The Climb: The Autobiography

by Chris Froome

  After a couple of days we took Mum to a local crematorium. I found it hard but something about it would have pleased Mum. It was basically a tin roof with open sides, like a warehouse with no walls, and a big fireplace in the middle.

  We brought my mum’s coffin through, unloaded it and put it on top of the open fireplace. We all took a burning branch and lit the fire, watching the flames slowly gather momentum. It was hard to stomach, in that the coffin disintegrated quite quickly and then the body was just there burning. I don’t know how long it was that way. I stopped looking.

  I hadn’t prepared mentally for this. I hadn’t expected the really pungent smell of burning flesh, I guess. At least a week had passed since Mum’s death. My memories of that day at the crematorium are about how harsh and brutal it was compared to the sanitized version of death that other parts of the world have become used to.

  I had imagined flowers, soothing music and togetherness. This was raw. I cried my eyes out.

  Afterwards we all sat together. Around this warehouse there was grass and a wall. It was Sunday and there must have been a Sunday school in session somewhere nearby. As we sat, the African hymns just came to us in the air. It was a beautiful coincidence that Mum would have loved, our grief mingling with this lovely high-pitched singing.

  Very emotional. Very African.

  When it was time to go we gathered some of Mum’s ashes. One thing we maybe didn’t need to know was that they had to keep stoking the fire to make sure that the bigger bones would burn. They need a higher heat. Again this was raw, but in Africa that’s how death is. There are no sugar coatings.

  A few days later, we held a memorial service at the St Francis Church in Karen. The church was overflowing with people whose lives had been touched by Mum, many of whom I’d never met. It was moving and emotional, and the memories still bring me to tears.

  I stayed in Kenya for perhaps another two weeks. There was no bike, no training. It was good to be with my brothers and to go through the process of our grief together, before separating again.

  I remember thinking at one stage, ‘Wow, I haven’t even touched a bike now for probably a week or two.’ I was still pretty emotional and not in a very good place, but that amount of time away from the bike would have been a record.

  Then one day Claudio Corti called me from Italy.

  ‘Froome, how are you doing?’

  ‘Okay, Claudio. I haven’t really been training or anything, but I’m with the family and we’ve had a good time together. Thank you.’

  ‘Froome, do you want to go to the Tour?’

  I just went quiet. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t give him an answer other than silence.

  ‘Froome, you do the Tour. Okay? Bye.’

  I put the phone down, went back to my brothers and told them that the team wanted me to do the Tour de France. More silence and shock.

  The talk, when it started, came down to what Mum would have wanted. What she would have said. My brothers knew. I did too, but I wanted them to tell me.

  ‘Why stop living your life?’ she would’ve asked. ‘Don’t mourn. Don’t be miserable.’

  Jono had said this to us a couple of days before the crematorium. We were all in tears and Jono had said, ‘Listen, she’ll be looking at us and telling us not to be ridiculous. She’ll be saying, “Get over yourselves. Don’t sit there crying for me. That’s not living. Living is making the most of life. Celebrating it. No wasted moments.” ’

  Jono and Jeremy said those things to me again and I knew they were right.

  As it happened, it hardly mattered. While we were mulling these things over, a press release went out in Europe. I was named in the team for the Tour starting two weeks later in Brest.

  Three years later, Jono, Jeremy and I went down to the coast, to Diani, south of Mombasa, where Mum used to come and had so often brought us. We went out on a boat to just beyond the reef. There, we scattered her ashes. It was beautiful and graceful and we brought many flowers too.

  We had thought we might scatter her ashes on the Rift Valley, but when we thought of Diani and the ocean, it just seemed more appropriate for Mum.

  Life is strange and often funny.

  Sometime later Jono found a note on Mum’s computer. It was her will. She left us her possessions, such as they were, and asked us to scatter her ashes in the ocean at Diani.

  The four of us, my brothers, myself and Mum, shared a last smile with each other.

  13

  2008: The Tour de France

  Three days of the Tour de France. Please make it stop.

  Merciless. Helter-skelter. A war zone. A long daily grapple for survival.

  Three days in and I was 168th in a field of 178. At least one of those guys behind me was an injured teammate.

  This bipolar peloton was in a different mood than I had ever seen it in my limited experience, rolling with a shocking, wicked momentum once it got past the daily pleasantries of the neutral zone.

  I was out at sea and completely out of my depth. Whatever happened to those leisurely picture-postcard rides through fields of sunflowers? This was faster than any race I’d done before.

  Could I just have the old dream back, please?

  Three days and already my ambitions had been whittled down to merely getting through it. Hang in there and get to Paris. I wanted to finish the Tour and to have that experience. Any other fanciful notions had been purged. Despite my shiny new British racing licence I was still being written up as the first Kenyan to ride the Tour de France – okay. If I could be the first Kenyan to finish it, that would be enough – better than enough.

  They say that all good things take time and that all the crap gets delivered by same-day express. They’re right. It started badly. Day one was Brest to Plumelec. We had only 10 kilometres or so to go when our team leader, Mauricio Soler, crashed. He had broken his left wrist on the Giro earlier in the year and he damaged it again now before any of us had crossed a finish line. It was the right wrist, too. He also ripped a hole in his shorts and in the flesh on his leg, high on his left thigh.

  Soler was our leader and the hero in the mountains a year previously. He had earned our loyalty. There was nothing for it but for Félix Cárdenas, Giampaolo Cheula and myself to wait for Mauricio and to attempt to nurse him back to the group. Mauricio was shaky. He almost took himself out on a barrier a couple of kilometres further down the road but we survived.

  Giampaolo and I finished stage one 4 minutes and 4 seconds adrift.

  ‘Happy’ days.

  I wanted to finish for myself. For Mum. For the past and for the future. But already I felt lost. The race was being decided somewhere up ahead of me every day. Most riders get a recce of the key stages in the weeks and months before the Tour. I just had a map. I rode blind into the valley of death and rode blind up the climb that led out of it.

  In June I had travelled to Africa to grieve. I took at least two weeks’ sabbatical from the bike, and when I got the news from Corti, I went out for two long runs and found out the hard way that runners use different muscle groups to cyclists. I ached in places I had forgotten existed.

  When I flew back to Italy I went straight out on the bike for six hours. I rode six hours every day for six days in a row. No recovery days. Then I joined the team up in Brittany for the hullaballoo of Le Grand Départ, which was as underwhelming as the weather was overcast. For the last couple of days in Brittany we were restricted to two-hour training sessions. My body needed more.

  The peloton hit the road carrying forty-three of us who had never ridden the Tour before. I wondered how the other forty-two had spent the previous month.

  Stage two. More of the same. Not waving but drowning. Soler was wounded and there was nothing we could do for him after a while except leave him to his agony. Both of his wrists were bandaged up now. He came in last on the day, over 7 forlorn minutes behind everybody else. I lost another 2 minutes or so. Again, the race and the main group all finished ahead of me, and
I only crossed the line when the drama was over.

  Next day, on the third stage, we lit out from the walled town of Saint-Malo on the road to Nantes. The rain came at us with frequent ambushes. We would think we had seen the last of it each time the skies teased us with a show of blue. Then the deluge would resume. We rode through a forest. The water seemed to have gathered in the leaves above to fall on us in engorged droplets. And the winds never settled on their plan. Most of the time they hit us sideways. Crosswinds leave you with few defences and nothing splits a field quicker. I found myself yo-yoing from the back of the peloton into the convoy of support cars and back out. The vehicles offered some protection from the wind but amidst the cars was not where you wanted to be.

  It was not a bad day for the team though. Up at the front, Paolo Longo Borghini was part of a small break which built a good lead and kept it. He finished 4th. Robbie Hunter was 12th. I was almost 5 minutes behind but people told me that my race would start the following day with the individual time trial.

  I wanted to believe them. I wanted a small taste of whatever Paolo and Robbie were having.

  We were a platoon of nine carrying the hopes of Team Barloworld through this twenty-one stage counterclockwise yomp around France. Me, a mongrel with a Kenyan flag on my dossard and a British passport in my bag. Two Colombians, Félix Cárdenas and our leader Soler, both skinny like saplings, as if bred for climbing. Baden Cooke, the sprinting Aussie. Two South Africans, Robbie Hunter and John-Lee Augustyn. Two Italians, Paolo Longo Borghini and Giampaolo Cheula. And one Spaniard, Moisés Dueñas.

  We were not a close bunch. That’s how it is in pro teams. Language, experience, seniority and different schedules mean we generally have just a superficial relationship with each other. I was friendly with the two South Africans, of course, but with, say, Moisés Dueñas or the Colombians I had little more than a nodding relationship unless we needed to communicate during a stage.

  I roomed with Giampaolo Cheula, one of the Italian riders. He was a tough fellow: squat with blond hair and a blond moustache. He finished the Tour the previous year and had been with Barloworld since 2005. That gave him some seniority and he didn’t mind letting me know about it. But it wasn’t just me. I think John-Lee Augustyn and Daryl Impey also felt that Giampaolo liked to give us a bit of a hard time. Probably because we were all neo-pros or because our backgrounds and our accents didn’t fit the picture of the typical European professional.

  Earlier in the season, back in the Vuelta a Asturias, I was fussing with the mechanics late one evening getting the bike right for an individual time trial the following day. Giampaolo, who had a ‘neo-pros should be seen and not heard’ attitude, couldn’t help but give a thin smile and ask me, ‘Well, Chreees, what thing will you do tomorrow on this special bike of yours?’

  As it happened, the time trial went very well. I came 5th. I didn’t say anything but the next day I thought to myself, ‘There you go, Giampaolo. See?’

  He wasn’t a bad guy. He was once given all the tough flunky jobs and I’m sure he just felt a responsibility to preserve the pecking order that he came up through. It was fair enough.

  Ah. Stage four. They told me that my race would begin here on a cheekily short time trial at Cholet. The stage was a shade under 30 kilometres – a bit too abbreviated for any real suffering, or so I thought.

  Soler came down to breakfast with the results of an X-ray, which revealed a broken bone in his right hand. His left hand was still so sore that he was finding it hard to apply the front brakes. The poor man was getting a worse reputation for crashing than I had, but he said he would do the time trial anyway.

  It was a race of three parts: headwinds starting out, crosswinds in the middle and a tailwind pushing you the last 10 kilometres home.

  Soler finished close to the bottom of the pile, fresh evidence that the Tour was breaking him day by day.

  For me, it turned out that the wisdom of the crowd was correct. The first good day arrived. There were no worldwide headlines but some encouragement dripping slow. I finished 33rd, which was the best of Team Barloworld, and 6th in the young riders’ category behind guys like Vincenzo Nibali and Andy Schleck. I felt like I was just coming into my strength when the finishing line loomed.

  Giampaolo, my room-mate, came in 118th. It wasn’t my place to offer consolation or advice to an elder though.

  The next morning brought the longest stage of the Tour, a 232-kilometre ride to Châteauroux. It was long and flat and Mauricio Soler’s heartbreak came to an end. He crashed in the neutral zone and gave up the ghost. We rolled on, knowing that the day was a play with the drama all packed into the final act. It was a stage loaded for the sprinters, and Mark Cavendish won the battle.

  I was far behind, hanging in there and thinking of the mountains.

  We had a couple of transition stages to go, and then another long flat stage on the Saturday before we would get to stage nine, and go up where the air was rare.

  Until then I would be watching from a seat near the back.

  When we hit the mountains I felt at home. Not at home like a guy banking on a stage win, or even at home like a rider rolling all day with the front group. I just had a little surge of confidence. Any ambitions for GC were gone in the first couple of days, but that was okay. I’d made it this far in what would prove to be an accident-prone team – accident prone or disaster prone, take your pick. Now I could test myself.

  I’m neither superstitious nor religious, but for me, of all people, to escape the various calamities raining down on Team Barloworld for those three weeks of the Tour meant that maybe somebody was looking down on me, giving me a steer when she wasn’t enjoying the flora and fauna of France. Getting to the mountains was the first suggestion of that.

  Stage nine ran from Toulouse to Bagnères-de-Bigorre, taking us into the high Pyrenees. Riding out of Toulouse, there was a static of excitement buzzing through parts of the peloton. Everyone has their talents and when the Tour route is announced each rider can see the days where he might thrive more than others, and the days where he might toil harder than most.

  This was a day that we mountain goats had been looking forward to. Four category-four climbs as appetizers. Then a category three and finally two category-one mountains, Col de Peyresourde followed by Col d’Aspin and a roll down the other side of the mountain to the finish.

  I wasn’t in the front group all day long astounding the race commentators but neither was I back in the society of the gruppetto, in the blurry ranks of the indistinct and undistinguished.

  I did have a brief shining moment as the stage leader on the road though.

  At the bottom of the Col d’Aspin the group I was in must have been about forty or fifty strong. We were maybe 5 kilometres up the climb and I remember being towards the back of the group feeling relatively comfortable. ‘I’m in the group,’ I thought. ‘We are on the climb. I won’t be picked off here.’

  I looked across and saw David Millar, the Scottish rider, a couple of yards away. My knowledge of the pros was limited but David Millar, though never a climber, was still a big deal to me. He was in difficulty. He was on the tip of his saddle, really squeezing out any energy that he had left.

  It was strange but that put some iron in my soul. I remember the feeling that seeing David Millar struggling gave me, and the energy that shot through me. If he was suffering and I was feeling just about okay, then that had to be a pretty good sign.

  ‘All right,’ I said to myself, ‘if David Millar is about to go out the back pretty soon now, there must be others around here that will be going with him. Time to get out of here.’ I started moving up through the group maybe two-thirds of the way up the climb.

  The Col d’Aspin isn’t a legendary Tour de France ascent but it is one long haul. I got to the front of the group probably two or three minutes later.

  I was in the front tip of the leading group as we ascended but knew that I wasn’t likely to be with them when we came down the far side. �
��So what the heck,’ I thought. I attacked.

  I remember thinking that I was going quite fast. ‘I’m not going to rip the field apart but I’m going to do this for a few more minutes. I’ll blow out of the picture soon enough but I want to have my moment in front while I can.’ I never got more than 20 metres in front. And my lead hardly lasted more than a minute.

  What happened next was that the Italian Riccardo Riccò came flying past me as if I were standing still at the side of the road posing for an oil painting. He was on his big chainring, no doubt, out of the saddle. He just burned past and went sprinting off. By now I couldn’t even turn the pedals any more. I looked at Riccò’s disappearing form and thought that I had never seen such talent.

  People said that evening that Riccò’s explosive burst had reminded them of Marco Pantani, one of the best climbers of his era, although his career was filled with doping allegations. They were still saying that a week later.

  I got back into the bunch and was duly dropped just as they were cresting in the last 500 metres of the climb. I rolled over the finish line in 51st place, second best of the team after Moisés Dueñas.

  ‘Okay,’ I thought. ‘These are my mountains. Game on.’

  Wrong. Next day, stage ten, I came home 120th, 33 minutes behind Leonardo Piepoli. Col de Tourmalet nearly broke me and my lesson for the week was to respect the course. But there was lots still to learn as we paused for the first rest day of the Tour. The tutorials were just beginning.

  Oh my God. Had he murdered Cárdenas?

  Félix Cárdenas, the Colombian rider, had been rooming with Moisés Dueñas, the quiet Spaniard who sat just across and in front of me on the bus as we went to and from the race each day.