by Chris Froome
When they reached the end of the meeting they showed diagrams of where the support cars needed to be during the race. Rubbing it in, I felt.
Tony Harding was the South African manager in Salzburg. He had been quite instrumental in Robbie Hunter’s professional career and I had seen him often at the races in Johannesburg. He came over with a big grin on his face and whacked me on the back of the head.
‘What are you doing? Idiot!’
I told him my story. How Robbie Nilsen had helped me to train specifically for the time-trial event, doing lots of 20-minute blocks. And how Robbie had gone to Hi-Q, who had generously agreed to pay my airfares. I had instructed ten spinning classes a week to cover the rest of the costs, leading back-to-back classes so that I could treat them as training sessions, structuring the lessons around the intervals that Robbie had planned for me to do each day.
‘Probably a bit hard on the corporate punters but that’s life. It was hard on me too. Ever tried pretending to be warming down, pretending to be doing five minutes of very easy pedalling and looking relaxed and smiley and speaking accordingly while you are still actually pedalling like crazy? That is hard.
‘Oh, and then I should tell you that I impersonated Julius Mwangi by email and I’m in a B&B so far out of town it might as well be in a different country.’
‘Well,’ said Tony Harding, more amused than impressed, ‘you obviously want to be here.’
Then I got my big break. Daryl Impey, another young rider who went to St John’s rival Jeppe High School in Johannesburg, was staying on his own in a twin room for the duration of the competition. Tony put my time-trial bike on his roof, drove me back to the B&B, and helped explain to the owners that I would be moving out before I had properly moved in. He then installed me at the South African team’s hotel in Daryl’s room.
It was a different world. Suddenly I was staying in a decent hotel with an organized team. I was driven everywhere. I was fed and watered. They even had a mechanic.
The mechanic had taken one look at my racing bike and said, ‘Chris, you can’t race on those tyres, they’re old, they’re falling apart.’ He put these really smart tyres on my bike. First thing I did when I got home again was take them off my bike, so that I didn’t damage them during training. I would keep them for a special race.
I could see that this team meant business. I absorbed their earnestness and filled my lungs with expectation.
The Time Trial
The time trial came first. It was actually one of the reasons why I time-trialled into Salzburg to the managers’ meeting. Planning, management, strategy.
This race meant everything to me. I wanted to build on my previous hour in the hot seat in Melbourne, and the training that I had been doing with Robbie had made me appreciate the skillset required to put in a good ride. Hitting a high output of wattage and staying there was the pain that I had come to enjoy.
It dawned on me that I was at a world championship. I felt like I had partly shifted the earth off its axis to get myself there, and if I could make an impact now, it could change my life. If I could show the promise that was growing in my quads with every month of hard training, I thought I might finally get a shot at joining a European team.
As I waited for the countdown, in every sense of the phrase, I was on the starting ramp. It was my opportunity to seize the day, to shake the world. It was my moment, and I was ready.
There were riders on the roster who were being billed as the ‘real deal’. People were already talking about them in terms of what they could achieve later in their careers at the Grand Tours. Their places in the landscape of the professional world seemed unquestionable. I, on the other hand, was a head-in-the-clouds kid who rode on his own outside Johannesburg, keeping left all the time. I was someone that even the cycling community in South Africa didn’t take seriously. Maybe this adventure was too much, too soon?
I was more flustered than I should have been as I headed down the ramp. I had performed my warm-up on the turbo trainer and while on the starting ramp I was still trying to get my bike computer to reset. I needed to get it back to the zero setting before I started, but the countdown had already initiated. I was preoccupied as I pushed off down the ramp.
The first corner was 200 metres down the road. It was a 90-degree right-hand bend in front of a grand old building. The driveway was cordoned off by crash barriers covered in advertising, and there was a marshal standing on the bend peering down into a bunch of papers, which seemed to resemble a start list.
The building was situated on an intersection in such a way that when there was no racing you could drive up this road and head right or slip left at the edifice. They had left the slip without a crash barrier or advertising boarding because the race route wasn’t going in that direction. We were clearly taking the right-hand bend on the bike. I knew that. But I was agitated and wasn’t in the headspace that I needed to be in. When I approached the corner, still trying to pick up speed to make up the lost time spent worrying about resetting my bike computer, the unguarded slip to the left caught my eye. I was conscious of both the marshal and the turn, but when something attracted my attention to the left, my brain for just one-hundredth of a second decided to say, ‘Hey, maybe we go left?’ Subliminal. Then it issued a correction. ‘No. We go right. You know it’s right.’
I was wired though. I had already drifted to the left side of the road because my brain had raised the possibility of a left turn and I was now heading in a straight line towards the marshal, whose nose was still buried in his papers.
He was directly in my turning line. Yes, I had messed the corner up a little bit but I could still make it round easily. Only this guy was standing in the road. Did I swerve? Surely he was going to move out of the way, or he would jump back? He was standing on the road during the time trial, at a world championship. He must have been aware of riders coming down this way at high speeds?
I needed to keep my speed up. I hadn’t started well and if I slowed down here I might have been a couple of seconds off my target before I had even taken the first bend.
I kept my line.
He didn’t move.
We collided.
Or rather, he stood there and I hit him at speed. He hadn’t even braced himself for the impact. My aero bars went straight into his chest. Poor man.
He went flying to my right, his feet up in the air, while I tumbled to the left. We both hit the ground. It was shown on television, and there was a photographer there, too, who caught everything. He captured the whole crash, frame by frame, as the marshal flew through the air with his papers.*
Behind me, as I got up, there was a large advertising sign. It said, ‘Salzburg, Feel the Inspiration’.
I was devastated. After all my planning to get to the race, I couldn’t believe that I was on the tar ten seconds into the race. I had gone from medal hopeful to comedy gold by the first bend.
But this was still the time trial. This was still Europe. I had nearly 40 kilometres left to show the cycling world my worth. I grabbed my bike as quickly as I could and got straight back into the race again. I didn’t even check the marshal. Not so much as a ‘sorry’ or a ‘how are you?’ I almost bounced back up off the ground and was gone like the wind. It was over so quickly I could have fooled myself into thinking that the accident had never happened. I rode on. My brain calmed a bit. I thought that surely I couldn’t have lost more than 15 or 20 seconds at the most? I had to get straight back into it. I reasoned that there was enough road ahead of me to claw back the time.
My intermediate placings were encouraging. After 10.1 kilometres the first split had me down in 52nd place. By the next intermediate check at 23.7 kilometres I was up to 40th. The time trial ended at 39.5 kilometres. I could tell myself that I had run out of road.
All things considered, I’d had a decent time trial. I had set off from the start trying to chase the power level that Robbie and I had calculated beforehand, something that I could sustain for the whole d
istance. Overall I came in 36th out of a field of over one hundred Under-23s from around the world.
There were some fine names racing that day. Dominique Cornu, the winner by 37 seconds, was one of them, a twenty-year-old Belgian rider who had already signed up for the professional Lotto team (sponsored by the Belgian lottery). Alexandr Plius¸chin was also there, a Moldovan prodigy who did not perform quite as well as expected and finished only two places in front of me. Edvald Boasson Hagen from Norway, Rigoberto Urán from Colombia and the Brit Ian Stannard, all future Team Sky colleagues, finished further up the field ahead of me, in 5th, 23rd and 25th respectively, as did Mikhail Ignatiev, the Russian time-trialler, who placed 2nd. Tony Martin, the German who would later became the world time-trial champion, finished 18th.
I saw the marshal a few days later. He was bruised badly on his chest whereas I hadn’t even drawn blood on my knees. The trauma for me was more about the shock of what had happened and knowing that everyone was watching. I felt like a red-faced kid again.
Although it clearly wasn’t the European debut of my dreams I was quietly happy. I compared myself to the riders that I had beaten, many of whom were racing for the continental teams that I had emailed in the previous months.
That was an achievement for me, and a base to build on. I would go home and get busy with Google Translate and my schoolboy French to write to Italian and French teams, informing them of my news in language which would amuse and intrigue them: ‘Hey, I beat your guys in the time trial.’ No, I wouldn’t quite say that, but I would have liked to.
It was after the time trial that the strangeness of being the entire Kenyan cycling team and management really struck me. There was nobody to talk to. I’d had a time trial which would be an internet comedy clip for ever. It was finished though. Over. There was no crowd to chat with. No management to debrief me.
Tony had organized a neutral service for me for the race, so that if I punctured I would get a spare. But neutral meant just that; the mechanics weren’t there for moral support, or to mend my punctured psyche. I could have phoned a friend or family member but I decided not to. I persuaded myself that no one would want to receive a call from their boy who had ridden a time trial, on the biggest day of his life, and had managed to ride straight into a race marshal before the first bend. What was the right tone to take with information like that?
I went back to the hotel where the South African pros were milling about in the lobby. These were big names in the cycling world that I lived in and men whom I respected and looked up to: Robbie Hunter, David George, Ryan Cox and Tiaan Kannemeyer. They had all been riding the pro-scene for a number of years. David George had been Lance Armstrong’s teammate for a while at US Postal, whereas Robbie had already achieved a great deal, having won stages in the Vuelta a España and raced in the Tour de France.
When I walked in I hoped that they hadn’t watched the race or at least hadn’t heard about it. I tried to blend in and kept my head down as I passed through the lobby. A couple of them were sitting there, talking casually.
‘How’d it go?’ they asked as I passed.
Phew. They knew nothing.
‘Ah, it went okay. Could have done a bit better, but yeah, it’s all right. Came in 36th. No complaints.’
I kept walking, looking around frantically for the lift. Behind me I heard roars of laughter. The penny dropped. They knew. They hadn’t watched the race but they had been alerted to the highlight, who was now walking through the lobby looking sheepish.
‘What were you thinking?’
‘What did you do?’
‘How did you crash?’
‘Did you have something against the marshal?’
They renamed me. I became Crash Froome. That name would stick with me for a good few years afterwards. Tony Harding, Robbie Hunter, Daryl Impey and the boys – I was Crash to them.
The Road Race
The road race was 177.2 kilometres of hard road, three days after the time trial.
A hilly course, there was a climb every lap, which would normally have favoured my strengths, but the inclines were really steep at points, more than ten to fifteen per cent. This meant that they were brutal and short, as opposed to long and gruelling – my speciality – and they were not effectively ‘breaking’ anybody over the course of a whole race. It was better, though, than a flat circuit and I felt proud to be in the front group approaching the close of the race.
It came to a sprint. A bunch of around fifty of us were left towards the finish, out of a field of two hundred. I was in there with Edvald Boasson Hagen, Mark Cavendish and Rigoberto Urán; riders I would never outsprint. I finished 45th in the lead bunch, 5 seconds behind the winner, Gerald Ciolek of Germany. The Germans had a strong team and had controlled the race well.
It wasn’t a result that Europeans could relate to. In cycling, the judgement of European bosses was all that mattered. I knew that nobody would scan down the placings and say, ‘Do you remember that kid who has been riding properly for a couple of years and who hustled and hassled to get here? Well, he raced on his own with no team and he came in ahead of riders like Dan Martin, Daryl Impey and Geraint Thomas. He might be worth a shot.’
I could say that I had finished in the lead pack at the World Championships. I could leave Salzburg feeling disappointed if I wanted to rummage for it or feeling much better about myself if I was realistic.
That was the end of my racing year. I stayed around for a few days to watch the professionals race on the same course that we had ridden. Paolo Bettini, a strong Italian rider, was the overall victor and I watched with awe as he attacked in his big chainring after 250 kilometres.
Even being in the big chainring was unnerving for me at that time. I had ridden the same race in the lowest gear possible, struggling to get up the viciously steep slopes. But there was a man who was riding against unimaginable resistance and he was sailing away from everyone else. There were 15 kilometres left and I watched him, thinking to myself, ‘I’ve got a really long way to go to reach anywhere near that level.’
I flew back home to Africa encouraged, but realizing that my future lay elsewhere. The races in South Africa simply couldn’t give me what Europe had to offer, or even what I might be good at.
The 2006 season was coming to an end, so I contacted the UCI again because I had heard that they had registered a mixed continental team for riders from developing countries. Based in Aigle, Switzerland, cyclists from a range of nationalities could train and compete in competitions wearing the UCI’s blue and white kit. I continued to write to other teams too, telling them about my results at the World Championships, as well as my performance at the Tour de Maurice a month previously where I had repeated my feat from the previous year by winning the second stage, and then winning the third stage, too, before eventually going on to win the whole race for my first stage race victory. It wasn’t as prestigious an event as famous French races such as Paris–Nice, but my palmarès was nevertheless starting to show respectable results.
The UCI came back to me. They said, ‘Yes, let’s give this a go. You’re from Kenya, racing on a Kenyan licence. We’ll give you a chance because Kenya is an underdeveloped cycling country.’
Underdeveloped? Man, they didn’t know the half of it!
Part Two
EUROPE
10
The big chainring. It was time to move on up.
If Kenyan cycling was underdeveloped, then I was a child of Kenyan cycling. I was twenty-one years old and had ridden once in Europe. My bike handling was poor, I was just a few years on from being the kid doing tricks and jumps in their backyard, and I had never steered a bike round a serious hairpin bend on the fast side of a mountain. The big chainring, also known as the real world of professional cycling, was still a dream.
I longed for Europe but I could feel the relentless peloton of time catching up with me. If I didn’t get a move on, it would pass me.
When I had finished in the chasing bunch in Salzb
urg a rider called Peter Velits crossed the line somewhere close to me, but sufficiently ahead to be given 22nd place, instead of my 45th. Peter and I shared many traits. He was from Slovakia, which wasn’t a traditional cycling country. He was a stage race rider who liked the climbs but time-trialled well, too. He also hadn’t gone to Salzburg in 2006 to finish 22nd.
Peter had been a professional since 2004. He had finished 7th in the 2004 Tour of Egypt, although nobody from his team that year had been forced to bury themselves in the desert, while waiting for death. He had come 3rd in the Giro delle Regioni in 2005. I hadn’t even heard of the Giro delle Regioni in 2005.
Peter had gone to Salzburg with far more realistic hopes than mine in 2006. The race was part of his professional calendar by then and this was his third attempt. In Salzburg he had time-trialled badly, finishing behind his twin brother, Martin, and behind me, even without the impediment of starting the day by crashing into a race steward. In the road race that 22nd place finish wasn’t the stuff of his dreams. Indeed, he would come back and win the Under-23 Road Race at the World Championships the following year in Stuttgart.
Peter’s name and story were well known to me by the time I got to Salzburg. Earlier, back in the spring of 2006, riding for the second tier Team Konica Minolta in South Africa, Peter had won the Giro del Capo, the much-missed annual stage race in the countryside around Cape Town. He was only three months older than I was, but he was light years ahead of where I needed to be.
That win in South Africa for his small and resilient home-based team was a bit of a coup for both Peter Velits and those riding with him. Despite the high-tech sponsor’s name, Team Konica Minolta ran on the sort of budget that aspired to be called ‘shoestring’. Yet it was a fine proving ground for African cyclists. The team specialized in producing buds and blossoms out of arid earth.