by Walsh, David
Head doctor Alan Farrell consults regularly with the doctors in South Africa who deal with Froome’s condition, and the team has no problem with the treatment taking place so far away from Europe because of the greater understanding of bilharzia in Africa. My feeling with this condition is that it’s a case of move along folks, there’s nothing to see here.
So. Imagine if Team Sky signed Chris Froome for his immense potential, if backroom members of Team Sky saw that potential even before there was a Team Sky. They didn’t hire him because he rode like a comical marionette. They didn’t hire him for the fun of inventing a whole whacky back story for you to swallow.
In fact, they pay him a huge amount of money so that they can enjoy his potential as it is realised. And they have spent many, many hours polishing the roughness off him, putting him together after crashes or naïve tactical errors, telling him not to ride when sick, poring over books to learn what exactly bilharzia is. Many, many hours.
If you were going to make up a story with which to fool the world, Chris Froome’s would have been too much trouble and demanded too much colour. You already have within the ranks Bradley Wiggins, with his long history on track and on road, his rough charm and huge likeability, his marketable face furniture and his salty tongue. He is story enough. And you had a team around Bradley in 2012 who could escort him to a Tour de France victory while reading magazines and making small talk as they rode.
Why would you want a Froome, a bean-sprout oddball with an English passport and an African heart? Why split your team into the Wiggos and the Froomeys, cycling’s Mods and Rockers? Why have two top dogs? Why, when you answered all the questions in 2012 about Wiggins, would you step up and beg the world’s indulgence because you have an even better yarn to spin this year?
In the house of Team Sky I have looked around. I have asked the questions. Done the journalism I came to do. Nobody has given me a secret handshake or password signifying membership of the Masonic Lodge of Supreme Wizard Murdoch. Nobody has slammed doors in my face. And I have concluded that Chris Froome exists within Team Sky because he is an almost unstoppable force, one of those freak talents which, against all the odds, somehow bubbles to the top.
A white, shy middle-class kid in a gentle suburb of Nairobi gets left to play with the black kids in the township? It’s almost too cinematic. He gets whipped away to South Africa for his schooling but goes back to Kenya every summer and every holiday. Back to Kenya and his bike and his friends. He learns Swahili. He gets chased by a hippo. He collects snakes and scorpions.
Bradley Wiggins used to say that winning the Tour de France doesn’t happen to kids from Kilburn. Getting to hear of the Tour de France doesn’t happen to kids in the township. But Froome is irrepressible. He turns up in Europe at a UCI meeting as the manager, administrator and sole competitor of the Kenyan team. He hustles. He crashes. He does stupid things. He loses one race by 1'25", having lost 1'20" of that time crashing.
Anytime he is in the last chance saloon he gives an exhibition of his derring-do. The main thing they had to teach him was to ride with a little less swash to his buckle.
He made it because nothing was going to stop him making it. He came late, very late; he saw, he learned, he conquered. He brought bilharzia with him and it almost sent him home again. His condition and the way people respond to it are almost emblematic of his whole story.
And here he is on the podium, still in yellow at the end of Stage Thirteen. Today he has looked human, and in doing so we have seen the determination and the intelligence which have underscored his flashier performances. It’s no great stretch to imagine that those qualities have informed his long journey from the township to here.
This evening our home is Hotel du Pont Neuf at the village of Le Veurdre in the Auvergne. At the last count 544 people lived in this village and there is no indication that much has changed since. There are approximately sixty tourists tonight, thirty from Sky and thirty from Saxo. If there was one evening on the Tour that Sky doesn’t want Saxos for company, this is it.
In the restaurant at the Pont Neuf, Froome and Richie Porte are shooting the breeze with Geraint Thomas who is complaining about the lack of support from other riders when the Saxos went. ‘I went to Dan Martin [Garmin] and said, “You know it’s your Tour as well,” but he didn’t want to work. None of them did.’
Only 68 seconds were lost but the cleverness of Saxo’s manoeuvre and Sky’s failure to cover it sent ripples of excitement skipping across the surface of the race. ‘I was there when it went,’ Thomas is saying, ‘but I was caught in a bad position, blocked in.’
Froome listens and nods his agreement, his calmness as unwavering as the Tour is unrelenting. While he listens to Thomas, the last of the Saxo riders walk past. They are taking their meals in an extension to the restaurant, separated by a thin partition.
Beyond the divide, the Saxo boys are in fine fettle. Staff at one end of the table, riders at the other end. In this little partitioned extension to the restaurant, Sky’s staff take their evening meal, seeing all but pretending not to notice. Service is slow, partially because so many of the Saxo group must be served first. Among Sky’s staffers, the mood is subdued. Each speaks to the man alongside, quiet conversations that are normal when it’s been a tough day at the office. Then Saxo’s riders raise and touch their glasses, Alberto Contador says something and they all drink.
A toast to their success earlier in the day.
The mood among Sky’s carers and mechanics isn’t brightened by this.
And the ultra-slow service isn’t helping. Eventually, food begins to arrive but not yet to the ravenous Sky carer Christian Alonso.
Then there is the crash of plates on the wooden floor, a bang so loud it almost makes you jump. Alonso stays sitting, and just says in an unheard message to the waiter, ‘If that’s my steak, I kill you.’
Next morning I walk with Froome to the team bus as we’re ready to leave the Pont Neuf.
‘Yesterday was tough?’ I say.
‘I’m feeling much better this morning, a very good night’s sleep does that. Slept really well last night.’
‘Is the calmness more apparent than real?’
‘I think there have been times when I have been panicking a little inside but I’m fully aware that this is a three-week race and I don’t think there’s any one moment that you can throw away the whole race. Yesterday we were put under pressure by Saxo. I just missed it, but didn’t want to spend too much energy riding in no-man’s-land. Better to sit up and wait for teammates to regroup and then start to chase. Knowing I had a buffer of almost four minutes was a factor in my decision. Definitely.’
These mature and considered race calculations place him closer to his brothers’ professions than he might like to accept. Perhaps he did choose the life of accountancy after all. But his dreams are on these roads, working in the outdoors, feeling the wind on his face.
He would be the first to admit that in the narrative of this Tour de France, Alberto Contador and his Saxo teammates delivered some good lines on the road to Saint-Amand-Montrond. But the accountant in him would curtly remind them that there is only one line that matters. The bottom one.
CHAPTER TWELVE
‘I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The Equator runs across these highlands, a hundred miles to the north, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet. In the day-time you felt that you had got high up, near to the sun, but the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful, and the nights were cold.’
Karen Blixen, Out of Africa
Once I asked Chris Froome what he would do if the world was ending and he could have one last bike ride before the curtain came down.
He didn’t have to pause. He’d take his bike to the Ngong Hills, the range of four knuckles which wrap around one part of the Great Rift Valley. It was between these lush summits, in this world teeming with buffalo, rhino, hogs, snakes, wildebeest and other creatures missing from the p
eloton, that he fell in love.
His love was the bike, the place. A skinny, diffident white boy tagging along after a gang of local kids as they hauled ass from Mai-a-Ihii, a Kikuyu township, to the highest Ngong peak Lamwia, 2460m above sea level. This was but one part of an adolescence that was half Huckleberry Finn and half Tom Brown’s Schooldays but played out under the canopy of African skies.
He was the only white kid, the mzungu, in a bunch led by a former pro David Kinjah. Kenyans like to run. These kids liked to cycle. Kinjah led them like a pied piper. Froome chased him down every time once he grew into his strength. They took a thousand tumbles on the narrow pathways, gasped for air on a hundred summits.
The heart never leaves home. Chris Froome carries a British passport and tells people that he grew up in a British home in the heart of Africa. Yes, it’s true, he turned the blade of his knife inwards and paired it with his fork after eating, and asked to be excused before leaving the table. The licence under which he now races bears the stamp of the United Kingdom and when he races in the Olympics, it is for Team GB.
But does this make a man British?
I asked him too if on his travels between countries and continents there ever comes a moment when he thinks, ‘Yes, I’m home now.’
Again, he didn’t need time to consider.
‘That comes when I land at Nairobi Airport and I hand my passport to the official as I’m going through. He looks at it and grins, I grin too. He hands me the passport, I walk on and that’s when I think, “I’m home now.”’
Africa is in his soul. His heart never left the place.
Bastille Day!
One rule of Tour de France coverage is that Bastille Day clichés aren’t on the banned list. The day is so fragranced with wafts of epic heroism and Gallic liberation, so full of native pomp and splendour, that it sometimes seems that the Tour de France was designed around it. We are licensed in perpetuity to reach into the sack of history and find whatever we can to make 14 July on the Tour more than a national holiday.
Today, though, brings a special gift. The peloton tackles Mont Ventoux, the immense and ghostly mountain of Provence where Tom Simpson died and from which legends have been born. So many that it is hard to believe that Ventoux is in fact an infrequently visited icon of the Tour. Yet the place is instantly recognisable. The Tour’s other showpiece summits hunker with their neighbours on mountain ranges and conceal their weaponry until you try to conquer them. Ventoux just sits there on the rolling plains of Provence, staring down on the Rhone Valley. A brooding, half-dressed sentinel.
Its nickname, Mont Baldy, diminishes its dignity but the top of the mountain is nude limestone without stubble of vegetation or trees. Even in the summer sun the bare limestone gives the impression from a distance that the summit is snow-capped. It is eerie and impressive, and as you gaze up from the plains you recall a second fact from 1967 and Ventoux. In February of that year, months before Simpson keeled over with heat exhaustion and a pocket full of amphetamines, a wind gust of 198 miles per hour was recorded atop Ventoux – 198 miles per hour!
The Tour, when it snakes through its native turf, has no corporate boxes or premium levels. It is raucously democratic. Those who want a close-up of the superstars along the parcours will drive, ride or walk up Ventoux till the road is lined either side by what look like refugee camps for the middle classes. Cars, camper vans and picnic tables. Flags and banners. Men strutting in ridiculous mankinis. Women tanning. It is a ramshackle guard of honour composed by hundreds of thousands, some of whom will spend days waiting to see which rider can spend the least time on the mountain.
It is Sunday and Ventoux looms at the end of a mixed week for Team Sky. After the heroics of Froome on Ax 3 Domaines, it became increasingly clear that the team weren’t working with the ominous efficiency of 2012. Stage Nine was a disaster and just two days ago Froome had lost a minute to Mollema and Contador on the stage from Tours to Saint-Amand-Montrond. The boys in black were dispersed through the field being buffeted and disheartened by crosswinds which didn’t seem to take the same toll out of their rivals from Saxo and Belkin.
Today the pack will want to isolate Froome again, make him think that he can’t keep doing this on his own. Pick off his lieutenants and see if their general has a breaking point.
Gary Blem’s shoulder-length hair distinguishes him straight off from the clipped military neatness of his Team Sky colleagues. So too does the South African accent. Team Sky’s lead mechanic is part of what seems, from a distance, to be the new Africa. He travels to Europe to work while his wife, a Scot, and children stay behind in Pretoria.
He doesn’t have either the guilt or the arrogance of the old colonialists but gives off an intense pride about the continent. He came to the team because in 2011 Mark Cavendish told Dave Brailsford there was only one man he wanted messing with his bikes, and that man was Blem. A year later, the sprinter moved on to Omega Pharma-Quick step, Blem was supposed to follow but it couldn’t get tied down in time and, though he loves Cavendish, Blem was happy to stay on at Sky. Now the kinship he feels is with Chris Froome.
‘Froomey, to me, he is Kenyan, a hundred per cent Kenyan, and I would love to tell everybody. I’ve discussed this with him. You know I’ve said to him, “Listen, well done, this is great for African cycling.”’
When Froome rode his first Tour in 2008 he did so with a little Kenyan flag stitched into his dossard. Last year when Bradley Wiggins conquered France he had a small mod symbol stuck to his bike. Blem wanted something which would personalise his friend’s bike and maybe even inspire him a little.
‘I wanted to let him know that there is actually a whole continent that is supporting him, you know; apart from the UK and the British ties to the team, he’s got a whole continent that’s actually supporting him out there. And that’s why I had a few little inspirational stickers made, I know it’s small but it’s, it’s just something that if he looks down and he’s suffering he can remember, maybe his mother even, in a sense. Or his roots. It’s just small things, you know, you never know if it will do anything for him or not but . . .’
He settled for symbols rather than words. The centre of the Kenyan flag bears a Masai shield with spears. Giving more thought to the gesture than the average mechanic would give to a Christmas present for a spouse, Blem had a sticker made first of the shield and spears in the colours which appear on the Kenyan flag. He then had a shield and spears made predominantly in the colour yellow for when Chris Froome’s jersey colour inevitably changed during the Tour. He also had a little sticker made up in the colours of the Kenyan flag, but in the shape of the nation itself.
Froome was moved but wondered about such an expression of individuality within a team which discourages it. ‘Don’t you think I might get into shit for this, you know?’ Gary Blem told his friend that if he had any doubts the bike would be stripped of its new decoration instantly. Froome shook his head.
‘Ah no, screw it, leave it, I’ll keep it on my bike.’ So today Chris Froome – reared in Kenya, educated in South Africa, resident in Monaco, and passport holder of Britain – rides up Mont Ventoux with a Masai shield and spears on his bike, reminding him of where the story began. He is the boy from the Ngong Hills. The pale mzungu on the bike too small for his spidery legs.
It is a still, oven-hot Provençal day. The peloton has learned the hard way that Team Sky like to ride at high tempo and drop challengers off the back with accelerated bursts. There is only one response. To do the same. Or die trying. To string the black jerseys out, isolating them, letting each Sky rider do his own hard toting to nobody’s benefit but his own.
So they leave Givors at a furious pace, about fifteen minutes before eleven in the morning. There are breaks from the start. Philippe Gilbert [BMC] and Lieuwe Westra [VCD] are hauled back after a few kilometres. Three more race ahead without saying goodbye at 16km. Nothing doing. Katusha, the Russian team, are bullying the peloton along at top speed and the breakaways flare briefly be
fore dying.
An escape committee of ten gets away; a disparate group of individuals, a talented rouleur, a few useful équipiers, but no one worries the big guns keen to keep their powder dry in the peloton. So the gap stays at just over a minute for a time; the elastic between the escapees and the pack taut. Then it snaps and the lead is 7 minutes.
Dave Brailsford travels on this 242km stage on the team bus, as does the doctor Alan Farrell and the physiotherapist Dan Guillemette. They watch the race on the decent-sized television at the front which will be replaced by the big screen pulled from the ceiling once the bus has stopped.
The first hour of the race has been ridden at an average speed of 48.2kmh, the second at an even more punishing 50.4kmh. For a day which is going to take almost six hours and finish with the ascent of Ventoux, this is too fast. So when the ten breakaways begin to increase their advantage, Brailsford kicks back.
‘We can relax a little bit now, let those guys build up a lead before reeling them in as we get closer to the beginning of the climb. What we didn’t want was for this attacking and counter-attacking to continue, and then some dangerous people getting in breaks.’
But on Bastille Day, order can’t be maintained for long. For this is le quatorze Juillet, the day the French must show themselves. No one expects a home winner of the Centenary Tour de France but, perhaps today, there can be a local hero. Five of the twenty-two teams in the race are French but only three are represented in the breakaway group. Quel dommage for Europcar and Cofidis!