The Climb: The Autobiography

by Chris Froome

  It was a constructive talk which had no firm conclusions but at the end Rod said to me, ‘Listen, you’ve got talent and you’re heading in the right direction. Keep it up.’

  Doug Dailey had been keeping an eye on me since the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne and now Rod Ellingworth was, too. Their attention encouraged me.

  I had only been in Europe for a few weeks but this was what I had come for: big days in the mountains and a few mentions in key dispatches.

  Réalisant mon espoir, as the old Talking Heads song says.

  11

  One day I was learning to paddle in the still and familiar waters of Johannesburg. The next I was shooting the rapids down mountains with magical names. In professional cycling the speed of events picks you up and carries you along. You look up from the road and from the race and there is a strange new landscape rolling past on either side of you.

  Breathe it in and ride on.

  I was dividing my time in 2007 between Aigle in Switzerland and the Team Konica Minolta house in Tielt in Belgium, though there wasn’t a lot of time to be divided. John Robertson was keen on us entering the classics and criteriums in the Low Countries, but I tried them and didn’t like them. Or they didn’t like me. The bends and the accelerations and the short cobbled climbs suited some. For a boy raised in Nairobi, far above the sea, I might have had a chance in the south of France but the grey north was not going to be my terrain de prédilection. So the guys would head off and race and I would spend the day training, looking for climbs, doing my own thing.

  After Italy, the Tour of Japan was the next decent stage race of the season. In my head I drew a ring around any stage race we entered. These were for me, my proving ground and my shop window. Japan was seven stages starting in late May. We began in Osaka on my twenty-second birthday. A year earlier I had been back in Johannesburg and the thought of being paid to spend a week racing in Japan was about as far away as Japan itself.

  I grew into the race and on the penultimate of the seven stages I got my chance. The stage, 128.5 kilometres beginning in the Shujenzi Stadium in Tokyo, took us out around a circuit corrugated with stiff climbs. There were so many climbs that I couldn’t have designed the stage better myself.

  I went with the first break. There were ten, eleven, twelve of us, but I felt strong. We chipped out a solid lead, but the relentless climbs took their toll on my breakaway companions. The peloton started reeling us back in, and morale and speed were diminishing quickly. With two laps and over 30 kilometres to go, I attacked the break. These were the scenarios that Robbie and I had in mind when I used to hold my power output as high as possible, for as long as possible, around Johannesburg. No crashes today, no rookie errors. I felt in control. I won by about 50 seconds. The stage put me 6th on GC behind an Italian, three Kazakhs and another Italian.

  I was still 6th after the race finished in front of big crowds the next day.

  I rode for Kenya that summer in the All Africa Games. Daryl Impey won gold in the road race; I took the bronze for Kenya, finishing between two Eritreans. I rode Mi-Août en Bretagne, a modest four-day stage race in north-west France, and won. The GP Tell in Switzerland went well, especially on the mountain stage, the fourth, from Chur to Arosa. A big Alpine climb. I finished 2nd behind a serious climber, Mathias Frank, nearly catching him on the long haul to the summit finish.

  Like many smaller teams, Team Konica Minolta offered its riders the chance to develop. I could feel through 2007 that I was doing that. I made rookie errors but I knew that the more rookie errors a rider made, the longer he would be a rookie. I tried to learn something every time.

  Not everything was perfect, of course. John wanted me to ride the Tour of Britain in September but I thought the race was too flat. I would have preferred the Tour de l’Avenir, which was a more suitable race, and an event renowned for young riders announcing their talent. A young Greg LeMond won L’Avenir by more than 10 minutes, and from that moment people believed he would go on to win the Tour de France. I thought if I could do something in L’Avenir, European teams would be paying attention. But being in Britain was important to John Robertson.

  By then, though, I was getting enough nibbles of interest from bigger teams that I felt I would be able to secure a contract for the following year.

  I remember getting a call out of the blue from Robbie Hunter. How he had got my number, I’m not sure, but he left me a message saying, ‘Hi, Chris, Robbie here. Can I give you a call sometime to have a chat about your plans for next year?’

  To paraphrase the line from Jerry Maguire, he had me at ‘hi’. Robbie was a guy whom we African riders always looked up to. The most successful cyclist in South Africa, he had ridden the Tour de France several times. Daryl is crowding him for the title these days, but at the time of that phone call, Robbie was the most successful road cyclist that South Africa had ever produced. He got there on his own will, no academy or anything. He fought to get where he had to go. He was the model. And Robbie Hunter wanted to talk about my plans!

  I took the hard negotiating position that whatever his plans were for me, they were my plans too.

  Robbie was with Barloworld, a team with a strong South African flavour. Barloworld had received a wild-card entry to the 2007 Tour de France and done well, taking two stages and the polka-dot King of the Mountains jersey. Mauricio Soler won stage nine and the jersey. Robbie won stage eleven and finished 2nd in the competition for the green points jersey for best sprinter.

  Those of us on the lower rungs of the ladder were surprised and impressed.

  Off the road, the Tour of Britain worked out well for me. Barloworld were there and I spoke with Robbie about their plans and my plans. Once I spoke with Barloworld I had my heart set on joining. I didn’t even explore the other options that were floating around.

  Robbie wrapped our talk up with an invitation. ‘Come to the Worlds in Stuttgart in a few weeks’ time. We’ll have the contract ready for you to sign. We’ll sign you up for 2008.’

  Stuttgart. I came. I raced. I was conquered by my own fatigue. I had been pushing harder and harder since that meeting with John Robertson in Pretoria in 2006. Now, at the World Championships, I didn’t hit anybody at the start but time-trialled worse than I had in Salzburg. I found a shard of energy at some stage in the road race but finished 21st, a good way behind Peter Velits.

  Signing my name to a contract was the only exertion I was fit for.

  There were no fireworks or marching bands when I showed up in Stuttgart. Claudio Corti, the Barloworld team boss, asked the team soigneur, Mario Pafundi, to see to me. Mario is now with Team Sky, but back then he was to keep an eye out for a tall Kenyan kid who was coming to the team bus, as instructed, to sign a contract.

  I went along at the appointed time and stood outside the team bus obediently. Knocking on the door or sticking my head in seemed too cheeky. I waited for somebody to emerge for the meet and greet; I had never met Mario before. Meanwhile, he was a couple of yards away scanning the crowd, looking for what he thought a tall Kenyan kid should look like.

  Time passed. In Mario’s part of Italy they’re not familiar with mzungus, so I stood outside the Barloworld bus for a long time before the penny dropped. Eventually I was fetched inside. The contract was signed.

  It was minimum fare. I don’t think it even met the UCI standards. The money was in the region of €22,500 a year. As a neo-pro the UCI rules state that the minimum duration should be two years.

  Inside, I was offered a one-year deal. They ignored the two-year rule.

  So did I.

  I’d told myself that I could be up there with these guys. I took my one year at minimum and prepared to grab the big brass ring. Secretly it was my intention to make the Barloworld Tour de France team.

  T. I.E. my friend, T. I.E.

  This is Europe.

  Mid April 2008: I rode yesterday. This morning I am in France but yesterday I was in Holland. Racing. I raced more than 200 kilometres of an event I’ve alre
ady forgotten the name of. Me and Félix Cárdenas, the Colombian climber. The sponsors needed a presence there. Cárdenas pulled a short straw. So did I.

  We rode. We finished. We did our jobs. Then they put us in a car for five hours and dropped us at a hotel 80 kilometres north of Paris, near Amiens. At 2.00 a.m. That’s the first lance they stick in your romantic thought bubble about Paris–Roubaix, the Queen of the Classics. It doesn’t start in Paris. Not since the revolutionary spring of 1968.

  Cárdenas and I weren’t sharing a room. That would make sense. I went to my room where another rider was already sleeping. I am meek, too meek for Paris–Roubaix perhaps, too meek to switch on the light. I fumbled around for a while. Found the bathroom, found the bed, found some sleep.

  In Holland yesterday, after about 150 kilometres, we hit the infamous baby heads. The pavé is what they call those narrow stretches of cobblestoned farm paths. The cobbles are as big as melons. Or baby heads. A very long time ago it was somebody’s idea of fun to make cyclists ride over these things. Maybe riders were upholstered differently then. Maybe fun was different then.

  We hit the pavé and the bikes did the shake, rattle and roll that people had come out to see. The pavé was a one-way system, so the highway bottlenecked drastically when we hit the cobbles. All around the riders become erratic as their tyres found purchase and then slipped on the smooth, damp stones. Keeping the rubber on the road and our craniums off the cobbles was all any of us cared about.

  The marriage of the rider and the bike hits a literal rough patch on these lumps. The bike doesn’t want to know you any more. It spits out the water bottles that haven’t been taped in. It jolts and jounces and makes noises it has never made before. The bike wants to throw you off like a stallion bucking a rodeo cowboy. You grip the steel of the handlebars, hold on for your life, squeeze until your knuckles are frost white. You would die this way rather than take your hand away for a second to squeeze a brake.

  And you have to ride aggressively if you want to survive. Very aggressively if you want to win. You don’t simply have to subdue the violent uprising of your bike, you have to beat those around you at the same time. To win without risk is to win without glory, Eddy Merckx once said. Belgians love cobbles*.

  When riders hit the pavé, the peloton gets compressed, then shattered and scattered. If somebody falls or rides too gingerly, you can’t get past them. The line ahead gets away from you. There are distractions. Tyres give way with a hiss of surrender. Spokes buckle and wheels bend like surrealist art installations. Bikes, even support motorcycles, just slew off the road.

  In Holland yesterday we clung to our bikes as the cobbles sped past below us. The organizers had erected a line of yellow plastic tape along the route to keep us on the course. On the other side of the tape was a nice smooth cycle path. Concrete and flat and inviting.

  I had a revolutionary idea. Those who love cycling on baby heads could feel free to do so. Who was I to judge them? I like concrete though. So I ducked under the tape and rode along on the concrete bike path. Cry freedom, brothers.

  Soon I was passing up through the peloton – well, parallel to it. I was bellowing at the odd farming family who had come here to watch: ‘Guys, can you please move out of the way!’ I felt great. The hard stares from the mud-stained faces of the other riders burned holes in my back. I felt even better. ‘How is that pavé working out for you fellows?’

  Of course, pretty soon a commissaire arrived alongside as if he were chasing a three-alarm fire. He had his car window down and he was blowing a whistle. Multi-tasking. No man in history ever looked so excited to be blowing a whistle.

  My new friend was very agitated to see a bike on the bike path and not on the cobbles.

  ‘No, you’re finished. You’re out of the race. You’re disqualified. Stop! Stop! Stop!’

  It was like a psychopath you had briefly dated telling you that it was all over. It is a shame but it was good while it lasted. Basically, phew!

  Listen, mister commissaire, it’s not you. It’s me.

  I put my hands up in the air.

  ‘Okay! I’m stopping!’

  I dropped back and said to the team car that the commissaire had told me I had to stop. Their eyes narrowed. I thought about suggesting that maybe he didn’t like Africans but the eyes within the team car kept looking at me.

  The Italian mechanic cut the silence with a razor grin.

  ‘Well, what did you do?’

  ‘I was just riding on the path.’

  ‘Ha! You’ve got a lot to learn, Chreees! A lot to learn.’

  I had been in Europe since January. Arriving in Italy at that time of year, I was assaulted by the cold.

  The team gofer, a guy called Romano, picked me up at Milan Malpensa. He had Daryl Impey and Mario in the car with him and together we drove the motorway. You picture olive groves and sunshine. This was just autostrada and industrial premises and snow.

  I had one thought: We train where? This may not be for me.

  Romano spoke Italian. So I thought. Rapid, staccato sentences. I couldn’t catch any of it. Romano is missing a finger, he’s got a bit of a stump there on one of his hands. He’s from Bergamo and actually speaks Bergamesque, which is a Lombard dialect and only barely related to Italian. It sounds like somebody trying to speak excitedly with a potato in their mouth.

  I remember Romano driving quite fast on the autostrada, talking with his hands, gesticulating all the time to get his points across to Mario beside him up front. He was so loud I assumed they were having an argument. I was mesmerized by the missing finger.

  It was a new and strange world.

  We drove to Adro in Brescia, which was where the team had the magazzino, or warehouse. Claudio Corti’s house was over the magazzino. The team bus was there too, along with all of the bikes and equipment.

  There was nothing special at all about it and, again, no mountains in sight. I was expecting mountains. The Italy I remembered from the Regioni was all Tuscan villages and nice climbs.

  We ate, Corti and some mechanics and the gang of us from the car.

  I’d been warned by the older guys about the etiquette of eating in Italy. Salad first. Then a plate of pasta or rice, followed by a plate of meat or chicken or fish. You don’t just go and pile everything you want on to a plate. So I just sat there watching what everyone else was doing before getting up to serve myself.

  I’d lived in Karen, in Kinjah’s, in South Africa, in Switzerland and in Belgium over the previous few years. And yet I had never felt so foreign. I was way beyond the borders of my comfort zone.

  We were a small squad, just nineteen of us: six Italians, two Brits (Geraint Thomas and Stephen Cummings), one Austrian, one Portuguese, three South Africans, one Swiss, two Colombians, one Spaniard, one Australian and one Kenyan.

  Daryl Impey, John-Lee Augustyn and myself were coming in as neo-pros. Robbie Hunter had been there a year or two. Mauricio Soler, the Colombian climber who had made such an impression on the Tour de France, was there. Enrico Gasparotto was the Italian national champion at the time. Paolo Longo Borghini, Giampaolo Cheula and Francesco Bellotti were the main Italians. Corti had his son Marco starting off in the team as well.

  Geraint Thomas and Steve Cummings spent most of their time down in Tuscany, so we seldom saw them. Corti wanted the rest of us living close to the service course for training, but seeing as the two Brits lived in Tuscany, I took it that this wasn’t an iron-clad rule.

  I shared an apartment for three weeks with John-Lee Augustyn and then struck out on my own. I didn’t want to live in Adro with everybody, including the team boss, right on top of me. My girlfriend, Andrea, was coming over from South Africa later in the year to follow a career in modelling. We had met while I was at university in Johannesburg, and living together was going to be a serious step. I found us a place in Chiari, 15 kilometres south of Adro, but on the main rail line to Milan where she hoped to work.

  It meant that to train I had to ride up t
he road to Adro and then keep going north for the same distance again to get to the mountains and the lakes near Sarnico. A 60-kilometre extra tariff on the training day. I liked that.

  Chiari was bigger than Adro. It had supermarkets, a rail station, canals and a nice piazza. All the benefits of space and being able to do my own thing.

  Mostly I trained alone. I already knew that the social aspect of a big group ride can sometimes seduce riders into training at a lower intensity. I dipped into the company every now and then but mostly I stuck to my seven-hour rides, punishing myself as much as I could. The others called me a training fundamentalist. I didn’t argue.

  I loved the mountains around Lake Iseo. Flying through mountain tunnels and little villages. Music thrumming 0n the iPod. Dreams of the Tour in my head. The work pattern remained the same but the rides were tougher than in Johannesburg. Find the threshold and hold it there for as long as possible, twenty minutes or more. Long intervals. Again and again. And again.

  The place I found was the upper floor of a two-level house. It had one main bedroom, one smaller bedroom and a kitchen-cum-lounge area. The landlord asked for a very reasonable rent, I think about €600 a month, and I was happy to go with that. It was more expensive than sharing with the guys in Adro but the word was that in Adro, Claudio Corti knew every move you made. I wasn’t so keen on that.

  I remember there was considerable fuss about signing the contract for the place once I had agreed to rent. I didn’t have a resident’s card and, as the landlord wasn’t used to foreigners renting, Italy’s bureaucratic maze turned what should have been simple into something deeply complex. Eventually, we got it done.

  I settled in, and started to learn Italian. Most language students buy tapes and listen, but I printed out common Italian words, cut them up and taped them to my handlebars every day.

  The guy who lived downstairs, also a Romano by name, lived with his mother, Sante. She was an absolute angel, always asking how I was, and even though we couldn’t really speak we would sit there and trade a few words every day. When I first arrived it was just before Easter, which the Italians call Pasqua, and everyone was getting together for a big meal on Easter Sunday. Romano and his family asked me to join them for their gathering. I went straight into their family meal for Easter, a huge spread of Italian food and hospitality. There were little parcels of pasta, ravioli, cannelloni, the works. I remember thinking I was going to have to do seven hours’ hard training to work it all off. And then they broke open the Easter eggs.