by Chris Froome
Brad perked up a little when he was back on the wheel. I was pulling again and the climb had eased off so it was quite a lot easier to stay on the wheel. I pulled faster. We could at least get Pinot back at this rate.
We hauled Pinot back in, along with a couple of other stragglers too. I had time to think as we rode. All around us the crowds were jostling and cheering, but not much of the internal drama was known to them at this point.
How would this play out? I had made an attack that the team didn’t think was a good idea. I then called it off. All the same, I knew that by nightfall I would be in the stockades.
The history of cycling is littered with instances like this. In some cases, the guy who was stronger than his team leader said, ‘Fuck it, this may never come around for me again.’ Stephen Roche attacking Roberto Visentini in the 1987 Giro d’Italia is probably the great modern-day example. Over time many people have forgotten Roche went against team orders, remembering only that he won the race.
I’m the guy who turned back with the blue light flashing.
I pulled them to the end and when we rounded the last bend, with 50 metres of road left, I put my head down. Pinot and myself sprinted for the line but he edged me out. Surviving from an earlier breakaway, Pierre Rolland won the stage with Pinot 2nd and me 3rd. As a reflex, I looked behind to check on Brad as I crossed the line. He had lost a couple of seconds but Nibali was with him. Job done. Now for the bloody postmortem.
WINNER: PIERRE ROLLAND
OVERALL GC 1: BRADLEY WIGGINS
2: CHRIS FROOME + 2 MIN 05 SEC
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Case for the Defence: By nature, m’Lord, Mr Froome is incredibly stubborn. He had a plan in his head; he felt it was a good plan. He was going to see it through. When the plan succeeded, all would see the beauty of his thinking.
Case for the Prosecution: Mr Wiggins or the agents thereof had retained the services of Mr Froome to do a specific job of adventuring. At a time when he could not be sure of Mr Wiggins’s good health or spirits, Mr Froome chose to continue the adventure on his own thus causing physical and psychological damage to Mr Wiggins and spoiling everything.
Moreover Mr Froome had with some impertinence told Mr Wiggins what to do. Mr Wiggins had subsequently been brought ‘close to the edge’.
I could see the point. Brad was a cycling track star who had been absorbed into road racing at a high level. He had never really been given orders in the way a domestique gets given orders. He was officer class, not enlisted.
His experience was that he just said ‘faster’ or ‘slower’ and the world around him went faster or slower.
Even in team meetings he would never pipe up and say, ‘Okay, guys, this is what we are going to do today.’ That job would be done for him. On the road he would supervise the implementation. Faster. Slower.
I knew there would be a reaction. Everybody had seen me go and what I had hoped would happen behind me hadn’t happened.
After crossing the line, the inquisition began. I was mobbed by a swarm of journalists.
‘Could you have won today?’
‘What happened out there?’
‘Were you pulled back there by the team?’
I gave my explanation.
I had thought I would try to gain some time back today. I thought Bradley was in a good place. He obviously wasn’t. As soon as I heard that, I waited for him and brought him all the way to the finish.
The good lieutenant. No big deal.
A couple of journalists really pushed the point.
‘But you could have won today, couldn’t you?’
‘You could have taken the leader’s jersey today, how do you feel about that?’
I just responded along the party line. ‘I know I’m here to do a job for Brad and he’s the leader and I’m here to do a job, end of story.’
I never tried to say that wanting to win should not be such a bad thing.
Brad, though, was clearly rattled. He told journalists it was just a mix-up: Sean had said, ‘Slow, slow, slow,’ but because of crowd noise Chris thought he said, ‘Go, go, go.’ One of those things.
Sean Yates wasn’t in the loop. He said I had pissed him off.
Going back to the hotel I knew there would be more to come.
The hotel was right by the finish; I could have done with a bus journey. When I got back some of the guys were finishing their warm-downs in an abandoned room on the ground floor.
Mario Pafundi came across and spoke a few words to me. Typical Mario. ‘No problems, no problems. All good.’
No one came over and said, ‘Christ, what the hell were you doing out there, Froomey?’
I warmed down as normal, went upstairs and showered. I then waited for Richie to finish on the massage table and made a few calls. I wondered if clouds were gathering.
My mind rewound the tape to the point where I had suggested before the stage that I might be allowed to attack. Sean Yates had made a point of saying, ‘Uh, listen, Froomey, we know you want to attack but …’
We had agreed that Brad would be taken to the last kilometre or so. I had asked what was the difference if Brad was safe with 5 kilometres to go: ‘If the opportunity presents itself, can I not go with 5 or 6 kilometres to go when the road is still hard, before it flattens out?’
In my mind was the fact that if I could only go with 500 metres left I could only reclaim a fraction of my lost minute and 25 seconds. Attacking that late was basically not attacking at all.
Sean had come back at me saying, ‘Well, no, we’re here to do this job. No, you’re not going to attack far out.’
I went to Sean again about it and made the point again. ‘I really want to attack today. I’m feeling fresh and I can definitely get back some of the time that I’ve lost. I need to get a good buffer over Cadel and Nibali so that if something does happen to Brad, I can take over with no problems.’
A little while later, Dave had called me to the back of the bus.
‘Froomey, come in here a minute.’
Dave was disturbed. The tone in his voice was agitated. When he is worried his eyes get bigger than normal. They were like two planets now.
‘Froomey, all this talk of attacking is beginning to unsettle people now and we’re going to fall off track if we’re not careful …’ He made a gesture with his hands to suggest this sort of togetherness of the team. He was like an upset vicar. He was almost shaking at this point.
Okay, I said to myself, he’s bothered now. Brad must be upset. That makes Sean upset.
I said to him, ‘Dave, this isn’t what we talked about. I was told I was going to have freedom in this Tour to go for it on the climbs. These are not the conditions under which I stayed at Sky.’
I’d called Michelle earlier that morning and said, ‘Please go through my contract and just check exactly what the wording says. I’m going to need to remind Dave of that today. I’m going to tell him that I have every right to attack on this climb at the end of the stage. I feel fresh. I can do this.’
Dave just said, ‘Look, this is causing a lot of agitation. A lot. Brad is up there stressing. Sean is just, well, he doesn’t know what you’re going to do. We need you to say you’re going to go along with this.’
I said, ‘Listen, I’m not going to do anything stupid, but I want to go for it today without jeopardizing this Tour. I’m not going to throw it away but if there’s an opportunity and Brad is on the wheels and he’s safe, then there’s no reason why I shouldn’t go for it.’
Dave immediately said, ‘Well, what if he punctures when you’ve already gone?’
‘Seriously, what are the chances? In any case, he has almost two minutes’ advantage.’
‘No, no, no, Froomey. That’s too much chance, that’s too much risk.’
We had a silly, worst-case-scenario discussion but it was settled in my head that they felt my desire to get that minute and 25 seconds back might put me in a position where it threatened Brad. Then I might turn rogue. They would hav
e to control the uncontrollable. This scenario had never been in any of the PowerPoint planning presentations.
I had got my stuff for the stage and left for the start line. We were into the stage and I remember all day just feeling so at ease on the wheels, thinking that I was really fresh, and felt really good. Why not?
Anyway, that was in the morning. This was now. Aftermath time.
When I got to massage, David Rozman, our soigneur, looked at me and smiled – he was half pleased and half disapproving. I knew what he was thinking: you did the first part, but not the second part. By the time I got to dinner the guys had finished eating. I sat down at the table on my own.
Sean came along and sat down next to me. He gave a little laugh and just said, ‘Eh, Froomey, what are we going to do with you?’
‘What, Sean? I did exactly what was asked.’
‘Well, no you didn’t. You attacked, didn’t you?’
‘I did, but look at how the race unfolded. It was playing into our hands perfectly: Nibali had attacked twice, he was tired and I got Brad back to Nibali. I brought Nibali back twice, and I’d dropped Cadel. We were in a perfect position. I really thought Brad would have been able to stay with his group without any issues. As soon as I heard that he hadn’t, I waited. So what’s the problem, Sean?’
I said all this without aggression, more as if I were asking the question from a position of ignorance and innocence.
Sean conceded that he could see where I was coming from but insisted that I had still disobeyed the orders that I’d been given on the bus. But I’d never fully bought into what we said on the bus and he knew that because I had challenged it. There was nothing really left to say.
Then Sean added, ‘I think Dave wants to have a chat with you.’
I also explained to Sean that there were probably things he didn’t know about, in the sense that Dave had promised me certain things; that I could go for this Tour and ride for myself. Or at least try to ride GC without being held back. I told him that those were the conditions under which I stayed at this team, things which had been written into my contract. I was just filling him in. We weren’t being aggressive. He had been testing the waters; I was explaining the tides.
The tides were choppy on Twitter around then too. Cath Wiggins had tweeted a note of warm praise to Mick Rogers and Richie for their ‘selfless effort’ and ‘true professionalism’. It wasn’t the character limit on Twitter that prevented her adding the words ‘Chris Froome’.
Michelle had fired back more economically with one word: ‘Typical.’ Then she had come back with an expansion about being ‘beyond disappointed’. ‘If you want loyalty, get a Froome dog – a quality I value although being taken advantage of by others.’
Later, Dave dropped me a message: ‘Come up to my room.’
When I got there, Dave and Tim Kerrison were waiting.
‘Okay, Froomey, tell us what’s going on. What’s happening, what’s troubling you?’
It was funny. He had called the meeting. He obviously had something he wanted to say, but I went straight into my side of things.
‘Listen, Dave, this is not what we had agreed at the end of last year …’
I went over all that I thought had been agreed and asked what had changed and why.
Dave said exactly what Sean had been saying. Brad was now in yellow. We only had one mountaintop finish to go and one time trial from today onwards. At the moment, standing right where we were in GC, Brad had the better chance of winning. So now we were all going to go one hundred per cent behind that.
My argument was just as blunt. What happens if – as we all remember seeing on the last two Grand Tours that Brad has done – he fades in the last week, or he crashes or something goes wrong? What if one of those things happens and I’m still too far off Nibali to be able to catch up again?
Dave, the man with a plan for all occasions, said that it was wrong to speak now in ‘what ifs’. These were the facts. We had to work with the facts.
So we talked facts. Day one, I punctured. No contingency plan. Fact.
Dave immediately apologized for that oversight. It was a mistake. He was sincere but the point was made. There had been promises made and yet from the puncture to the special lightweight wheels and skewers, which Brad was using exclusively, all had been geared towards Brad. I had thought this was the team that didn’t do oversights.
Dave said to me, ‘Brad wants to go home, he’s ready to pack his bags and leave the race altogether.’
I remember thinking, so it’s okay for him to leave and not give anybody else a hand? If he leaves, will I have to carry his bags? My point was that we were at the Tour. How many chances was I going to get in my career? I just wanted what was agreed upon. I wasn’t staging a coup; I was riding a race.
We talked for probably half an hour about where the team was and how it basically came down to the point that right here, right now, I was nowhere near being in as strong a position as Brad.
I had to accept that.
We talked through the different scenarios. If I were to attack, and Nibali came with me, and we both got to the line together, I would be in the yellow jersey. But if, in that position, I then punctured with 2 kilometres to go, or if something else were to happen to me in the last couple of kilometres, I’d lose time to Nibali, then Brad and I would both have lost the yellow jersey.
That was a whole pile of ‘what ifs’ from Dave, but I could see it from his point of view. I saw the big picture but I still felt let down about the promises I had been made.
The next morning, we got on to the bus and we all went to the back section and closed the frosted-glass doors. There was Brad, Sean Yates, Dave and myself. Tim too, I think.
I felt quite betrayed by Sean Yates. He took the much harder line and basically began reprimanding me for what had happened the day before.
‘You went against the plan; you’ve rocked the boat, and you can’t do that again. This is where we are in the race; you’re not to jeopardize that.’
When we had spoken the night before he wasn’t at all like this. I felt like he’d almost been given orders to perform a punishment shooting in front of Brad.
I turned straight to Brad and said to him, ‘Listen, if you’ve got a problem with me, come straight to me, don’t go round to other people and make the problem worse. Come speak to me and we can sort it out. But it doesn’t help if you go telling Sean, telling Dave, telling everyone else what problem you’ve got or why you’re unhappy. Speak to me about it.’
He sort of nodded and muttered a few words. I suspected that this may have been Sean and Dave’s way of placating Brad. Brad would never do it himself. It was not in his nature. You didn’t really expect to have a conversation with him, especially at the Tour where he was under all the pressure and the stress. We rode around him and his moods like he was a traffic island.
I went back to the team area on the bus feeling that whatever there had been between myself and Sean was gone and that I wasn’t going to be able to go for a mountaintop finish, even though Brad was always going to secure his victory in the time trial on the second-to-last day. But I liked Sean, regardless of that. I’ve got a lot of respect for him as a bike rider, and as a director I think he did a really good job. It was just on a personal level that I felt a bit disappointed. I thought he was bigger than acting out that little performance.
That day, as the media inflated the whole La Toussuire episode into ‘Shoot-out at the OK Corral’ we rode a long, dullish stage. We rode that day still thinking about the day before. I hardly remember a thing about the stage.
The people closest to me were all saying the same thing: don’t let this pull you down. Well done, keep plugging away at it. They would have been disappointed in the way that I had been held back but they knew that I wasn’t the type of person to throw in the towel.
We had four stages to ride between La Toussuire and the second rest day of the Tour at Pau. I slept very little, on those days or on the rest
day. I would lie awake for hours. I’d hear Richie nod off and I’d just be lying there thinking about all the different things going on in my mind. How could I ride differently? How could I stand up for myself without jeopardizing the position that Brad was in? I began wondering if I’d been bought off, if I had just been signed by the team in order to neutralize me. If I was riding for Garmin in this Tour and threatening Brad, questions would have been asked.
I wondered what options I had. Every single ‘what if’ ran through my mind.
If we got to Paris and Brad won, did that lay an even stronger claim for him to come back and defend the title next year? Was I just fooling myself here? How did this work? Where was I going to fit in in the long term?
These guys were really not taking me seriously. Not only might I not get the chance to win the Tour in 2013, I might not get the opportunity to even try.
I wanted to know what my potential was. I wanted to go as hard as I could in the mountains until I blew! I wanted to expend all my energy and have to crawl to the finish line one day. I wanted days when, instead of standing, I would have to sit down in the shower. I wanted to know how far I could go. That is a fundamental of sport, mining the talent, loving the raw ability to go mano-a-mano against somebody doing the same.
I worried about how the team were reacting. The guys picked up on everything. Did they think I was the baddie here? I got a lot of reassurance from Richie. He was the same with me all the way through, saying, ‘Just do what you need to do.’ He didn’t need to say any more.
Those nights I would be awake until 4.00 a.m., usually texting Michelle. Texting. Texting. Texting.
At midnight she’d say, ‘Okay, go to sleep now, you’ve got a race tomorrow.’
An hour or so later I’d send a message: ‘I really can’t sleep, I’m just lying here, are you still up?’ And she’d get up and keep me company. We’d try to talk about other things but always we came back to the race and what was going on behind the scenes.