by Chris Froome
I put on full leg warmers and the thickest jacket I could find. On the bus I shivered all the way to the start, and something definitely felt not quite right. I spoke with Nicolas Portal, assistant director sportif, telling him I wasn’t good.
‘Chris, just try to stay in the wheels. It’ll be fast until the break goes, then you’ll be okay.’
Twenty kilometres in, I felt even worse. The break hadn’t gone, the speed stayed high and once we hit a climb, I was off the back. Soon I was being overtaken by the race cars and when our second team car drew alongside, I spoke with Nico. ‘I’m sorry but I have to get in the car. I’m feeling terrible and I’m not going to be able to get to the finish. I’m really sorry I can’t stay and help Richie but, feeling as I am, there’s nothing I can do.’
Next morning I was worse again so I was packed on to a flight back to Nice. For the following five days, I felt more sick than I’d ever done in my life. On my own in a tiny studio apartment, this wasn’t an especially joyous time. The team had me on antibiotics but through those first few days they made no difference. There were times when I was afraid I was going to die.
Bobby later told me that when I abandoned the race on that Saturday morning, Sean had ribbed him about it. ‘Ah ha, what’s wrong with your boy? I told you he’d take the money and that would be it.’ Well, there I was back in Monaco, enjoying the good life.
Having to pull out of Algarve was just an occupational hazard. It shouldn’t have been a big deal. But often that initial setback is the first domino to fall. I’d asked the team a few months before if I could skip Paris–Nice as Jeremy was getting married in Kenya on the weekend the race finished. They said no. ‘If you’re going to fit into the Tour team, you need to be there.’ I felt they were telling me, politely, that I had to do whatever I was asked. I understood that.
But I’d already told Jeremy that I’d be able to get that weekend off. Jono and I were the ‘best men’ so I had to be there. I asked Jeremy if he could put the wedding back for a week and told him that if anyone had to incur any extra costs to change their flight or their hotel booking, I’d take care of it. Jeremy put the wedding back and thankfully there were no extra costs.
A week before Paris–Nice I went for a training ride with Richie, and Bobby came along too on a scooter. We were on a climb when Richie pushed on a bit, and I struggled to stay with him. I was coughing every 10 seconds, as if my lungs were being squeezed, and I couldn’t stop. Bobby moved up alongside me and shook his head.
‘Listen, I’ve got to make a call here, there’s no chance of you riding Paris–Nice. You will only destroy yourself if you try.’
I couldn’t argue. That bug had been a bad one; the dominoes were continuing to tumble. Bobby told me to take it easy for four or five days and by the time Paris–Nice began, I was only just getting back into training again. On the day Paris–Nice ended, I went for a long spin with Adam Blythe. Our plan was to do a long, steady ride but instead of coming back directly to Monaco, we would ride on to Nice and I would watch the final Col d’Eze time trial on the Team Sky bus while he met up with his BMC teammates.
Our ride took us over the border into Italy and after going through Ventimiglia on the Italian side, I suffered a Crash Froome relapse. A serious one.
We were coming towards a border crossing at Latte and an inviting stretch of clear road that led through a couple of tunnels. ‘I need to do a bit of an effort here,’ I told Adam. As I occasionally do, I had used my time-trial bike that day. I needed practice in the time-trial position.
Adam tucked in behind me and I increased the effort. We were coming towards the border and just as I began to ease up, the road got a little busier. There was a cafe/liquor store on the right, cars parked along the road, but nothing dangerous until an older man suddenly stepped out from behind one of the cars, directly into our line.
‘Whoooaaaa!’ I screamed.
My brain saw him stopping when he heard the scream. He was going to stay right there. I was going to veer left. Everyone was going to walk away from this unhurt. But he kept going, quickening his step if anything. He shifted straight into my line and I smashed into him, my helmet crashing into his head. Down he went.
I carried on flying, but without the bike under me. I landed half on the island running down the middle of the road and half on the road itself. I rolled over. I had to get on to the island, out of the road. I needed to catch my breath. People gathered. Some came to where I was, others were around the man, who might have been in his late sixties, early seventies.
I had to know how the man was, but he wasn’t moving; no movement at all. I sat up to take a look but that was met with instant disapproval from those around me. ‘You mustn’t move. Lie down. Keep your head still. You have a bad cut on your chin.’ My helmet had been shattered. They were thinking head injury.
Adam had reacted to my scream by locking on his brakes and then veering round us. He was okay. All I could think about was the man lying there motionless. I felt sick, nauseous and dizzy. I kept trying to look over to where he was. I saw the brown paper bag he’d been carrying. It was on the road, brown turning to claret. His bottle of red had been another casualty. People were talking to me. ‘You’re going to need some stitches. Don’t move until your head’s been examined.’
‘Please,’ I said, ‘can you check on that man. See if he’s okay.’
Five minutes later someone came back.
‘It’s not good. It’s really not good. There’s a lot of blood coming from his head. It looks like he’s dead. Someone felt for a pulse but there wasn’t one. Just all this blood.’
I sat up again to look. Their voices were still telling me to lie down, but I had to see. A blanket or sheet had been put over the man. From where I was looking, it seemed it was over his entire body. ‘I have killed this guy,’ I thought. ‘With my helmet, I have killed him.’ It was the most horrible feeling I’ve ever had in my life.
I lay back down and thought, ‘Christ. How can I ever come back from this? This is more than an accident. This is a situation where a man has died.’
I didn’t feel at any point that it had been my fault. He had stepped on to the road in front of me, leaving me with no time to avoid him. I hadn’t been reckless. No, this was an accident. But I didn’t know what to do. I had my phone, and Adam was standing beside me. People asked if they could help but the damage was done.
Some amateur cyclists stopped and took photographs. I thought that these could be on Twitter and Facebook in the next few minutes. I thought of Noz, Jono, Jeremy, Michelle – I didn’t want them to see them, not knowing if I was okay. I called Michelle, still lying there flat on my back. Someone whispered that I should ask to be taken to a French hospital as I’d be seen to quicker there than in Italy.
We were still in Italy though, so it was an Italian ambulance that arrived. Paramedics came towards me, then went straight to the old man. I strained to see. They took off whatever had been covering him, loaded him on to a stretcher and into the ambulance.
And I saw him move. He was still alive!
‘This is so fantastic,’ I thought, ‘the best thing that’s happened for a long, long time.’
They took him to Bordighera Hospital, on the far side of Ventimiglia. Another ambulance would come for me.
I’d lost quite a bit of skin from my legs and arms, but nothing major. I had a gash on my chin, but that wasn’t too bad either. Then they discussed what to do with my bike. A man who’d been in the cafe offered to mind it until I was ready to collect it. Adam said he was riding back to Monaco to get his car and he could take it then. The police shook their heads and said it was part of the evidence. They were going to impound it.
We’d been given some new handlebars for our time-trial bikes and not everyone on the team had them. I’d got one of the last pairs and I was thinking, ‘If they take the bike I lose the handlebars and I really don’t want to do that.’ I asked to keep the bike, but the police said no, the bike would be tak
en to the police compound in Ventimiglia. Then I remembered the old man on his way to hospital and the handlebars seemed less important.
While I waited for the ambulance I photographed the line of cars parked on the road beside the cafe/liquor store. All of those cars were on a no-parking line and if anyone was going to say this was my fault, I wanted evidence, just in case, to show that those cars shouldn’t have been there.
At the hospital I had to sign forms I could barely read, before they took me for an MRI scan and then stitched up my chin. But mostly they left me on a surgical bed in a corridor staring at the ceiling.
From there I called Bobby. ‘Listen, I’m not coming to the finish of Paris–Nice this afternoon. I’ve had an accident and hit an old man. I’m here at the hospital with him, waiting to see how he is and when I’m going to be discharged.’
The police said they needed a urine sample to check my alcohol level. Standard procedure. When the nurses came I asked about the man and was eventually told he’d fractured his skull. It was serious but he would be okay. More relief.
Adam returned in the car and had to hang around for a few hours before they allowed me home. It was a long, long day. But the man recovered.
In the aftermath of the accident I went to Ventimiglia police station close to ten times, and actually got to know the guys working there – two in particular were keen cyclists. They told me I had to pay a small fine for hitting a pedestrian, explaining that Italian law considers seniors in the same way it regards children and I would be held responsible.
Getting the bike back took for ever, but eventually I did.
The day after the accident I flew home to Kenya for Jeremy’s wedding. Shaken up by the experience more than the fall, I was glad to have those days with the family. The service was held on the veranda of the Tamarind Hotel restaurant overlooking Tudor Creek on the coast just north of Mombasa.
It was a light-hearted service with a beautiful backdrop. During the ceremony they played a song that I hadn’t heard for years but it was something my mother had always listened too, often when just she and I were together in the house. It made me feel very teary and, after that, I was choking back the emotion. It was just so sad that she couldn’t be with us on this day. She would have been in her element.
The reception was on two traditional sailboats about a kilometre out on the Indian Ocean. The boats were roped together and linked by a bridge. We ate barbecued lobster, prawns, crab and lots of fresh fish.
Jeremy brought a mountain bike I’d left at his place in Kenya to Mombasa and the next day I got up early so I could do three or four hours of training before the sun got too hot. On the way home I stopped off at Dr Charles Chunge’s practice in Nairobi. Charles had discovered my bilharzia and I was keen for him to check if it was still in my system and what level it was at. I’d also been having stomach problems and wanted him to examine that as well.
‘The level’s gone down since we first found it but you’ve still got it,’ he said. The numbers were now in the three hundreds as opposed to the five hundreds they had been at the beginning. Still, it was time for another round of Biltricide. Dr Chunge gave me six big tablets, advised me to take them all at once and warned me it would be a few days before I felt one hundred per cent again.
His tests on my stomach found typhoid, another fairly common problem in Africa, and he gave me medication for that too. Soon, my stomach was feeling a lot better.
Michelle had a week’s holiday. Women can seldom resist a man with parasites, a skin rash and typhoid. Michelle was no exception. She came to Europe to see me race at the two-day Critérium International. Girlfriends aren’t typically welcomed at races, but Bobby Julich had convinced the team that I was in desperate need of some motivation. After being sick at Algarve, followed by slow recovery, followed by a bad crash, then a week in Kenya, I suddenly had a bit of catching up to do.
The Critérium International confirmed that. I wasn’t good.
Michelle came back with me to Monaco, saw my little apartment and silently despaired. She thought about the days I’d spent here alone feeling sick as a dog after Algarve. It wasn’t an easy decision for her to give up her job with Investec. I’d loved her for her independence, yet it was the one thing I was asking her to give up. She went home and, after a few weeks of deliberation, resigned.
The Critérium International had shown me that I was off the pace. At the Tour de Romandie I made a start at reparation. By then the Tour team was taking shape. Brad had won Paris–Nice and the question was who would be supporting him in the mountains. Mick Rogers and Richie were ahead of me. On the hard stages in Romandie, I was pulling fourth last. I was doing the work on the middle climbs too, but always trying to pull for longer than my body wanted.
I remember doing one long pull, thinking, ‘I’m only going to be able to do another five hundred metres,’ and somehow managing to get over the top of that specific climb before again counting in five hundreds up the next climb. Just a little further.
Mick was very experienced and I think he saw himself as the natural road captain and Brad’s main man. He was riding well at the time.
Romandie brought me on a lot and at the Dauphiné a month later I felt like I was close to being back to my highest level. On the penultimate stage Richie and I were pulling at the front on the Col de Joux Plane, with Brad and Mick in behind us. The Joux Plane is hard but Richie and I felt good and pushed it. Or at least we did until Mick started telling us to ease up: ‘Easy boys, easy.’ Hearing that was good for our morale.
That Dauphiné ended in Châtel and we stayed on in the Alps for a fortnight to do a recce on some of the climbs we would ride in the Tour and a final block of training. Feeling good after the Dauphiné, I felt I moved on to another level during this last training camp. I’d been riding with Richie all year and he had generally been stronger than me in the mountains. Over these few days that changed. In the best form of my life, I would go to the Tour de France.
2012: The Tour de France
Stage One: Sunday 1 July, Liège to Seraing, 198 kilometres
At a team meeting on the bus Sean Yates outlined how things would work.
Brad and Cav were the protected riders. If one punctured, teammates would wait and pull them back up to the peloton. I wondered what about me? Apart from Richie, no one would have guessed I might have been thinking along these lines. After all, what had I done this year? Fourth in the Dauphiné was my best result. Set against Brad’s victories in Paris–Nice, Tour de Romandie and the Dauphiné, that 4th place was nothing. I kept telling myself that in the mountains there would be opportunities. There had to be.
The first stage was through the rolling countryside of the Ardennes but the climbs were too short to get rid of all the sprinters. Ten kilometres from the finish is generally where the jostling for places towards the front of the peloton begins. It’s a fight you can’t avoid and I had got into a good position; I was in the front third of the pack. Then I punctured.
Richie saw it. I didn’t ask him to wait, and the team definitely didn’t ask him to wait. But he did. Richie had every chance of finishing high up on GC in this Tour but on the first stage, he sacrificed that for me. That was an incredible thing to do.
We were on a long straight road that ran by the river, and a crosswind was hitting us from the right. If there was one place on the entire stage you didn’t want to puncture, this was it. Richie did a really long pull for me until we could see the peloton ahead of us, but with the crosswinds, it was so hard to make contact again.
Soon the crosswinds split the peloton and that meant we were never going to get back to the front group. The groups we caught were also struggling. Then the front group disappeared from view. It was out of sight. Gone.
We picked up our teammate Christian Knees, who’d done a lot of work for Brad but was spent and unable to do any more pulling at that pace. If it hadn’t been for Richie, I would have been on my own.
I lost 1 minute 25 seconds becaus
e of the puncture, which was hard to stomach. All the talk I’d had with Dave about my riding for GC at the Tour now seemed like it was just that. Talk.
The race had hardly begun and already I was behind. It was a big blow. It also didn’t help that, apart from Richie, hardly anyone noticed.
22
2012: The Tour de France, continued
Stage Seven: Saturday 7 July, Tomblaine to La Planche des Belles Filles, 199 kilometres
The Algarve sickness, missing Paris–Nice, that collision with the old guy in Latte, the Tour plan that saw me as nothing more than one of Brad’s lieutenants and then the puncture on the first stage; most of what could have gone wrong, did go wrong. But I was riding well, and had what was probably the best form of my career. The first mountain stage of the race was to the summit of La Planche des Belles Filles in the Vosges.
I knew this would be interesting. We had been to recce the stage, and the climb at the end was going to be hard: it is steep at the bottom and never eases. It isn’t extremely long – just 5.9 kilometres – but it is enough.
To get there we would have to go over a category-three climb and a lumpy approach through a bit of a forest. None of it was easy.
Ten kilometres before the start of the final climb, everyone was fighting for position. I was last in the Sky train, with Mick Rogers in front of me, and Brad in front of him. We were on the right-hand side of the road and were at the front of the peloton.
If you watch a bunch sweeping up a third-category climb on television it all looks pretty ordered: people swap positions, a line of four or five riders moves up through the pack, a guy peels off the front and someone takes his place. It seems like everyone knows what they’re doing. But this isn’t how it is.
Right now, to make a stressful situation worse, Greg Henderson had re-entered my life. For some reason he thought it was his right to be on Mick Rogers’s wheel; Greg was now riding for Lotto, a Belgian team, and he was a lead-out man for the sprinter André Greipel. But it was a hilltop finish – what was Greg doing at the front on a day like this?