The Climb: The Autobiography

by Chris Froome

  As for coaching, at Barloworld nobody had ever really called. I had found that quite strange, expecting somebody to check up on me every day. A pro cyclist has a mountain of work in front of him always, and a circus of distractions elsewhere. Barloworld had just sort of said, ‘Okay, see you at the next race, kid.’ Nobody ever checked to see if I was on the mountain or at the circus. The assumption was basic: ‘You have turned pro so put on your big-boy Lycra shorts and keep doing what you have to do, and whatever the hell it was that got you here.’ After the races we would get some token advice from Volpi or Corti: ‘Now you need to do a bit more long training.’ It was as vague and as general as that.

  Micro coaching and long-term planning wasn’t a marginal change. It was massive.

  To me it is a big challenge to the legacy of the mass-doping era. I believe the prevalence of cheating and the fatalistic belief that ‘everybody’ was doing it retarded the progress of clean science in cycling training. You see it in the recidivist guys like Riccardo Riccò. Even though they’ve been caught before there was no way they could contemplate racing clean. It wasn’t an option for them because they believed first that everybody was doping, and second that no matter how intelligently or how long they trained, they couldn’t beat a doper without doping themselves.

  Many people still believe that. To train hard and to train scientifically, to be skinny and to be innovative? That can’t possibly be enough. You must be doing something on top of that. The proof?

  ‘Don’t know. You just must be.’

  Things have changed. In the culture of the peloton they have changed. I was training in Tenerife in 2012 when the Cannondale team were staying up there too. One of their riders, Ivan Basso, approached me. He had been suspended for two years after Operation Puerto in 2006, a doping investigation that had involved some of the world’s most famous cyclists. He wanted to ask me a few questions about what training I was now doing and what I was eating after the races. He asked the same of my teammate Richie Porte. He even asked Richie about our protein recovery drink, and how he might be able to get some for himself.

  He listened intently to everything that we said and I was happy that he came to us. He wouldn’t have asked if he believed we were doping. He would have believed that he had the answers already.

  It was like talking to a neo-pro. His journey had taken him full circle and he was welcome to the information. I think Ivan Basso believed (and I think he was right) that he was coming back to a peloton that wasn’t dirty in the majority. It was not pristine clean, and probably never will be, but in terms of the peloton’s culture, we have passed the tipping point.

  Back in 2010, in terms of detail, I was finding more and more that Sky was at the other end of the spectrum compared to my experience at Barloworld. They were obsessive, which was the way I liked it. The team nutritionist, Nigel Mitchell, knew every morsel of food that passed through our lips. And why. On the Barloworld bus we commonly had packets of biscuits, Italian biscotti, in the cupboards. We would arrive, hungry after a long journey, and demolish a packet between two or three of us. Compare this to the Team Sky bus, where the closest thing to junk food you could find would be a fruit yoghurt.

  The list of those small, good things, which are different about Team Sky, is endless. And yet 2010 was not a good year for me in terms of results; there was no lift-off.

  It culminated when I went to the Giro d’Italia in May, which is the best I can say: I was there. In racing terms, I got my head kicked in, bought the T-shirt and came home.

  I hated that. I had come to believe that I had some genuine potential. A serious team had signed me on as a future star; they would drill down in the right places and the great gusher of my potential would be untapped. They had offered the people and the equipment to shape me into a real climber and GC contender.

  However, by the time we got to the Giro that view would seem to have changed. Or they had never had the view at all. I had become the guy whose job it was to get on the front and start pulling on the flat days. That wasn’t my strength, but it became my role.

  Through the previous spring I had been the odd-job guy that the team were calling on for hard labour. Maybe that was why I had been signed, after all – for being quiet and uncomplaining. I thought to myself, ‘Blessed are the meek for early in the race they shall inherit the front of the peloton.’

  My highlights of the season were few and far between.

  2010: A Brief History (pre-Giro)

  January

  THE TOUR DOWN UNDER

  The days were long and flat and hot. I liked the weather, but nothing else was my cup of Earl Grey. The race was suited to leading out sprinters and pulling on epic flat stages. I finished 76th.

  I was still innocent in the ways of the pros. One day I was going back for bottles or for someone’s feed bag during the race. I was very happy with how I was going and content to carry out this extra errand. The bunch was quite strung out and I was coming back from the very front where I had been working hard. I was drifting backwards through the field and Sean Yates, our sporting director for Team Sky, was at the front of the motor convoy in the car, waiting for me. And waiting. I was happily coming back slowly but I hadn’t stopped pedalling; I was just letting myself be carried back through the group. Sean was getting impatient although it wasn’t really registering with me. Suddenly he was shouting in the radio.

  ‘Froomey! Where are you? Put your effing brakes on and stop!’

  My new team turned out to be first-rate Sean Yates impersonators. All week long I heard it. ‘Froomey! Where are you? Put your effing brakes on!’

  February

  TOUR DU HAUT VAR

  Two days of good climbs corresponded to my best result of the season so far: 9th overall.

  GRAN PREMIO DELL’INSUBRIA-LUGANO

  A snappy title with a snappy finish. I crashed out.

  March

  VUELTA A MURCIA

  No mountaintop finishes and only a short time trial. I found myself asking, ‘Why am I here?’ I finished 55th.

  VOLTA A CATALUNYA

  Two good days of riding and then I was as weak as a kitten. I finished 72nd.

  April

  A volcano erupted in Iceland, cancelling all flights.

  I took this personally.

  I had been trying to organize my life off the bike as per Rod’s guidance. We were travelling north to the three Ardennes Classics (the Amstel, La Flèche Wallone and the Liège–Bastogne–Liège). I assumed that as the first race was on a Sunday we would be travelling up on the Friday at the earliest. So I didn’t read the email. As it turned out, the team flew up on Wednesday without my knowledge and I missed the flight. Then the volcano erupted and it wasn’t just a case of being on the next flight. I felt bad for Rod and drove to the Ardennes all the way from Tuscany, realizing that Europe was far longer than it looked on maps.

  AMSTEL

  After such a long journey, another disappointing placing: 76th.

  LA FLÈCHE WALLONNE

  I died on the Mur de Huy hill, or at least I was dead for the eleven minutes that I lost there. I came in 119th. Afterwards, an environmental splinter group tried to sue me for littering after I threw away a drink bottle during the race.

  LIÈGE–BASTOGNE–LIÈGE

  I was sick and I didn’t tell anybody, finishing 3rd from last, or 138th, if you want to look at it like that. I made a note to the Ardennes: ‘Goodbye, I never liked you anyway.’

  TOUR DE ROMANDIE

  I felt sick and weak again, this time on the time trial. I rode straight on at a right-hand turn near the finish line and ended up in a flower bed, crocked. It was the end of my Tour de Romandie.

  I would like to say that apart from the sicknesses, the crashes and the bad results, I was happy. Except that I wasn’t. I seemed to be in a catch-22 with the team. I wasn’t feeling one hundred per cent or even ninety per cent most days and they were giving me the job of going in the early breakaways. I would spend a lot of
energy trying to do that, but if I ever got into the breakaway, I knew that it meant being dropped when we got to the mountains. If I didn’t reach the breakaway, I knew I didn’t have the strength at that time to do as well in the mountains as I felt I could have done, even if everything was all right. So I looked bad on the flat and bad in the mountains. I had the best care and coaching I had ever received, but I felt inexplicably weak.

  2010: The Giro d’Italia

  The race started in Amsterdam on 8 May with a time trial. Bradley burned the place up whereas I was as limp as a dishcloth. On the second day, though, Bradley was taken down in a huge crash. Although we got him back to the race, another even bigger crash with 7 kilometres left held us up. He lost 37 seconds through the chaos.

  Day three brought even more chaos. But it was a better kind, if you liked that sort of thing: evil crosswinds, a long-haul stage and a scattered field. My job was to lead out for Greg Henderson, the Kiwi sprinter, so that he could have a crack at winning the stage, and so that Brad could get some GC time back. With 10 kilometres to go, riders from other teams were surprised to swing round a tight corner and find most of Team Sky lying on the ground. We had crashed. Most of our bikes suffered damage and Brad lost 4 minutes. Greg didn’t get to the ball. He had the strutting confidence common to most sprinters and was seldom happy, especially not now.

  The mountains were days away but already I felt hollowed out. Stage four was a team time trial, which was something I should have been good at. Unfortunately, after I had done a number of solid pulls on the front, I was one of three Sky riders to get detached before the end.

  Team Sky have an aggressive race philosophy. The team happily assumes responsibility for controlling a race, and if that means sticking four or five of us out at the front for three hours, then that is what we will do. If other teams can keep up with us, that is good for them. If not, it is still good for us. Either way, though, it is a hard gig as a rider. You don’t get many days swinging the lead with the gruppetto. In the Giro I would race up to 200 kilometres on the front of the peloton, swapping off with maybe three or four other guys.

  I limped on. I remember a couple of days of bad rain when the dust of early summer turned to a porridge of mud. On the lowest point of the revolution when pressing the pedal down our feet would dip into water and the cold started to insinuate itself into our feet and then on up through our bodies. When racing there is only one thing I hate worse than the cold, and that is the cold stiffened by rain.

  On stage seven I was 7 minutes behind Cadel Evans. The mountains were waiting for us the next day. Maybe I would feel happier in their arms?

  Steve Cummings and I had to chase down a breakaway group the next day, then hang back and pull Brad into contention. The last climb was up a mountain hidden in a soup of fog. We got Brad into a good position and although he lost a little time, he moved up from 26th to 23rd in the GC. Steve and I collapsed with the effort. Steve lost 5 minutes and I lost 12 in the closing kilometres. It was a decent day of work but my right knee was causing me pain. There was a sharp, stabbing sensation just above my knee, with a bruise forming in that area. In the mountains it was especially bad and I knew there was something seriously wrong; it was really hurting.

  Every time I pushed down on the pedal on that side, the pain shot through. I tried to compensate by using my left leg more, but then that leg began to get very tired.

  I started getting physio strapping every day in an effort to support it. On the flat stages that worked okay, but on the climbs, where I was putting more pressure through my knees, was when I really felt it.

  So, I was in trouble in the mountains and having to do big pulls on the flat. Those days pulling on the front are tough for any rider, and although I remember thinking that if Brad won or if Greg took a sprint stage I would feel part of the glory, neither eventuality happened. The job, though, means you keep doing your long pulls. You ride on with hope in your heart and pain in your body.

  I rode on until stage nineteen. Not all of the days were bad but I was bothered in the long term by a lack of direction in where I was heading as a rider, and in the short term by the nagging pain of my injury. My knee felt as if there were something pulling inside at the tendon.

  I was also still learning the politics of the peloton on Grand Tours and I was naive and unsophisticated about reading the race. On stage eleven, for instance, we rode in monsoon conditions. Brad and three others from the team got into the right group after just 20 kilometres of the 262-kilometre stage. I, meanwhile, got into the wrong group, so that whereas Brad picked up 12 minutes on the leaders, I lost 46 minutes in the gruppetto from hell. I was the lowest-ranked Sky rider on GC that evening. An Aussie rookie named Richie Porte ended up in the maglia rosa of race leader when the rain stopped.

  On stage nineteen out of Brescia to Aprica my knee howled at me all day. There were three big climbs on the stage and the last one was Mortirolo.

  Mortirolo fights you – it is brutal and relentlessly steep all the way up with just a few stingy gaps for recovery. On the climb just before Mortirolo, I had dropped off the front of the race and gone to the gruppetto but as we were riding along I noticed that Greg Henderson was off his bike. It was lying on the side of the road because he had gone into the bushes to go to the loo. His stomach was bad that day.

  I waited for Greg and the two of us rode to the top of the climb together. I thought to myself, ‘Okay, the two of us will work together to get back to the gruppetto now.’ It was raining again and I struggled for a moment to get my rain jacket on. Then Greg suddenly shot off down the slope and left me there. I couldn’t believe it.

  A few members of the team had a go at him for that afterwards. Despite my waiting for him just moments before, he had left me on the descent to push on alone. He had managed to get behind a passing team car in the next valley and had rejoined the gruppetto, so now I was the very last rider on the road.

  When I reached the Mortirolo I could feel that I wasn’t going to be riding anywhere quickly. I rode the first 3 or 4 kilometres mostly pedalling with one leg, and I was all alone, well behind the gruppetto.

  The team car radioed at that point, and said that the gruppetto was 17 minutes in front. I knew that was the end for me. The suffering seemed foolhardy and unprofessional, and it was time to call it a day, or cost myself the season. I radioed back to our directeur sportif, Steven de Jongh.

  ‘I’m done here. Finished. I need to stop.’

  The message from the car was, ‘Okay, just keep going at your own pace, don’t do any more damage to your knee. Gemma, one of the soigneurs, is up on top of Mortirolo, giving feed bags out to the riders. You can get in the car with him.’

  There was a commissaire vehicle close to me and an Italian policeman on a motorbike. The team car was up with the gruppetto making sure that everybody had their rain jackets and the commissaire vehicle drove on up ahead too but kept coming back down to check on me.

  I remember fans on the side of the road really trying to push me on. They were shouting, ‘Grinta, grinta!’ which means gumption or dig in. But sadly all I was thinking was, ‘If only they knew that I’m just heading for my lift at the top.’ There was no point in encouraging me.

  The policeman kept looking across. I was grinding so slowly that he would stop his motorbike every couple of metres and put his feet on the ground. He knew I was done. After he had looked across a few times I spoke to him in Italian.

  ‘I’m going to stop on the top of the climb.’

  ‘Okay, do you want to hold on?’ He indicated for me where to hold on. ‘I’ll take you up.’

  I didn’t want to do it.

  I didn’t want to disappoint the fans that were cheering me on with such heart, so I pushed on for another 2 kilometres.

  He asked me again, smiling sympathetically. Clearly his patience was wearing thin at the speed I was riding up the climb, and I was starting to feel guilty about keeping him there.

  I held on for barely 10 second
s. We went round just one hairpin bend only to find the commissaire car waiting round the corner. The doors opened and they leapt out and ran over to me.

  ‘Stop! Stop! Stop! Disqualificado!’

  They made a huge drama of taking a large pair of scissors and cutting my number off my back. A camera crew from the Italian station Rai happened to be with them to film my disqualification. Rai were competitors of Sky Italia, and seemed to be enjoying the moment.

  I initially didn’t think much of it as in my mind I had already retired and was focused on getting to Gemma at the summit. The sound of me clipping back into my pedals quickly drew the attention of the commissaire holding the scissors.

  ‘No, no, no! You can’t ride any further.’

  I asked if they were going to give me a lift to the top but they told me there was no space in their car. We stood for a good few minutes arguing about how I was going to get to the top before they conceded that I was allowed to ride on, after all, but only because they had cut my numbers off.

  It was just another 2 or 3 kilometres to the summit, but it took me half an hour. The policeman was still nearby but, having been scolded for taking a lift, I knew better than to hold on again.

  Finally, I reached Gemma at the top. After I climbed into the car I ate some food, put on some warm clothes and we drove back to the team hotel. However, when I arrived back it wasn’t over. I was inundated with press enquiries about being disqualified for holding on to the motorbike.

  It was typical of my luck that season, but I was beyond caring really. What nags long term is the show-trial element – I was demobbed on the mountain with the cameras rolling. That, and years of people who haven’t got the faintest idea of what actually happened deciding that somebody who would take a pull up a mountain would definitely dope and betray his sport.