by Chris Froome
During the Giro, even when I wasn’t sick, I had struggled. I hated the stages where we went up into the snow; I had never felt so cold in my life. Stage seven is still in my bones. It was a freezing cold day, or a freddo, as the Italians say. We came down from the heights of the Maloja Pass, which was a mad descent, and I was so numb and so miserable that I couldn’t change gears or brake properly. It should have been a good day for me but I came in 120th.
I was overweight and unfit. When I was sick I lost form and conditioning and let my eating go off track. I raced the Giro at 71 kilos. Back then I would normally race at 69 to 70 kilos. These days I ride at 66 kilos.
I also found that it was a very strange and far more unpredictable style of racing. In the middle of the stage, when everyone would be riding hard and the leading team were controlling on the front, all of a sudden four guys would attack, even though there was a breakaway in front. It was different to every other race I had done.
The best day was stage fourteen, although it may also have been the worst day.
I asked the mechanics before going out for extra gears but the feeling was that I was merely making a fuss. Most people would have been running a compact and a 27 for those kinds of gradients, which were really steep. I remember that the day before the stage I went to the mechanics and said I was aiming to get in the breakaway the following day, and for that I would need really light gears to get up the climb. But their attitude was macho-dismissive and they said that 25 would be ‘fine’ as a climbing gear. ‘What do you want more than a 25 for? You should be embarrassed even for asking! You’ll be fine on what we give you.’
I wasn’t really able to argue and I was slightly intimidated. But this was another lesson – I should have fought harder. When it came to the key moment in the race, I literally couldn’t turn the gear when I needed to.
Up the last climb, the Aussie Simon Gerrans and I had the stage between us. The road kept going up, and getting steeper as it did. I felt strong, but I sensed that Gerrans did too. In the end, I broke first. My legs seized up and Gerrans pushed on. I was struggling and a group of four other riders eventually picked me off on the last kilometre, so that I finished 6th.
The gears farrago actually ended as an embarrassment to us all. In an attempt to diminish the gradient I began riding zigzags up the hill, pushing over and back across the road. As I got to the sides to turn, people in the crowds were pushing me to try to get me up because I was almost coming to a standstill. Naturally, the papers got pictures of this fun.
Unfortunately, when the Barloworld team car reached the same point on the hill, it too broke down and the same crowd were photographed pushing it up the slope. The next day there were two photos in the press: one of me being pushed up the stage, and another of the car. The caption read something like: ‘Hill 2 Barloworld 0’.
It was no wonder we didn’t have a sponsor to save us for the following season.
Despite all of this, I finished 36th overall in the Giro, which wasn’t a bad result, but still disappointing.
The year lagged by.
I was British now and competed in the National Road Race championships in Wales late in June.
A few times on the Giro I had ended up riding close to Bradley Wiggins, the former Olympic track rider, and in Wales on the Iron Mountain, as the most celebrated climb was called, it was Bradley Wiggins and me who were left to summit the top of the climb together.
We had a lead of a minute on the chasing group as we went into the laps of the finishing circuit. The group started chewing into our lead quickly enough and I looked across at Bradley. Then I looked at the shrinking margin and made a break for it. Bradley got swallowed up whereas I stayed out on the front for longer. Only on the final stretch did Kristian House, Daniel Lloyd and Pete Kennaugh go past me. I settled for 4th but it was a good day of racing and the welcome from the crowd was warm.
After Wales I had nothing substantial on the road ahead. My body didn’t have anything substantial left in it either. I was often feeling poorly and having to take time off the bike, which sucked away my spirits.
When I watched the Tour de France on television, I kept an eye on Bradley Wiggins. I was interested in his approach – he was lively and lithe in the saddle and he time-trialled well and competed decently in the mountains. I felt our strengths were similar.
Wiggins was carrying no extra weight. I knew that if you wanted to ride clean, your diet and nutrition are huge issues and I was always exploring that side of cycling. I had been training for a long time without breakfast but race days were different. You couldn’t go out to race without food inside you. That seemed logical. But on race days I never felt the same hair-trigger lightness that I did when I was training. I watched Bradley, wondering how I would forge the gap.
The silver lining was that I had a team for the following year. David Brailsford, who seemed to have been Yoda to Bradley Wiggins’s Luke Skywalker in the track days, was starting a road-racing team with a British flavour.
Most of the staff who would form the backroom support for this new team had been involved with the British set-up at the 2008 Worlds in Varese. I had known some of them beforehand but that week put me firmly in their minds and I was comfortable with them. The riders Steve Cummings and Geraint Thomas from Barloworld were talking to Sky at the same time. It was an easy decision and though the line-up wasn’t announced until December, I knew from about April onwards where I would be racing in 2010.
The summer petered out without leaving any marks on me, although two small things close to the end made me happy to be moving on.
In September I raced the World Championships for GB in Mendrisio, Switzerland. I brought my Barloworld Bianchi time-trial bike and the GB mechanics simply cracked up when they saw it.
‘You actually race on this thing?’
‘What’s wrong with it?’
The mechanic put pressure on the bottom bracket with his foot to show me how flexible the bike was. The whole thing moved and flexed.
‘So?’
‘So that’s what happens when you stand up on the bike and whenever you get out of the saddle. Basically, when you put the power through the pedals it’s being lost in that flexion; instead of being transferred into a forward direction, it’s becoming a sideways movement on the bottom bracket.’
I made a mental note. Don’t stand up. Stay seated.
He wasn’t finished.
‘And your gears!’
‘What about them?’
‘They’re a bit of a joke. Half Shimano and the other half Campagnolo? Sort of a nine-speed chain with a ten-speed cassette. To be honest, your whole bike is a joke – the cables you’re using are the wrong cable housing and you’ve got brake housing on the gear shifters. We’ll re-strip it for you.’
They did, and I came in 18th. It was still nothing to write home about. I was three spots ahead of Brad, but that didn’t mean much as he had suffered a mechanical and ditched his bike midway through his time trial.
I was disappointed with the diagnosis on the bikes that we had been using at Barloworld. Then, at around the same time, I had to compete in a race about a hundred kilometres from my house on Lake Como.
I got a lift down with somebody but I wasn’t feeling too good; I’d been sick again and I really just wanted to shut down the year to sort out my health. I wanted to get ready for 2010 and a new start.
It was a hilly one-day race, and I had completed about three-quarters of the course when I pulled out. It was a lost cause. I had been dropped and I didn’t feel great. The race was being run on laps so I just pulled in to the team bus when I came around to it on the circuit. Instead of going back with the team to the hotel and returning home the next day, I put my backpack on and got ready to ride the 100 kilometres home myself.
As I was leaving, Alberto Volpi, the director, stopped me and told me that I needed to get myself together. Volpi basically accused me of pulling out of the race on purpose because I knew I had a 100-kilometre ri
de to get home.
It was a pointless, silly sort of argument. I said, ‘Listen, I was dropped. It wasn’t because I didn’t want to be here, I’m just not in good form and I couldn’t be at the front of the race any longer. It’s a hard circuit and I don’t feel well. I need to get home and I don’t have a car. This is how I’m going to get back now.’
I finally arrived back at my place at about 10.00 p.m. after doing the long ride. I was still annoyed.
Our last race together as teammates with Barloworld was in October. It was a one-day race in Italy, and one of the smaller events, with only seven of us there to ride. We didn’t really have a leader for the race, and we felt like we were mainly there to make up the numbers.
The night before the race, we had a final dinner together. It was a chance to swap some old war stories and to say goodbye, and the guys decided to order a bottle of wine between the seven of us. The waitress came over to uncork it and we nodded as if we knew something about wine. She was ready to pour the glasses when Volpi walked over from another table and seized the bottle.
‘No’, he said sternly. ‘Tomorrow there is a race.’
He walked off, and with him went the wine and all of the sentimentality in the room. That was Barloworld, over and done with.
That story of the wine reminds me of Fanny. The following month Christian Pfannberger got a life-long ban having tested positive riding for the Katusha team. He had enjoyed another good spring in the Ardennes. In 2010 he became the first athlete to be named in the Austrian National Anti-Doping Agency’s investigation of athletes allegedly involved with illegal blood-doping with a company called HumanPlasma.
We liked him – we really did. But we were young and naive and learning.
15
GOALS SET BEFORE THE START OF THE 2009 SEASON
Medium-long-term goals (next 2–3 years)
Minimize difference between performance on good form and bad form – more consistent and predictable performances.
Ride the Tour again and focus 110 per cent on that.
Medal in CW Games TT in March 2010.
Look realistically for first Tour stage win in 2011 (mountaintop finish).
Long-term goals (next 3–5 years)
Reach top 5 in the Tour.
General goals
Develop mentality to keep focusing on next goal and keep improving. Assess mistakes and learn. More discipline in everything I do. Stop letting others influence my riding negatively – be my own leader!
Learn more about my body as far as diet is concerned.
Challenge the conventional system.
No idols as they only test positive – only aim to beat them.
(Memo sent by me to Rod Ellingworth.)
Rod Ellingworth. I can still see his outraged face looming behind the wheel that day when a car full of cycling hoodlums from the UCI school sped past him on a hairpin bend high on a mountain.
Now he was my coach.
Contact with Rod was constant and always useful, but an email that I sent to him before the start of the 2009 season sticks in my mind. I had written down a list of goals with a five-year plan with my aims as a cyclist. I’m surprised now at my presumption. Back then, Rod probably was too. I planned for an increasing number of podium finishes over the five years that would follow, and an improvement in consistency.
We had been working together for three months and Rod was still having to explain the basic facts of cycling life to me. My blissful ignorance of the pro world wasn’t charming him at all and would have to end. He told me that we could not forget about the off-the-bike work, and everything that we did when I wasn’t riding. He said ‘we’, although he meant me. He talked about my day-to-day organization around the team, and of how I needed to understand the ‘where’ and the ‘when’ if I was told to be somewhere. This was essential.
Another thing was my cycling knowledge. Every day I needed to be watching races and reading cycling results to help me move forward tactically; I was still very poor in this department. Despite all of this, Rod said there was an outside chance of me riding the Tour de France that year.
I am sure, looking back, that this sentence was the only one which properly registered with me. ‘Really?’ I thought. ‘Great.’
Rod continued. Other areas to work on included my climbing ability, how to cope with crosswind sections, how to improve my position in the peloton, how to get on the wheel in front faster and my general vision in the peloton of where my teammates were. He wanted me to have a better strategic understanding of what the team needed, using the riders around me to find out, and the team radio more often to get the information I needed. He told me not to be scared of asking simple questions.
He was right. I still saw myself as ‘kikoy and sandals’ type of guy, a serene presence in the dog-eat-dog world of cycling. I was very quiet within the team and grateful that people at Sky were interested in a man who grew sproutings in his suitcase. I certainly wouldn’t have been one for suggesting anything over the race radio.
I realized that I was about to become a well-chewed bone if I didn’t shape up. Kijana, welcome to Team Sky.
There are certain catchphrases and accessories which are lightning rods for criticism of Team Sky. Many people seem to hate the ‘aggregate of marginal gains’, for instance. And the bus. Some day a large finger will point down from the clouds and issue a bolt of lightning which will destroy our vehicle in a flash. And lo, a godly celestial voice will boom out, ‘How’s that for marginal gains?’
I suppose it all depends on whether you are on the inside of the bus looking out, or on the outside looking in.
Stepping on to the Team Sky bus was like being upgraded on an aeroplane. You went from the cramp of economy to the sinful indulgence of first class. You didn’t feel guilty; you just felt that this was the way it should be for everybody, that nothing was too good for the working man.
There are nine riders in a race, so there are nine reclining seats with all the clip-ins for our MacBooks, a reading stand and a plug point right next to the seats so that we can charge all of our devices. There is also a holder for our drinks, and a big sound system. The bus alone was something to write home about.
The faces of those who would be on the bus were launched at a grand affair at Millbank in London in early January. Dave Brailsford had apparently sat down with some journalists three years previously outside a bar in Bourg-en-Bresse during the Tour de France and mused openly about starting a British Pro Tour Team. They believed him then and this was the proof. Dave is a guy you believe. He radiates energy. I believed him when he came looking for me because his record already said more than enough. He had hauled the British track cycling team to a couple of gold medals at the Athens Olympics in 2004, four golds at the Worlds a year later, a crazy rush of nine golds at the 2008 Worlds and then seven golds at the Beijing Games.
There was something about all the energy and all the talk of innovation and detail that was irresistible. I signed a two-year deal on €100,000 a year. This was not a fortune in cycling terms, but I figured that this would be my finishing school as a professional.
By the time we got to Millbank, twenty-five other riders had heard the siren song including my old teammate John-Lee Augustyn. We were a British team with underlying flavours: eight Brits, three Aussies, three Italians, three Norwegians, two Frenchmen, a Canadian, a Spaniard, a Belgian, a Finn, a Swede, a Kiwi and John-Lee the South African.
When the media wanted interviews it was Bradley Wiggins, 4th in the previous year’s Tour de France with Team Garmin, and Edvald Boasson Hagen (Edvald had won four of the eight stages of the 2009 Tour of Britain) whom they buzzed around, like bees ready for the pollen of hype. Bradley and Edvald were the marquee potential. When journalists recalled Bourg-en-Bresse and Dave Brailsford’s thinking-aloud session, they remembered his belief that a British Tour de France winner could be produced by a British team within five years of the team being created. At Millbank, with Bradley having been ag
gressively recruited, they could see that future. It didn’t have sideburns yet but it soon would have.
We were duly launched and then went off to Valencia to train. Our enthusiasm was an advantage in itself. There were no old lags insisting on things being done the way they always had been done. However, in the broader world of cycling there was an undercurrent of resentment. The Hollywood-style launch, the money, the aggressive recruitment and the Jaguar team cars, while all of the other teams had more regular makes, annoyed some people. There were smaller touches too, such as the thin blue line down the spine of our jerseys and its representation of the slender border between winning and losing. As 2010 got rolling, these petty grievances preyed on the minds of others much more than they bothered us.
We were in good hands. Take the bus as a metaphor for the rest of the set-up. I had received help before, from Kinjah and Robbie especially, but I had never had a coach before, someone like Rod who was calling me on almost a daily basis to catch up on training or talk about what we were going to be doing tomorrow or the day after or for the rest of the week. It was day-to-day contact.
My career had always been a walk on high wire. I had always felt alone out there and not too far away from the slip that would deliver me to the pavement again. Now there was this safety net, this web all around me telling me how to stay on the wire and spreading a safety net in case I tumbled.
There were simple things, such as the soigneurs. Or carers, as Team Sky calls them (something else that gets up the noses of the old school like pepper spray). At Barloworld the majority of the soigneurs were former cyclists in their sixties. They gave massages and grumbled about how it was better back in the day. There were only two young soigneurs in the Barloworld team: Mario Pafundi, who is now at Sky, and Hanlie Perry, who is now at British Cycling. They were more representative of Dave Brailsford’s carers: young, incredibly hard-working and attentive to all our needs.