The Climb: The Autobiography

by Chris Froome

  ‘Okay, I’m not going to look at the meter any more. It’s not reading correctly today. I haven’t calibrated it right.’

  I continued riding and hit a heavier gear. The carpet started unrolling. It was at a good lick and I was riding on feeling and instinct now in my new lower flat-back position. Go.

  Brad came off the ramp 4 minutes after I did. By all accounts he looked as if he had been shot out of a rocket launcher. At the first intermediate checkpoint after 13.3 kilometres of road he was 1 second ahead of Tony Martin, who had set the landmark time for the day, 55 minutes and 54 seconds. My own time was 25 seconds off Martin’s pace at that point.

  By the 30-kilometre time check though, Brad was feeling the pain. He was now 19 seconds behind Tony Martin; meanwhile, I was 1 second behind Brad and getting stronger.

  Not long after the second time check, however, I could feel the tiredness invading me. Suddenly I wanted the comfort of my power meter again. I looked down and could see I was hurting. Aha, maybe it was right now – it had fixed itself!

  My brain will tell me anything in times like this.

  I was going to try to hold but I was feeling rough. Everything was screaming at me now to slow down. Just a little bit. Slow down. I would try to hold these numbers though to keep the average.

  Marcus Ljungqvist, our director sportif, was now in my ear on the radio. There were no details, just encouragement: ‘Great ride, Froomey. Keep it going, Froomey. That’s it, you’re smoking this TT. Brilliant. Very good.’

  I had a couple of energy gels tucked up my shorts and took them. The sweetness gave me a quick shot of revival but after a while my legs were talking treason again. I could hear them. You can start to ease off now, boss. You have done the work. You really have. You are almost there. Just ease a little. It won’t hurt you. Go on. You have done it. You are spent. You need to take it easy. Everybody is impressed by what you have done. Listen to Marcus. ‘Great ride,’ he says. You can relax a little bit now. No need to beat yourself up any more.

  Then the counter-argument came blaring from my brain. Shut up! Rubbish! Time trials are won or lost by seconds. A game of inches. Legs, you should know that by now. Every second we can get, we keep clawing at it. There’s not a chance I’m going to let you slow down. We need to get a contract.

  I got back up to speed again. Then I saw the numbers dipping. No. No. Fight. Fight. Back up again.

  Coming in through the cobbled streets back into Salamanca, I could see the town in the distance full of big buildings which looked welcoming as I got closer. There is a charm about the town and I love the place, I really do. All the more so because coming through now I knew that this was the end. I got out of the saddle and pushed a bit harder. Down in the saddle again and now the finish line was in sight through an old archway. Yes. Over the finish line into a courtyard.

  I was hollow; as empty as I could be. All of me was out there on the road but I knew that it was a really good time. I was right: it came up as 2nd behind Tony Martin, who had been around a minute faster than me. Now I had to sit and wait for a lot of other guys to come through.

  Tony Martin. I didn’t count Tony Martin. This was his playground as well as Bradley’s, but Tony wouldn’t challenge on the GC. Looking at the GC, I thought, ‘Okay, I am the second-best time trialist at the moment. I am very happy with that. We will see who does what from here on.’

  I sat with Szrekkie for a few seconds at the finish. He put a towel around me and handed me a bottle as I sat there on the top tube of the bike, just waiting. Every couple of minutes he laughed with approval and patted me on the back. ‘Well done, boy, grot verdomme.’ I started to feel nervous. Around me people were talking about Brad’s time and there were flashes of his progress after the second check. I heard the figures. Hold on, that time was down on mine.

  Okay. I struggled to get to the end. Maybe Brad would make the time up there? As he was coming closer I was making the calculations in my head. I saw it suddenly – Brad wasn’t going to do a better time than me. I almost felt scared. This was going to upset people; this wasn’t the plan. And as I knew all too well, in this team we lived and died by the plan. Now I had gone and beaten Brad. It was as if I had coldly dropped him on a mountain pass, and this could be seen as a sin, instead of a good thing.

  I was quite worried and turned to Szrekkie. The look on his face said it all: ‘Ooh, you’re in trouble now!’

  He gave a half-sheepish sort of laugh, which was not reassuring.

  As Brad came over the line, Szrekkie disappeared to go and catch him and sort him out. I looked around.

  This might not be so good. It could cause problems. This was not the position I wanted to be in.

  One of the chaperones from the race organizers ambled over to me and said that I had to go on the podium.

  I looked at him blankly. Why would I have to go to the podium? I hadn’t won the stage. Maybe I was the most aggressive rider or had I won some gimmicky award?

  ‘No,’ he replied. ‘You are the leader of the race. Leader of GC. You’ve got the red jersey.’

  Wow.

  This was a lot to take in. It was like I had been zoomed out from where I was to this new place. I was scared, happy and trying to make sense of it. It was dawning on me now that I would be the leader if Brad didn’t do it. He was in front of me at the start of the day, but not any more. I had seen the other GC contenders’ times.

  I was ten days into a Grand Tour, it was a rest day tomorrow and I was leading the race. This could not be happening: I was the leader of a Grand Tour! I would have the jersey for one day at least, which was more than I could have ever hoped for from this race.

  Did this mean I might be able to get a contract?

  That was all I had been thinking about in the last 7 or 8 kilometres on the long stretch of road where I could see the tar and Salamanca in the distance. All the time when I was really hurting, really struggling to find it in me to keep maintaining that kind of speed, I was thinking of the telephone calls with Alex and Bobby. I thought of Bobby asking about my contract and Alex telling me again and again that Sky just didn’t want to say anything.

  After this, would they want to keep me? I remember looking at Salamanca and thinking that today I could make sure they gave me a contract. I was not slowing down; I wanted an answer. I wanted to make up their minds for them with the time trial. That really drove me over the last few kilometres.

  I had to stay around afterwards for the podium stuff, and tried to remind myself that this might never happen again. I should just be happy and enjoy it.

  For some reason they pulled Bradley into the changing-room van too, where the podium riders get dressed into a set of clean kit. ‘Why am I here?’ he asked. He was getting quite grumpy about it and I didn’t blame him. Why had he been pulled in here? He continued to ask but no answers came and the chaperone looked confused as I gazed across from where I was sitting in the van. I was embarrassed really. What could I say? If truth be told, I was still a bit scared. I just wanted a contract.

  They eventually said to Brad, ‘Okay, you don’t need to be here. Just Chris.’

  Sensitive. Thanks.

  I held my breath, wondering what would happen now. Brad turned to me and said something friendly and approving: ‘Good ride. Well done.’

  And he walked out.

  I breathed a sigh of relief.

  Next in my mind was what the bosses would say. Brad had given me a couple of nice words but what would Dave make of it? What would Shane Sutton, Brad’s coach, have to add? This was a migraine for them.

  I did the podium ceremony, feeling that I just had to smile and make the most of it. I was in the leader’s jersey, after all! But at the same time I felt very awkward and out of place. I was apprehensive about what was to come.

  When I talked to Alex later I wouldn’t be Cuba Gooding Jr and he wouldn’t be Tom Cruise. Show me the money? No, I wasn’t that sure of myself. More like, this should get me a contract? Shouldn’t it?
/>
  18

  2011: Vuelta a España, Continued

  Day of Rest

  I awoke in the morning from uneasy dreams and found myself transformed in my bed. Yesterday I was a bargain-basement domestique having a good week; today I was a commodity. Forty-seven kilometres changed my life.

  We were having a rest day and our team was scattered like furloughed soldiers about the amazing hotel which was actually a castle, a real castle. It was very old and we were the only team staying in the lovely setting. We were impressed.

  Alex Carera, my agent, was arriving to meet me. It certainly was an old-world place to be speaking of new-world things like contracts and cash but it had to be done. We sat in the courtyard and talked, where I knew we would be seen.

  I could sense that yesterday had caused some unease in the team. ‘It’s still all about Brad,’ Shane Sutton had said to the media. I hadn’t said anything different and told the microphones I was really happy to be in this position, and that I had never expected it, but that we were all here to work for Brad. I went straight for the party line – the safe option.

  I hadn’t spoken to Dave Brailsford or the guys at that level. I hadn’t even spoken to Brad.

  We went out for a recovery ride in the afternoon and my teammates chatted quietly to me. Dario was very enthusiastic. He said how proud he was to be with me, to be on a team where now we were leading a Grand Tour and defending the jersey. He had taken a lot of happiness from it. He had been there and had seen me struggling in Castilla y León and Catalunya. On a bad day at the Tour de Suisse, he took care of me. He was one guy who saw I had talent but it wasn’t quite showing. I trusted his views.

  I asked Dario what he thought. Did he reckon I could keep this up for three weeks now that I had done it for ten days? Or had I hit my limit and was a bad day looming just around the corner? In an ideal world, could I go all the way?

  He just looked at me. ‘Why not? Three weeks. You just have to do ten days again and then you are finished. You do a criterium on the last day and that’s it. You have done it now once already. Do it again. Don’t see it as twenty-one days. Look at it as ten days. Start again tomorrow.’

  That’s so Dario. Pragmatic, simple, solid.

  I was wary of being the man who goes into hospital with a terminal disease and comes out cured but moaning about the bland hospital food and the thin mattresses. I knew that when I came to Spain I would have been happy just to leave with a contract, any contract. After the last ten days, though, I was starting to think I was worth more. All that potential wasn’t counterfeit. My belief that I was suited in temperament and genetics to being a Grand Tour rider seemed to be spot on.

  In the short term we had eleven stages left. Brad had struggled yesterday and I had been with him in the mountains doing most of the pulling. I led the race on GC. I didn’t expect, and couldn’t expect, the team to cancel their bets on Brad but I thought it would be smart if they hedged their risk by having two protected riders for the rest of the Vuelta, and to let the best man win. That seemed like good tactics – good for me but also good for the team. That couldn’t come from me, though; it would have to come from the management.

  It didn’t happen. In Team Sky we get many things right but the plan is still the plan is still the plan. Especially if it involves Brad, who has so much more history and friendship with the top table. I understood that.

  I was still there as a teammate, to do the domestique role that the team had asked me to do. I was still relying on the team for a contract and I didn’t want to upset people in the moment when I had at last delivered a notable performance. I wanted to show them I was a team player but I also wanted that recognized; I wanted for the team to simply say to me that although this was a position nobody had expected, on the long flat hauls I shouldn’t be doing the heavy lifting any more as Brad and I should be recharging and waiting for the mountains. Ultimately, I wanted them to tell me that if it got to the endgame and I had a better chance of winning the Vuelta than Brad had, then I should go for it.

  I knew they were holding their breath, though. They were thinking, ‘This is just Chris Froome’s career in microcosm. We’ve had the brilliant, but something will happen to dull the light. Stand by for his Tour de Suisse day, his Tour of California day, or his “landing in a front garden” day. It has happened before and it will happen again. It’s just a matter of time.’

  I understood that too.

  But I was different now. One of the secrets of the last ten days had been that I didn’t turn myself inside out looking for a result one day and then die a death the next. I was in the Vuelta and riding with the sole objective of being the best teammate possible for Brad; any urge to attack had been out of my mind. I had endured long, hard days but I hadn’t had the chance to empty myself to that level; there had been none of my crazy, hell-for-leather attacks. I was always riding at Brad’s pace in the climbs and I had learned from that. And what I didn’t tell Dave, or anyone, was that riding at the front, just pacing Brad, was easier than the way I used to ride.

  Something else that had been troubling me came to a head on that rest day. The last day or two I had been suffering from a bad rash and the previous night had been the worst. Brad and I had exchanged our usual ‘goodnight’ as the lights were flicked off and he fell asleep. I couldn’t sleep at all, after all the excitement, and then I started to feel the red, welted bands around my legs. These were where my skin had been in contact with the rubberized cuff grips that stopped my shorts riding up.

  I already had the red jersey but now, in a matching colour, were large continents of this itchy, angry rash around my body. If I scratched at them they would get worse and spread; if I didn’t scratch, I would lose my mind. I had been wearing physio tape during the time trial to support my back and now there was a rash anywhere the tape had been. I had worn bandages on my knees, and there was a rash there too. It must have been the mixture of heat and moisture, I reckoned, as I recalled that for the last ten days we had been pouring water over ourselves as much as possible.

  I finally dozed off but at about 3.00 a.m. I woke up scratching myself on my legs, my torso, my back and my waist – basically anywhere that had experienced continuous friction. It was crazy and I was bleeding from the demented scratching. Creeping out of bed, I found my phone and looked up the doctor’s room.

  The doctor was Geert Leinders.*

  I knocked on his door and woke him up.

  ‘Look at this.’

  ‘Ooooh!’ His eyes opened very wide.

  He was very sympathetic for a man woken at 3.00 a.m.

  ‘That is a problem.’

  He got me some cream and I lathered it on to myself, hoping to calm the rash. I went back to bed and fell asleep straight away, thankful that the morning would bring nothing more pressing than a rest day.

  In the morning, though, I started sniffling a bit. The health forecast was for a cold, or another chest infection, either of which would be devastating coming so soon after I had taken another dose of Biltricide following the Tour de Suisse. I told the doc how I was feeling; that I was a bit run down, and that I had a nasal snuffle and a snotty nose. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘as a precaution we had better put you in a room on your own. We don’t want you passing anything around the team.’

  So I was packed into a room on my own with my nasal sprays and my creams.

  I felt sort of bad. Myself and Brad never really bridged that gulf of mannerly silence and now I was bailing out. On the other hand, at least I was not holding my breath any more waiting for Brad to say something or bracing myself to say something that would engage him. I felt much more relaxed. I could answer phone calls, which there were plenty of, without feeling that every word was being digested right next to me. Things were a lot easier. I could speak freely about my contracts and about how plans and matters were within the team.

  I’m sure Brad felt the same.

  Looking back, I would love to have had Brad’s impression of all this bec
ause as a team we were in a weird situation. But he never really speaks much within the team. It’s as if he has his circle of people around him all the time who muffle our idea of him. By the time he comes back from races and gets through speaking to the directeur sportif, to Dave, to Shane Sutton and to his soigneur, I reckon he is all talked out. He doesn’t contribute that much at the table or when we’re all on the bus together.

  He can make everybody laugh, though, which goes some way towards making up for this lack of connection. He has a particular talent for doing impersonations. In the team the guys reckon it is a defence mechanism, shielding him from his own reserve. Either way, he is very funny.

  He does an impression of me with a really hivvy Sith Ifricin iccint. It’s almost too much but that’s what good impersonators do. It does make it very funny and I enjoy his humour a lot. He could be mean and bullying with the impressions but he isn’t. They are just entertaining.

  We get a couple of pairs of Oakley sunglasses given to us about twice a year. I have a child’s delight in being handed classy sunglasses for free and it is still a novelty. One day I asked innocently if the bus had an alarm on it, because I usually leave my Oakleys on the bus overnight. Brad twigged that, and he killed me on it:

  ‘We cin survive without the 800k bus, think you, ifficer, but whit about my Oakleys? Are your min looking for them? Do you nid a discription? An artist’s skitch? I cin’t bileev this is hippinining …’

  He does a pretty good Dave Brailsford too. He picks up on all of Dave’s little motivational speaker phrases and runs them together like a slightly demented version of Dave:

  ‘The three Ps of our culture and of our team: Professionalism. Performance. And, ehm … Whatever. The two Ps of our culture and the W.’

  Our favourite is his take-off of our press officer, Brian Nygaard. Poor Brian really likes his wine; it is a passion for him. Wine and fireworks – Brian’s face would light up when talking about fireworks. Brad took the fireworks theme, while playing the press officer, and all with a Danish accent: