by Chris Froome
‘Good luck to him,’ I thought. He was obviously feeling good. The rest of us, meanwhile, continued to watch each other. Nobody wanted to get on the front just yet.
It suited me. I just had to stay on the wheels of those chasing Mauricio. All of the teams had crumbled and there were different-coloured jerseys speckled all over the mountain. In front, we were just a group of individuals by now, responsible only for ourselves.
We were all happy to let Mauricio go but then a rider from the Cofidis team attacked. I had no idea who he was but I went with him because he looked like he meant business. I sped up and got on to his wheel.
He turned out to be David Moncoutié, who was quite an established climber and a very interesting man. He had come 13th on his third Tour de France in 2002. Higher if you subtract the dopers ahead of him (five riders who finished in positions above have since either served bans or admitted to doping). One thing that everybody agreed upon was that he, Moncoutié, was never a doper.
I later heard that he had turned down big contracts at various teams who wanted him as a team leader because he didn’t want to ride GC. He wanted to ride races his own way and target certain stages. In this way, he stayed with Cofidis his whole career. He was into homeopathy, vegetarianism, breaking early on mountain stages or hanging with the gruppetto if not. He dealt with doping by racing for and against himself, getting the most out of his own talents.
I have huge respect for David Moncoutié now, but that day I didn’t really know who he was. He just looked like a good bet to follow up the mountain. Mauricio was up the road so I sat on Moncoutié’s wheel. He never once asked me to try to come through or to take a pull. If he had asked I would have told him that I was fine where I was. ‘My man is up front. You can take me to him, Tonto.’
Instead, he just glanced back a couple of times to check I was still there.
I liked my odds. Moncoutié was a big guy and he was riding well but surely he wasn’t going to last too long up there doing all the work?
Still, it felt like he was going fast. With every kilometre we went up he seemed to be gaining a kilometre per hour in speed. Little sprouts of worry began to form in my brain. This shouldn’t have been happening.
With 3 kilometres to go, my legs felt like they were tweeting my brain: This guy is going too fast for you, sucker.
Suddenly, Mauricio was in our sights a few hundred metres in front of us; it was the first time we had seen him for quite a while. The road behind looked empty. I could sense that Mauricio was starting to die a little. He had to be. His back was getting nearer to us and I was tiring too. But this guy in the Cofidis gear was just getting stronger. I stayed sitting on his wheel thinking that this wasn’t going quite as well as I had imagined it would. He was not blowing up.
Mauricio never looked back at us and Moncoutié kept pounding away on the pedals in front of me, never out of the saddle, never relenting from the huge pace. We got within 100 metres of Mauricio, going round switchbacks with a kilometre to go, when I realized that the only way Moncoutié was going to fade now was if I threw him off the mountain. That wouldn’t get me signed up with another team for next year, at least not with a French team.
We didn’t have radios on, so I leaned round the side of Moncoutié, shouting up the mountain like a put-upon mother calling her son in for dinner.
‘MAURICIO! MAURICIO!’
Finally, Mauricio looked back and saw us. He had thought he was clear and could go easy. Now at least he knew we were coming, but ominously his speed did not change.
With 800 metres to go we passed Mauricio. I gave him a push to get him in on Moncoutié’s wheel, hoping that Mauricio had more left in his legs than I had. Neither of us is a sprinter but this Cofidis guy who had dragged me up the mountain, he surely couldn’t be a sprinter either?
The road flattened out. Maybe he would ease up here and leave the door ajar? Go on, Mauricio. He didn’t. With 100 metres to go, Moncoutié blew us away. Mauricio finished 2nd. I was 3rd.
On the team bus afterwards I sat down and began telling it from the mountain.
‘I don’t know who that Cofidis rider was but for quite a big guy, he could climb so well and –’
Robbie Hunter guffawed.
‘Chris, did you really not know who that Cofidis rider was? Seriously?’
After that I always looked out for Moncoutié in the races. This was the guy who would be in the breakaway on a climbing day, when the GC riders had let a big group get away from them that didn’t have any contenders in it. This was the guy I wanted to be with to get to the finish.
He would choose the right kind of moves because he was older and knew how the races worked. ‘Look and learn, kijana,’ I thought. ‘Look and learn.’
I was in Johannesburg at the end of 2008, just as the year was sliding into 2009. It was time for a term report to my old friend Matt Beckett, to catch him up on my news.
I told him that I had committed to Barloworld for another year and even had an agent now, a man called Alex Carera. Alex had received some interest from the Lotto team, and had something on the table, although I felt like I still owed Barloworld as they had put me in the Tour.
‘Are you on the big money yet?’ Matt asked.
‘I went up from 22,500 to 30,000 euro. So yeah, crazy.’
‘Maybe you could get work packing bags at a supermarket, double your money and buy a yacht,’ he replied sarcastically.
I mentioned that the Kenyan Olympic Committee had dragged their feet on releasing me to get my British cycling licence until it was too late to go to the Beijing Games.
Matt asked if I was sad or upset.
I was. I felt sad because it was so petty and because they had nobody going there to represent Kenya anyway. Also, the road race course – and this was rare for the Games – was long and lumpy, which meant that it might have been perfect for me. Finally, I was sad because poor old Kinjah would be putting up with all of this rubbish long after I would.
Matt wanted to know about the other thing, that thing everybody was asking about: doping.
There’s an unspoken rule, isn’t there? Call it a code among professional athletes. It was like Fight Club again. In the same way that the first rule of Fight Club is no talking about Fight Club, the first rule of professional sports is no talking about doping. No matter what you have seen or what you have heard, you say nothing. If a doping story breaks, you are always surprised. You never heard anything, you never saw anything and nobody ever spoke about it. ‘My, oh my, this is a shock.’
It was different among friends.
‘What’s the story, bwana?’ Matt asked.
He knew about the Tour bust, but the whole world seemed to know about that one. Matt wanted inside juice.
‘Does the dark side have a gravitational pull?’
He knew that as Moses of the Hemp I was probably too naive to even sense it but surely there was something I might know?
I told him about Fanny.
I liked Fanny, or Christian Pfannberger to give him his full name. Fanny is Austrian and typical of the Austrians I’ve met – so blunt that they make Germans look diplomatic. I enjoyed his company though.
I roomed with him for a one-day race late during the previous season and he had made me laugh. He was complaining about his head being sore because he had been drinking too much over the summer. Apparently it was the right time for the wine in Austria or something and Fanny did his bit as a patriot and drank plentifully. Now he had come to the race and he was saying that his head was hurting because he hadn’t had a drink in a few days.
Earlier in the season, in the spring of 2008, Fanny had set the world on fire. He made top ten in each of the three big Ardennes classics:
Amstel Gold – 6th.
La Flèche Wallonne – 9th.
Liège–Bastogne–Liège – 5th.
That was impressive work. But there were cryptic things that he liked to say. ‘It doesn’t matter what the muscles look like,’ he’d tell
me, ‘it’s what’s in the muscles that counts.’
Daryl, John-Lee and myself, being the neo-pros in the bunch, discussed our suspicions. We knew that Fanny had form. He had served a two-year doping ban a couple of years before he joined Barloworld so there was certainly the whiff of dark-side sulphur about him.
One of the things he would commonly ask us was, ‘Have you been tested at home?’
He wanted to know when they would come – was it in the morning or in the evening? And would they do urine and blood or just urine?
It felt like he was trying to work out any sort of pattern that the testers might be following.
We all liked Fanny and maybe it was just his robust Austrian way, but we always found that side of him to be strange. After the Tour bust knocked some of the innocence out of us we found his behaviour more worrying.
And yet … he asked these questions to guys he hardly knew. Surely he was too bright to do it again after a two-year ban? And he drank wine. If he was still doping surely he would be more sober? Or more cloak and dagger, at least? He was good company and a funny man. He couldn’t be another one putting all of our careers in jeopardy, could he? Or could this all be far worse than we thought?
Fanny was moving on to ride with the Katusha team in 2009. We were sorry to see him go, but there was some relief among us too.
‘That was some scary shit, Matt. Finding out during the Tour that other guys might still be doing it.’
‘Yeah, but think of it this way. You’ve only been a professional for a year and a half, or two years. You’ve already been able to achieve top-ten results and top-five results in some of the Spanish races. If you are competing against guys who are doping then either it’s not helping them that much, or you have serious talent. You should be encouraged.’
Matt was right. I was encouraged, but angry too. I trained harder.
Barloworld had given us just twelve months’ worth of further lease on the dream. We had only one more season together, so for 2009 we would be ‘Team Dead Men Walking’.
The news of the end being in sight was announced at our training camp in January in Tuscany. When they came out and told us it felt like we were being given months to live. Then all of our bikes were stolen in the middle of the night. My room was the closest to the bike storeroom. I heard noises early in the morning and thought it was unusual for the mechanics to be working already but went back to sleep. I woke up properly a few hours later at about eight o’clock and everyone was standing about scratching their heads and looking around. Thirty bikes had disappeared overnight.
Andrea had arrived in Italy before the Tour de France and was soon to depart again. Neither her career nor our relationship had ignited in Lombardy. It’s tough living with a cyclist. I had one day at home after the Tour before leaving again to race in Holland for a week, which is just how it goes.
Cycling was changing too. We had biological passports now. It was a novelty to be a part of it, to have to log on and tell the computer where you would be at any given time. If you left the house you had to say exactly where you would be going, even if it was the supermarket or the shop round the corner.
I literally put down every movement and I was fascinated by the process. If I went shopping for half an hour, somebody would know. If I took a walk, the same thing. One evening, Andrea and I went out for a meal in Sarnico. It was a rare occurrence for us to go out like that, but I logged in as usual, putting down the name of the restaurant and that I was going to be there from seven o’clock till ten thirty.
I was sitting with Andrea and our food had just arrived when I got a phone call.
‘Chris Froome? We’re here to test you, we’re standing at the restaurant reception.’
I was blown away. It worked.
‘I’m just going to pee into a beaker, dear. Back soon.’
Of course, I didn’t really know how we would proceed, given that we were in a restaurant. We got a few funny looks until I asked one of the waiters, who gave a shrug as if he were used to this and waved us to a quieter and more private area of the restaurant which wasn’t being used.
We sat at a table there, filled out the paperwork and then I went to the bathroom for the urine sample. Next, I sat in a dark corner to do the blood.
It was an odd introduction to the new era. I don’t know what I would have told Fanny if he had still been around to quiz me.
Early in the summer of 2009 I was riding the Giro d’Italia, another Grand Tour. Over the first few days I performed a new trick: riding and puking at the same time.
Barloworld’s view of me for a while was expressed with a mix of encouragement and concern. Claudio Corti would take me aside on occasions for one-on-one chats. During the 2008 Tour, after the day I went with Menchov on Alpe d’Huez, we had one that I recall clearly. He offered me advice to dial it down a bit sometimes.
‘We know you are strong,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to show us by attacking, attacking, attacking. You don’t have to prove anything to us.’
I understood his point, but he didn’t get mine. I felt that if I attacked earlier in races I could be at the front for a while. I wanted to get my piece in there because I knew that when the big guys made their moves in earnest, I would be dropped. I didn’t see why I should wait around for that. Maybe it would get me a better GC position but I wanted to try lots of situations and learn from them. I was stubborn about wanting to do it my way whereas Claudio thought it was more a matter of me having an itchy trigger finger. He wanted me to just stay calm.
But here I was, getting sick, and it was because I insisted on doing things my way. It started as soon as I got up, when I ran into John-Lee at the hotel.
‘John-Lee, I’m feeling bad. I don’t know how I’m going to make it through the day. Seriously.’
I told him what I thought the problem was, but he just smiled and patted me on the back.
‘Keep it quiet, my friend. No need to be telling everybody.’
I knew what he meant. What I carried about in my suitcase was worrying to Claudio and company. I was dabbling with different things that might help extract the best out of myself, and had spent some time with a Scottish friend of mine the winter beforehand, a guy called Patrick Leckie. He was incredibly bright and a straight-A student, but disguised it well. You could speak to Patrick and decide that he might be a little bit slow, but I had known him since school and knew different.
Patrick wasn’t bad athletically but sport wasn’t really what got him out of bed in the morning. He had been on a trip to India and then done some community work with monks in Thailand. I think that sort of life would have interested me if the bike hadn’t claimed me as its own.
Patrick came back from his travels and he was a hundred per cent vegan – the whole nine yards. I went to see him at St Andrews in Scotland and spent a few days with him, sleeping on his floor.
I loved the trip and remember Patrick telling me about all the amino acids and nutrients that your body can get from eating sprouting vegetables. When a vegetable begins sprouting it has an extremely high content of amino acids, which are good for recovery and energy. It was just a cornerstone of basic healthy living for Patrick, and he convinced me that I needed to have at least three handfuls a day of these things.
So I bought into it. Soon I was mixing them with porridge in the morning or with muesli, and throwing sproutings in with whatever I was eating.
I had started a miniature gardening allotment in my suitcase and every evening I would take the little transparent trays out and rinse them, before stacking them on a windowsill where they could grow. I would rotate the trays so that the new vegetables would be at the bottom, the three-day-old ones would be the next level up, followed by the six-day-old vegetables, and so on.
I would be swapping them around as the races went on. The crops were mung beans, alfalfa shoots and quinoa. I mainly grew mung beans, which were little green beans that I would pour water over after a few days. I would then wait, and after a few da
ys more they would already be several centimetres long. They grew rapidly.
To the Italians, this was all blasphemy, even offensive. They would set about eating their pasta in the morning, whereas I would be there with these strange shoots that had been growing in my suitcase, scattering them on my breakfast cereal. It worried Corti, in particular.
‘Please, you really need to do things the way that we’ve done them in the past. They’ve worked for us. We know how to eat before a race and you don’t need to eat these things.’
I would nod, but I kept cultivating and would eat the harvest in secret after that.
During the Giro, though, I was sick and it was my fault. I had grown some quinoa but had put too much water on it. It had started fermenting, or hadn’t grown properly, and it started to go slightly fizzy.
I ate a whole bowl of it in the morning, thinking to myself that it didn’t really taste very nice, but I ate them regardless. I put it down as a credit in the ‘sufferings’ account. Quinoa is used as a substitute in South America for rice and it is supposed to have many health benefits for your body. Normally you should cook it but I had been sprouting the seeds and eating them raw and now I could taste the mistake as I chewed. After eating a whole bowl of the stuff I felt very sick.
My stomach rose up against me and every time I threw up I could see the little quinoa grains, and the fermented taste would come back to haunt me. It was one of the longest stages of the Giro – or at least it felt that way.
2009 was the year of treading water. Barloworld had been granted wild-card entries to the Tour de France for the two previous years but weren’t going to make the cut for a third time in a row – bad results, a doping scandal and imminent extinction had taken care of that.
Although we raced in the Giro, we hadn’t really done enough racing beforehand to make a success of it.
I was now living out in Nesso, a village on Lake Como. I had a small house in fine isolation about 15 kilometres from Como itself on the winding road around the lake. It should have been perfect but in March I came down with a cold that I couldn’t shake for a fortnight. I was off the bike for a couple of weeks because I knew that if I even pushed the bike out the door I would weaken myself and make things worse. I had to sit it out to get better, which left me behind for the season.