The Climb: The Autobiography

by Chris Froome

  Stage one at Lake Tahoe was designed for me. They had front-loaded the race with climbs and there were good hauls up hills with great names such as Spooner Junction, Brockway Summit and Emerald Bay. Bobby had a house close to Lake Tahoe and we did some training rides up there to take a look at the route.

  However, the day before the race the weather moved in and it snowed heavily. The organizers still wanted the race to go ahead but we would be starting on the lake shore and riding straight up into the mountains all day. We were standing on the start line, kitted up and ready to go, and I remember being so heavily wrapped up that only my eyes were showing; I had a beanie on and a balaclava covering my nose and mouth. I never remember being that cold before or since, and although I’m stoical about all sorts of pain, I hate the cold.

  I’d had about three or four shots of espresso in the camper van before braving the outside, when the organizers told us that the race had been called off.

  It was a big relief, but by now we were already on our bikes, buzzing on caffeine, and we had to get to the next hotel. I don’t recall whose idea it was that we should ride as far as we could towards our hotel, with the option of jumping into the camper van if it got really bad. I don’t recall it, so I don’t know where to direct my bitterness.

  We did about half an hour on icy, sleety roads, and then it started raining hard too. It was freezing, and despite heavy winds and more snow, we just kept going.

  Only the Team Sky riders had opted for this madness. We were the only ones out there like dogs in the rain. Marginal gains? I don’t think so!

  After an hour I got into the camper van, with snow all over my face. I was shivering and numb beyond pain although I knew that the pain would come when the numbness lifted. I had to dry off as best as I could with towels and then wait until we reached the hotel.

  The race was a big deal to me. It would be the first time, and maybe the last time, that the team would ride for me. I went to the sauna in the hotel with a couple of the guys to sweat out whatever hadn’t been sweated out on our failed attempt at a training ride through the blizzard.

  I had come to California confident and looking forward to it, but after the disaster of the snow-and-sauna day I had a cough that started small but grew. I told Bobby that I wasn’t feeling quite right; Bobby told me I would be fine. ‘Training has been good,’ he said. And he was right. I planned to reproduce those numbers on the mountains stages in California.

  The race went okay at first. I took some antibiotics and got through the first couple of stages, which were made for sprinters. We won them both – Ben Swift one day and then Greg the next. All was good and I was 33rd on GC, just 10 seconds off the race leader’s jersey, which Greg wore.

  The next day was a summit finish on Sierra Road and my kind of stage. I finished 2 minutes 53 seconds behind the stage winner, and was now nearly 3 minutes behind on GC, even though I had moved up to 17th place.

  ‘Oh well,’ I thought. We had finished that evening in the town of Modesto. The American poet Robert Frost was born just about an hour up the road in San Francisco. He famously wrote about the woods being lovely, dark and deep, and how he has promises to keep, and miles to go, before he sleeps. So did I. Frost also said that what he had learned about life could be summed up in three words: ‘It goes on.’

  So do stage races. I was bruised but the race went on, and I kept on.

  I felt no better but hung in there. I did a poor time trial on stage six, where I got it wrong tactically. Although I had known there was a time trial coming I had spent the previous day riding about 200 kilometres in a breakaway. I time-trialled 1 minute 39 seconds off the winner but stayed 17th on GC, which sounded a lot better than it was, as the Tour of California was the week after the Giro and many of the top riders were either tired or away.

  I had hoped for better.

  On stage seven, the ride to Mount Baldy promised more. The stage started with a tough climb only 10 kilometres into the race, and the plan was for me to go into the breakaway on that first climb. It wasn’t a top-secret strategy – everyone knew there was going to be a breakaway of the really strong guys who were trying to climb the GC ladder. That was the breakaway to be in.

  The breakaway formed without me. Swifty, a gentleman and selfless rider, worked like a dog to pull me across the gap. I had the luxury of sitting on his wheel, and once there he peeled off and dropped back to the bunch, job done.

  The pace was rattling with 3 kilometres left to the top of the climb and everybody was pushing it. I stayed in the break but I was on my limit just to be there, and I knew that I wasn’t going to do any damage. We were approaching the summit when I realized that I was not going to be able to stay with them at all.

  I was blown off. Soon the peloton came and swallowed me. Ben and the rest of my teammates tried to pretend it wasn’t an issue, but I could feel their disappointment, and all the more acutely because I’d been in their position so many times before.

  Before I knew it, I was slipping back through the peloton. GC leader? I couldn’t even stay in the peloton! I tried really hard to hang in there, and to save some face. But I couldn’t.

  I ended up in the gruppetto. And soon I was barely hanging on to their tails. Over the top of a climb, I was just managing to stay with them and I knew that if I dropped off them I would be out of the race entirely.

  I think that day was one of the hardest days I’ve ever had on a bike. I remember fighting to be with the gruppetto, hanging on with my fingernails. Mentally, it was such a knock for me. I came in 118th of 126 finishers and lost 32 minutes. I wrote in my race diary that night: ‘Felt okay before the race and went in the break up the first climb but blew my tits off, couldn’t even get into the peloton and ended up in the gruppetto 30 minutes down.’

  There was nothing else to be said.

  A year previously Team Sky had chosen me for the Giro. This year I hadn’t made that cut but I had been given this chance to be the GC leader in California. The guys had worked for me as well as I could have wished, but I had failed. I had been given my chance and had blown it.

  I didn’t feel myself but I could imagine that evening some people in Manchester taking calls or going online: ‘Thirty-two minutes. That’s Froomey for you.’

  After California I knew I wasn’t a realistic choice for the Tour de France and I was back to being anxious over whether I would get a contract for the following season. The Tour de Suisse might have helped. Its nine stages began in Lugano in mid June with an individual time trial on day one and day nine.

  I time-trialled well on both of those stages, but in between, my graph was basically the story of my life: good rides recognized only by those who read the small print, contrasted with bad rides that screamed for attention and could be picked up on another continent.

  I was 11th in the prologue and decent in the mountains the following day when Mauricio Soler, my old crash-prone colleague from Barloworld, took the win.

  And then on stage three I lost 10 minutes, dropping from 9th on GC to 30th. It was just my good fortune that Dave Brailsford, noting my respectable results on the first two days, flew out to be in the team car for day three when I attacked much too soon and rode like a novice. He saw me drop like a stone from the lead group. ‘Well, that’s Froomey, isn’t it?’

  With that, my confidence flew out the window. Though it was a bad day, I’ll never forget how my teammate Dario Cioni nursed me through the stage. He was so strong that day but he stayed with me, encouraged me in that calm way of his, and without him, 10 minutes would have been 15.

  But I had no energy and over the next few stages I slowly dropped down the GC. I knew that riding a good overall position was no longer on the cards, so I looked for opportunities to get a stage result in the days to come.

  I was offered some perspective when Mauricio Soler came off his bike on stage six at high speed. He hit a spectator and then a solid fence, head first. He suffered a fractured skull, a cerebral oedema and other injuries. T
hey placed him in an induced coma that night, and although he recovered, he never raced again.

  Over the last three days I began to feel more comfortable. I finished 9th on the time trial on the final day and left Switzerland wishing that the race had another ten days to run.

  For the Tour de France, I opted not to sit and watch it on TV and depress myself. It goes on, I thought to myself again, and there was still one last shot at redemption – Bobby and I regrouped and he pointed me towards the Vuelta a España.

  I kept my head down, focused on my training and watched everything that I ate.

  I rode up into the mountains every day, occasionally with Bobby in tow on a scooter, overseeing some of the more specific intervals he had set for me.

  I rolled straight on to the Tour of Poland. I was feeling good physically now, and had lost some weight (I was down five kilos for the summer). Although I felt strong, I couldn’t help noticing that there weren’t any Polish Alps.

  The team didn’t seem to be using me right here.

  But I had no choices – I hadn’t earned choices. The team wanted me to go in all the early breakaways and be the go-to guy on flat stages. I would end up sitting on the front for long pulls, doing hard labour. Later, I would miss out on the key breakaways.

  I kept quiet, and did my job, but I couldn’t help feeling that this wasn’t for me.

  I remember speaking to Bobby at the end of the Tour of Poland. He was frank.

  ‘Listen, Chris, it’s going to be difficult to get you into the Vuelta. There are other guys that they want to take, but I’m trying to convince them to put you in. It’s between you and Lars Petter Nordhaug.’

  Lars Petter was in his contract year too. He’d ridden the Giro earlier in the year, whereas I hadn’t.

  I spoke to Alex Carera, my agent, and it was a back-to-the-wall talk.

  ‘Alex, I don’t know if I’m going to get into the Vuelta. We need to start talking to teams now to see what my options are. Worst-case scenario, we can use those offers to try and set a benchmark for Sky, in case they want to decrease the salary I am on.’

  At this point I was thinking that the decrease in salary might be my best possible option. Any time Alex called Dave Brailsford to talk about my future, Alex was hearing a lot of ‘hmmmmms’

  and some ‘umming’

  and a bit of ‘ahhing’.

  Alex wanted to play hardball but Dave didn’t want to play anything. The best I was hoping for was that they would cut my wage to €60,000 or €70,000 a year and keep me as a cheap and cheerful adornment so that I would get another shot at proving myself. Surely they looked at the training numbers uploaded to them every day? Surely they could see something in me? On my good days, I was doing what barely anybody else in the team could do. On my bad days, unfortunately, the same could be said. I could still live in Monaco on €65,000. Well, just about.

  Later, Alex would show me texts he had been getting from Dave. Things were worse than I’d thought: ‘What has Chris done all year? He’s done nothing,’ and ‘We don’t know if we’re going to keep Chris.’

  At the end of the day, I was a commodity and this was the corporate world. If you’re not performing, or if you don’t deliver, they’re going to cut you and move on, without looking back. Adios.

  I saw it with other guys on the team. Guys who I thought were pretty good riders and really good teammates would get cut from teams all the time. 2011 wasn’t going particularly well for the team in general and there was a rumour that there would be a lot of bloodletting before 2012.

  It is quite cut-throat in that sense. In the cocoon of the bus and the hotel there is this manufactured feeling of ‘We’re all friends, and we’re all in this together, we are almost a family,’ that kind of thing. But there is a very thin line, probably a blue one, between becoming a made guy in the family and being kicked out of the family.

  Lars Petter finished 16th on the Tour of Poland. I came 85th. It’s true – sometimes you don’t need a weatherman to tell you which way the wind is going to blow.

  I got home the Monday evening after Poland, a little delicate from the night before. I had a short recovery ride, just an easy hour to get some air into my lungs. The next day Bobby called, with bad news I assumed.

  ‘Chris, you’re going to the Vuelta. Lars Petter has gotten ill. He’s in bed with a bad flu and he’s on antibiotics now. They’re not going to take a chance with him so they’re taking you instead. You’re in.’

  It was that close. Scarily close. But Bobby and I started making new plans, big plans: Vuelta plans.

  17

  2011: Vuelta a España

  Stage One: Another Fine Mess

  The pre-race plan was distributed.

  ‘Objective: GC with Bradley. TTT is an important kick-off for the team. Kurt and Ian will take care of Bradley and his positioning on the easier days. Dario and Thomas will give Brad protection on all the mountain finishes and will help Bradley with his positioning. Xabier, Morris and Froome will do their best to survive as long as possible and will fetch bottles etc. Then in the sprint stages, CJ is our sprinter.’

  Okay – I certainly wasn’t coming in as the high-mountains domestique that I’d hoped to be. I was going to have to work extra hard; I wasn’t going to neglect my bottle duties but I decided I was going to be there in the mountains when Bradley needed me. I had to be.

  Away we went, tilting at windmills. Brad was Don Quixote and in my head I was his Sancho Panza, at least when we were in the mountains, which were my red-ringed days of heavy work. We were rooming together, which was interesting because we are not a good mix. Brad is shy and reserved with people and I am much the same, which means we don’t bring the best out of each other. Actually, we don’t bring anything out of each other. It was a quiet room and, as Sancho Panza tells the Don, a closed mouth catches no flies.

  It was especially quiet on the evening of the first day after the time trial which, if I’m being frank about it, we messed up.

  Bobby J had been in charge. Team time trials are all about the group dynamic. Your time is taken from the fifth man home in a team of nine so you have to stay together for as long as you can and at least five have to be together at the finish. The guy doing a pull on the front has to maintain a certain speed and as soon as it drops, he moves aside to let the next guy through.

  Bobby was nervous, but we all were, and maybe we overthought it. This was beachfront, Benidorm, during heatwave time, and we had our time-trial suits and helmets on as we did about three laps of the circuit at around eighty to ninety per cent beforehand, working out who would pull and where. We were just making ourselves tired.

  The course started off up a climb of about 3 kilometres, which made it quite tricky. We didn’t want to drop any guys too early but CJ Sutton is a sprinter and Stannard is a big lad. If they lost contact on the climb, they could struggle to finish inside the time limit. We needed to keep them with us, so that they would be able to do some big pulls after the climb.

  The greater danger is the one you don’t expect. Just a kilometre in, Kurt-Asle Arvesen and Xabier Zandio overlapped wheels and crashed. We lost Kurt, and Xabier was held up and fell behind, so we had a split. We rode conservatively, hoping the others would come back to us.

  On the descent we let Brad, our best time trialler, pull us on his own so that he could pick his own lines and wouldn’t have to peel off while navigating one of the four roundabouts before joining the beach road. In retrospect, that wasn’t the best thing to do – it was too conservative. On a descent you can make up a lot of time if you are interchanging the lead because it’s really easy for the guys on the wheels and quite hard for the guy on the front taking all the wind. As strong as Brad was, his leading the entire descent didn’t help our time. We got to the bottom and felt we really had to dig in deep. We did and immediately lost a couple more guys off the back.

  With 5 kilometres to go there was a communications mix-up. We were on the flat now, passing through a town and
riding a full-out time trial. CJ, our sprinter, had sat up as his race was done. At the same time, Xabier, who had pulled himself back to the rest of us, had done a big turn on the front and then sat up, which left just four of us. This spelt disaster and the radio had to tell Xabier the bad news: ‘You have to get back on, Xabier. Vamos!’

  He did a huge effort to get back on but by the finish our pace line was breaking up all over the place. We finished 20th of twenty-two teams, 42 seconds off the winning time. Footon, who were a second behind us, and Andalucia, who were even further back, were the only teams with worse times.

  It was just one bad day. Nobody said much afterwards and we put on brave faces – we had lost 42 seconds but over three weeks that shouldn’t matter too much on the GC.

  We hurt though for Bobby, who had put a lot into this, and for Brad, who had come back from his broken collarbone to try to salvage something from the season.

  One other thing that I recall from around this period was that I had been looking at videos of time trials. I had said to Bobby that I didn’t feel my racing position was aggressive enough – I felt comfortable but too high up on the front and was taking too much wind.

  Bobby said, ‘Okay, let’s give it a go,’ and we literally took two whole spacers out of the handlebar, dropping it by about a centimetre and a half. This was a huge difference and it felt fantastic. It felt fast and it felt like, without compromising the power, I had adopted a position that was far more aggressive and that my back was flat.

  I am a man of constant marginal gains.

  Stage Two: Fuhgeddaboudit

  We talked together on the bus in the morning.

  Dave B said, ‘Yesterday is yesterday, so forget about it, the real race starts today. Forty-two seconds in the mountains is nothing, don’t worry about it. Get on with the race now.’

  I nodded.

  I needed to impress the team here. In my mind I wanted it to be like one of the stages back in Murcia where I had been the last guy with Brad over all the mountains. That was the job I wanted to do again; to show them I could be useful up there. A high-mountains domestique was what I wanted to be – for now.