by Chris Froome
Within the team, it was seen differently. He had just gone back on everything that had been agreed beforehand; things that had been said and understood for a long time. On the second rest day of the 2012 Tour he had taken me aside when we were out on a recovery ride near Pau. His words were: ‘Listen, Froomey, don’t worry, I’ll be back here next year to help you.’
He had told me that my chance would come, and that he would be pulling as hard as he could for me. He’d confirmed that as recently as in Mallorca in January when he told the media he was focusing on the Giro but going to the Tour ‘to help Chris’.
Now it all seemed pretty hollow. Brad had issued a gilt-edged invitation to the media. Sir Bradley Wiggins cordially invites you to Wiggins vs Froome, a duel to the death to be staged under a July sun …
There was a populist appeal to his argument. He was the Tour de France champion, the Olympic gold medallist, the mod god. A lot of people generally didn’t understand why he couldn’t just win another Tour de France as a matter of course.
I was confused; I didn’t know where all this had come from. It hadn’t been discussed with me and it hadn’t been talked about within the team.
This stuff at the press conference wasn’t glib. It wasn’t a voluble man letting his mouth run away from his brain. Brad is bright, he’s articulate. He doesn’t often open his mouth just to make small talk.
In Pau that day in 2012 he asked me just to get him through that last week and he’d be here in 2013 to help me. It was very powerful to hear him say that; I knew it wasn’t easy for him. For the rest of that last week I didn’t leave his side. I believed him.
I tried to get hold of Dave. No luck. I got Chris Haynes, our head of media, on the line.
‘Listen, Chris, what is going on there? Was this in the messaging plan that was given through the team?’ Whenever we do a media day we get briefed beforehand on key messages, things that the team would like us to put forward.
Chris didn’t see that anything was out of place.
‘No, things went smoothly and it all went according to plan …’
He wasn’t the man I needed to speak to. Either that or I was completely out of the loop and had been deluding myself all year. To fend off the media I issued a statement via email saying that as far as I was aware nothing had changed from the team’s side; I was going to the Tour de France as leader.
I sent a copy to Dave’s office adding a note that this message would be much stronger if it came from the team. The subtext was: or is Brad now bigger than the team?
I spoke to Dave the next day. He said he hadn’t seen Brad’s statement. He claimed that none of it had been discussed with him but he knew that Brad was under a lot of scrutiny. People couldn’t understand why he wasn’t defending his Tour title. He was just saving face.
I was confident in what Dave said. I believed that it wasn’t a conspiracy within the team. I got ready for another two-week stint in Tenerife. It was 30 April. The bomb was defused but the clock kept ticking. Shortly afterwards, Dave issued a statement:
‘Given Chris’s step up in performances this year, our plan, as it has been since January, is to have him lead the Tour de France team.’
Hallelujah.
In Tenerife on top of our old volcano the internet seldom works. The rooms have small prison-cell TV sets that only trade in Spanish. There is nothing interesting to do and no distraction. We rely on each other for entertainment and, knowing just how entertaining we all are, we take the precaution of bringing box sets of television series.
For those two weeks we were all watching Dexter, a very dark comedy series about a serial killer. We thought it was a comedy anyway. The main character is basically a forensic analyst. He’s the good guy in the programme, but there’s a slight catch in that he moonlights as a serial killer. To his credit he only kills murderers and people who have slipped through the cracks in the pavement of the legal system …
We all enjoy Dexter. The thing was, Dexter himself looked very like … well, very much like Tim Kerrison. It just seemed too perfect that this guy was the sort of very dry laboratory analyst who lived his life through numbers and was really methodical about everything.
Poor Tim. By day he was coming up with tortures which he might inflict on us out on the mountain. Killing us softly with his stats. Then in the evening he was helping us bond by appearing to us in the guise of a fictional serial killer.
Apart from that we had little or no distraction. If it was somebody’s birthday we had a small celebration. My own birthday is 20 May. Normally we would take the chance to go to a restaurant in Villaflor, a good half-hour drive down the mountain. We might run wild and sinful by allowing ourselves to eat something different. We might even have a few sips of wine. Decadence. But on 20 May we were flying home so there was no chance of an evening celebration. That morning, instead, we had a surprise. Knowing my weakness for pancakes, Michelle had contacted the soigneurs to see if they could get the kitchen staff to make some pancakes for breakfast. The waiters brought out a big platter of pancakes for us all. It was really nice and something different.
The last step before the Tour was the Critérium du Dauphiné starting on 2 June.
When we planned the season I knew that Brad would be at the Giro. But he had won the Dauphiné for the last two years and he would haunt us, although I didn’t know how.
Brad had pulled out of the heavily touted Giro campaign after twelve days, laid low with a chest infection. He was also having a little trouble with his knee. A few days later he announced that he was in no condition to ride the Tour.
I knew the team hadn’t just dodged a bullet; we had ducked a cannonball. No matter what was said or how much we had deferred to each other in public, the first weeks of the Tour would have been played as Froome against Wiggins. The gangly Kenyan-born Brit against loveably gruff mod geezer.
The media would have had fun and the Tour would have had its storyline, but the pressure could have cracked the team. Deciding where to sit at breakfast might have become a political decision.
Instead we went into the Dauphiné with a sense of relief. On a personal level it was a tough break for Brad and after the year he had enjoyed in 2012 the disintegration of 2013 seemed cruel. On a professional level it meant getting on with what had to be done. Life: it goes on.
The Dauphiné didn’t have a mountaintop finish till stage five, which ended on the massive Valmorel. Everything came together for us that day. Contador attacked late but not convincingly after we had worked well all day pushing a high pace. He was reeled in and I accelerated away to take the stage win and the yellow jersey.
The next day we even got up early and did a recce of stage seventeen of the Tour, the time trial to Chorges. We had left another marker down on top of another mountain. There were three stages left, but the race was basically over. In the mist and rain to Risoul on the Sunday we applied the lessons we had learned in the spring and didn’t respond instantly when Contador made his big attack. We upped our pace and waited for the race to come to us.
The Dauphiné finished with Richie and I on the top two steps of the podium. We had eight of the nine guys who would ride the Tour with us at the Dauphiné. Kosta was the exception.
We went to the French Alps for our final preparations. Our team. My team.
28
2013: The Tour de France
Stage One: Saturday 29 June, Porto-Vecchio to Bastia, 213 kilometres
Here we were.
I had caught a plane to Corsica on Wednesday. The ferry ride would have been more spectacular but it takes around three hours to get here from Nice. No romance – I was going to work.
The usual pre-tour hoopla began: a medical, followed by a press conference, followed by a presentation. The team rode to the latter in a motorboat, with all of us trying to give deep, meaningful looks like Vikings arriving to pillage a new land.
As usual the media attention felt odd. Every person in the press conference room seemed to have at
least four cameras and we looked out into a wall of lenses, microphones and lights. If you scratched your nose, crinkled your face or looked up at the ceiling, the shutters whirred. So you looked blank and vacant. No Viking stuff here.
Nine of us would live and breathe together for the next three weeks: myself, Richie, Edvald Boasson Hagen (Eddie), Vasil Kiryienka (Kiri), Kanstantsin Siutsou (Kosta), David López, Ian Stannard (Yogi), Geraint ‘G’ Thomas and Pete Kennaugh.
From the Isle of Man to Belorussia, the Ngong Hills to Norway, Spain to Tasmania – some anthology of life stories for one team.
Over the next twenty-three days we would race twenty-one stages: two individual time trials, one team time trial, seven flat stages, five stages which were a bit hilly and six mountain stages. Four of the mountain stages would have summit finishes. For us, the Tour would probably be won or lost on those stages.
To paraphrase the golfers, ‘we sprint for show, we climb for dough’. And stage one was mostly for show.
We were rolling out of Porto-Vecchio for Le Grand Départ; our heads full of dreams and plans.
The day began with a gentle ride through the neutral zone. I always give myself a little task each morning when we’re rolling through the zone. Today I tried to get to the front of the race by the time we reached the official starting point, where race director Christian Prudhomme would wave the white flag.
I do this because I like to start at the front; I don’t like the idea that I have to catch up before we’ve even started. I began roughly halfway back in the bunch, slowly moving up the sides. I could feel everyone was slightly more nervous than usual, but then again, this was the start of the Tour. I felt confident though; I had my teammates around me as we went up towards the front.
Richie was just in front of me with Yogi. The three of us were moving up together when we got to a left-hand turn, which sort of doubled back on itself and then dropped downhill. Now the speed started picking up.
It was a slightly tricky turn, but nothing crazy. And we were only going about twenty kilometres an hour. But as the turn looped back on itself, the width on the outer side of the road narrowed.
The barriers that had been placed in the road squeezed the space on the corner, making it tighter than expected. Well, much tighter than I expected.
Richie made it round the barriers but only just. I didn’t. I couldn’t brake in time.
Going towards them, I was thinking, ‘Please let the barriers be plastic … if I hit them they’re going to just move a few metres and I’ll be able to unclip fast and carry on.’
Turns out they were concrete. I hit one and it didn’t budge a millimetre. The bike stopped dead and I went from being on the saddle to being half over the wall. I didn’t actually hit the ground, but draped myself there like a coat dropped on the back of a sofa.
For maximum indignity, one of my legs remained clipped into the bike. As it went down on to the ground, I dropped on to the wall and my other leg remained still attached to the left pedal.
I – a team leader in the Tour de France, on stage one, in the neutral zone, doing twenty kilometres an hour – had crashed into a concrete barrier.
I was dazed and grazed, and landed quite hard on the side of my leg and arm. There was a bit of blood, I’d got a dead leg and my pride was broken in about nine places. But if I had been shot full of bullet holes at that moment, I was still getting back on that bike.
This race wasn’t going to ride away from me before it had even started.
I’d fallen on the right side of the bike, which had the derailleur, the gears and all the mechanisms. Froome’s law. That would be the side I fell on. The derailleur had bent and I could see the damage straight away. So I called for a new bike on the radio and said I’d had a small crash.
There was silence on the line; then again, people make no noise when they roll their eyeballs.
Eventually Nico said, ‘Okay, we’re coming, Chris.’
Nico is pretty calm but I could pick up the concern in his voice. From an outside perspective I’m sure it would have looked like: FROOME CRASHES IN NEUTRALIZED ZONE! HOLD THE BACK PAGE …
Thankfully Gary Blem, our lead mechanic, was in the car and was on to it straight away. I got the spare bike.
The race also hadn’t gone too far ahead. When I caught up, the guys were all at the back waiting. Except Richie, who had been told to stay with the bunch.
Seeing the team hanging back, waiting for their leader, did nothing to diminish the embarrassment.
I’m sure a lot of people, including some of my rivals, would have enjoyed this, thinking that I was a nervous wreck. Sky had gone from having all their eggs in Brad’s basket to being led by a basket case: ‘If he can’t even make it through the neutral zone, he’s not going to make it off this island without having lost ten minutes … He might drown when we hit the coast!’ I felt there might be a Crash Froome Anecdote competition inaugurated in my memory: ‘He hit a commissaire. He rode over an old man. He ended up in a garden.’
More than anything it was my pride which was damaged. I responded with frantic nonchalance. Ultimately, I still felt relaxed in myself, and I began to laugh at it. This was typical for me. Last year it was the nose plugs …
I steadily moved through the group again. There were a few comments as I moved up, with guys saying, ‘Ah! Are you okay?’ with big grins on their faces. I tried to joke it off: ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah … just taken my stabilizers off … bit wobbly … still learning.’
However, when I thought about it later I got a sick feeling in my stomach. If I had been going a little bit faster, the spill could have been nasty; it really could have been the end of my Tour before it had begun. Who would trust me to lead again?
I was mightily thankful to have a bruise and a dead leg and nothing more.
Luckily the race laid on more embarrassment and controversy and by dinner time I was just a footnote. The Orica-GreenEdge team bus had got jammed under a gantry over the finish line. The organizers moved the finish forward by 3 kilometres and somebody eventually had to let the air out of the bus’s tyres for it to be freed. The finish was moved back again and then there was a mass crash. Contador took a tumble, as did G Thomas, who was shot like a human cannonball over his handlebars. He came back to earth with a bang; he thought his pelvis was broken.
Marcel Kittel won the sprint; Cav lost his shot at yellow when he had a crash near the finish.
Making a show of myself on the opening stage soon became old news.
Welcome to the Tour.
WINNER: MARCEL KITTEL
2: ALEXANDER KRISTOFF
41: CHRIS FROOME
(ALL RIDERS AWARDED THE SAME TIME.)
Stage Two: Sunday 30 June, Bastia to Ajaccio, 156 kilometres
Corsica is drenched in history. A lot had been said about this, the one-hundredth staging of the Tour de France taking place entirely within the nation’s borders. Even as we rode, people were worrying themselves about Corsican separatism, but I had no side to take in the discussion. I just knew it wouldn’t really feel like the Tour until we got back to the mainland, and what felt like France. But with the rocky landscape of Corsica set dramatically against the perfect blue sea, I was hardly itching to get out of there.
That day was all set up for the sprinters. We rode down to Ajaccio, the birthplace of Napoleon Bonaparte. Everybody started but we were worried about the health of G Thomas.
There was a modest climb thrown into the stage just to keep us interested. I needed to take my body for a test drive so I took off and went over the top ahead of the bunch. The bonus was being able to come down the other side without worrying about more chaos in Corsica. One spill on the tricky downhill could have scattered a lot of us all over the hillside. For a man yet to master riding slowly around concrete barriers it was best to play safe.
Having tweeted birthday wishes to Michelle in the morning my attack prompted speculation that I was attempting to win the stage as a romantic gesture. Alas, it wasn’t
to be.
RadioShack-Leopard’s Jan Bakelants won the stage ahead of Peter Sagan. I trundled home safe and happy in the peloton.
WINNER: JAN BAKELANTS
OVERALL GC 1: JAN BAKELANTS
2: PETER SAGAN +1SEC
18: CHRIS FROOME +1SEC
Stage Three: Monday 1 July, Ajaccio to Calvi, 145.5 kilometres
Up the west coast to Calvi. A mildly lumpy ride.
We didn’t have a good day and G was in agony. If he were a racehorse we would have him put down. He was Welsh though. He was surviving that too.
Two-thirds of the way along the road he appeared out of the blue beside myself and Richie at the front of the peloton.
‘Not dead yet, G?’ we asked.
‘Goooo on, boys,’ he roared and let us be. My old friend Daryl Impey performed a fine lead out to set the stage up for Simon Gerrans. A South African, setting up an Aussie, in Corsica. Who would have thought?
After the day’s stage, a lot of the guys in our team felt frustrated. We went over the last climb with only two or three in a front group of about ninety. They felt they needed to step it up; they hadn’t been in the right places when they needed to be. There was no sense of despair though; no self-doubt. Just an itch to get started properly – we had something to prove.
At the end of the day I was still on course. And so was Richie. We hadn’t been great, but we had been strong enough to keep everyone’s hope alive. If anything, Corsica – especially that day – was just a bit of a wake-up call. We were not sailing through this race; sacrifice and suffering were all that lay ahead.
WINNER: SIMON GERRANS
OVERALL GC 1: JAN BAKELANTS
2: JULIEN SIMON +1SEC
15: CHRIS FROOME +1SEC
Stage Four: Tuesday 2 July, Nice Team Time Trial, 25 kilometres