The Climb: The Autobiography

by Chris Froome

  As I rode towards the finish I wondered if Cav was up ahead about to win gold. We’d get to the finish and there’d be a huge celebration …

  It was quite a disappointment when I got back to the small tent at the finish to see everyone crestfallen. We had been talked up so much. The Kazakh, Alexandre Vinokourov, had the gold we had hoped to help Cav win.

  The day hurt. Afterwards I saw a lot of negative comments on social media. People thought I was just saving my legs for the time trial and was not really interested in the road race. I thought, ‘Ah, if only you guys knew that I actually hadn’t gone this hard in all of the Tour. Today I went much deeper than that!’

  Hard times. And four days till the time trial.

  When I left the Kenyan cycling world there was both the sadness of farewell and the lightness of feeling I was doing the right thing.

  Mum and my brothers, but especially Mum, had strong reservations.

  For Mum, the decision was tied to emotion – she felt truly Kenyan. I think she had even traded in her British passport for a Kenyan one so that she could work properly without having to apply for visas. She definitely had a Kenyan ID in her purse and Kenyan identity in her heart.

  Mum always said to me, ‘No, don’t change from being Kenyan, you’re Kenyan, you were born here.’ She was very proud of me representing Kenya and she wanted me to keep riding for the country I grew up in.

  I wish it had been that simple.

  I remember explaining to her time and time again, ‘Mum, it’s just not that easy.’

  I knew that by keeping my Kenyan passport I was causing more harm than good for Kinjah and the rest of the guys who were trying to make it from a more difficult starting point in life than I had; I was being used as a political weapon against them. The Kenyan Cycling Federation stopped giving Kinjah and the rest of the riders around him a licence to race in 2006.

  As long as I was performing under a Kenyan licence it was making the Kenyan Federation and Julius Mwangi look like they were active. They could pretend they were doing something to develop riders in the sport. They weren’t. For me to be their poster boy was basically hurting the riders, the guys like Kinjah who weren’t getting any kind of support.

  I knew too that compared to every other Kenyan that I’d raced with I’d had a very different journey. I’d had a much more privileged upbringing than they’d had. I grew up in a home that had running water and electricity. I loved every minute I spent with Kinjah and the guys. We ate the same food, slept in the same room, did the same things and rode the same bikes. I was one of them and it was a great, great thing in my life, but the difference which I was always conscious of was that I was staying with them; they were actually living there. In that sense, I didn’t feel that I was really a Kenyan cyclist.

  The road out for me was just a cycle home to Karen. The road out for Kinjah and my friends was a long, hard climb. When the time came I went to a good school in South Africa and I could afford better bikes. I could access different information and I could get myself to Salzburg. Kinjah and my old riding partners had none of those things.

  They deserved opportunities and I didn’t think it was fair that I was taking up one of the spots on Kenyan teams. I might as well have sat in Kinjah’s hut every day and eaten all the food.

  I talked to Kinjah about the switch and he was actually quite happy. In terms of career progression, he felt that it was going to be the best thing I could do. And in terms of helping his cause it was the best thing also because the Federation had started pointing to me saying, ‘Chris is doing this. Chris is doing that. Chris is one of the guys we’ve developed.’

  I had always been self-conscious and quietly guilty about that bit of comparative privilege in my upbringing; I had it easier than my fellow Simbaz did. It was unspoken among us but we all knew it. Deep down it sat poorly with me to take the easy road out and to represent Kenya. In doing so, as well as eating up resources I was going along with the pretence that cycling was being carefully cultivated.

  I love Kenya but sometimes the best you can do for somebody you love is to leave them be and let them grow. Nobody will be prouder than me when a true Kenyan rider wins a stage on the Tour or stands on a World Championship podium with the anthem playing. Then Kenyan cycling will have travelled the road that Kinjah and the guys carved and paved. Whatever I can do for them to make that day come quicker, I will do, in gratitude for all I was given.

  I think once Mum understood those elements of my choice she was better with it but I know she did feel sad that I wasn’t representing Kenya any more. She’d been really proud of that and she didn’t think that I would ever really feature within the British system.

  She never got to see me ride the Tour de France. And here I was, four years later, at the Olympic Games in London, riding for Team GB. Bad days and good.

  Olympic Time Trial

  I’d had two decent time trials in the past month on the Tour, coming second to Brad on both of them. I thought I was obviously in good shape, but I couldn’t expect to be anywhere near the likes of Fabian Cancellara or Tony Martin; I would be riding for 4th place.

  Brad and I were the only two riders who had stayed on for the time trial – Mod Father and Tintin in the same story again.

  We had the same sort of build-up to the time trial that we’d had for the road race: everything was done properly and we fell into our old pattern. Only one difference: I was using my standard team-issue TT bike. Brad was on a custom bike commissioned by UK Sport. When our paths crossed we swapped cordial hellos. We ate in near silence. We did our own thing.

  After the Tour, I realized that Brad had never really said thank you. He’d never actually shaken my hand and said, ‘Listen, Chris, thanks for all you did in the Tour, the sacrifices you made and everything.’ I almost thought that in those few days in Foxhills it was coming. I kept on expecting it, thinking, ‘Okay, maybe tomorrow morning he’ll say it,’ or, ‘He’ll have reflected a little bit on the Tour by now.’ I found it really strange that it just never came.

  I started the time trial thinking, ‘Right, I’m feeling good here. I’m pushing on, pushing on.’ It was a flat course and I began at quite a good pace. I held on to it. I can remember getting closer and closer to the end, and just when I was feeling as if I were running out of steam, I heard Rod on the radio saying how I was up on Cancellara, and I was sitting in 3rd place … I wasn’t far off Tony Martin.

  That news blew me away. It had gone pretty well and if I could keep pushing on there was even a chance that I could beat Tony. My legs were feeling completely full of lactate, and were so spent, but I thought to myself, ‘The only thing I can do now is just stare at the SRM box; stare at the box and use that to motivate me. Get the numbers up to where I want to be. Ignore those legs.’

  I got to the low to mid 400s; got that wattage out. I kept staring at the box and counting down the kilometres towards the finish. Whenever there was a corner, and every time there was a bit of a bend in the road, I’d steal as much recovery as possible. Two seconds of not pedalling, through the corner – bliss!

  And then I would punish myself. ‘Okay, now you’ve had your break, you can carry on pushing those 400s again. I don’t want to see that number below 400 again.’

  I hovered between 400 and 440. Those figures indexed my mood: the higher the number, the happier I felt. The lower it went, the more I fought with myself.

  Close to 400ish, where I was not so happy, I’d think, ‘At least it’s not a long way off; at least I can hold it here. This is sustainable.’

  In one breath I was thinking, ‘Fantastic, I’m looking like I’m gonna get a podium here.’ In the next breath I was thinking, ‘I could make a silver if I catch Tony Martin.’ So I tried to focus on Tony; I pictured myself closing in on him. Maybe he’d started fast and as I got closer to the end I’d hear the time gaps coming down; maybe he was struggling a bit.

  It never happened.

  Bronze.

  For a short whi
le I’d dreamed of silver, but before the race I’d almost written off being on the podium at all. It took a while now to absorb the achievement: this was different to 3rd in any other race. This was the Olympics. It was an amazing feeling.

  In a funny way it felt much better than the Tour podium. The Tour podium felt staged and very false to me for some reason. At the Olympics, on the other hand, it really felt like a privilege just to be standing up there. Even though Brad and I had our differences, or whatever, I did feel an unusual amount of pride that we were there, the two of us, 1st and 3rd, both on the podium, in front of a home crowd.

  It was a big deal; a good and happy ending.

  The Tour gave way to the Olympics which quickly gave way to the Vuelta, which meant three weeks in the Spanish heat. We hadn’t done any proper recces of the key stages but it was a course that looked inviting, with eight mountain stages and a lot of mountaintop finishes. I didn’t know what was left in my tank but I was getting my chance to be the team leader at a Grand Tour.

  The race was likely to be dominated by home headliners: Juanjo Cobo was going for back-to-back home wins, Alberto Contador was back in the peloton of a Grand Tour after his ban, and Alejandro Valverde and Joaquim Rodríguez were also in the mix.

  Significant chunks of those days were spent in their company. On stage three, for instance, Valverde, Rodríguez and I chased Contador down half a dozen times on a single mountain.

  It was an interesting race but I could feel my energy slipping away early on. There was a mountaintop finish in Andorra where we had taken the race on and put all the riders in the team on the front. Richie, Sergio Henao and Rigoberto Uràn had made a strong pace on the final climb as this was the day I planned to ride away from the three main Spanish riders.

  With 4 or 5 kilometres left, I hit the front and tried to go. I went but Contador stayed on my wheel. After pulling for a few minutes I signalled for him to come through and give me a hand. He wasn’t interested; he just looked down and shook his head.

  We almost came to a standstill, and Rodríguez and Valverde came back to us. I thought to myself that these guys were a lot more punchy than me on the climbs. It would be in my interest now to try to keep the pace relatively constant, and not to let them have too much recovery.

  So, stupidly, I got on the front and carried on pulling at a good pace. In the last kilometre they all left me for dead and took 20 to 30 seconds out of me.

  There was a time trial that I had ringed in red as important. I came 3rd, some 39 seconds back. Then, on another day in the mountains, Rodríguez took 2 minutes 40 seconds out of me. I was getting used to seeing the backs of the three Spaniards rolling away from me.

  But I kept going. I know now that to do the Tour and the Vuelta you need a break in between and then maybe three weeks of clear, dedicated training for the Vuelta. Back then I just kept on going to the well every day.

  I had come 2nd in the Tour, I had won a bronze medal at the Olympics and now I’d come 4th in the Vuelta. If I had been offered that at the beginning of the year I would have taken it, for sure.

  Bobby said to me that what I had endured at the Vuelta impressed him more than anything I’d done at the Tour.

  I was persuaded that it had been ideal preparation for the World Championships, and with my head still echoing with the excitement of the Olympics, I went. However, I rode about 120 kilometres and it wasn’t to be. My legs retired of their own accord.

  I longed for a few weeks off; days when I might take the bike out to ride for an hour and then meet somebody for coffee. But there were not many of those days and 2013 was already beckoning. I needed to recharge first though.

  On the last weekend in October the team were to gather in London. Brad was staging something called a ‘Yellow Ball’ to mark his win in the Tour. Then the team were to meet for a debriefing session about the season.

  I didn’t get an invitation to the Yellow Ball. I would also be left out of a bonus payment from Brad to all the riders that had ridden for him as a token of his appreciation. These were small things but it seemed that Brad was brooding ever more darkly on the Tour and how he saw my role in it.

  As for the debriefing, the whole atmosphere of celebration which it had seemed to promise was sucked away by a new undercurrent. The team was going to purge some staff members as part of their ongoing zero-tolerance policy towards doping.

  Staff members were being asked to come clean on any past involvement with doping. Who was going to own up? What did it mean for the people who owned up?

  I can remember Bobby coming into my room and talking to me. He had obviously made the decision to tell the truth about his own past. He said, ‘I’m going to go in there and I’m going to tell them that what I did was take EPO …’

  He said he felt it was his responsibility to tell the team, and that he didn’t want any negative association to rebound on myself or Richie. We knew what he was saying: he was our coach and, because he had taken EPO, people would think that he might be advising us to do the same. He said this wasn’t fair on us. He was going to tell the truth because he feared it would come out sooner or later and the damage would be bigger. He preferred for it to come from him.

  It was very clear to Bobby that if he did own up it would be pretty much the end of him. He went into the room knowing that. Of course, knowing something will happen in advance doesn’t stop you from being disappointed when it does.

  To add insult to injury for Bobby, when we went out for a last evening, he lost his jacket and his wallet. He had no cash, no credit cards, no job.

  When we worked together, Bobby had a great deal of passion for what he did and for dealing with people. This came through in the way that he’d volunteer to come and follow us training to watch the efforts that we were doing. Or the fact that I’d upload a training file and he’d be on the phone five minutes later talking about it, and we might talk for an hour, or even two.

  As an end to a big year for Team Sky; and, for me personally, it all seemed oddly disappointing but understandable.

  I went back to Africa to get rested up for 2013.

  25

  On one of those faraway, forever-ago Christmases with Mum and my brothers, this particular one at Kilifi, a coastal town 55 kilometres miles north of Mombasa, I was a seventeen-year-old cycling dreamer without his bike. So on Christmas morning, thinking about the food that would come my way later in the day, I decided on some pre-emptive exercise: a run on the beach, the sun on my face and the Indian Ocean for company.

  I’d gone about 3 kilometres, bounding along and happy, when it seemed like I’d stubbed my foot. But it was not your normal stub moment; it was more like the ground had grabbed me and wasn’t letting go. I looked down and saw that a pencil-sized harpoon arrow had gone into my foot.

  The difficulty was that while the arrowhead of the harpoon had torpedoed into my flesh, the other end was buried deep in the hard sand. I was stuck. ‘On the first day of Christmas my true love said to me … what in the name of the Lord are you going to do?’ What was strange was the absence of any pain. I didn’t feel the harpoon go in and now that it was there, it didn’t hurt. So I sat down and tried to prise it free.

  Moving it at the point where it had entered, I could see the tip of the harpoon shifting under my skin much further up, towards the ankle. It had gone four or five inches into my foot. This was quite serious.

  A guy with dreadlocks came walking towards me.

  ‘Merry Christmas,’ were not my first words.

  My eyes directed him to the situation.

  He looked at the harpoon, at my foot, and then at me.

  ‘Oh, you’ve got a bit of a problem there.’

  I moved the harpoon to show him how it had gone into my foot.

  ‘That’s not good.’

  He tried to pull my foot free but it was too painful – there was a barb near the sharp point that had wedged into my flesh; the weapon had been designed to enter but not exit. He then tried to get the other e
nd of the harpoon out of the sand. By bending it this way and that he eventually snapped it off.

  It was rusty and old. Part of the broken harpoon was still poking out of the sand, but four or five inches of it were still in my foot, with another three inches sticking out from between my toes. Putting my arm round the shoulder of my new dreadlocked friend, I hobbled up the beach to a nearby hotel.

  From there I called the rented house my family were staying in. My mother and my cousin, Sarah, came for me in the car. The hotel receptionist said the options were the public hospital in Mombasa – more than an hour away – or a local clinic. Not fancying the one-hour drive, we turned up at the local clinic, a smallish tin establishment not dissimilar to Kinjah’s place at Kikuyu, where we found a cheerful guy in his mid sixties, in a white doctor’s coat.

  He sat me on a wooden bench and he moved the embedded harpoon, gently at first. He then tried to yank it out, but it wasn’t budging. My mother and he agreed that forcing it out could do a lot of damage, probably leaving rusty chips inside, and potentially leading to infection and further complications.

  ‘We’re going to have to open it up,’ said the man who I was guessing was a doctor. ‘I will take out the harpoon and clean up everything that’s inside.’

  He injected me with what I imagined was a local anaesthetic. The razor blade wasn’t quite what I had expected but it sure sliced open the sole of my foot. I don’t know that the anaesthetic had much effect because after he’d opened up my foot it became really painful.

  The amount of blood shocked me. It gathered in a small puddle on the bench and then flowed like a red waterfall on to the floor. That was about the time my cousin Sarah retreated from the room. I noticed the doctor was shaking a little and sweating profusely. He seemed worried.

  ‘I hope we haven’t cut too many nerves here,’ he said, which wasn’t reassuring. My mum looked over his shoulder. With the foot now opened up, he was able to free the harpoon.

  Taking it out was the easy bit. Sealing the wound was much harder. He didn’t have any surgical suture and the needle kept bending as he pushed it through my skin. I think it was a standard sewing needle rather than a surgical one, and instead of suture he had to use fishing line.