The Climb: The Autobiography

by Chris Froome

  No, actually, he hadn’t.

  Bobby cheerfully told me later that he even had to google my name when he was told by Sky that he would be coaching me – I clearly didn’t make big first impressions.

  When I reminded him of the brief encounter at the airport he recovered well though. He said that he remembered me as being very keen and enthusiastic and that I had really been picking his brain. He told me he reckoned it was going to be fun to work together. I felt like a Labrador.

  I told Bobby I was going to move to Monaco.

  ‘You’re not a millionaire, are you?’

  ‘No. But I’m going to do it anyway.’

  If it was enthusiasm Bobby was looking for, he had found it.

  I needed to change. Quickly. I was riding at a decent speed through the back door of the last-chance saloon. On the way out, that is. I had one year left of a professional contract which might be my last. I was earning €100,000 in that year, which was not exactly enough to retire on, and hardly enough to live on if I moved to Monaco. I decided to gamble.

  Whatever ability or talent I possessed was getting lost in translation from training to races. I kept all my training data, and every page told its own story.

  An SRM power meter file from April 2010, for instance, pre-Giro, showed that I was doing a lot of what I called ‘over-under’ intervals. Robbie Nilsen and I had come up with the name and structure for these, which involved taking my power to above my lactate threshold and keeping it there.

  The intervals were all pretty consistent. For 3 minutes at a time I would go over my threshold, which meant pain. There would be 1 minute of recovery in between, but this wasn’t complete recovery – it was at a level that would allow the burn to subside ever so slightly.

  Nowadays, it has become one of the intervals that we do most often with the team when we’re getting close to peak fitness, but that April I was doing the over-under at a very high-power output all of the time. And although I was producing these impressive numbers alone, I would never reach anything close to them in competition.

  In my race results from 2010, nothing really stood out. Comparing my training with my racing was like looking at the stats of two different cyclists.

  I needed to be better. If 2011 went poorly then I would be all out of chances. The footnotes of professional cycling are filled with the one-line obituaries of careers that lasted a year or two – short stories with different beginnings, but all with the same end: ‘He had promise, he never fulfilled it, and they cut him loose.’ ‘All he ever wanted was to be a pro cyclist, but he couldn’t cut it, so he came home.’

  I didn’t want to be one of those guys.

  Team Sky was the standard bearer for marginal gains and attention to detail but inevitably there was a hierarchy. Twenty-six riders don’t all get the same attention. The guys who would deliver stages, who would win classics or contend in Grand Tours were not expendable and Team Sky was in a constant process of honing and perfecting them.

  The domestiques, however, who would help them, were more of a batch lot. If one of them wasn’t functioning you would rattle him about a bit to see why. If nothing changed, then you unplugged him and gave his €100,000 to some guy who would function.

  That was life. Everybody is equal but some are more equal. In that corporate context Team Sky would do its best for me, but delivering performances was what counted. It was up to me to produce.

  The move to Monaco would be a huge change for me, sorting out a lot of my life off the bike. And although Bobby Julich had probably been given a lot of the team’s waifs and strays to work on, he suited me. Rod had taught me many invaluable things, refining much of the work Robbie and I had done over the years in South Africa, but Bobby had a long career as a professional and somehow being able to tap into that experience became a vital resource for me. He could tell how I was feeling before I had even expressed it.

  Italy could be so chaotic that it wasn’t a great place for somebody with my administrative skills to be living in. Often I would go away for a week of racing and come home to find the electricity was off. A missing comma or a stray apostrophe in the detailed instructions to the bank would have stopped the payments to the electricity company.

  I’d spend a week with no lights and no fridge.

  I would have to make at least one visit to the council, one visit to the electricity company and one visit to the bank. I would write letters struggling with the Italian words relating to bureaucracy. Just as I was setting off for the next race a week later, the lights would come back on.

  Another complication was that if you were not a resident, you couldn’t register a car in your name, get the internet at your home, or even, in theory, rent a home. My life off the bike was disorganized at the best of times but Italy wasn’t helping. I loved the country but we were a bad marriage.

  I had managed to buy an off-road motorbike with big suspension, knobbly tyres and a great guttural roar through the friend-of-a-friend’s-cousin sort of thing, and I would ride it through the mountains, exploring Tuscany on the odd day off.

  One hot day in the late summer of 2010, another season fading into disappointment, I got on the motorbike wearing a helmet, T-shirt and shorts and rode the four and a half hours from Tuscany to Monaco to meet an estate agent.

  You can imagine what the Monaco estate agent thought of this guy in his T-shirt and shorts. She showed me three or four apartments and in the end I chose the cheapest, which was a room, or, as the estate agent called it, a studio apartment.

  I went back to South Africa over the winter and stayed with my good friend Matt Beckett in a cottage on his parents’ property. I trained very hard, with my sessions starting at 6.30 a.m. and going for six or seven hours. Some days Matt would come out on a scooter to motor pace me for hours at a time in order to simulate that feeling of being in a race. I got myself ready, Skyped Bobby a lot, discussed what I was doing and fed off his encouragement.

  In January 2011, after I had returned to Europe, the team travelled to Mallorca to train. The first race of the year would be the Tour of Murcia in Spain, in early March. Not long before that, I settled up everything with the landlord in Tuscany and left. Bobby had said that the trauma of moving house could cost me a chunk of the season. He didn’t know me well then. I owned just a bed and some drawers and the move took place on a recovery day. A friend of the landlord packed my things into a truck and drove my belongings and me to Monaco. I was training as normal the following morning, just in a different country.

  Rod had often talked of sorting out my life off the bike. Ironically, the move away from Rod was a big part of that. I had internet in my home now instead of having to find Tuscan cafes where I had sat slowly sipping on a pot of green tea while using their Wi-Fi. I could now Skype family and friends. There wasn’t an alpine range of red tape to climb through every month. I could go to a race and lock the door and come back to find everything still working.

  Yes, it cost a fortune, but it was a better life. I was more balanced and more focused. I also discovered what had been eating me and my potential up: parasitic worms.

  Looking back, my tweets through 2010 are an odd mix of defiant optimism shot through with chips of worry. There are several references to getting sick, followed up by grand proclamations that all ailments and bad times were soon to be a thing of the past.

  In truth, I didn’t know what was going on. I was the domestique who lived on his own and did things on his own, which was good and fine if I was producing. But I couldn’t afford to be the domestique who also complained constantly of not feeling too good.

  Or maybe I should have complained more – at least I might have discovered the cause more quickly.

  Before and after the Commonwealth Games in Delhi in October 2010 I found my way back to Africa. The season had fizzled out and I was drawn home. I spent a couple of weeks in South Africa before going to Delhi. Afterwards I made my way to Kenya to spend some time with Jeremy, who had relocated home and was by th
en working in a gold mine (as an accountant, that is). His life had progressed but personally I felt as if I were working in a coal mine, with a knife and fork.

  In Kenya I was called on for the usual UCI biological passport tests. I never mind those tests; they are no intrusion at all compared to the benefit to the sport. And I had good reason to be grateful for them. I was sick of being sick, tired of being tired, and it was the extra nudge I needed to seek medical help. The labs where I could have the tests done for my biological passport were adjacent to the offices of Dr Charles Chunge, a tropical disease specialist in Nairobi. Jeremy knew of my ailments over the previous year, and had recommended that Dr Chunge check me over. Jeremy had recently been treated for bilharzia by the doctor and had suffered similar symptoms.

  Dr Chunge listened as I told him about my recurring pattern of illness and fatigue, and ordered a full blood-screening to check for anything out of the ordinary.

  The UCI was looking for things which might have enhanced my performance, whereas Dr Chunge was looking for something that might be sabotaging it.

  He came back to me within an hour.

  ‘Chris, you’re riddled with bilharzia, just like your brother.’

  Gulp.

  Quick, Batman. To the Wikipedia.

  Bilharzia is a disease caused by parasitic worms of the Schistosoma type. It may infect the urinary tract or intestines. Symptoms may include: abdominal pains, diarrhoea, bloody stool, or blood in the urine. In those who have been infected a long time, liver damage, kidney failure, infertility, or bladder cancer may occur. In children it may cause poor growth and difficulty learning.

  The disease is spread by contact with water that contains the parasites. These parasites are released from freshwater snails that have been infected. The disease is especially common among children in developing countries as they are more likely to play in infected water. Other high risk groups include farmers, fishermen, and people using infected water for their daily chores. Diagnosis is by finding the eggs of the parasite in a person’s urine or stool. It can also be confirmed by finding antibodies against the disease in the blood.

  In other words, on a trip home I had come in contact with infected water. It was hard to say exactly on which trip that was as they were annual post-season events and bilharzia can remain dormant for years. Where, is also a mystery; it could have been while fishing, or mountain biking through stagnant water – the possibilities are endless in Kenya where over twenty per cent of the population is infected. Somewhere along the way these tiny snails had issued their larvae that had pierced my skin, got into my system, transformed themselves into tiny flatworms and had set up a community inside me, feeding off my body. They were literally dining on my blood.

  In Europe, bilharzia is virtually unheard of, so every time I had complained of illness or abnormal fatigue, doctors assumed from the symptoms that I had glandular fever or mononucleosis, as Americans call it. Not knowing to look for bilharzia, they hadn’t found bilharzia.

  Bilharzia had found me, though.

  The definition of the parasite, like many medical definitions, sounds scarier than the reality. If you subtract the uncomfortable knowledge of having a parasite living inside you, what remains is a reality that many people live with from day to day in rural Africa. Sometimes it is detected, often it isn’t.

  Unfortunately, for an endurance athlete, life is spent running the system down and then recovering. The bilharzia caused me to feel extraordinarily tired at times and left me open to colds and infections. It was debilitating enough to hinder my career but not bad enough to set alarm bells ringing. The team saw the inconsistency and saw it as a part of me. With help from those worms, it was.

  The parasite gets into your system and penetrates your organs. The more time it has to colonize, the more difficult it is to get rid of, and it feeds off red blood cells, which for a bike rider is a nightmare.

  If you are lucky, and catch it early enough through a screening, one dose of treatment should work. If not, you are into a war of attrition, nuking the parasites every six months, until finally you win and they’re banished.

  In November 2010 I had my first dose of Biltricide, whereby I swallowed the large white pills and hoped for the best. The side effects are like an exaggeration of what Biltricide sets out to cure. For the best part of a week I was pretty wiped out as the stuff flooded my system and went to war. After a couple of days, though, I was thinking about getting back on the bike. There would be another blood test and maybe another dose of Biltricide in around six months down the road.

  For now, though, I had a new year, a new home and a new coach, as well as a matching number of challenges:

  Learn the tactics of race riding.

  Improve technically.

  Wipe out the worms.

  I got lucky.

  I found the worms and I found Bobby Julich. The worms had been eating my potential and Bobby saw and believed in my potential.

  When I first started working with Bobby, he sent me out on some tough training rides to push me to my limits and determine what I was capable of. He was amazed with what he saw and went straight to Rod with his findings. Same old, same old – the sorrowful mystery of Chris Froome.

  My training files belonged to a guy who should have been on the podium at the Tour de France, whereas my race results belonged to a guy who should have been on the couch watching the Tour de France. It made no sense. Bobby thought my power meter had to have been incorrectly calibrated. Rod knew the story as he had been watching me for longer than Bobby had.

  ‘No, the data is spot on. That’s Froomey.’

  So it began. Bobby set about enacting my finishing school and I had some structure in my life now. Surely it had to translate into my racing?

  The first change would be less tinkering and experimenting on my own. I had always been fiddling with diet, equipment and bike set-up. Even worse, I had experimented randomly with training, pushing myself way beyond my limits just to see how far I could go. I enjoyed the suffering because I thought it would help. But it depleted my energy levels on long races and that in turn ate my confidence.

  Secondly, Bobby was frank about things. I didn’t know how to race. My heroic charges when people were least expecting them gave me a couple of minutes in the spotlight but didn’t produce results. Bobby set about teaching me how I could get the right watts out at the right time. Videos, race reports and stats – I learned to study them all differently. I learned that the key parts of the race were when people were holding back, and the highlights were when everybody was going flat out.

  Thirdly, my style and technique needed to be sanded and polished. So I began doing Pilates and started to respect rest a little more. I became the parasite, feeding on Bobby’s racing experience.

  I was still going towards the back door but I had a hand on the brake and my feet on the ground, fighting the momentum of the exit. For the first time in a long while I felt excited about the road ahead.

  A typical morning conversation with Bobby went along the lines of:

  ‘Okay, we need to put in a good effort today, so keep the intervals at this level here.’

  ‘Can’t I do them at a higher level?’

  Bobby wanted me to back off. I always wanted to train harder. Usually we compromised.

  The Tour of Murcia came and went. Over three days there were no highlights for me other than a top twenty in the individual time trial on the last day. Back in the Sky offices in Manchester I knew that nobody was sitting bolt upright wondering what was happening.

  The Volta a Catalunya was better. Not that much better, but I had one of those days when I felt all the parts coming together. It happened during stage five when four of us broke away and stayed ahead for most of the day. We were never going to get away with it, and when the gap was big enough so that it made one of our number, Francesco Masciarelli, the race leader on the road, the big guns duly hauled us back in time for the sprint finish.

  But I was learnin
g about using my energy at the right times, and whether it was that or the bilharzia, or both, my strength seemed more evenly spread out over the week in Catalunya. On the last two stages I finished in the main group.

  On to the Vuelta a Castilla y León. I beat Alberto Contador, a Tour de France winner, on a mountain finish on stage three and then came in the top ten in the time trial. I finished 14th overall, only about a minute and a half down on the winner. Today, some people still say that I had never done anything before my results during the 2011 Vuelta a España, but I’ve always smiled at that opinion. Were these insignificant results? Not to me.

  Still, I admit, there were no congratulatory telegrams from Manchester, but I hoped that somebody was noticing. Bobby was offering favourable assessments and I began to daydream about getting another contract.

  I was a replacement rider for the Tour de Romandie. I can’t recall who pulled out but I got a late summons. I’m sure they had erected special crash barriers around the flower beds of local residents when they heard I was coming, but fortunately I managed not to lay myself out amidst the blossoms this time.

  I climbed well. There were a couple of big category-one climbs on stage one and I finished 8th. The next day was lumpy and I crossed the line just 2 seconds off the guy who won the stage. More importantly for me, and for the team, was that I was turning in good performances. I was doing my pulls and being effective in the mountains; I was earning my corn.

  I took a few days off after Romandie, struggling with a chest infection. It was the sort of thing I had hoped would be banished along with the worms, but fortunately my recent performances (and whatever Bobby and Rod were saying now about my potential) had been enough encouragement for Dave Brailsford to take a gamble on me. At the Tour of California I would be team leader and our designated GC rider.

  The team consisted of Kurt-Asle Arvesen, Alex Dowsett, Mathew Hayman, my old mate Greg Henderson, Jeremy Hunt, Ian Stannard, Ben Swift and myself – not a bad group at all. As a bonus, I would get to room with Greg again, so it was harmonicas and kikoys all round.