by Chris Froome
Alex had told me that Jonathan Vaughters at Garmin had been on to him wondering about my availability for next year. So there was a worst-case fall back if I needed one but I had a chance here to persuade Dave to keep me at Team Sky, even if it was for less money.
I could reschedule the daydreams. I could survive. ‘It goes on.’ There would be other days and if I did well here maybe I could go to the Tour the next year as a high-class equipiér. If I got a chance, maybe then I could go for a stage myself, and do the sort of thing that David Moncoutié would do – get in the early breakaways that survive to the mountaintop finishes. Not being a GC rider, I would not be a threat to anyone and would stay under the radar. They would let me go and then one of those days I would win a stage.
That would be enough.
For now though I was the ninth man on the team. I knew Thomas Löfkvist was intending to be the last man with Brad in the mountains. I would do what I was told to do. I thought the heat was going to be a factor: Thomas grew up in Scandinavia and I grew up in Africa. But maybe I was clutching at straws.
Since breaking his collarbone, this was Brad’s first day of real racing. He would be riding gingerly so I needed to mind him. There would be a sprint at the end so I also needed to see if I could get CJ into position.
Once we started, the racing was on the flat and there were crosswinds so the job was just to protect Brad. Kurt was captain on the road and he called the pulls according to the tactics we had laid out that morning on the bus. I could do a long pull if needed. They certainly weren’t saving me for later – they weren’t sure where I would be later.
The plan was simple and it worked. We had a good day and kept Brad buoyant in the GC. CJ timed his sprint perfectly and won the stage.
Yesterday? Hey, fuhgeddaboudit. It’s a bike race. It goes on.
Stage Three: Hurt Locker
Tougher than we thought – days with lesser-category mountains sometimes turn out that way. Some people hung back waiting for the big climbs, while others wanted to make a point. The heat also hurt us, although we were not alone – the sun seemed to mess with my SRM power meter, which meant that mine read four degrees at one point.
We had lined up proceedings for Brad going up the final category-three climb. Thomas Löfkvist had done a long pull on the earlier slopes then pulled off. I felt like I might blow a kilometre from the top but I looked around and everybody else also seemed to be struggling. Good. I endure pain better if everybody is suffering; you draw morale from wherever you find it.
I led Brad over the line in the lead group: I was 12th, he was 13th on the same time. Mission accomplished.
We did well and in my mind I had proved a point in my private mission to show I could be Brad’s main man when the going got tough. I hung in there till the end.
Tomorrow was the Sierra Nevada.
Stage Four: Starsky and Hutch
The first uphill finish to the Sierra Nevada was to take place in the afternoon: 2,112 metres in height, 39-degree heat, with 23 kilometres of ascending. One long haul.
We followed the wheels and a group of forty broke off as we approached the mountain. With 7 kilometres to go there was a minor breakaway but I stayed close to Brad – we were becoming a duo.
Daniel Moreno and Chris Anker Sørenson had gone away in the break a little bit earlier, and they stayed away. For me it was the first mountaintop finish where I alone had been with Brad. I had stayed with him and been on the front at times to keep things under control, but, most significantly, I was now the only guy left with him.
We finished together in the bunch behind Moreno, Sørenson and Daniel Martin. I was still on duty right to the end.
I got some words of praise; in my own mind I was being promoted to the job of last guy with Brad.
The adrenaline, the excitement and the buzz – it was all running through me for hours afterwards.
Stage Five: Darkness, My Old Friend
We slept the night before at the hotel up in the Sierra Nevada. A lot of people come here to do altitude training, where the land is barren and dark volcanic earth is all around. I didn’t sleep very well.
I felt terrible most of the day and any effort to move up in the peloton hurt. At one point I dropped back to the team car to collect bottles and ice and then pushed back up hard through the peloton with them. I took nine bottles: seven in my jersey and two on the bike – one for each rider.
Over the last 50 kilometres I seemed to feel comparatively better. This is a theme I notice. When I’m going well, the start of the stage seems to be the hardest part. I struggle to shake that sluggish feeling but towards the end of the race, particularly in the last 50 kilometres of a 217-kilometre stage, I’m starting to feel good again. I’ve flushed my legs from the hurt of the day before.
I felt very much at ease as we went up the last category-two climb. The final kick to the end was sharp and steep, less than a couple of kilometres up a pavé road to the finish. I stayed with Brad, helping to close any gaps opening up in front of him in the mad scramble up the harsh gradient to the finish line.
At the finish Brad nodded in my direction, a hint of a thin smile. It meant ‘thank you’, but that’s about as chatty as we got. In the room when we turned out the lights at night we said, ‘Goodnight now.’ In the morning when we got up we said, ‘Morning.’
That was it, really. No hostility, just long minutes of silence.
From the beginning – and I did find this a little bit odd – we wouldn’t talk about the race much. Any discussion we did have felt slightly strange. I remember going to talk to some of my teammates about it, saying, ‘It’s really weird in the room with Brad – if I say anything, he’ll just say “yeah” or something in agreement, and that will be the end of it, there won’t be any further discussion.’
Stage Six: The Hangover
This was the hardest day so far. I was sore from start to finish and badly positioned for most of the stage. I knew in future I would have to be further forward when it got lined out like it did.
Sometimes when the peloton was strung out and I was near the back of the line, Steven de Jongh’s voice would crackle on the radio:
‘Chris, you are too far back now, you need to move up.’
My legs were okay over the last climb, a category two, but the peloton started splitting on the downhill, which put us in the red again to close it. Although the stage wasn’t a mountaintop finish, it was a long 200-kilometre haul in the heat, and the Sierra Nevada and the sleepless night on top of it were catching up with me now. Two days after a really big effort is usually when I pay the price. That day was no exception.
Brad and I finished in the group 23 seconds behind Peter Sagan, the stage winner.
We lost Kurt-Asle Arvesen. He had a bad crash the previous day after colliding with a spectator at high speed. Today his body was spent and bandages and dressings could only do so much to plug the seeping energy from his skinless limbs. CJ wasn’t feeling great either. And tomorrow looked like it was going to be dull.
Stage Seven: The Cure
I woke up feeling much, much better. There was a relaxed start from the peloton too, which helped. The race kicked off towards the end in the crosswinds, but it was only 25 kilometres and there were no major dramas apart from a messy crash in the final stretch that we luckily avoided. It was a good day all round.
This meant there was no change in the GC positions for Brad and me: I was 21st and Brad was 22nd. It had turned out to be a nice recovery day before tomorrow’s trek from San Lorenzo de El Escorial, which promised to be a tough day of climbing.
Stage Eight: Crash Froome, the Return
I was using the compact osymetric chainrings for the stage, which meant that no SRM stats other than my heart rate and speed would be recorded. I would need the lighter gears when the gradients reached close to twenty per cent later on.
There was a crash halfway through the stage, but we didn’t escape it this time. There were winds again and the bunch wa
s all crammed up on the left. Someone in front of me braked too hard, or I hadn’t reacted quickly enough, and I went into their back wheel and subsequently off the side of the road. There was a small drop which sent me tumbling off into a ditch of brown desert-like sand. After a soft landing I rolled on to some prickly shrubbery but my ego hurt more than anything, as I had to clamber back up and rejoin the race.
I tried to hold something back during the stage, and not to go too deep while maintaining position in the front group. Bobby’s lessons were getting through to me. Even in the final shakedown I stayed close to Brad, and when it kicked off I rolled at his tempo to the line. We didn’t go too far into the red, which meant another good day. There would be higher mountains tomorrow.
Stage Nine: Szrekkie for Ever After
A massive day! I punctured on the run-up to the final climb, just as the race was hotting up. When I changed the wheel the new one had the magnet attached at a different point so I had no speed-readings on the final climb.
If you’re missing the speed, you’re missing the distance too. That is not so crippling an issue on the last climb as when it happens earlier in the day, but still it made me edgy. I just don’t like not having all the data.
Luckily after my puncture the peloton had started gradually up the climb so it was not the usual helter-skelter I had expected. As the climb ascended, so too did the tempo until we met the crosswinds with 4 or 5 kilometres to go.
We hit a ribbon of flatness on La Covatilla, which was a relief after climbing for so long but the reprieve was only for about a kilometre and a half. Then there would be a 3-kilometre hustle to the finish. By now the front group had whittled to twenty and Brad and I moved near the front. We were the only Sky riders up there.
I could feel a really strong wind from the right, and when nobody wanted to take responsibility for working, the opportune moment presented itself.
‘This is it,’ I thought. ‘I’m not just going to pull normally and wait for someone to attack. I’m going to pull with everything I have. Let’s go.’
The wind from the right meant that everyone was riding over on the left-hand side of the road, trying to get some shelter from the guy just to their right. That created a diagonal line, or a diagonal echelon. The guys on the edge of the road were almost in a line behind each other, coming close to riding off the edge.
The guy at the front, who was me, was in a tough position but I exploited the hand I had. I moved just two feet from the edge of the left side of the road. That space of two feet offered shelter to one rider only: Brad. His front wheel was side by side with my back wheel and nobody could get shelter from Brad as there was no room. They would have to ride directly behind him. It was a perfect crosswind scenario and I pushed really hard. I squeezed the watts higher, up over my threshold.
Depending on what I have ridden beforehand, I know I can push for half an hour on a mountain at, or at least close to, my threshold. Behind Brad, the field disintegrated.
When we got to where the road climbed up again and I had pulled for the flat section, I knew my job was done. There was no one left apart from four guys, including Brad. I pulled off, expecting the four to rush past me, continuing their battle for the summit. But no – they seemed to slow down, showing no sign of wanting to maintain the tempo. They almost seemed to have stopped and were just looking at each other. I realized they must all be pretty tired because no one was taking it up.
So I pushed on again, back to those four guys. As I got to the rear wheel of the fourth rider, Brad took it up, and got on the front. The wind was still coming from the right but now we were going uphill again. Brad put it right in the gutter. I don’t think he knew that I was back on; he’d seen me pull off and I had done my turn. Now I was clinging on to 5th.
I wasn’t thinking about the GC. I had done a great job today and this was bonus territory; I wasn’t completely spent. I wanted to get back to Brad to be able to say to him, ‘Well, let’s ride again a bit more like we just did,’ but Brad had taken it up. He was in time-trial mode, going hard, and I was now pinned to the back on the edge of the road, trying to steal any sliver of shelter from the rider in front of me, but there was not much shelter to be had.
Getting to the last kilometre, the metal barriers appeared at the edge of the road. I saw the first barrier at the last second and pulled out, just missing it. I pushed to get back on the wheel ahead of me again, turning myself inside out with effort, my shoulders almost touching the hoods of my handlebars. And then, boom! It was sprint time. Daniel Martin won the sprint, Bauke Mollema was 2nd and Juanjo Cobo was 3rd. Brad and I were 4th and 5th. Race leader Joaquim Rodríguez, meanwhile, finished 50 seconds off.
Brad and I moved up to 13th and 14th in the GC and that night I knew things had changed. This was probably the best day Team Sky had experienced since we hit the mountains. I got it right in the crosswinds and we blew the field to pieces.
Steven de Jongh, our race director, came and patted me on the back.
‘Where did that come from, Froomester? Great ride, man.’
He told me that I had basically put Bradley back in the race and that my pull on the front blew away the contenders like seed heads off a dandelion.
I had matched my training numbers and added some grown-up thinking on the road.
At last.
I went to see Stefan Szrek, the Belgian soigneur who was giving me post-race massages over the three weeks. As I walked in the door I could see it on Szrekkie’s face: his beaming smile that said, ‘Good job’. He didn’t need words. He was just shaking his head, smiling and laughing. I grinned back at him.
I always have a good chat with Szrekkie whenever I am on his table. He sticks on the latest music he has downloaded, usually house or trance, and massages me while he is half dancing with a big grin on his face. He’s great company: he speaks English with a very Flemish accent and sometimes he’ll stick his Flemish words into the middle of a sentence just to keep you guessing.
For those three weeks I had him all to myself, which meant I didn’t have to queue for a massage. However, as he was the only soigneur with just one rider to massage, he had other jobs to do. These included doing everybody’s laundry and being responsible for matters at the finish line, such as giving us our recovery drinks and producing clothes for anybody who needed to go to the podium. He would also escort riders to the changing camper or go to anti-doping with them. This was the stress of Szrekkie’s life as far as the Vuelta went, and it kept him in a state of constant panic.
I thought I had problems?
Stage Ten: The Pain Mutiny
Time-trial day: 47 pounding kilometres around lovely Salamanca. Or Bradley’s playground, as Steven de Jongh said.
The plan for the day was clear. Brad would be going flat out and the stage would be between him, Tony Martin and Fabian Cancellara. The rest of us would fight for scraps. Well, I would. In a nod to my new status within the team, I was allowed to go flat out too, whereas everybody else would be riding within themselves. It was time trial today, and a rest day tomorrow. The team could recharge the batteries.
When we went out to look at the time-trial course I took headphones and music along with me. I listened to the beats and focused on the route, concluding that I really liked the look of it. It wasn’t pan-flat but rolling, which was perfect for me.
Brad and I were using osymetric chainrings. When you start off with them it feels a bit odd. It isn’t a circle that your pedal strokes are forming any more but more oval-shaped. However, after one long ride the new movement seems very natural.
I enjoy the feeling when I stand up on the pedals; it feels like I can really push and that the power coming out would get me up any mountain. For me it feels right, and more natural than pedalling in perfect circles with every revolution of the pedals. Other people say there is no difference: no logic to that feeling, and no science – that it’s a mechanical placebo. Well, it works for me.
I think there is particularly more to ga
in on the osymetric chainring when the road is going uphill. The angles seem better and you can feel more of a difference as you pedal. You give a little extra force on the uphill, and then on the downhills you ease up more than you normally would. That’s the way I’ve always liked to ride, anyway.
So the course felt right in that sense. And Bobby was always good on time trials. He would speak in terms of letting a carpet unroll. You are unrolling it. It starts off big and as it unrolls it gets faster and faster, right to the end. That’s how I needed to think of my effort and my energy – the carpet. I needed to get it going, get it going, to build up the momentum. As it is getting smaller and smaller, it is getting faster and faster. When it’s completed unrolled, that’s when my race is done.
I do the same with my gearing. I start off possibly pushing with a heavier gear but keeping the power up there and as I tire towards the end I make it easier for myself using the lighter gears. I always imagine this concept of the carpet rolling out.
Years ago in my South African days, Robbie had come up with some time-trialling rules. Typically I would go out too hard and then die. So we decided that for the first ten per cent of any time trial (say it was 40 kilometres, well then, for the first 4 kilometres) I would go at below my threshold. I would basically make an effort to go easier than I should be going so as not to put myself in the red too early.
Today, for the first 3 or 4 kilometres of the time trial, I was looking at my power meter and making sure that I was saving some energy, which is hard to do with all the adrenaline and excitement. On days like this, when I am full of confidence and desire, I run the danger of going flat out too early. I won’t realize the mistake until ten minutes in when I feel barbecued.
I felt I was holding a little back but the SRM was confusing. It had to be wrong. My body thought I was not going hard enough and my head thought I was maybe losing time. After about 2 or 3 minutes of this internal debate I put an end to it.