by Chris Froome
I knew the truth. And I knew that I didn’t have to get on the bike any more that week. I was going to put my knee up and rest for a while. It was time to regroup.
Back in the peloton, Brad’s Giro d’Italia had fallen apart that day as well. He had lost 37 minutes. Meanwhile, our teammate Greg still hadn’t won any sprints during the race, unless we counted his breakaway from me, when he found his strength on the descent.
There was a ‘back to the drawing board’ mood about the entire team.
In that first year I felt that Team Sky was too corporate. We had our spreadsheets, our pie charts, our plans and our targets from day one, and part of the sense of control had been to make the year unfold exactly as it had been planned.
But after the Giro I definitely got an inkling that things were unfolding very quickly for us, too quickly perhaps. The season was getting to the business part at a galloping pace. Suddenly the Tour de France loomed and we didn’t seem flexible enough to deal with it. As a team we believed that if we paid our customary homage to the god of small details everything would work out in the end.
Dave summed it up well afterwards: we spent too much time worrying about the peas and no time considering the steak.
There was certainly a lot of planning and preparation that had been done around Brad. He had been doing recces of all the Tour routes but I don’t think there had been much structure put in place in terms of assembling a Tour group and of training and racing together as a team. There was lots of time spent Brad-building but little time spent team-building.
I remember talking to Steve Cummings some time after the Giro and not long before the Tour. Steve had his doubts. He was knackered and felt that the Giro had been for him, as it had been for me and Brad and every other member of the team, a far harder experience than we had anticipated. It knocked us about. Steve said he had put on something like four kilos in weight after recuperating from the Giro, and now they wanted him to go into the Tour and do the same job but even better. Why?
Because that was the plan. And we had to stick to our plan.
I took a few weeks off after the Giro. I hadn’t made the cut for the Tour so I nursed the wounded knee and tended the wounded pride. The Giro experience had deflated me.
Noz had flown to Italy during the Giro and even though I stayed with the team until the end of the race, I saw plenty of him during the days after I had abandoned. He then came to stay with me for a while. We visited Rome together for a few days and enjoyed each other’s company before we went back to Tuscany.
At some stage while Noz was still around I took a quick trip to Manchester in the hope of addressing my knee problem.
I felt that my position on the bike was quite a big problem. We had changed my posture earlier in the season and I seemed to be battling with that. I felt as if I were a little bit too high on the saddle, which was putting an extra strain on my knees.
This was where I was paying the price for being an unusual specimen within the cycling world. Riders who had entered the professional scene in their teens would have had their riding posture and position sorted out early in their careers. I was aware from numerous jokes that I looked ‘kinda funny’ in terms of style, but I had never had a professional come up to me and say, ‘Your position should be like this.’
I had always simply got on a bike and ridden in a way that felt natural to me. Maybe I was right. Maybe I was a chiropractor’s worst nightmare. I didn’t know.
When somebody finally took me through the posture and position work, I was keen to listen. It was Phil Burt and Matt Parker from British Cycling who analysed me initially. They had come over from the track team. Matt is a performance analyst and Phil is a physio. I was happy to receive their professional opinions.
Now, I’m not sure if it was their track background (they had not worked with climbers before) or my unorthodox riding style but I think we made a fractional, honest mistake when we were first doing the bio-racer set-ups. That process involves capturing the bike’s measurements and putting them into a computer to calculate all of the required angles for your knees and your body. Then a decision is made on what is optimum in terms of height and position.
From the start I had a feeling that I was a little too high in my saddle but it was all so marginal that I assumed I would get used to it. I didn’t.
Meanwhile, back in Manchester on the flying trip, I had an MRI scan on my knee, which showed that it was inflamed but had no lasting damage. I told them that it felt as though I was having to stretch to reach the bottom of my pedal stroke and this was putting additional pressure through the saddle. Matt and Phil were open to the idea of slightly lowering the saddle. I had done a lot of reading up on positioning by then and had read that climbers should typically be a bit further back behind the bottom bracket so that they can use the leverage to get up the climbs. Flat riders would typically be a little further forward where they can be on the tip of their saddle and pedal over the bottom bracket, a bit like time trialling.
I went back to Tuscany to recuperate and then experimented.
I lowered my saddle from about 81.5 centimetres down to about 80.5 centimetres, so around 1 centimetre lower. I tried that for a week and then I moved it back up again.
The comparison was interesting. When the saddle was higher both before and during the Giro I had been getting bad saddle sores. With the saddle lowered these stopped straight away, and only returned when I raised the saddle again a week later. It was just an extra bit of pressure. Even now, if somebody puts a new saddle on my bike and it is a millimetre too high I feel it straight away.
The impact on my knee was just as obvious. The pain I was getting along the side of my knee and on the top of my knee came from having to stretch further than I normally did. When I lowered the saddle it stopped.
(Also, with the high saddle I’d get constant saddle sores on my undercarriage. I had this fluorescent yellow chamois in my shorts and at the end of many a long stage, I could see exactly where the sores had burst. Not much fun.)
The trial and error worked. I moved further and lower back on my bike and have ridden that way ever since. It’s actually an extraordinarily low position for someone of my height, and my inseam, but that’s just where it feels most comfortable.
The happier the undercarriage, the better the rider. Who said that? Merckx? Coppi?
Later that year I watched the Tour on TV, and then rode the British Nationals, followed by the Commonwealth Games in Delhi. I had one or two other adventures but generally I let 2010 slink away to its own unmarked grave.
I don’t visit there very often.
Postscript: The Odd Couple
While 2010 faded away, I would always have Greg Henderson.
After it was established that I was quiet and easy-going, it was decided that Greg would be my room-mate. Blessed are the meek for they shall also inherit the Kiwi.
I remember being in rooms with Greg quite often. I knew he had strong opinions and a way of expressing them that didn’t need amplification. The other riders would see me in his company and wink at me knowingly: ‘Enjoy!’
Greg was a bit of a strange one. Even for a Kiwi. He would perch on his bed in his boxer shorts and headband, and sit there playing the harmonica. He always brought a little harmonica with him wherever we travelled. I wasn’t about to complain about his dress sense; I was sitting there wearing a traditional Kenyan skirt.
His musical talents were a different matter. A music lover is someone who can play the harmonica but chooses not to. Greg was the opposite: he couldn’t play the harmonica but did so anyway. I would put my earphones on and watch something on my laptop to drown out the noise.
That was how we spent most of our evenings.
We didn’t talk much, even though Greg would talk a lot himself. He had very strong opinions and was quite intense, so he would get worked up about things and always had an axe to grind. CJ Sutton was the other sprinter on the team, and Greg would spend hours deconstructing CJ. I
would be listening and nodding: ‘Yep. Yep. Sure. Interesting.’
I did feel sorry for him in a sense. He was a little bit of a loner and didn’t seem to have any close bonds with anyone on the team. I didn’t think he was necessarily a bad guy, but just slightly socially inept. I think he would say the same about me.
Like me, Greg didn’t make the Tour de France team that year. He was left out in the end in favour of Michael Barry. Dave explained that if a team was going for the yellow jersey, it had to put all its eggs in one basket, which was Brad. The lesson of the Giro seemed to have been that there was a lot of energy spent on riding for Greg and CJ which had produced no stage wins and left Brad exposed. Dividing resources had diluted the effort.
After the Giro, not putting me in the Tour team had been an easy decision. However, Greg had enjoyed a more successful start to life in the team and excluding him was a tougher decision.
That August we did the Eneco Tour, a predominantly flat race in Belgium, which was one suited to the punchy riders. Edvald was doing really well in the race, as it was made for him, but Greg had already won a stage. It was the last night before the final time trial, when Greg decided that he wasn’t going to do anything much the next day and thought he would have a few drinks.
He came back into the room at around 1.00 a.m. and got on the phone to his wife. He was complaining about an argument he’d had with someone downstairs.
‘Ah, I’m gonna kill ’im,’ Greg was saying.
This was 1.00 a.m. I had been asleep for a couple of hours already and the time trial was a far bigger deal for me. I wasn’t the champion of serenity at that moment and turned the lights on.
‘Greg? Just leave it, man. Please. Just turn off your phone and go to sleep. Sort it out in the morning, whatever the problem is.’
At 7.00 a.m. Steven de Jongh came to our room.
‘Greg, pack your bags, you’re out of here, you’re going home. You’re not starting the race today.’
Apparently Greg had been down in the bar, and at some stage somebody had urinated on the front door. The owner of the hotel was there, who also happened to be a special guest of the race, and possibly even a sponsor, so not someone we should have been upsetting. And there had been an argument not over the urine but the mop. Who was going to mop it up? Greg got involved and offered typically strong opinions in his robust way.
It was not only that, but Greg had also been winding up the mechanics and other staff by telling them they would soon be out of a job, because he had heard they weren’t going to get their contracts renewed.
I don’t know the details but, fairly or unfairly, they sent Greg home anyway. I don’t think he quite fitted into the Sky model. He just didn’t tick all the boxes for Dave and the guys, even though that year I think he was our most successful rider.
If only he could have played guitar.
16
After hours in the last-chance saloon, downtown Kraków.
It was early August 2011 and somewhere Bradley Wiggins was recuperating from the broken collarbone he had suffered during the Tour de France. Team Sky were fretting about him as saving the season hinged on Brad’s health.
Meanwhile, I was in Poland: flat, unforgiving Poland. The Tour of Poland had just ended and I had finished 85th on GC – not exactly knighthood territory.
The team were flying out the next morning but my flight home was later in the day for some reason. I had worked hard all week on a predominantly flat course only to end up buried on the foot slopes of the GC.
That night I did something I had pretty much never done before – I went out on the town. The race finished in Kraków and I painted the town red. Well, sort of salmon-coloured; I was new to the game.
I switched off from it all. I’d put so much into the year: the races, the training, the weight loss, the Biltricide, the altitude work and the life lessons. But now people were avoiding my eye and I felt like a dead man walking. Sometime in the next few weeks the hints would start falling, and then the chat.
Obviously, Chris, we have to make changes … regenerate the team … we appreciate everything you have done … we wish you … whatever you do …
I had never done anything after races, or in between, for that matter. The candle in my life had only ever burned at one end and I scarcely existed off the bike. However, on this night in Kraków my friend Adam Blythe, the British rider, was hitting the town. For once, I got on his wheel and went with him. We met up with a few other riders, including Tom Boonen, the king of the cobbles, as well as a couple more Belgian guys.
You’ve been a good guy to work with, you will be missed here … I think you’ve made friends … unfortunately you’ve had some bad luck … some illness …
Now I was feeling good. We had a fine dinner and went on to a club afterwards. This was new territory for me but all I remember is a lot of fun. We were dancing like fools, drinking like fish (well, not like fish, but like cyclists on a night out), telling jokes, trading stories and laughing a lot. We were blowing off half a season’s worth of worry and stress.
We are all under pressure … let me just say this was the hardest decision … the best of luck in whatever you choose to do … you gave it a shot, Chris, you really did …
Shot. Yeah. That was one thing that stood out in Kraków that night: one euro for a shot of vodka. If you’re in the valley of despair and can’t see the road back, don’t head to the bars in Monaco. You would need a mortgage to buy a round of drinks. Fly to Kraków instead. Even with the airfare you would come out ahead.
It was getting bright when I got back to the hotel, and due to some administrative quirk, probably my own doing, I was staying in a different hotel to the other guys. At least I had no room-mate to worry about.
I was drunk. Not completely drunk … just, you know, happily so, happily so … happily what? I didn’t know. I just thought, ‘What the hell, we’ll always have, um, Kraków drunk.’ Happily so.
I lay on the bed, looking up at the ceiling, content for now: I had gone a whole night without thinking about my career. I was relieved that nobody had asked me with grave concern about how it was going with me and Team Sky, and whether it was terminal, or how long I had left.
If they had asked I would have said the only thing I could say:
‘Well, it’s not going. I’ll definitely have to rethink things in the next week. Rethink everything. We won’t be having a reunion like this in Kraków next year.’
That would have killed the atmosphere nicely.
So, Chris, this is goodbye … hopefully we can meet somewhere down the road … I’d like you to keep this chamois as a memento of your time here … yes the saddle sores … I knew you would enjoy that. You know where the door is.
My seasons had a bad habit. They would slouch off in late summer to die quietly somewhere in the shade: 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007 – those years all died young.
In 2007, I had gone to the World Championships in Stuttgart intending not to do anything more vigorous than sign a contract with Barloworld. I raced but my heart wasn’t in it and I had rolled around the roads thinking of home; I wasn’t in good form and I was quite tired by the end. The year was done.
After the race I was sitting in the airport waiting for my flight. I was going to Zurich and from Zurich onwards to Johannesburg. In the boarding area I spotted a guy in a seat facing me. He was lean and trim – the cut of a cyclist – and he also looked familiar. There weren’t many professionals at that stage who I would have felt confident about recognizing, but this man I knew. I had watched the documentary Overcoming, about a year in the life of Team CSC, and he had featured heavily, along with Bjarne Riis, Carlos Sastre and the rest of the riders. I glanced down at his feet, and he had a sports bag with his name on it.
It was definitely him: Bobby Julich.
He was interesting to me for a number of reasons. Firstly, he was a late starter like me and in the early nineties he had trained alone hoping for a pro career to come along. When he finally
did get picked up by a team, again like me, he had shown that he was not just a good time trialist but as a rider had more than one string to his bow. He had later finished 3rd in the infamous 1998 Tour that was marred by doping, crashed in the individual time trial the next year, but then never seemed to take it on to the level that people had expected of him, even though they talked him up as the new Greg LeMond.
He had started in the Motorola team, joining a group that already had Lance Armstrong in its ranks. When Bobby Julich crashed out of the 1999 Tour, Armstrong was on the cusp of his long, dark domination of the Tour and became the only American rider that mattered. There wasn’t any love lost between Bobby and Armstrong.
I knew Bobby Julich’s story so I said, ‘Hi,’ and introduced myself. I remember being blown away by how open and approachable he was; he was just very easy to talk to. He wasn’t some remote cycling god demanding reverence, but a good guy who seemed genuinely interested in what I was doing. Stuttgart had been the final race of his career. He had just retired and although I’m sure he had some big matters, like the rest of his life, on his mind, he asked me what I was doing there. I told him that I had just signed on as a professional with Barloworld.
He might have said, ‘Good luck to you with that, sonny, the team’s barely professional even if you intend to be.’ He didn’t though. He wished me all the best and gave me a few bits of advice.
Bobby became technical director for his old team Saxo Bank after that for two years, before quitting in 2010 to move to Sky. Late in the same year, as my season was looking for a tree to die under, I was told that I would be working with Bobby Julich in 2011, instead of with Rod, whose Tuscan classroom was getting too crowded.
I was fascinated by the karma. Our paths had crossed by chance the day after Bobby had ended his long pro career and I had signed up for what I had hoped would be my long career. Now Bobby would take up the job of putting the paddles to my chest and shocking me back to professional life.
I wondered if he had been quietly looking out for my results in the years since we had met.