And so good at it that I even became a prefect at St John’s without them getting wind of my extra trips to and from the school. I found work at a Johannesburg bicycle shop too, called Cycle Lab, in Fourways. I was paid by the hour and tried to work as many hours as my weekend would allow. Later, I even started instructing local spinning classes, taking back-to-back classes so that I could also make them a worthwhile training session for myself.

  The money mounted up.

  Eventually, I found a bike in the classifieds that was almost identical to the bike Matt Beckett, my buddy at the school cycling club, owned. It belonged to a man who had bought it to try to get fit and then hardly used it.

  I thought I was getting a great deal. He wanted R10,000 for it, which was less than £1,000. It was sleek and so much faster than anything I had ever ridden before. Even though it was actually about three sizes too big for me (the frame was a 60-inch or perhaps even a 62-inch – today I ride a 56), I felt it was the right size for me at the time. I could grow into it.