The Climb: The Autobiography

by Chris Froome

  It wasn’t ideal but up until this point at least our system had worked. Suddenly, though, the car was nowhere to be seen. We took turns dropping back into the convoy but each time we would confirm each other’s assessment of the situation – our support vehicle was gone. We dropped back again to ask other team managers if they had seen our car, but the answer was the same.

  The sun was high and hot. Our bottles were now completely empty, and we were still expending every ounce of energy, pouring ourselves, mind and body, on to the road. We couldn’t figure out what was going on, but the car wasn’t the problem now. The problem was the stark fact that we were dehydrating in an Egyptian desert.

  I dropped back from the peloton to the South African team vehicle. I had recognized the driver as Bart Harmse, a commissaire from a number of the South African races I had taken part in as a junior.

  ‘Oom Bart, can I please get some bottles of water from you? Our support team has gone missing.’

  I tried to make the request sound as reasonable and as respectful as I could, but the way Bart looked at me, his face said that this was one of the most half-assed things he had ever heard.

  So half-assed that he took pity on us. I managed to get two or three bottles out of him and we shared them around the team as best we could. Still, there were seven of us, all thirsty and burning up. We were like a shipwrecked crew in a great ocean with the last canteen of water on the lifeboat long since drained. Except that, unlike a shipwrecked crew, we were all working manically, outputting as much wattage as we were humanly capable of. The water didn’t last long between seven of us.

  Poor Michael, it wasn’t supposed to be like this for him. It certainly wasn’t the dream. He was thirsty and struggling, and seemed to be pushing uphill in a place where there were no hills.

  Between us we tried to imagine that we were at home, that we were riding in our beloved Ngong Hills, swapping sharp insults and teases. We pretended for a while that we weren’t toiling through this vacant desert. There was so much sand that it had lost its novelty. The road behind and ahead was endless and our water had been finished long ago.

  We were all feeling it. When we looked at each other we could see the effects of this imposed drought. We were slowing and getting weaker. This was happening to us at different rates but Michael looked the worst. The shine had gone from his eyes and his grin had vanished. This was no ride through the hills. This was desperate.

  I tried to imagine what was going through Michael’s head. Above all, there would have been his pride. We were here together, riding this tour. It was another country and another chapter. When we returned home to Kenya, when we were back in Kinjah’s place, we would tell stories of our big race adventure. The stories would be funny but with a spine of steel to them. This was the scenario: we all gave some and some gave all. The guy who wilted would be remembered, seized upon and turned into a figure of laughter.

  Like the rest of us, Michael would never want to be remembered as the one who was dropped and left behind. No. He wouldn’t want to be the first.

  On the other hand, this was a just bike race. Bad things happened but usually nobody died. So why wait until he fell off his bike through dehydration or heat stroke? Why be a fool? How would the stories sound if he keeled over and got taken to hospital for a few days? Not good, either.

  Something had gone wrong but it was out of our control. Broom wagons, those large buses to collect stragglers, followed races for exactly this reason. If things got too much, then we could get off our bikes and it would pick us up and take us home.

  With these thoughts whirring in our minds, we pedalled on, each of us withdrawing into our own world of thirst and worry. I had an advantage here, probably. I like to suffer. I like it better when I know that the people around me are suffering too. For a year and a half I had been rehearsing this pain on the roads around Johannesburg. Nobody told me there would be days like this, but I trained for them. Just in case.

  Eventually Michael’s brain made a public service announcement to his body. This was too much. He was dehydrated, it was too hot, he had nothing.

  He stopped, got off his bike and stood at the side of the road. I imagine he was half embarrassed and half relieved, waiting for the broom wagon to come. It would at least have bottles of water and air conditioning.

  Michael’s Tour of Egypt was over.

  There was no broom wagon. Or if there was, it had driven past Michael and had left him standing on the side of the road in the desert.

  He sat down by the roadside and didn’t panic. A car coming from either direction would be visible from miles away. He would flag it down and hitch a ride. If they had no room they would have some water, surely.

  No one came. Peering into the shimmering heat vapours coming up off the tar, it dawned on him that this road through the desert was a route that nobody used. The afternoon sun was focusing its heat right down on him now. Mad dogs and Englishmen, yes. Kenyan cyclists, no.

  He sat and sat. Nothing. The wait went past the point of being funny; his life was ebbing away. He had to get out of the sun before he fainted. Or died. He actually had this thought: ‘Right here in this desert, on my first ever tour race with the Safari Simbaz, this is where I will die.’

  He started to dig. When he got past the surface heat, the sand there was cooler. He dug a trench and rolled himself inside, pulling the desert sand in on top of himself. His helmet was all that was protecting the top of his head, which was the only part of his body that stuck out from above the sand. In this hole it was cooler for a while but he knew that he had dug a provisional grave for himself.

  By this point, he must have thought the rest of us had finished the stage. Surely we would look around, and go back to check on him? We must have realized by now that he hadn’t been chauffeured to the finish. What would we do? Surely we would find the team car and drive back along the road? What if we couldn’t find the team car? Suppose we assumed that he was okay? He might be somewhere with Julius Mwangi and the know-nothings?

  Meanwhile, he lay there, dying in the desert.

  After we finished the stage from hell, there was no sign of our team manager, Mwangi the Exterminator, and no sign of the car. There was also no sign of Michael.

  The race organizers provided us with our keys for the hotel nearby and we checked into our rooms. We had been warned about not drinking the tap water there so our thirst stayed with us. Riding for Kenya and we had no water to drink at the end of a stage through a desert. It felt like madness. I walked to a local shop and bought a few five-litre drums of water and hauled them back for the guys.

  There was still no sign of Michael. We thought he must have been having a time of it with Mr Mwangi and the ‘support’ team.

  Finally Mr Mwangi pitched up later that evening. He had a big grin on his face and was showing us postcard photos of the pyramids and Mount Sinai. Mr Mwangi had been sightseeing up in Moses’ footsteps, where he’d received the Ten Commandments.

  We had two questions for Mr Mwangi. One. Had he really been off playing tourist all day while we were riding in the desert? Two. Did he happen to have Michael with him?

  The eleventh commandment: Thou shalt not abandon your riders, Mr Mwangi.

  We checked with the race organizers, but they had nothing to report back. No one had seen Michael, and no one was taking control of the situation, either.

  When a cycling team functions as normal, the riders get up early in the morning, eat some breakfast and head off to their race. The clothes and belongings they will not use in the race are brought along behind them in the car with the support team. That gear usually arrives at the next hotel room before the day’s racing finishes. However, that day one of the soigneurs from the Polish team had screwed up. He had collected all of the chargers for his team’s radios and placed them in a bag for safekeeping. Then he had driven off and left the bag behind in the previous night’s hotel.

  In early evening, just as it was getting dark, the team had the o
ption of continuing the race without radios for the remainder of the week, or sending the soigneur off to drive back through 235 kilometres of desert to collect the chargers. He would then have to drive the 235-kilometre return journey to get back in time to charge the radios so they would be ready for the next morning. Unlike in our own team, radios were the lifeline of a proper support unit, so the soigneur drove off into the dusk and the desert. He was an unhappy man. Although the road was empty and straight, it was time already for headlights, and the sheer monotony of the drive was a worry after a long day. He tried to keep cool and alert.

  Odd. Was that a bike lying in the sand just there? It couldn’t be. He pulled off the road and reversed. Holy shit. It was a bike resting on the vague border between road and desert. Maybe it had been left by one of the teams and somebody was supposed to come back along and retrieve it?

  He stood there on the road looking down at the bike. What should he do? If he took it and the team came back to retrieve it, they could be there half the night searching around. But it seemed too weird to leave it behind.

  Over there – what was that? He was sure he could see a helmet on the desert floor, lying on its own. He tried to figure it out in his mind: rider abandons, then leaves bike and helmet there for collection when he steps into the broom wagon. That would make sense. He walked over and picked the helmet up. Sweet mother … there was a head underneath it.

  Michael had been lying in his little grave as darkness fell. The grim irony hadn’t been lost on him. His last chance of being spotted was vanishing with the light. Yet the darkness was bringing a coolness to the desert. In his hole, his head tilted into the sand, he had fallen asleep. Empty.

  He wasn’t going to die from the heat. He was going to die from the cold and the sheer exhaustion.

  But suddenly Polish hands were frantically scrabbling the sand off him, pulling him out of his grave. He was shredded with exhaustion and dehydrated to the point where standing up was a challenge. The Polish hands offered him water. Slow. Sensible. It flowed into him like life itself.

  Welcome to the Tour of Egypt, Michael Nziani Muthai. Your Federation thanks you for your efforts.

  We raced on until the end of the tour but Michael took the tourist option. He quite enjoyed travelling from hotel to hotel. Alive to give witness to the story of the week.

  8

  2006 Act II: The Commonwealth Games

  This was the beginning. Of the end. The Commonwealth Games.

  This felt far better than Egypt. It even smelled more like the big time. As riders we were staying in the athletes’ village in Melbourne along with the rest of the Kenyan outfit in our country’s quarters. There were six of us: Kinjah and me, Michael Nziani Muthai of the desert, Davidson Kamau, his brother Peter Kamau and Simon Nganga. We were pleasantly surprised to be treated like the rest of the Kenyan team, on par with far more high-profile athletes.

  I enjoyed discovering who was who. We popped along to a couple of the track sessions. Watching Kenya, and being in the Kenyan stand when the team won a gold medal, was extremely special. There was an amazing atmosphere. I loved that Games spirit.

  I had brought two bikes with me. I wanted to max out on the experience and to ride in both the road race competition and the time-trial competition.

  If I was being truthful, my time-trial bike was a makeshift sort of thing, and definitely not an appliance of science. It at least had deep section wheels and aero bars. These provided a more aerodynamic position where my hands and forearms were lower, further forward and closer together to reduce drag. It all helped, but it was still the bare minimum. Kinjah had the same intention for the Games, to enter both races, and had come armed with the same equipment.

  When we first arrived in Melbourne, Kinjah took me aside.

  ‘Chris, it’s a bit of a joke here at the moment.’

  ‘What’s new?’

  ‘No. They want me to do the track events as well.’

  Kenya had no competitor for any of the track events. Kinjah had tried to explain, to make them understand. He used short words. He. Could. Not. Ride. The. Track. It was a completely different discipline. Kenya didn’t even have a single track in the whole country.

  The argument was ongoing. Julius Mwangi and the Kenyan Federation felt that Kinjah was being disrespectful and rude. They assumed he wouldn’t agree to do the events because he was too full of himself. They mustered all their expertise and explained the situation to him again and again: ‘Listen, it’s on a bicycle. You race on a bicycle. You need to race. So why can’t you ride the track?’

  Kinjah held firm and resisted. He wasn’t going to humiliate himself in front of the world for Mr Mwangi’s benefit.

  ‘Listen to me, Chris. They also want us to ride the mountain bike race. There are three places. You, me and Davidson Kamau.’

  It was easy to end that argument; I didn’t have a mountain bike with me.

  Kinjah relayed the bad news to Mr Mwangi and his organizers. They offered us a deal. If we agreed to ride the mountain bike race, they would provide us with three mountain bikes through the Commonwealth Games funding.

  Kinjah and I both recognized the same patriotic opportunity; we were each going to get a free bike out of this. Kamau too. After the Games, we thought, we could send these mountain bikes back with Kinjah, so that other Safari Simbaz could use them. Kinjah was in charge of the budget and a deal was organized at a local cycling shop. He squeezed everything he could out of the poor shop owners. The bikes were decent and far more disposed for racing off-road than anything we had ever owned. Although they were not fitted with disc brakes, they were equipped with front suspension forks and they were much lighter than we were used to. The rear stay was made from carbon, which was elaborate enough for us. We were ready to go, or as ready as we could have been.

  The mountain bike event that we had never planned to ride was coming two days after the time trial and three days before the road race.

  The Time Trial

  The next day I had a warm-up ride on the time-trial course along the beautiful beach route situated on the St Kilda Foreshore. Skirting the long sandy beach, I spotted some riders in their pristine English gear. Wow, they looked so professional. All wearing the same gear, skinsuits and aero helmets, and they were only warming up.

  I made a mental note: borrow an aero helmet and pin the Kenyan gear on tight to make it look like a skinsuit.

  When the morning of the time trial arrived they sent the African nations out first. In order of weakness. Christopher Clive Froome was listed to go first. Then Tumisang Taabe of Lesotho. Next, Rajendra Singh of Fiji. Also from Fiji, Percival Navbo didn’t have a time-trial bike at all; he was on a standard road bike, and he got to ride closer to some of the genuine time trialists! It was nothing personal, but I knew that the purpose was to get us support acts out of the way first.

  The time trial took us out on a fairly flat road along the coast. I would have preferred hills but my time-trial bike was quite heavy, it weighed over ten kilos, so the flat wasn’t bad. The course was just over twenty kilometres each way. I recorded a time of 53 minutes 58 seconds.

  The next rider didn’t beat me. Or the next. Or the next. I knew nobody serious had started yet, but I realized that my time wasn’t that bad, either. I was in the hot seat; I was the leader.

  The hot seat isn’t hot but it is literally a seat. It’s at the finish line and the top three guys are taken there when they finish. When someone beats the time of, say, the third guy then the third guy gets bumped off and the new guy takes his seat. If there is a new guy who beats everybody and comes in first, then the first and second move down the seats and the guy in seat number three leaves. After the finish line they took me straight to the hot seat and I sat there in my cycling gear, having a drink. I had my first fifteen minutes of fame for a performance that wasn’t even yet a result.

  Somehow, I continued to be the top man for a very long time. There were about eighty riders in the field and forty-nine
more had gone out before anybody beat my time.

  All of my family saw me on TV. The broadcast kept on switching back to the hot seat and this young, skinny guy. Cyclingnews.com called me ‘Chris Froome, time trial revelation’. I was sitting there in the hot seat when two managers from the English team first noticed me. Their names were Dave Brailsford and Shane Sutton.

  ‘See what that kid has done?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘That Kenyan kid. Wearing the sandals.’

  ‘Doesn’t look like a Kenyan.’

  ‘Well, he is.’

  I wound up 17th overall in a field of seventy-two riders but, thanks to spending over an hour sitting in the leader’s chair, the result seemed to bestow more attention on me than a 17th-placed finisher had ever received before. Nathan O’Neill of Australia took gold. Kinjah was 31st.

  Another member of the British Cycling management team spotted me later that day. His name was Doug Dailey. He made a mental note.

  It had been a day to cherish for me.

  Kinjah had endured enough. This was the Commonwealth Games, after all. When the media asked him about the Kenyan Cycling Federation he had replied that the organization did not run with the efficiency of a Swiss watch. One of his frustrations was that this was a competition on the world stage and we didn’t even have any team kit. In the end we had been forced to purchase plain white and black jerseys ourselves and have the word KENYA laminated on to the backs.

  Before my time trial we had all been called into a meeting in the Kenyan quarters in the village. The Kenyan Federation had been bullyragged in the media and they needed to express their hurt and displeasure. The meeting grew into a disciplinary hearing. Kinjah wasn’t there, but he was in the dock.

  The Kenyan officials were furious. Yes, they conceded that we had no kit, but drawing attention to that fact, as Kinjah had done, was a worse crime. Our team, who were all Kinjah’s guys, were quiet and we kept our heads down. We were intimidated as this was a huge opportunity for all of us. At the Games here in Melbourne we were a long way away from the tin hut in a Kikuyu village outside Nairobi. The officials held all of the strong cards.