The Climb: The Autobiography

by Chris Froome

  After eight months of saving, it was mine.

  It was Italian. A Colnago, with a blue and pink aluminium frame. It was a thing of beauty.

  6

  It’s 5.00 a.m. It’s dark. Dawn is still just a promise. The temperature is in the minus figures as I head towards the school sanatorium. I’m wearing my tracksuit and carrying a bag for my helmet. I’m shivering.

  I saunter casually now, clearing my head in the fresh air. When I arrive I unlock my Colnago and go inside. I do the Clark Kent thing and materialize in my cycling gear.

  Getting out of the school is easy in the dark. Getting back in, when things are busy, will be much harder, like a Colditz operation. I usually attempt re-entry during the breakfast-time rush. But the cold is turning me blue now. My hands grip the familiar curves of the Colnago handlebars. I hate the cold. Passionately. I am wearing thin school gloves. This is the only concession I make to common sense. The school gloves are warmer than my fingerless cycling ones. I think they are, anyway. There is no equipment capable of calibrating the difference in the coldness of my fingers when swaddled in school gloves as opposed to cycling gloves. I’m so numb that I simply can’t imagine anything being colder. I ride out like this every winter morning, wearing only bib shorts and a short-sleeve top. No long-sleeve jerseys. No gilets. No arm or leg warmers. Occasionally, I put plastic bags on my hands before I put the woollen school gloves on over the top. Not big with the Eskimos, I imagine. They help me stay warmer for maybe sixty seconds.

  I leave the school at 5.00 a.m. each day in this icy darkness. Matt leaves his home at the same time. He is a day boy; I board. I ride towards Matt’s house; he rides towards the school. When we meet we spin off into the brightening morning for a full-tilt training ride. We are competitive with each other. It is kudos for me if we are closer to Matt’s house than to the school when we meet in the morning. It is a small victory for him if we meet at any point nearer St John’s. Sometimes I leave the school at ten to five just to play with his head.

  The dark roads are empty and mysterious. The morning stillness is punctuated only by sudden birdcall and the odd bakkie ferrying labourers to their jobs, the men stoic and sleepy in their flat-backs, leaning into the angles of the hills so that we think they are about to tumble out.

  As we ride, the air pushes against us and bumps us about. My lips are cracked from the cold. When you are on a bike the air has multiple personalities. I don’t like descending into dips and hollows because all the cold air that has collected at the bottom freezes us even more as we pass through it. It’s like being dipped in frost. Flashing over bridges or streams, the air is more robust, it shakes us down and roughs us up. I shiver and shudder down the slope of long dark hills. I descend in a blind fury because the act of pedalling gives me some warmth. Generally, if the sun is aiding and abetting me, I look for hills. Hills are an unrequited love early in the morning though. The air on the way down is unkind to me. Sometimes I even pull on my brakes just so that I have to pedal again to get going.

  It’s love though. Every ache and chill. Me and my Colnago and these hills. In love, everybody hurts. If you are serious about hills and bikes, it hurts.

  Life made for a strange tapestry. The halls of St John’s and the beloved chaos at Kinjah’s were two of the bigger strands of my life as I left my childhood behind. With Kinjah and the guys, the bike was a staple of existence that tied us all together. In St John’s, the bike was an instrument of subversion and escape. A minority interest.

  In St John’s there is one dominant faith. I enjoy rugby without being devout about it. The school is quite fundamentalist about the sport though. Rugby. Then cricket. If you don’t play rugby, some form of observance is still compulsory. You go and watch from among the congregation while the school’s first team plays at the weekends. You help with the rite that is the special school cheer or war cry. This isn’t voluntary. It is like the draft. No dodging.

  Matt and I were the two most ardent lobbyists for cycling. That placed us on the outside. We were not the cool kids, or even in the orbit of the popular crowd. We didn’t run with the jocks or the big rugby players. My friends and I were a small and harmless subculture. We weren’t nerds, nor were we troublemakers. We flew under the radar.

  One day we fell in behind the headmaster as he was striding from one building to another. He had too much to do already without making time for a special meeting with the cycling posse. We urged him to understand the extraordinary time demands of cycling training. It had no beginning and no end.

  ‘It would really help if we could be excused from coming to cheer for the rugby team, if we could have your special permission.’

  ‘Gentlemen, I can’t let people just come here and go off and do whatever they want. We have our school sports here. They take preference. That’s how life is.’

  However, life for a cyclist had become much easier since Allan Laing, our new housemaster, had joined. He turned a blind eye to me arriving in the middle of breakfast and sitting down at a crowded table, taking the spot to which a sympathetic friend had already carried down my morning meal. Runnels of sweat gave my game away but Allan was a cycling man and looked the other way.

  Buying the gleaming Italian Colnago encouraged me to increase my commitment to a level befitting the bike’s beauty. Matt and I both joined the local Super C Cycling Academy, named after the Super C energy sweet. This was the first time we were part of an official bike set-up.

  The father of another junior schoolboy had finagled some sponsor money and an agreement to support the academy. I was very competitive with Matt at the time and he was already at the level I aspired to be. Matt had more of a natural build for a cyclist. He had huge quads and an impressively lean upper body. Take either end of him and you had the body of a genuine rider. I just had the skinny upper body. It came as a matching set with the rest of me. My relationship with cycling was like a detective with a puzzling case. I knew what I wanted to solve. It was just working out how that was the trouble.

  The Super C Cycling Academy was a rudimentary set-up. We rode with youngsters from different backgrounds including a few Afrikaans kids. We had enough riders to make an A team and a B team. We would go on to enter the national Junior Tour of South Africa for two years running. The race took place (and still does) in Ermelo in Mpumalanga. The Junior Tours gave us an annual serving of humility. It was more hard evidence for me of how far I had to go. Most of the stages were flat and by the finish we weren’t even in the same postal district as the leaders. I would be dropped. Most of the team would be dropped. We would get nowhere and I would think of how much harder I needed to train.

  I recognized that I had come into the sport relatively late, only starting to ride properly when I was thirteen, and that I had a lot of learning to do, and a lot of growing to do, before I could catch those front-runners. That was fine by me though: I knew I was in cycling for the long game.

  We were still really just kids. I remember being absolutely intimidated waiting at the start line and looking across at some of the other guys who had giant quads and full beards. I hadn’t even started shaving yet.

  The team time-trial day, in particular, was the one stage where we got up out of bed nervous and then spent the day proving to ourselves that we had plenty to be nervous about. It was a day of trying to coordinate an effort between the six of us in the team when we didn’t really know what we were doing, and didn’t have access to any hard information that might cure our ignorance.

  We were sappers coming out of the trenches and charging into no-man’s-land. In a team time trial you ride together as a group against the clock, taking turns at the front of your mini-peloton in order for the rest of your teammates to draft in the slipstream behind, in theory. However, for us, one person would often cycle too hard and leave the rest of us behind. We lost most of our guys in the first few kilometres and were constantly dropping each other. Occasionally, somebody would decide to prove a point and drive hard until they fell
off their bike with exhaustion.

  I was one of the riders who always clung on until the bitter end. It was just dogged perversity, managing to endure the suffering. But I actually enjoyed those time-trial days much more than I did the road stages. There was more to do and I relished the unpredictable racing dynamic. There were certain skills to hone tactically but also a lot of pain to bear. I did whatever I could to survive, because pain had to equal learning.

  Matt rode for a good few years but marginal pains killed him in the end. He didn’t love it quite enough when cycling really started to hurt. He was sane that way. He simply decided that professional cycling was not for him. I, on the other hand, found some sort of solace in the suffering. More than that, I found that from the pain came satisfaction, from the suffering, joy. The older I got the more I liked being off on my own, pushing myself through the various stages of exhaustion for seven or eight hours at a stretch.

  My school terms in South Africa left my mum on her own back in Nairobi. However, she had regular physio work at a clinic on the Ngong road and she was still in touch with Kinjah. In fact, it was more than that. She had practically become a member of the Safari Simbaz, acting as a soigneur, or carer, for the team; she would be on hand to offer any assistance, particularly during races or training rides. Kinjah had no back-up vehicles whenever he or the team raced, so Mum would drive behind as the support car, having bought plenty of bananas and water beforehand. She would do this even when I wasn’t there.

  She never told me the full extent of how involved she became and I only found out about what she had done for them many years later. She would often, for instance, drive up to Mai-a-Ihii with a car full of posho, a few pots of Cadbury’s hot chocolate and some bags of sugar. Posho was used to make ugali for the team (it is the maize in powdered form) and the other ingredients were added to the boys’ avocado paste. In this way, she looked after them, and they loved her for it.

  Perhaps her involvement was a connection to me while I was away, but she saw too that life in Kinjah’s hunkered hut, and out on the road, was about more than just the bikes. It was about opening up the world. For the Safari Simbaz, the hub of the world was Kinjah’s house. Their individual journeys were the spokes that radiated outward.

  Teaching a boy the discipline required for riding and training, as well as self-denial, put him on a road to the sort of self-fulfilment that he might never have dreamed about or have been able to achieve on his own. It gave him his first sense of possibility. The kids who buzzed in and out of Kinjah’s hive, just like I did, would probably never get the chance to see the inside of a great university or go on to change the world. But they could work to be the best at something, and if not the best, they could get the best out of themselves. They could journey until they found the limits of what they were capable of, without the speed bumps of race or class. Mum saw that. She saw the enjoyment, the pride and the discipline; gifts that Kinjah gave away every day to us all.

  I don’t believe that Mum ever had dreams of seeing me grown up in a tie and bespoke suit, attached to a briefcase and a job that might make me a senior vice president some day. If she had, she never projected that vision on to me. From Rocky and Shandy, through to my obsession with bikes, she was happy to see me content so long as I was a decent person. She encouraged a sense of independence in my brothers and me, and the world and its infinite variety was something she loved and appreciated more than most people did.

  She always enjoyed travelling out from the epicentre that was Karen, Langata and Nairobi. The Safari Simbaz races were partly an outlet for that, but I had left her without her fellow explorer for our adventures to the Rift Valley or the highlands. She loved the coast though. If Jeremy and Jono were home from England I would try to get back from South Africa, Mum would take time off work and we would head for the beaches of Diani, which fringes the Indian Ocean.

  These trips were a bonus. When I was in South Africa I always returned to Kenya at least once a year, for the long summer holidays, but those days and nights were mainly given up to the bikes with Kinjah and the team. Generally, though, during most of my time in South Africa I managed to get back home more than once each calendar year. Paying for flights was a difficulty, of course. Noz could manage one return ticket for me in the year but a second trip was costly and I was expected to contribute.

  It turned out that I was wearing the solution. In school in Johannesburg I had developed a habit that I still have. I had begun wearing kikoys, the very colourful type of sarong wrap garments which Kenyan people wear, not so much in Nairobi but typically along the coast. In St John’s my kikoys were the subject of some curiosity and even mild admiration. I was a walking advertisement for the clothes, which sadly weren’t available in Johannesburg. The city needed a kikoy outfitter.

  On a trip to Mombasa with Mum and my brothers I bought twenty to twenty-five kilos of the things. Kikoys in Mombasa sold for 200 shillings a go – about £1.50 per kikoy. Back in Johannesburg, to the discerning fashionistas of St John’s, I sold them on for R100 each, about £7.00. I had to sell around a hundred of them to keep myself in airline tickets.

  There was a hitch. Bringing so many kikoys back to Johannesburg meant not being able to carry very many of my own clothes with me. It was difficult enough flying my bike back and forth, so I ended up travelling just with bags full of merchandise and my bike.

  There weren’t enough pupils of taste in the boarding houses of St John’s to buy the full consignment of kikoys but I persisted with my business plan. I dangled them before the staff who worked with Noz in the office. Some felt sorry for me, others seemed to genuinely like them. Either way, they paid up. There were a few local workers who thought they might look good in them too. Done.

  I diversified the range, bringing in trousers and handbags made out of kikoy material. I went to a flea market in the Midrand shopping centre where they had an arts and crafts market and applied for a spot, setting myself up on a foldable table. After races on weekends I would head straight to my kikoy business. Some people loved the kikoys while others thought they were a bit kooky, but I mustered enough customers to sell three-quarters of the stock, covering my flights and a little bit extra for bike parts.

  Having to save the money made me treasure our special trips to the coast even more. Mum looked forward to these excursions with her three sons – two accountants and the daydreamer – and my brothers and I enjoyed them because we didn’t often get to spend much time together. Mum would always get me to go with her to the beach early in the morning, to do yoga with her. She would tell me how good yoga was for me. I was doubtful. I would look at the dawn sky maturing into morning and wait nervously for people we knew to begin passing us on the beach, who would steal furtive glances at me and Mum stretching by the surf, smirking as they went.

  They might have mistaken my red face for sunrise but Mum never cared what people thought. If we were all in a beach bar or a cafe having some drinks or something to eat, and they piped up some music that she liked, she would get up and dance. Her three brave boys would be examining the cutlery as if they didn’t know her. I think that just added to her enjoyment of those moments.

  Mum dancing. Yoga on the beach in Diani. The boys. These things are stuck fast and fond in my memories of Africa.

  Kinjah had set me believing that once I had developed physically, the mystery of how to be a full-time cyclist would be solved. I simply needed to keep training along the same lines. If I gave time to the bike, the bike would give the strength to my legs.

  It was a healthy position to take. I couldn’t force the muscles to grow. I needed to spin more. Kinjah always encouraged me to pedal at a high cadence, instead of grinding a heavy gear. By the time I was sixteen, I was riding the bike on a set of rollers in my room, as well as continuing to hit the cold, morning streets with Matt before dawn. I would often pretend to play squash (an approved school activity) with Matt in the late afternoon or early evening as the two of us headed off again for another
training spin. I was still in constant contact with Kinjah, reporting to him on my progress and asking him more specific questions now about which gear was the best to use, and what my ideal cadence should be.

  I watched the 2002 Tour de France with my mouth agape. It was the first Tour I ever saw. Ivan Basso and Lance Armstrong’s duel in the mountains was like an epic dogfight between two World War One pilot barons. A residual of hero worship for Basso lingered with me until I came to learn the shady pharmaceutical secret of his success. You never get over that feeling of betrayal. Basso was my first and last hero of the peloton.

  Sometime around then I met Robbie Nilsen. Robbie was a man with fingers in several pies. A lawyer by trade, he had a passion for cycling and performance. He ran a junior cycling academy in Johannesburg called the Hi-Q Supercycling Academy (Hi-Q is a car servicing chain). Our meeting was timely. It was beginning to dawn on me that the typical South African fun race with a couple of thousand people involved wasn’t going to be adequate preparation for a life on the lofty peaks of the Tour de France.

  Kinjah and I were still exchanging ideas and training concepts but Robbie became part of the conversation too. We spent long afternoons together on weekends discussing practice ideas. I was coming to realize that the social aspects of the fun races I had been entering had trace elements that could be found again in the group training rides which we were now spending hours putting ourselves through every week. As harsh as it sounded, the group always tended towards the lowest common denominator. No matter the will or the intention, the capabilities and desires of the strongest rider in the group were normally tethered to the limitations of the weakest rider. The weakest guy may actually have been pouring all of himself into the road and the strongest guy may have felt like he was doing the same. But he wasn’t. There would be some part of his inner self that he would never touch.