The Climb: The Autobiography

by Chris Froome

  12

  Nobody was happier than I was to see the back end of April.

  My secret plan to winch myself into the Tour de France field had taken a few serious knocks as we chased around northern Europe.

  That was okay. It had been a long shot in the first place but I had needed the idea in my head on those seven-hour training rides with no company except the techno coming through the iPod. Dreams are what keep us all fuelled. I had always dreamed of a blinding sunburst of breakthrough but instead I was looking at a watery dawn.

  In Barloworld I knew my place. The April calendar didn’t suit me but there was no point in crying about it. We were a small team and I was the rookie. This was what I had signed up for. So I kept quiet, learned what I could and did what I was told. And I knew that the month of May would be better.

  I was still learning Italian. Claudio Corti had only a little more English than I had Italian, so we didn’t interact too much.

  His thoughts and wishes were transmitted to me through Robbie Hunter or his PA, Francesca. Living down in Chiari alone (Andrea wouldn’t arrive until late summer) kept me out of harm’s way. When the team needed me for a race, Romano would drive down to collect me.

  Otherwise I worked alone and I worked hard.

  Life in Chiari was enjoyable to the extent that there was actually a life in Chiari. Since leaving school the idea of home had taken on many different guises: Johannesburg, Aigle, Tielt, Chiari. I’d laid my head down in each of those places but home was probably still Mum’s place back in Nairobi.

  One day I thought about it and realized I hadn’t been home since the Christmas of 2005. Andrea had come to stay with us for a while and we had gone up to the Mara like in the old days. And then I went back to the fast side of life.

  I kept in touch with Africa as much as I could, sending reports, questions and stories back to Robbie and to Kinjah. The path to Chiari and to Europe had been laid down by those two key influences. Now that I was here I was surprised by how much they had taught me – and also by how much there was still to learn.

  Those rides with Kinjah and the Safari Simbaz had mined out a huge well of enthusiasm and passion in me. The sense of fun and the pure thrill of riding is something that can get lost when you start doing it for money. Kinjah’s joy stayed with me though and still does.

  Robbie’s ground-breaking theories on training were the foundation for what was being built. His ideas were still serving me and I was conscious that I was doing things differently to the other professionals around me. So many times now I follow Tim Kerrison’s training programme at Team Sky and think, ‘This is what Robbie had me doing years ago.’

  What had to be learned though was the determination to keep pushing hard even when the thrill was gone. I had to develop the hardness of a drill bit to drive through the field when necessary. And my bike-handling technique needed constant work and tampering. Robbie and I talked about these things through emails and the occasional call.

  Although I hadn’t been home in so long, I knew Mum was still willing me up every hill and through every field. She was pleased to see me doing something I loved and something I seemed to be good at. For a long time she had taken Kinjah’s word that I had some talent. And whenever I talked about cycling, she recognized my passion and said, no matter what, I was to follow it. Thank you, Mum.

  In her own way she had given me as much of a foundation to build on as Kinjah and Robbie had.

  With Mum I don’t remember ever being told, ‘You can’t do that,’ or ‘These are the rules.’ She didn’t believe that rules existed merely to be followed. ‘Do it if you want to,’ she’d say, ‘and you can find out for yourself what it’s like, what the cost is.’

  I really loved that philosophy. I still do. She made me think about how stupid it would be to do certain things, about how actions would hurt other people or hurt myself or betray the things I believed in. It was a sensible philosophy. Obeying rules just because they are rules isn’t the same as having your own moral compass. Mum knew that character is what you do when nobody is watching.

  Mum instilled a sense of responsibility and good morals in me that I live by to this day, and I know that diverting from these would be a betrayal of her. Cheating would not be an option for me.

  I never felt rebellious. I never felt that breaking rules just for the sake of it would be a rite of passage or something to emphasize my individuality.

  I remember one incident in particular that reflects Mum’s philosophy. She happened upon one of my older brothers attempting to smoke a cigarette. He was trying to hide it but she said to him, ‘Hey, come on then, let’s have a smoke.’ And she pulled one out of her own pack and made him smoke it in front of her. He just coughed all the way through it until he got nauseous. He never wanted to smoke again.

  And we never wanted Mum to smoke again either. That was another story.

  From Europe I would speak to her over the phone. I’d try to call her every other weekend if I could, though more often than not we communicated through emails.

  It was only the previous year, when I rode the Giro del Capo and then the Regioni for Konica Minolta, that she seemed to appreciate for the first time that I could actually be a professional.

  It was funny. She would support me in that indiscriminate way that mums have. I couldn’t detect any difference in tone between the ‘Wow, well done!’ she would send to me if I’d done something in a race that meant nothing in South Africa or the ‘Wow, well done!’ she would send if I had placed well in a serious race. She gave the same support, no matter what. And I think she did know the difference.

  After I left Kenya and then left Africa, she stayed in touch with Kinjah, and continued to be an integral part of the whole effort with the Safari Simbaz.

  My cousin, Sarah Penfold, had moved back to Kenya. Sarah was a photographer, and on weekends she and Mum would drive behind the Simbaz wherever they were racing. Sarah would take photos and help Mum with the food and the water for the riders.

  Mum became an avid supporter of cycling and continued to be a great friend to Kinjah and the boys. She would still arrive with baskets of food for them, and as her appreciation of things grew, she became very, very angry about the Federation and how it wasn’t supporting these riders.

  She grew extremely passionate about the whole thing. Not only because of what Kinjah had done for me, but because she saw something in the purity of cycling that appealed to her. She loved adventure and being out in the world, and cycling was opening up those things to so many kids.

  She knew what was important and what mattered in the cycling world and that wasn’t big races or big money. It was the sense of who you were that you carried with you. The possibilities. I think when she said ‘well done’ it referred to more than just finishing places or winnings.

  Even though I wasn’t home often, her growing passion for cycling and her constant encouragement diminished the distance.

  April had been significant for another reason apart from the frustration of the classics. I became a British rider just before riding La Flèche Wallone. The trail which had started with Doug Dailey back in Melbourne and continued through contact with Rod Ellingworth had led to this. I swapped my Kenyan licence for a British one.

  My feelings are complex and maybe impossible for somebody from a less complicated background to understand. I know people who feel they are from Yorkshire and Britain; from Merseyside and Britain; from the Isle of Man and Britain; and so on. Well, we were raised in Kenya feeling that we were of Britain. My brothers were sent to England when they were old enough. We lived in Karen, which was a little piece of England. We ate Sunday roasts with Yorkshire puddings. We had pythons not ferrets, scorpions not corgis, but there was a duality in us. We were from a tribe of interlopers, a line which had come to Kenya, whereas true Kenyans had sprung from the soil. Our relationship to Kenyan earth was different. Our people had come to make a living from that earth. The Masai and the other tribes had a more spiritual
tie to the land. We were on it. They were of it.

  Still, we loved Kenya. Always will. But given the failings of the Kenyan Cycling Federation – not just failings but vindictiveness – it never felt like a betrayal to explore the other part of the Froome family identity. I wasn’t a product of Kenyan cycling. I was a product of Kinjah cycling. And Jane Froome cycling. And Robbie Nilsen cycling. Mr Mwangi and his blazers did nothing for any of these people and were in a constant state of war with Kinjah. There are people running Kenyan cycling who carry grudges until their shoulders bleed.

  Naturally, the process was made more difficult than it needed to be. The first step was the surrender of my Kenyan passport. The Kenyan authorities wouldn’t accept it as they didn’t have the documentation for such a procedure. A receipt, in other words. So I created a document. I drew up an affidavit at a lawyer’s office and went to the Kenyan embassy in Pretoria, gave them my passport and asked them to sign the affidavit confirming the transaction.

  Done.

  After that it should have been blue skies. If both countries are agreeable to a transfer in these circumstances the process is usually quick and smooth. So long as Kenya didn’t object I could be travelling, pending selection, to Beijing for the 2008 Olympics. Kenya objected.

  The process passed from my hands and people at higher pay grades began negotiating with each other. I got on with riding.

  The Vuelta a Asturias began in the city of Oviedo on 3 May. For me this was an opportunity to demonstrate to Barloworld that I was a better rider than I appeared to be while slogging around the Ardennes.

  Stages. Mountains. Time trials. I was hungry.

  Things started well. Day two contained two stages: a regular road ride out of Gijón in the morning, and a time trial of 17 kilometres in the afternoon. Samuel Sánchez González won the time trial and went on to win the gold medal in the road race in the Beijing Olympics later that year. I finished 5th in the time trial, 26 seconds off the top.

  Then two days later on stage four from Pravia to the mountaintop finish at Santuario del Acebo, a stage I would have ring-fenced as full of possibility, I blew up. I was 26 minutes off the top this time. It was sickeningly disappointing.

  The team divided into two after that, some going to the Giro in Italy, the others to the Tour de Picardie.

  I went to Italy. Not to the Giro but back to Chiari to train.

  Corti, the old pragmatist, had told everybody in the team that they were on the long list for the Tour de France. I still trained hard and said the right things if asked, but my hopes were slender.

  It was around this time that my brother Jeremy got in touch. He had been working in Dublin for a while but had decided to pack it in and move back to Kenya. The first thing he had to deal with back at home was bad news. Mum had cancer. The doctors said it was cancer of the bone marrow.

  Mum had always smoked and we had always hated it. My brothers, Jeremy and Jono, and myself grew up giving her a hard time about it. She smoked about twenty a day, cutting down to ten a day if people badgered her enough about it, but always going back to her pack-a-day habit.

  To be honest, we were horrible to her about it. We’d hide her cigarettes when we were away somewhere, and we knew that she couldn’t get to a shop. Or we’d put little firecrackers into her cigarettes. We’d tip out some of the tobacco from the end so she’d sit there and light these things and they would explode cartoonishly right in her face. Mum would be left with the filter dangling from her mouth. Sometimes we’d break the little firecracker open and pour the gun powder in there, so that when she lit the cigarette the whole thing would start fizzing up. It was mean, but she understood what we were trying to say. We desperately wanted her to quit and perhaps there was too much of the stiff upper lip in us for us to express that in any other way.

  She tried. For our sake. She never smoked in the house and never smoked in the car. She’d always get away from us to smoke. We respected that, and we knew that she genuinely did have a hard time stopping. She tried all the patches, all the chewing gums and whatever remedies were going.

  News like that swings into your day like a well-aimed sledgehammer. Things had been looking up for Mum. She had a couple of relationships after Noz left. She was involved with Kinjah, the boys and the weekend races. Her job was going well, and with all her sons in Europe, she had been doing some work on an American army base in Iraq.

  If we worried about Mum it was because she was in Iraq, even though the base was in a safe area. The job gave her a shot at some tax-free earning for a few months. She could come back from a three- or four-month stint doing massage or physio with soldiers and have a large cheque to cash.

  Despite our concerns, she was determined that she would not become a burden on her sons. She was reaching retirement age and, having been a homemaker for most of her life, she had minimal savings.

  My goal was to be able to buy Mum a house near Nairobi, where she could live and set up a physio practice. Since leaving Windy Ridge, she had never stayed anywhere for more than a year or two, and I wanted somewhere for her to settle down. It was one of the driving forces in the back of my mind, if ever I needed the motivation to push that much harder. I was determined to be successful enough to make this happen.

  She came back early from this latest tour to Iraq because she was feeling ill. She went into hospital in Nairobi for tests and the news was bad.

  Jeremy told me they were looking at doing a bone marrow transplant but in the interim she had developed quite a bad lung infection which turned into pneumonia. She was coughing really badly. All that would have to be dealt with first.

  There is an agony of indecision at times like that. Should you go home and maybe complicate the process of her getting stronger, by your presence? Mum would worry that we were worried. Seeing us gather in Nairobi would alarm her. Yet, if she was really bad, I wanted to go back.

  In the end, we decided that there was likely to be a long road ahead with the transplants and her recovery, and that Jeremy would need relief or help at some stage. In early June I went with the team to the Euskal Bizikleta, a stage race in the Basque country. That year, 2008, was the last year that the Euskal was staged.

  It was a short affair. Three days and three stages. I rode the first two days in mediocre form, finishing 51st on stage one and 80th the next day. That evening I remember having a long talk with Jeremy. Mum was still in hospital. She was struggling with the infection, but the doctors had her on antibiotics and were keeping a close eye on her. When the infection was cleared out, they still wanted to look at the possibility of doing the transplant.

  Mum was quite ill but she was fine for now.

  The next morning, about 11.30 or so, not long before the start of the stage, we were all kitted up and had put the radios on. We were ready to go to sign on when Robbie Hunter came to speak to me.

  ‘Listen, if you need to go home just say. Don’t mess around. You don’t have to be here.’

  I was moved by Robbie’s words. I explained that Mum seemed to be all right – in a battle, but doing okay. If things got worse Jeremy would tell me.

  Half an hour later my phone rang. Jeremy.

  ‘Bro, I’m really, really sorry. There’s nothing we can do. She’s gone.’

  Mum was fifty-eight. She had suffered a cardiac arrest related to the chest infection. They brought her round once, but she arrested again not long after.

  And that was it.

  I couldn’t breathe. My lungs closed up.

  I remember standing outside the team bus, so angry and so distraught. I hit the side of the bus with my fist. I sat down on the ground behind the bus, talking to my brother.

  When we finished talking, I got on the bus. The team looked up at me with a single set of eyes as I walked on. My tears told them everything. They were around me and then they were gone.

  Robbie said to me, ‘Just sit down, take your numbers off, take your kit off. You’re going home.’

  It was a really long bus j
ourney back to the hotel. I sobbed all the way. Gianni, the bus driver, kept on looking at me in the rear-view mirror and shaking his head in sympathy.

  The only flight to be had was the next morning. I don’t remember the details of getting home. I was taken to an airport and after a number of transfers ended up in Nairobi. I can’t recall where I flew. I just remember getting back to Kenya and being with my brothers. Jono had flown straight from London. I was the last of us to arrive.

  There are hard moments and soft moments in my memory from those weeks at home.

  We shared our memories and told stories about the trips we had taken together. I had my own recollections of the times when just Mum and I lived together, and how she loved all the possibilities in life and nature. She took such pleasure in sharing those things. The three of us grew up with our maker’s mark on us. Mum had always been colour-blind when it came to race, completely so, and we all took that from her. And we all, even my two accountant brothers, took some of her openness to life.

  So many stories. Sarah recalled a shouting incident between Mum and Julius Mwangi at a race. Kinjah and the boys and Mum and Sarah had turned up for a race and Mwangi had barred them, as they had no licences. Kinjah pointed out that Mwangi had refused to issue the licences. Mum flipped and told Mwangi he had no right to behave the way he did. He was taken aback. He shouted back at her, ‘What’s your problem?’ and told her she shouldn’t get involved with the politics, it was nothing to do with her, she should get in her car and go back home. At which point Sarah, who is quite petite, whacked Mwangi with a camera bag or something.

  That tickled me a bit. Still does.

  Me, my brothers, Sarah and a few others from Mum’s life – that was the farewell group.

  Seeing her body before the cremation was a tough blow.

  Together, we went into the room where they had prepared her body and dressed her. We all said a few words.

  Jono had been really fantastic. As the oldest brother, he’d taken charge of the family and had sorted out most of the logistics and arrangements, along with all the legal stuff that needed to happen for us to take over the estate, which was basically an envelope with the cash that Mum had earned on her last trip to Iraq. There were some shares, too. Not much; she wasn’t a material girl. When she had money she gave it away or lent it to people knowing it would probably never come back. Much of the work she did, she did for free. She could never turn anybody away.