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Chris Froomewith David Walsh

THE CLIMB

Contents

PART ONE

Africa

PART TWO

Europe

PART THREE

The Tour de France

Illustrations

Glossary

Acknowledgements

Follow Penguin

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‘After climbing a great hill, one onlyfinds that there are many more hills toclimb.’

Nelson Mandela

To my teammates for their hard workand dedication, and for helping meachieve my dreams, and to Mum andMichelle for the endless supply ofmotivation.

Part One

AFRICA

1

We have come out of Mai-a-Ihii, leaving histin house behind us. We have come down theDagoretti road inhaling the blood scent fromthe market and from its four death-houseabattoirs. I hold my breath as we pass a heapof rotting discarded carcasses. Sometimes inDagoretti the blood runs down the sides ofthe road and into the drains. Today we arefor the hills and the open road and we don’tcare.

We have skirted the Kibiku Forest, ped-alled a right on to the Ngong road and downpast the sad little Ngong Stadium, where theonly facility is the grass that the cattle grazeon. We have sped past the Kenya Power andLighting Distribution Centre, which keeps usbuying candles for the ambushes of darkness

that are sprung on us by the power company.We have raced down to the Forest Line roadand cut right past Ngong town, dodging thestray goat crossing the road and the colour-fully painted matatus that grind to a halt at amoment’s notice to collect or drop off theirpassengers. The chaos passes, and we’re onto the open road and into the Ngong Hills.

One last ride before I die?It will be in these hills, for sure. The can-

opy of blue sky barely above me, the worldtransforming itself from urban grime to ruralsafari below me. You can lift your hands upand away from your handlebar grips andstretch your arms skyward in triumph like astage winner. Your hands will be breakingthrough the floor of heaven. One last ride be-fore I die? Take me here.

He is Kikuyu and I am chasing him. As al-ways. The land of the Kikuyu people runs outat an invisible seam and this is now Masaicountry. The Masai named the Ngong Hills.

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A giant was stumbling, as their legend wouldhave it, from Kilimanjaro with his head inthe clouds. He fell heavily and left the indentof his four knuckles in the earth. The NgongHills. These four summits. We are ridingdown the spine of them now, he and I, chas-ing each other over the giant’s knuckles. I amsixteen. My head is never anywhere else butin the clouds. I dream of the great races. Butfirst, I must catch him.

Twenty kilometres we race along thisbrown, arid, corrugated spine. The bestviews, where you can see the road snakingdown for miles ahead of you, come at PointLamwia where Karen Blixen, the famous au-thor of Out of Africa, buried her lover DenysFinch Hatton. Lucky man. What a place tosettle in for eternity. Salute. Then we areheading down into the Great Rift Valley.

For a while in the hills I thought I mightget one over on him. I am mad for the

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climbs. He let me spin away once or twicebut always he reeled me in.

Down. Down. The Magadi road has loopedout of the green suburbs of Langata fromnear my old school, the Banda, but comingfrom Mai-a-Ihii we only join it down herepast the bustling, street-side markets ofKiserian. We are on our plunge down intothe Rift Valley. Lower and lower. Faster andfaster. Past the busy town of Ongata Rongai.Onwards. The road ribbons and twistsaround the countryside, long straightstretches and big loops which will take usfrom two thousand metres and set us downon the Rift Valley plains at six hundredmetres.

Downhill. No pain. Our calves will com-plain on the way home but, right now, this isfun. The addict’s rush. We are the happyslaves of our own rhythm. We exist in ourcadence.

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We might see anything here now that thecity is behind us. It’s clear that we are in Ma-sai territory. Passing through the village ofOltepesi, we stand out like a sore thumbamong the local people wearing the tradi-tional red shúkà. We ride on.

The road is nature’s audition reel. Look!Waterbuck. If we’re lucky we might see aleopard. Dik-diks, the small antelope foundin these parts, bound out of sight into thethorny undergrowth. Warthogs and baboons.Eland, monochrome zebras and elegantgiraffes.

People still claim to see the odd lion in thisarea. Not today. Apart from the dreadlockedone in front of me. Leone Nero they calledhim in Italy. Black Lion. I am chasing theBlack Lion.

We pass ostriches with long legs no moremuscular than my own. If I point that out toLeone Nero and the boys they won’t let melive it down. It’s true though.

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We are only cutting through this world, heand I. This is no Rift Valley tourist cruise.We are racers. I am chasing him. He is myprey. He is cackling like a hyena because heknows I will never catch him. I don’t have itin my haunches. He has thousands of milesof roads and hills packed in there, all com-pressed into clenched muscle. Teasing mewith his back wheel. Now you see it, kijana,now you don’t.

I can’t win, but he stays close enough totaunt me.

Down we go. It becomes stiller and it be-comes hotter. The further into this dimple inthe earth’s skin we ride, the more it is like afurnace.

We will rest and laugh together when weget to the end. The end is the moonscape ofMagadi with its salt-crusted shores and boil-ing soda lakes. There will be candy cottonpink clouds of startled flamingos. And mymother following an hour or two behind in

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the car will bring food to restore and re-charge us before we turn back for home.

I know him. He will say, ‘Put your bike in-to your mum’s car and go with her. The longclimb home is not for you, kijana.’

He knows me. Never.We race on. There are two dangers: hom-

icidal drivers and potholes. This is Africa. Dowe worry? Never.

In fact, I have taken my helmet off. Ishouldn’t but the heat is my alibi. The helmetis tied round my handlebars, clipped on. Heis not even dressed to race. He has a T-shirtand gym shorts on. And a pair of sneakers. Iam in full bloody racing gear. He loves that.

People in cars stick their heads out of thewindows. Look at that skinny cyclist kid try-ing to catch up with that Rastafarian on abike! Aw, God help him! Look!

I’m thinking that I didn’t pop him on theNgong climbs but maybe I put some ache

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into his old legs. If I surprised him could Iget away from him on the long downhill?

I make my moves and each time he re-sponds. I get close enough so that he draftsme but when I press the gas he has alreadypulled away.

We hit a pitted stretch of road. Potholesand fissures and lumps. We hit it fast. If oneslows then the other wins. We push hard.Then pop!, my helmet unclips as I hit one ofthe little speed bumps that wear and tear hasmade for the battered Magadi road. The hel-met falls a few inches and catches my frontwheel, sending it jolting sideways, towardshim.

He rides straight over it. The helmet jamsinto his front wheel. The front wheel stopsdead and the back wheel buck-jumps fromthe road. He says goodbye to his bike. He islaunched down the road at over sixty kilo-metres per hour, flying like a missile withdreadlocks.

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How far? He says fifty metres. I’m not sosure. That might have brought him into Tan-zanian airspace. The flying isn’t the thinganyway. The landing is the issue here on thedownward grooves of the Magadi road.

He lands first on his elbows and his knees.The road seizes huge patches of his skin fromthe joints and from the front of his body.There is blood everywhere. His knees aloneare a horror show. They look like the grafted-on asses of two young baboons.

I am scared and I feel guilty. Stupid. Sick.Any water I have left in my bottles I use totry to clean his wounds. I might as well trydamming Lake Magadi with stickingplasters. He is calm but we are both sweatingin the dead heat and I know that his sweat isrunning freely into his raw, vivid wounds.

We sit there on the side of the road for ten,twenty minutes. I apologize. He waves itaway. Every time, he waves it away.

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Maybe Mum will drive past and save us.Let it be.

We sit there and finally he stands upgingerly and gets back on his bike. Awounded John Wayne climbing back on tohis horse.

This is too much.‘Stop. I can carry you on my bike. I can

hold you.’His laugh scolds.‘What are you now? An acrobat? Let’s

ride.’Hours later Mum finds us in Magadi. Her

son, the wading bird, and his mentor, thewounded lion.

She wants to drive us back to Nairobistraight away. He negotiates a compromise.We go to the hospital in Magadi. The sodalakes have given birth to a company townand the town has a hospital where theymummify him in bandages. We ‘camp’ forthe night near the lake in a basic hotel.

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In the morning he won’t get into the car,so he and I saddle up. I have a hangover ofsuch guilt that I swear I can actually feelsome of his pain.

He rides hard though, the bandaged bas-tard. Hard up the long, long climb to Kikuyuand home. Hard enough to show me what ittakes. Hard enough for me to forget the guiltand want to beat him again. He takes me onthe hills. We do some sprints. He takes meon them too. He schools me. For hours heschools me.

We hit Mai-a-Ihii. We lift our bikes intohis two-roomed tin hut on a corridor of two-roomed tin huts.

I should go home but he knows that I don’twant to.

We sit and talk into the night about oldraces and racers.

‘Tomorrow again?’ David Kinjah says tome before he sleeps.

‘Okay! Sure.’

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Yes.My name is Chris Froome. I am a profes-

sional cyclist. Before that I was a skinny ki-jana with big dreams.

Boyhood happened to me in a house just out-side Nairobi, twenty kilometres south-westof the city, in a genteel suburb called Karen.The most famous resident Karen ever hadwas Karen Blixen and, although there areminor protestations that the suburb wasnamed after a different Karen entirely, mostpeople believe the place was named after theDanish woman who married her cousin,coming to Kenya to run a coffee plantation.

The homes around us were stately and el-egant and secluded by means of long drive-ways and secure gates. In Out of Africa, Kar-en Blixen described the very land I grew upon as ‘Africa distilled up through six thou-sand feet, like the strong and refined essenceof a continent’. She was right about the land,

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but what was built on it, and those who livein the town, are very un-African.

Karen was once predominantly British butin the last couple of decades many Americ-ans, Germans and Japanese have come tolive there too. A few outliers from the emer-ging black middle class live in the town, butthe place is primarily a colony of wealth, anenclave shielded from the sprawling city andits epic slums.

My earliest memories are from our bighouse in Karen called Windy Ridge. We hada pleasant, decent-sized home, and I had myown bedroom, as did my two brothers,Jonathan and Jeremy, who are seven andnine years older than me respectively. Whenthey were fourteen my brothers were sent offto England to attend Rugby School. We wererelatively well off, at least when I was young.

My mother, Jane Flatt, was born in Kenyain 1956 and raised in the highlands ofLimuru. Her parents, my grandparents,

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Patrick and Patricia, had followed a similarpath to Karen Blixen. They came here fromTetbury, England, early in the last century,drawn to the coffee plantations like filings toa magnet.

He was an archetypal character, my grand-father. The sort of grandfather you might seein films or read about in books. He won thewar, or so he would have us believe. He hadserved in World War Two, and in Kenya hehad fought for the British against the MauMau, a militant group made up of Kikuyurebels.

He passed down funny stories that weren’treally meant for kids. They were contraband,slipped to us from the adult world, and weloved them all the more for it. My favouritetale was about how Grandfather ended upeating his donkey in the jungle because hegot so hungry. Some comrades found himthere in the middle of nowhere. They werestarving too and they all ended up tucking

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into the donkey. This upset Grandfather be-cause his donkey had been his companionthrough the whole war. I was never quitesure what rank he held or what role he hadplayed during that time, travelling with adonkey – probably not espionage.

Grandfather was an aficionado of huntingand fishing. He taught us both of these butduck hunting was his main bag. God knowswhat he was shooting with back then whenhe scoured the forests of Kenya with his don-key but it had left him deaf. He had a hearingaid and, poor man, my brothers and I(mainly my brothers, as I was timid) wouldhave some fun at his expense. We would sitat the dinner table silently mouthing wordsto each other, making a great play of laugh-ing heartily. Grandfather, excluded and frus-trated by his impairment, would be frantic-ally trying to tune in his hearing aid. It wouldbe whistling with feedback as he tried to ad-just it. Once he had turned it all the way up

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we would start talking at the top of ourvoices.

He would recoil as if our words were sud-den gunfire.

‘Stop shouting. No need for shouting.’Growing up in Karen, we didn’t have the

usual activities or even the usual range offamily pets. When I was six years old I re-member crossing by my brother’s snake en-closure, which was basically a waist-high pitcovered with chicken wire, and I noticed thatthe back legs of my favourite pet bunny rab-bit were hanging from the mouth of Jeremy’stwelve-foot python. I had quite a few rabbits,but this was the one I had tamed, the one Icould pick up and carry around with me. Hewas close to being my best friend. I wouldhave known his hind legs anywhere but thiswas the last place I expected to see them. Infact, it was the last place that I would seethem. Like most of our pets, he had a Swahiliname but now he was just ‘Lunch’. There he

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was, about to be digested. I knew he couldn’thave found his own way into the snake pit.He must have been served up by my brother.

I got so angry with Jeremy that I picked upa wooden plank and started battering thesnake enclosure. I managed to punctureholes in the chicken wire covering the cage. Iwasn’t a bad kid but I could throw a goodtantrum if I didn’t get my way or if somebodycrossed me. Or if my favourite rabbit wasused as snake fodder.

My brothers always did their best to knockthat out of me. For my own good, of course –they were only ever cruel to be kind. They’dboth give me a hard time in generous meas-ures. We had some dog kennels, and whenthe dogs came into heat they would have tobe put into cages to keep them away fromeach other. We also had a huge male turkeywhich my brothers would terrorize if I wasn’taround to provide them with some fun. Andthen one day they found a way to combine

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the dog cages, the turkey and me into a new,ground-breaking form of entertainment.

We had air rifles and the boys would shootat the turkey with the pellets that I fed myrabbits with. The pellets would fit comfort-ably into the barrel of an air rifle. So they’dsting the turkey with the pellets and makehim angrier and angrier. One day that didn’tprovide enough amusement so Jeremy andJono had to improvise. When the turkey wassufficiently demented with rage they caughthim and put him into one of the dog cages.Then they caught me and put me in the dogcage with the lunatic turkey.

The ceilings were closed in and the cagedoor had a bolt that they jammed with astick. The turkey and I were the same height,or maybe I was a little bigger, but that turkeycould punch above its weight. I rememberbeing absolutely petrified because he was soaggressive. He ducked his head down andcame charging at me, his feathers puffed out

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in anger. I ended up huddled in the corner ofthe dog kennel with the turkey jumping andgrabbing at me with its feet, whacking mewith its wings and pecking at me all at thesame time.

This was so funny for my brothers thatthey had to try it again and again. It was hys-terical and they loved it. Only when I was inabsolute floods of tears would they open thecage up and let me out. My sparring sessionswith the turkey were usually two or threeminutes long. Time enough for both of us.Victory inevitably fell to the feathered one inthe red corner. Luckily my brothers neverthought to feed me to the python for a laugh.

The turkey lived to be the fall guy in myown entertainment when Jeremy and Jonohad gone back to school. The turkey stoppedgrowing, while his partner from the dog cagedidn’t. No. I finally got big enough to trau-matize the turkey myself. I would sneak upon him – boo! – then let him chase me.

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Repeat. Repeat again. Tease the turkey, lethim chase, on and on. I thought that was agreat game. Payback at last!

My father, Clive (or, as we all call him, Noz),grew up in England. He had been a goodhockey player and had played internationallyat Under-19 level but left it all to build a newlife in Kenya. Noz started in the tourismtrade, and soon established a successfulcompany, Flamingo Tours, which specializedin beach holidays and safaris in Kenya,bringing people to the Masai Mara and to theperfect beaches and blue waters of theKenyan coastline. Noz would organize theentire trip for holidaymakers, from start tofinish.

Aside from the company and the house, wehad some land: maybe ten acres, two orthree paddocks and a very generous gardenwith a tennis court. As well as our menagerieof pets, we had Jersey cows. My mother ran abit of a dairy on the property so we had a

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barn where all the feed would be kept for thecows, a milking area and stables. We had twoayahs (nannies), an askari (a night watch-man) and a couple of shamba boys (garden-ers) who helped out with the milking of thecows and the feeding of the livestock that wehad on the property.

The Ngong racecourse is a feature of life inKaren and Noz kept racehorses, two at a timewhen I was quite young. The horses are avanished memory as I was only three or fouryears old when they left, but the cows stayedand we had a bull too (no tease and chasewith him). There were ducks, geese andchickens, and that turkey. We were comfort-ably well off, but our lives still had the wild-ness of Africa in them. Kenya was a magicalplace to grow up. Then suddenly it all ended.

I was five or six years old when my par-ents’ marriage hit a reef and at the same timeNoz lost control of the company.

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The details are vague to me. Noz blamedthe business setback on a very large loan thatsomeone had taken out in the company’sname without his knowledge. Money hadbeen sifted away from the Flamingo ac-counts. Noz thought that it was being takenfor an overseas branch but the money hadjust disappeared. It’s blurry. My parentswere divorcing at the same time, but thebank showed no sympathy when it cameafter the family to pay back the loan.

First they eyed up the house and the cars,and then came the bailiffs. They took fur-niture and anything they could from thehouse.

I have quite a vivid memory from thattime. I had a little black bike that I wouldride around our place and I was practicallywelded on to it. All day, every day, I wouldride up and down our driveway and aroundour garden, pedalling backwards to apply thebrake. There was a narrow dirt road that led

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to our drive, and I would be there raisingdust until my mother summoned me forwhatever meal was next. My brothers hadgone off to school in England. Noz hadalready left by this time and moved in withhis new girlfriend, Jenny, whom he latermarried. I was left to my own devices.

On this particular day I remember thegates being locked.

It was as if Mum knew what was coming. Idon’t know if it was the bailiffs or merelythat Noz wanted to collect his possessionsafter the divorce, but I know that we hadchained the gates because some people werecoming to take our belongings from thehouse. It was a weekend and I was supposedto be going to a friend’s birthday party up theroad.

Outside the locked gates there was a biglorry, and people ready to do the lifting andshifting. My mother refused to let them in.There was a stand-off. I knew better than to

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whine about the birthday party. I recognizedthe man overseeing the operation assomeone from Noz’s company. I was themessenger boy in the negotiations, riding upand down on my bike, ferrying between thegate and my mum, relaying news of what wasgoing on.

‘Listen, open up,’ said the man. ‘Tell yourmum we need to come in.’

I conveyed the message and my mum wasvery upset. She was crying. She threatened tocall the police to intervene. I remember cyc-ling down to the gate and saying gravely tothe man, ‘She’s calling the police.’

‘Okay,’ he said finally, ‘tell your motherthat if she doesn’t open up we’re going topull the gate off.’

And that’s what they did. They attachedstrong ropes and big chains on to our gatesand ripped them off their hinges.

My mother was a remarkable woman. Assoon as they breached the broken gates she

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said to me, ‘Right, don’t worry about it. Getin the car.’

And we left. She took me to the party I’dbeen invited to.

‘Don’t worry about that,’ she said again aswe drove. ‘We are fine. It’s only “stuff”. We’llgo home and we’ll sort it out. I’ll sort it out.’

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2

With Noz gone, we were on our own. JustMum and me. Jeremy and Jono both contin-ued with their schooling in England. Whenthings started getting difficult in terms offinance, other members of the familystepped in to help with their education. Bythen Jonathan had finished at Rugby andwas at university. Naturally, they have differ-ent memories of those times.

My immediate family may have been re-duced to just me and my mum but, growingup, I was always really close to the ayahs.Ayah is a word used in Kenya for babysitteror nanny, and that’s what we called them.We had two ayahs, Anna and Agnes. Theywere second mothers to me and it was Annaand Agnes who taught me to speak Swahili.

They were both Wakambas, a large Kenyantribe. They taught me to speak certainWakamba words, but mainly we spokeSwahili.

Anna had a daughter called Grace. Gracewas three years younger than me and I re-member the two of us would often play afterschool. I’d be climbing trees, trying to set upa rope, slide or swing for us, and we woulddo all sorts of things together. Poor Grace. Iwould soon play the same kind of tricks onher that my brothers had on me. It musthave been some sort of revenge. I’d terrorizeher a bit but we were good friends. I gave hermy bike when it was getting too small for meand taught her how to ride.

Apart from Karen, the other affluent areain Nairobi is Langata and I was sent to theBanda School on the Magadi road inLangata. It was a little piece of the Britishpublic school system set down in Kenya. TheBanda School is set on thirty acres beside the

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Nairobi National Park. Twenty of those acresare playing fields. We had four rugby pitches,many hockey pitches, squash courts and asix-lane swimming pool. All very English,apart from the odd warthog escaping fromthe National Park and waddling across thepitches. Banda wasn’t an all-white school; itwas maybe seventy per cent white. It wasquite expensive though and the other kidswere all well off.

No matter how much some people mightwish it to be otherwise, wealth or colour willnever insulate you from the fact that you aresurrounded by Africa. I remember one occa-sion when I was twelve years old in Bandaand we were coming back from a schoolrugby game after playing up at Turi. Wewould always come back on the six-hourdrive via Dagoretti with its abattoir, lines ofhanging animal carcasses and bloody roads.We were on a school bus, just a bunch of pu-pils, one master and a driver. There was

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trouble in Dagoretti. The road was blockedand there was a riot in progress.

Our bus was trapped and there was trafficbehind us and in front. There was nowherefor us to go. We had managed to get right tothe front of the queue when the mob sur-rounded us. Suddenly people were shakingour bus backwards and forwards, an angrycrowd rocking and banging the side of thebus.

I am back there. I am sitting in an aisleseat. The crowd doesn’t break any windowsbut they’re trying to push in the door, themain door, and our big rugby coach haswedged himself in on the stairs, pushingbackwards against the door to stop anyoneopening it. Then our driver’s door is sud-denly flung open. Someone pulls him out.He’s a Kenyan guy from the Wakamba tribe,and this could be bad for him. As he is beingdragged from the bus he pulls a weapon fromunderneath his seat. In Kenya we call it a

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panga, a machete kind of thing with a bigwooden handle and an even bigger blade onit. One swing and you could do a lot of dam-age. We never even knew it was there. Theypull him out, he instinctively grabs hispanga and very quickly they let him goagain.

He jumps back on the bus, turns roundand has this huge grin on his face, reallyproud of the fact that he’s scared them off.We kids, we love that the driver did that. Wecheer and applaud and we are on our way.

At Banda I noticed one thing whichpuzzled me. Everyone seemed to have ayahsbut hardly any of my friends could speakSwahili as well as I could. I always found thatstrange. Some of my friends couldn’t put to-gether two words of Swahili. I suppose it wasa sign of how sheltered life could be in Karenor Langata.

‘Wow,’ I’d say, ‘you’ve lived all your lifehere and you don’t even speak …’

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Anna and Agnes could not speak Englishso it was always natural to talk with them inSwahili. Other people had English-speakingayahs, or ones with a bit of English, but inour house my mum spoke Swahili, as didNoz and my brothers. In my life now peoplefind it unusual that I speak Swahili but grow-ing up it was never a conscious thing, no oneever told me that I had to learn. It just camenaturally. When I came home from school,for instance, I’d be straight down to thestables or hanging out with Mutheke, theshamba boy, helping with milking a cow orjust chatting to him about life. We alwaysspoke Swahili.

Anna and Agnes were always very protect-ive of me when times were difficult, andsharing a language allowed them to speaksoftly to me sometimes about hard things.

Everything had gone bad very quickly formy parents, both professionally and person-ally. There were huge debts to be settled with

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the bank, and the house and our possessionsdidn’t cover it. It is hard to imagine howFlamingo Tours sunk so rapidly. There were,at a guess, over a hundred employees, whowere suddenly all out of work. Noz spent acouple of nights in prison. They took him into ask about the accounts; I think theythought that he might have had the moneysalted away somewhere. There were nocharges but the collapse of the company wasbig news at the time and affected manypeople.

Mum and Noz divorced while they werestill living under the same roof. It was atough period. My bedroom was closest totheir room and before Noz moved out therewere times when I would be woken up in themiddle of the night to the sound of my mumyelling at him. I know that Noz would neverhave hit my mother but they would argue vi-ciously. We had quite a few meals that des-cended into chaos. I remember a shepherd’s

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pie dish being thrown at Noz once. And wineglasses. Things would flare up and Anna andAgnes would swoop in and take me away,leaving my parents to it.

At the time I didn’t really understandmuch of it. I was angry with my mother be-cause she was the one who did most of thescreaming. They were both having a hardtime but, to my eyes, she was the one beingemotional. Noz would always stay quiet. Heisn’t a confrontational man but I think hecould stir her up just by saying very little. Hewouldn’t shout or get worked up and I thinkthat made Mum even angrier.

For a while after they split Noz still lived inKenya but in a different house. I would goand see him sometimes on weekends, orspend a week with him every now and then.It was always quite uncomfortable. I neverreally wanted my parents to see each other,and I always asked to be let out of the car alittle bit further down the road when I was

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getting dropped off so that I could walk therest of the way.

I knew that if they were together there wasgoing to be some kind of confrontation.

For years afterwards I used to get this sick,sick feeling whenever people raised theirvoices. I can still remember that horriblechurning sensation in my stomach any time Iheard people shouting.

When I was seven years old Noz moveddown to South Africa to start his life again. Itmust have been hard for him to do that. Iknow my mother always thought Noz hadtaken money from the company, but I can’tbelieve that he had. When he moved to SouthAfrica there were a few really tough years forhim and my new stepmother, Jenny. He hadnothing and had to start all over again. Helived with his mother at first, who had soldher property at an old-age village in order forthem to buy a small place there. They starteda new conference management business

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from scratch, running it from home for thefirst few years.

The day Noz left Kenya, my stepmotherand I went to the airport with him. By thetime we arrived I had fallen asleep in theback seat. He says that it was the one mo-ment in his life when he actually cried –leaving Kenya, not wanting to wake me upand not knowing when he’d next see me.More than a year passed before we saw eachother again.

After Noz left, my mother and I agreed thatwe wouldn’t ever shout, or at least that shewouldn’t shout at me if she was angry. If shedid raise her voice I always got that memoryback in my gut. The agreement was that ifshe was angry with me she would tell me shewas angry with me. She would talk to me andtell me why she felt that way, but she wasnever allowed to shout at me.

If I am honest, when Noz left I was slightlyrelieved. This was life and we could get on

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with it now. There would be no more shout-ing. It wasn’t easy. Mum didn’t really haveany qualifications and money was scarce. Westayed with my mother’s parents for a whilein the spare room of their house. We livedout our lives between Karen and Langata,and although most of the time the greatyawning slums of Nairobi, places like Kibera,never concerned us, we had our ownstruggles.

Mum earned some money by house-sittingfor people when they were away. Sometimeswe would rent a modest cottage in thegrounds of a bigger house. One of the placesthat we stayed in while we were house-sittinghad a vast garden but it was completely over-grown. I spent ages with Grace cutting backthe grass and making a cycling track throughthe garden so that we could ride our bikesaround.

Mum needed a qualification and she de-cided to study physiotherapy. She would

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spend long hours interning at the Kenyattaand Kajiado public hospitals. And when shewas home, it felt as though she spent all herfree time studying for upcoming exams. Iwould sit for hours intently colouring in herworkbooks, shading all the different musclegroups in different colours.

I learned how to amuse myself. Because ofMum’s hours at the hospital I had to bedropped off at school very early each morn-ing. School didn’t start until half past sevenbut I would be there on my own at 6.00 a.m.every day. Mum would always pack me a ba-con sandwich or a pot of yoghurt and fruit,and I would sit outside the classroom, on thestep, and wait. After a while, the securityguards started opening up the classroomearlier for me, so I could go in and sit at adesk and do my homework before school.

Academically, I wasn’t great. I loved num-bers and maths – they had a logical sequencethat I could appreciate and enjoy. But I am

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dyslexic and a really slow reader. I wouldhave to gaze at each word for a while, desper-ately hoping to recognize it. I dreaded havingto read out in class. I couldn’t do it fluidly, itwould be, ‘and – the – man – went – to – the–’

Because of the dyslexia I went to classes onSaturdays with a special needs teacher. Iwould try to work through exercises to im-prove my skills, but even then I found that Iwould read stuff painstakingly slowly andstill not be able to remember a word of whatI’d just read. The process of concentrating sohard used up all the available space in mybrain. English and history, or anything thatrequired a lot of reading, was difficult and Iwould struggle with the time limit in examsor class to read everything through.

My concentration span wasn’t great either.I was a dedicated daydreamer. I would al-ways be off in the clouds, thinking ofwhatever hobby I was fanatical about at the

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time. Butterflies were an early obsession.There was a famous butterfly collector notfar down the road from me, a man calledSteve Collins, who founded the Nairobi But-terfly Centre in Kenya. He got me into but-terflies and I used to go along to his placeand learn all that I could.

I used to love the detail of it. And the ritu-al. I would go off and catch a butterfly, andonce it was dead and stiff, I would inject itwith hot water to soften it again. Next, Iwould display it carefully on a board, know-ing how to spread the wings properly and pinit securely. I would spend a lot of my timechasing butterflies and trying to find differ-ent varieties from all over Kenya wheneverwe travelled anywhere. If Mum and I took atrip I would take the net with me, down tothe coast or to the Mara, wherever we weregoing.

I really enjoyed collecting, and I got toknow most of the different names, the Latin

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ones, for the butterflies. The most rare andhardest to catch were the different types ofCharaxinae, which I would lure into traps us-ing rotting banana and mosquito netting. Itwas something I was passionate about. I’vefound that every time I go through a phasewith a hobby or something I enjoy doing,that’s all I want to do for a while. I get com-pletely obsessed with things. That’s how cyc-ling would be for me. Still is. I’m lucky tohave been able to turn an obsession into acareer.

The butterflies lasted quite a while though,a couple of years at least. Cycling had alwaysbeen part of life too and I had always had abicycle, as far as I can remember. No matterwhere we moved, all those different houseswith Mum, I would always get to know themaze of back roads and footpaths. Everysingle one. When we moved to a differenthouse I was the pathfinder. It was an adven-ture for me to go out and explore the byways,

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learning all the back routes. I knew quicklyhow to get to places faster and which pathwas the most direct, or which road wentwhere. These days I get lost sometimes ontraining rides – I’ve lost that gift.

I had the same little bike for a long timeuntil I finally outgrew it. I then went througha stage of riding my mother’s bicycle. I wasthe coolest kid in Nairobi. It was a big shop-ping bicycle with baskets on the front andback. I would ride it around, and although itwas old-fashioned, the bike gave me my firsttaste of making a living from cycling when Iwent through a phase of being a kid entre-preneur. We were still living at Windy Ridgeat the time, where we had a huge avocadotree that grew right on top of our barn. It wasnot one tree really, but two or three avocadotrees that all came together in the one spot. Ispent hours climbing up and gathering theavocados that were ripe. I would collect bas-kets full of them.

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I couldn’t stand avocados at the time. Iwould put them into the basket on the backof the bike and cycle up and down the streetsat our end of Karen. I would ride up topeople and ask them if they wanted to buythem. They were five shillings (35p) each orthereabouts – my pricing structure was fluid.Sometimes I would take my stock down to asmall kiosk owner who sold the basics. It wasjust one guy in a wooden construction on theside of the road selling sweets, bread, milkand other staples. I would go to him andswap the avocados for sweets, or have himtake the avocados on consignment for me.Some days when sales were good, and I wasable to get a few notes together, I’d sneakthem into my mum’s purse.

My two brothers are accountants and as akid I felt myself slipping towards that abyss.With Noz gone, I was often more consciousof our financial situation than a child shouldhave been. There was a school car-pool and a

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few of the parents would share lift duties asthe school was twenty minutes or moreaway, depending on traffic. On Fridays, thegang of us in the car would be allowed tostop for ice creams on the way home. If itever fell on my mother’s day to pick us upfrom school I would fret that she wouldn’t beable to buy the ice creams and the other kidswould find out that we were struggling. Ireally worried about that. I remember goinginto the shop with my friends and picking upthe locally made ice cream because the fancyimported ice creams were six or seven timesmore expensive.

I would grab the local ones and offer them.‘Here we go, guys!’

And, being kids, they would all look at meand keep fishing in the fridge for the moreexpensive ones. I was in knots of dread.Mum always came up with the money but Ican still feel the tension when I think of

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those afternoons when ice-cream time fell onmy mother’s turn to do the car run.

It’s a quaint thing to say, but in Karen wemade our own fun. There were good times,and my memories of those are still light andclear.

On a weekend, as soon as we had time toourselves, one of my mother’s favouritethings was to go down to the Rift Valley. Wewould point the car south for forty-fiveminutes or an hour of driving away fromNairobi, open the door and step into anotherworld. The Rift Valley is Masai land. The Ma-sai are nomads, cattle drovers, but you cansee how they worship this strange, arid,rocky terrain. It has an almost desert still-ness, watched over by the extinct volcanoLongonot.

When we got there we would take a dirtroad off into the hills and the bush. Mimosatrees grew beside little rivers and the more

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we climbed and wandered, the more inter-esting the landscape around us became.

Mum loved the bush and the animals con-cealed there, the different sounds and themany different trees. As soon as I had sun-burn, for instance, she would cover me inaloe, from the thick fleshy leaves of the littleplants which thrive in arid places with lowrainfall. She would break the leaves off andrun the edges over my skin. Another discov-ery she showed me was the toothbrush tree,which has all sorts of beneficial propertiesand which people used for centuries as a nat-ural toothbrush. The elephant pepper, whosefruit sticks upward out of the ground like somany red elephant trunks, was also a greatfind. I would play practical jokes on peoplethat didn’t know what it was, convincingthem to chew it and laughing at the reactionas their mouth began to burn. Mum nevertired of teaching me about the bush. Sheloved the nature of that place.

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We would abandon the car and walk andwalk and walk, often following tiny animalfootprints and tracks. Finally we would findsomewhere to stop and light a fire. Webrought meat with us to cook on the fire andwe would sit and eat and talk.

The bike became a part of it too. The roadfrom Nairobi stretches out towards the RiftValley and on down, down, to the great sa-line drink that is Lake Magadi, with itsflamingos and its crust of salt, which in someplaces is thirty or forty metres thick.

It’s a relatively quiet road, populated withbig hills that roll all the way down to Magadiwhich rests at sea level. A descent of maybe1,800 metres. Mum would put my bike in theback of the car and once we were out of thesprawl of Nairobi, leaving behind the trafficand the chaos, I would get on my bike andcycle down the long forever hill.

I loved it. The whirr of the wheels. Thejolts of the road shooting up through the bike

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frame and through my body. The warmKenyan air in my face and the road slippingunder me as I chased the car through Masaicountry. Straight roads and steep drops. I’dpedal hard and get up to frightening speeds.

Those days, those places, those people, livewith me always. Geography, maybe, isdestiny.

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3

Bikes were freedom. By the time I was twelveyears old, I would often travel from Nairobi,where I lived with my mother, to SouthAfrica, to see Noz, and on one visit I boughtmyself a mountain bike. It was bog standardreally and came from a supermarket, but ithad gears. I had never had a bike with gearsbefore. I brought the bike back home withme to Kenya.

I loved that bike. I loved doing tricks andjumping with it, getting air under myself andmy wheels. However, it wasn’t long before allthe jumping and all the landing caused thefront fork to weaken. Kenyan roads are pit-ted like a face with acne scars and they arerough on bikes at the best of times. Some ofthe local bikes had springs above the forks to

absorb shock. I had nothing but me and thehandlebars above my fork, and it had bent allthe way out. I had basically ruined the bike.My pride and joy.

I took the stricken bike down to the villagemarket area. I wanted to find the local mech-anics that operated on the bikes for the villa-gers. They could straighten my fork. Now, Iwas a white kid, the only white face in thevillage. This was before I had met Kinjah andbefore I had started racing. I was skinny andgeeky, light years from the athlete that I wasto become. My kind usually replaced theirbusted bikes with shiny new ones, fromproper bike shops in Karen or Langata. Icouldn’t afford that so I pushed minethrough the teeming market looking for mymen. My supermarket bike wasn’t tooshabby for kids in the village but I was oblivi-ous to anybody coveting my wheels.

I found the guys I was looking for. Mostlythey mended punctures and fixed wheels and

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chains. I was their only white customer, asplintery little ghost with his supermarketbike. Big ears and a bike with gears, a greatnovelty to them.

We negotiated. They set to work. To theirsurprise I spent the next few hours just sit-ting there watching them as they weldedpieces of metal on to the bike to reinforce themetal I had bent. I was fascinated. I lovedwatching them.

After that I would take my bike there as of-ten as I could. I longed to have an excuse tobring it in for surgery. Kimani was the firstguy I got to know. I don’t think I can claimthat I was his friend, but he saw me as theyoung mzungu (white man) who would payto have his bike fixed, the kid who would tryto negotiate the best price before work star-ted. He tolerated me. I was a mzungu whowanted to pay the same price as a local. I’dsay that amused him.

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I didn’t care. I was obsessed. I would sitthere and observe, trying to learn from whatthey were doing. I liked it when Kimani orone of the mechanics worked on other bikes.It broadened my education. Bikes were al-most another language, a form of expression.The parts worked together like the grammarof a perfect sentence. I wanted to master thattongue, to be able to parse a bike, to be partof their world.

It wasn’t uncomfortable. They were intobicycles; I was into bicycles. That rubbed outmuch of the difference between us. I ab-sorbed everything. They would talk aboutraces, and I sponged up every word until myimagination was brimming. There was a racein Nairobi which they told me about calledthe Trust, sponsored by Trust Condoms. Itsounded glamorous. I picked up on the ideaand decided that I was going to start ridingmy bike in preparation for that. The Trust!Less jumping, more riding. I’d quiz them

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about the Trust because they were bigger andmore knowing and they had ridden it before.I wanted to join them. I wanted to be likethem.

But I wasn’t them and I’d find myself indifficult situations down there sometimes.People might stop me and say, ‘Right, giveme your bike.’

I must have looked like a soft touch butwith one bound I was always free.

‘Why should I give you my bike?’ I wouldreply. In Swahili.

So I was the skinny Swahili-speakingmzungu with the bike. They got used to me,eventually.

The legend of David Kinjah. First take.He was an odd sight, David Kinjah, the

sort of man you won’t meet every day. A tall,dreadlocked Kenyan cyclist with a 100-wattgrin, no sense of time and a generous soulmarried to a rebel heart. I remember the firsttime I ever saw him. I was at the Uvunbuzi

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Charity Ride with Mum. I was thirteen, onthe road to fourteen.

This was my second event, having riddenthe Trust race* a few months before. InKenyan terms, it was a big event, maybe ahundred or so riders, including a few localsalong on their sturdy Black Mambas (a road-ster common in East Africa). I was on myRaleigh mountain bike. I even got a free T-shirt for my participation. Mum knew someamateur cyclists, predominantly white guys,in their forties and fifties. I went along withthem for two or three rides. This was one ofthose days.

The riders in the Kenyan team jerseys andthe road racers were so far ahead that Ididn’t see them at all during that ride.

Suddenly, though, in the steaming after-math of the race, Kinjah was visible. Radiantand luminous in his bright Lycra kit, on hisslender road bike. There were a few otherguys with him. All of them were wearing

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Kenya national team kit. I could see that theywere different. Made men. Serious bikepeople. Professionals. They looked like theywere the centre of the world, masters of theuniverse.

The story goes that Mum went across toKinjah and asked him quietly if he wouldteach me a little about bikes and cycling. Iwas hyperactive, with more energy thansense. She worried that one of my freewheel-ing adventures through life would end badly.

Kinjah said yes. He would.I don’t think Kinjah was pointed out to me

in those terms, not as a cycling ayah orbabysitter. More like, ‘That guy is the captainof the Kenyan cycling team, you should havea chat with him.’

When I went over to talk to him, I said Iwas looking for a road bike, and asked if heknew of anything available at a low price. Isecretly hoped he had an old bike I could

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use, but equipment was scarce, even for thecaptain of the national cycling team.

I remember him being so approachableand friendly, asking me questions. How longhad I been riding? Which routes did I enjoy?I must have spoken to him for about tenminutes and at the end he said, ‘Listen,you’re not that far away from where I live – ifyou want to come up on a weekend, come fora ride.’

I took his phone number. I would be see-ing him soon. And often.

I don’t know what was said or what wasplanned for me between Kinjah and Mum,but from the moment I met Kinjah, learningthe rules of the road or the best way to fix apuncture were things of secondary interest. Iwanted to be like him. I wanted to spend somuch time on the bike that my moleculesand the bike’s molecules became fused to-gether. I wanted quads like a proper rider.Quads set like gleaming pistons beneath a

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slender torso and a narrow upper body. Iwanted to sit on my bike and look as if I hadbeen born for it. I wanted to race. And Iwanted to win. I wanted a Kenya nationalteam jersey. I wanted a road bike. I mighteven have considered dreadlocks.

I was both pupil and enchanted audience.Kinjah was fourteen years my senior. I lovedhearing about the races he had gone to, theguys he had ridden with, and how he hadridden. The constant battles with the sprint-ers – ‘dropping’ them on the climbs beforebeing caught again on the flat – these wereepic thrillers to me. It was 2002 before Ieven saw the Tour de France on the televi-sion for myself. This world of Kinjah’s, Icould scarcely imagine anything beyond it.

Kinjah was a Commonwealth Games rider.Twice. He had once said goodbye to Kenyaand left his village behind for a pro career inItaly. He was signed up with a small teamcalled Index-Alexia Alluminio, which was a

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Trade 2 team at the time (the equivalent toPro Continental, one level down from the toplevel at World Tour). They had some im-pressive riders on the roster. He spent thewinter training with them, and on theirtraining camp before their first race of theseason Kinjah was killing everyone on theclimbs. He was really showing them he was aclimber cropped from the altitude of our be-loved Ngong Hills. But come the first race,for some reason the sponsor decided to shutdown the team. There was a free-for-all;everyone grabbed the bikes and the equip-ment, trying to compensate themselveshowever they could. Kinjah was left in Italywith no team, no support and no money.

The other half of Kinjah’s life has been fix-ing bikes and tinkering with them. At thetraining camp he cleaned everyone’s bikesfor them. He was repairing the bikes andeven showed the mechanics a few new tricks.So, after the team disintegrated, he got work

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building bikes in a factory for severalmonths.

He stayed on for another six months, do-ing work out there, but eventually he wasforced to come back with nothing. Not thetriumph he had dreamed about, but at leasthe had been there. He had seized the day. Hehad followed his bliss. In Italy he was knownas the Black Lion.

He came home with stories to Mai-a-Ihii,his tiny village some twenty kilometres out-side Nairobi in the Kikuyu township.

Mum first took me to Mai-a-Ihii to visitKinjah. With people, she was colour-blindand she passed that on to me. She wanted tohave a look around. She somehow knew thatthis would become a second home for me.

Kinjah invited us in for a cup of tea. Hemade that sweet milky tea that Mum wasn’ttoo fond of, black tea with cinnamon, milkand about twelve scoops of sugar. VeryKenyan.

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At the time Kinjah’s place was one bigroom partitioned in half. A sitting room onone side; a bed and a cooker and the bikes onthe other. There was no electricity. Watercame from a big round drum that held 100litres. You opened the top and there was ajug to scoop water into a plastic basin. Waterfrom the basin was for washing yourselfwith. That same water, with your dust andsoap, was then used to wash your bike.

Going to the bathroom was another story.There was a line of small tin huts at the endof the alley closest to Kinjah’s place withabout four toilets in. You opened the doorand there was a piece of concrete on the wallfor stability, so that you wouldn’t fall in. Thiswas a good idea because there was no seat orstructure, just a hole in the floor. He had atorch for guests to take along on these trips.You sorted your own paper before you left.The open sewer smell was something it tooka few trips to get used to.

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Kinjah’s place was an open house. He hada gang of cycling friends and disciples whocame and went. He was a professor of cyclingto the local kids and they formed a looseteam known as the Safari Simbaz. Theystayed with Kinjah when they needed to orwanted to, and went away when they had to.

There was nothing elaborate there andnothing threatening. Mum could sense thegoodness in Kinjah and its hold over the oth-ers. No danger. As I was going backwardsand forwards to Kinjah’s place in the yearsafterwards she would always slip me a fewhundred shillings (just over a pound) to cov-er communal supplies at the market as mycontribution towards staying there.

That first day, full of sweet tea and prox-imity to a man who had raced in Italy, I justknew that every time I came to this place itwould be a different adventure. I wouldn’tknow where we would be going. I wouldn’tknow who we would be going to see. Or

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what. I knew that sometimes they wouldn’teven speak Swahili, let alone English. They’dfall into their own tongue and what was be-ing said would just go straight over my head.

‘Well?’ he said as we got ready to leave.‘Count me in,’ I said.

A legacy left to us by Flamingo Tours was aknowledge of all the camps that Noz hadused for tourists and their safaris. The MasaiMara became a favourite place for Mum andme. Life had changed for us but that wasn’tsomething we would complain about withthe Masai.

‘You lost your house? Well, they took ourlands.’

The Masai are nomads who wander withtheir cattle but governments in Tanzania andKenya have for a long time been trying tofence them in, cutting back on their historichomelands and making National Parks out ofthe world they used to travel through. TheMasai are an interesting, welcoming people

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though, and on our trips to the Mara, Mumand I often encountered tribespeople whowould stop and talk to us.

That’s where Rocky and Shandy camefrom. One half-term break from school,when I was thirteen, I was with Mum in acamp in the Mara. There were a few otherpeople staying there who Mum knew.

Some Masai came by claiming that a largepython had eaten one of their goats. If wedidn’t go and collect the snake the Masaiwere going to kill it. Fortunately, the Masaihad come to the right place. Mum had a bigheart and I had a hankering for a snake.

Off we went with a large sack searching forthe python that ate the goat. A couple of menfrom the camp came along too. A python thathas eaten a goat will lose her girlish figurewhile metabolizing it, and won’t be inclinedto slither far in the open. The Masai had giv-en us a rough idea where we might find thepython and there, at the base of a bush, was

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a hole in which the python had set up itsnest. The hole was just a short commute often minutes or so from the Masai manyatta,the village.

The python that had eaten the goat wasn’tat home but it had given birth not long ago.There were hundreds of little pythonssquirming about both outside and inside thehole. A few slithered away to hide but wewere quick and we got at least a hundred intothe sack. They may not have been happyabout it but the Masai didn’t like them. Theywould thank us in later life.

We took the baby pythons away in a car,off to a forest area, and released them therewhere there was more natural protection andfewer snacking opportunities for birds ofprey, including secretary birds and tawnyeagles, and mongooses. A few days latersome of the other people from the campcaught the mother python and released her

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into the forest too. Meanwhile, I kept two ofthe baby snakes.

I brought them home and christened oneof them Rocky and the other one Shandy.They were the cleverest names I could thinkof for two rock pythons. They were both abrown and black camouflage colour, but Icould tell them apart because Rocky had dotson his eyes while Shandy had the dots lowerdown. This information didn’t really fascin-ate Mum too much but she was happy for meto be happy. She never reminded me that Imet Rocky and Shandy while their mum wasaway digesting an entire goat. Or that Rockyand Shandy might later acquire an appetitefor skinny teenage boys.

Rocky and Shandy were each a foot longand their first home from home was in one ofmy brother’s abandoned aquariums. Theylived there to begin with on a carpet of news-paper, with a few rocks and some branchesthrown in for good measure, but eventually

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we got somebody to build them their ownplace. This enclosure was a bit more roomy,being maybe five or six feet long, four feetwide and four feet high. It was a solidwooden construction with mesh on the topand one wall of glass at the front.

Their house was outside on the veranda,perched on a few rocks so it didn’t lie on theground or soak up water. We were living inLangata at the time in a cottage in thegrounds of a much bigger house that we werehouse-sitting. The main residence had alarge, well-kept garden with peacocks roam-ing around in it. I’m not sure if I everthought of the complications involved ifRocky or Shandy escaped. It wouldn’t havebeen a good thing for either of them to befound digesting a peacock.

We had our own piece of garden that wasseparate from the big house. Rocky andShandy were pampered. I had a plastic coverwhich I slid over the mesh so that if it was

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raining they wouldn’t get wet. I found somehandsome pieces of driftwood in a dried-upriver basin in the Ngong Hills while explor-ing with Mum and placed them in the cage sothey could slither over them. They had alarge water basin too. Pythons like water sothey enjoyed swimming in it or just soakingin there. They had every amenity, and gener-ally a better lifestyle than Mum and I had.

I liked to tell people, especially Kenyans,that Rocky and Shandy were free to slitherabout the house at night, then return to theircage in the morning. It was a complete lie,but I saw people listening with wide eyes,thinking, ‘Wow, this boy has got snakesaround his property.’

Pythons don’t show affection or fetchsticks but there are compensations, particu-larly the novelty factor. Nobody I knew hadtwo pythons. In fact, nobody I knew evenhad one python. When I went to the local su-permarket I brought Rocky and Shandy with

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me. They weren’t fully grown yet. But neitherwas I. The sight of us freaked some peopleout.

Rocky was my favourite. He was mellowand relaxed as pythons go, and I could holdhim without any problems. Shandy was theopposite. He was moody and far harder tohandle. Neither of them had much time forMum. If they were in the house sitting withme on the couch and Mum came in, theydidn’t like it. They either smelled her fear orher cigarette scent and if she got within acouple of metres they lunged at her. For-tunately, they never came close to catchingher and when Mum left the room they wouldsettle down again. I don’t know what it wasabout Mum they didn’t like. Everybody elsealways thought she was great.

Not too long after the arrival of Rocky andShandy, I went on holiday to South Africa tosee Noz. Things had settled down for us allsince Noz had left Kenya, although he was

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still struggling to build his new conferencemanagement business. I would travel toSouth Africa once a year or so to see him. Iwas amazed by the sprawling metropolis thatis Johannesburg: shopping centres, movietheatres, arcades and sweetshops. The tripswere good but it was always great to get backtoo.

The days of going to the Banda Schoolwould soon be drawing to an end now I wasthirteen, and there was no question of mefollowing my brothers to Rugby School inEngland. Mum and Noz had put morethought into this than I had. One evening inJohannesburg, Noz, his partner, Jen, and Iwere out for something to eat at a small res-taurant when Noz raised the subject. Therewas no beating around the bush.

‘You’re going to come to school here.’There were tears. It might have been bet-

ter if he had at least attempted to beataround the bush. Back in Nairobi, Mum was

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now working in a surgery. She had regularclients, we were getting by financially and Iloved living in Kenya. The visits to Johannes-burg were always enjoyable, and always a bitdifferent, but home was home. This was theend of the world being presented to me in asnug restaurant. Leave everything you know.Leave Mum to her fate with Rocky andShandy. And vice versa. Say goodbye to allyour friends.

Generally, kids from the Banda Schoolwould move on to a secondary school onLangata road called Hillcrest and that’swhere most of my friends were heading.Only the really bright students or those withwell-off parents would go to prestigiousboarding schools in the UK. But these werethe facts of life: an education at Hillcrest costthree or four times more than the equivalentexperience would cost in South Africa. It wasnot a long menu of life choices that was

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being offered to me in the restaurant thatnight.

Noz’s business was growing slowly, thatwas obvious. They were still runningeverything from home with just one tele-phone, and although there was income, itwas not a Rugby School level of income. Itwas not even enough for Hillcrest.

This was all quite a shock but I would ad-apt and I would go to school in South Africa.It was not my choice because it was not achoice.

Mum had a dread. Well, two dreads. Meleaving, and Rocky and Shandy staying.When I moved down to South Africa, the twogrowing pythons would not be coming withme. I told her soothingly that Rocky andShandy were low maintenance, really. If shecould just throw them each a live rabbitevery month they would be fine.

Rock pythons aren’t for everyone, al-though they themselves aren’t particularly

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choosy. In the Malindi district in Kenya afarm manager once stepped on a rock pythonand, having wrestled with the snake for anhour, was dragged up a tree. While hangingup there waiting to be squeezed to death andswallowed he managed to raise the alarmwith his mobile phone. Villagers and policewere able to free him. The snake was de-tained but escaped the following day.

Tip: if you get attacked by a twelve-footpython (the southern subspecies like Rockyand Shandy don’t grow any bigger althoughother rock pythons can stretch to over twentyfoot long) and it is trying to wrap itselfaround you, all you have to do is try to grabthe head and hold the tail. Once you havethose two in your hands you can start un-winding the snake in the opposite directionto how they are wrapping themselves aroundyou. This was not the sort of handy hint Iwanted to be leaving with my mum as I washeading off to secondary school.

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I had been bitten on numerous occasionsby Rocky and Shandy. As the primary carer Ioften had to check their mouths for dirt. Thisis a common problem with snakes, and thedirt can cause an infection in their lip. Toprevent this, I used newspaper as a base intheir cages, but I also had to pull their lipdown from time to time and use a toothpickor a small stick to remove the offendinggrime. They wouldn’t appreciate mydentistry at all. Rocky or Shandy wouldlunge and there would be a horrible rippingsound as they tore at my flesh. It was apowerful impact, and felt like somebody hit-ting me. When the snake pulled away Iwould hear more ripping and there would beblood flowing and a temporary tattoo ofteeth marks. Thankfully, these bites were notpoisonous, and they healed quickly.

By the time I was due to go to South Africain May, when I was fourteen, Rocky andShandy would have grown to around a metre

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in size. Not quite huge, but still large enoughto enjoy eating live rats. I started them onmice. Locally bred. I built a little cage andbought a small family of white mice thatcame from a lab in Nairobi. I had three orfour of them to start with, but in a couple ofmonths this grew to twenty or thirty of themscurrying around.

The mice bred so quickly that I was able tofeed Rocky and Shandy with a plentiful sup-ply, but inevitably the snakes soon outgrewtheir modest diet. I could no longer even seethe bulge in their stomachs after they hadeaten a mouse. It was time to move on torats. These weren’t really an option forbreeding at home so I ended up buying rattraps.

It’s an interesting fact that snakes won’teat dead food. They are hygiene consciouslike that. A dead rat would be deemed com-pletely unacceptable from a bacterial and afreshness point of view, and for that reason

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Rocky and Shandy wouldn’t be enticed byanything that had already been killed.Thanks but no thanks. So the rat traps had tobe non-lethal. The poor rodent would headdown a funnel and get stuck. I would thencome along and release the rat into the py-thon cage. It was particularly tricky if I dis-turbed Rocky or Shandy by getting up andleaving suddenly just after they had killedtheir dinner. If I was wanted on the phone orif my mum called me, they could go right offthe rat if they hadn’t started eating it yet.They would leave it there like a child refusingto eat its greens.

I liked to innovate though. The lengths in-volved in catching a rat meant that havingone rejected by a disturbed python was ex-tremely frustrating. As a solution, and drawnstraight from the ‘seemed like a good idea atthe time’ file, I experimented with puttingthe dead rats into the oven to heat them upagain. I would then take the heated rat and

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dangle it annoyingly in front of Rocky andShandy to make them agitated enough tolunge for it again. The number of times I gotbitten doing that was considerable. On theother hand, who wanted to waste a rat thathad taken a week to catch?

These were activities I loved as a thirteen-year-old boy. But they would be a lot to askof my mother when I left home.

I came to understand my brother’s abduc-tion of my favourite rabbit. Jeremy had a py-thon to feed, after all. At one stage duringthese nomadic years of Mum and me house-sitting between Karen and Langata, we hadtwo empty houses. We stayed in a cottagewhile my grandparents occupied the mainhouse. The cottage was opposite a kinder-garten which had pet bunny rabbits as classpets.

You can sense what is coming. The bun-nies couldn’t. Some days when my schoolhad finished and after all the kindergarten

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kids had gone home I would ride aroundthere on my bike. Firstly, I liked doing trickson their playground where they had ramps.Secondly, the kindergarten served as a sortof takeaway restaurant. When Rocky andShandy were still small I dropped by the rab-bit cage from time to time and took away oneor two baby rabbits to bring home in mypocket.

As an adult, the guilt about that stays withme. Young children would arrive at class thenext day and their little baby bunny rabbitswould be gone. I did find it very hard feedingrabbits to Rocky and Shandy because therabbits, especially when the snakes grabbedthem and started the coiling process, let outa loud high-pitched squeal. I felt like inter-vening and stopping it. But the pythons hadto be fed and it was my responsibility.

When I got to South Africa the life expect-ancy of the kindergarten bunnies in myneighbourhood would mysteriously shoot

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up. I was not sure how Mum would feedRocky and Shandy, but I knew that shewouldn’t be heading down to the kinder-garten with two empty pockets.

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4

A year before I was due to finish at Banda,Noz and I had spent a holiday visiting poten-tial schools around South Africa. Mostly welooked at boarding schools. We had finallysettled on St Andrew’s in Bloemfontein.

It was tough. For a start, I arrived at astrange time. The English school systemused in Kenya clashed with the South Africanschool calendar so I arrived in Bloemfonteinin the middle of the school year, and in themiddle of winter. I felt as odd as a second leftfoot. More importantly, I was freezing, abso-lutely freezing. I had one duvet cover andone jumper. Everything was a shock to thesystem. I was so far out of my comfort zonethat I became disoriented. The school wasvery strict, boys only and predominantly

Afrikaans. It was enthusiastically Christian.We had chapel every morning and many ofthe pupils came from religious families. Theoverall feeling of the place seemed to besomewhere between a military academy anda monastery.

In our cupboards our clothes had to be fol-ded in an extremely specific way, with sheetsof smooth paper placed inside our shirt andthen the shirt folded around the paper in aparticular fashion. It made our shirts lookperfect and unwrinkled, which was a clevertrick, but not of huge interest to me as ateenage python keeper and trick cyclist.Everything had to be meticulous.

There were two people to a very smallroom, which was something of a cultureshock. I was billeted with a boy called Clin-ton Foster. He was from Botswana, which Iwas pleased about because he was also not aSouth African. He had been there longer

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than me, having arrived at the right time ofyear, and he showed me the ropes.

Altogether, there were four of us outsiders:myself, Clinton, a guy called Mark Dunnefrom Zimbabwe and one other guy, anotherZimbabwean. We were put into a specialclass to teach us Afrikaans, with the goal ofbeing able to pass some exams in four or fiveyears’ time. Again, this was tough, but atleast it was easy to find help in a school fullof Afrikaans speakers.

Our maths teacher was an old Afrikanerwho, to my amazement, couldn’t speak morethan a few sentences of English. I was beingtaught maths in Afrikaans and most of it wassailing over my head. Maths was still one ofmy favourite subjects; I had always beenmore at home with numbers than withwords. One day in maths class the teacherwas ranting on in furious Afrikaans and Iwas lost. I turned round to ask someone be-hind me what he had just said, but everyone

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was writing frantically and I was confused.The teacher looked round and saw me talk-ing. He picked up one of the old wooden-backed dusters for the blackboard andhurled it straight for my head. He missed meby inches and hit the poor boy I had askedfor help.

Some of the teachers were resourcefulpeople. One of them had a cane which he hada nickname for. It was called Poopytoll. Ididn’t know what this meant, but presum-ably it was something imaginative aboutyour bum being your ‘poopy’, and ‘toll’, as inpaying the toll. I didn’t know precisely; Ididn’t care much.

We were a small school, consisting of justa few hundred pupils, but every morning wewould face the world wearing our blue tiesand blazers and our wooden boater hats. Itwas Afrikaans with a dash of England.

The most difficult adjustment to make wasthe hard labour. We had dorm inspections

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twice a week, after school and on weekends.We were made to dress up in full regalia withthe blazer, the hat and the tie. Then we eachhad to stand outside our door and wait forthe axe to fall. There were rules. You couldn’tjust leave your bed with a duvet and a pillowon it. Sinner! You had to pack away the pil-low and the duvet and replace them with aquilt that was immaculate and absolutelyfree of wrinkles. Wrinkles were an abomina-tion before the Lord. We had to fold thecorners in a special way into hospital corners– the edges were so sharp and pressed thatyou could cut your fingers on them. Obvi-ously if we did bleed, we would have to holdour fingers out of the window. We then hadto make a perfect V and tuck the quilt undernicely so that it looked ultra-neat. I had nev-er done anything like this in my life. The pre-fects would walk into the room, look aroundand pull the bed out to check for dust. Thedust could be anywhere, from the windows

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to the floor, but they would find it eventhough we had been mopping, sweeping andpanicking. We weren’t given much time toget the room ready, so the work would befrantic and our hearts would beat like crazywith fear. We were petrified by the prefects.They loved their work. They would gothrough our rooms forensically, snoopingright into the corners, running their fingersalong the skirting boards. Any brown stainsor dust coming away on their fingers and wewere in trouble.

The prefect tossed our room up anyway hewanted. He threw everything out of our cup-boards, crinkled all the paper for the shirtsand even turned our beds upside down. Thenhe would calmly walk out again.

‘Right. Another inspection in half an hour.Get your stuff ready.’

To add to the pressure and intensity of thesituation, I’d be standing outside my doorpraying that they wouldn’t happen to

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stumble upon my secret stash of ‘tuck’ – mysweets, chocolates and biscuits that I’dbrought back from my last visit home. At thebottom of my clothes cupboard, I would un-screw the floor panel and hide my bounty.Had the prefects discovered my hiding place,they would have ‘confiscated’ (and later de-voured) the contents.

We youngsters also had to skivvy to cleanthe room of someone older. I did it for one ofthe prefects but there were two or three of uson rotation so we took turns.

If the dorms were messy or if we had beennoisy after lights-out they would give us allhard labour. The prefects would take us outon a Saturday morning or a Sunday, depend-ing on where the ‘sport’ was due to takeplace. A prefect once made us carry him out-side on to the rugby field sitting on hiscouch, so that he could lounge there andwatch. From his throne he would make usrun and do press-ups, as well as these torture

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squats where we had to squat 90 degreesdown until we were almost sitting. We hadour hands out and we would crouch thereholding the pose for maybe five minutes ofagony. We were shaking but the prefectwould still come along and whack our out-stretched hands with a stick.

As we were only fourteen years of age, itwasn’t hard to make us break down and startcrying. A few of my overweight classmatescouldn’t perform the exercises at all, but ifanyone stopped then the whole group wouldhave to start again. That was the mentality.

It was awful, but the boys who weren’t asfit became the enemy. If they collapsed in adrill, some of my other classmates would getup and just go for them. There was fightingand deep trauma for some of my friends. Iwas lucky that I was in good shape so I didn’tattract too much attention.

Hard labour was the worst, but there wereother things that they didn’t tell us about in

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the prospectus. If we were ever late for any-thing, punishment would inevitably follow.Mostly they would make us stand in the quador in front of the chapel on a weekend dayfrom ten o’clock in the morning until four inthe afternoon. Rain or shine, we would haveto remain bolt upright and dead still, like fig-ures in Pompeii. Living like this day-to-daywas a struggle – but I was determined tosurvive.

Although Bloemfontein was tough andlonely, the experience taught me things. Youare your own best resource when things arebad, and I had found my own ways of havingfun. When Noz’s business started to pick up Iwas bought a stunt bike which I took with meto Bloemfontein after about six months, bywhich point I had sussed out the lie of theland. Other kids had proper bicycles but thestunt bike was all that I needed. I could getpretty high on it and the forks wouldn’tbend, no matter how hard I pounded them. I

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loved doing tricks, spinning it around andperforming wheelies. It provided me with aworld of my own to escape to. Racing wouldcome later, but in Bloemfontein the bikeserved different needs. St Andrew’s was amixed school, made up of us boarders andthe day boys who got paroled to go homeevery evening and on weekends. The bike be-came my passport to freedom because Icould use it to visit my friends who were dayboys. I would stay weekend afternoons at afriend’s house and we would play computergames or watch television until I had to re-turn for evening roll call.

We had our first ride together.‘You know,’ he said to me afterwards, ‘you

look pretty good on a bike, a natural. You’reobviously keen and you want to improve.Why don’t you come training with us?’

I drank that in for the instant boost it gaveme. A shot of pure enthusiasm.

‘Really?’

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Kinjah said I was a natural. He was a pro.It had to be true.

Later they would joke that my elbows wereso wide when I rode that I looked as if I wereabout to start flapping my arms to takeflight, but I didn’t know that then. Cyclinghad me, hook, line and sinker.

And that’s how it started. On the first fewoccasions Mum would drop me off at Kin-jah’s place and pick me up in the evening.Then we got to the point where he said, ‘Whydon’t you just sleep here and we’ll go and dothe same thing tomorrow?’

Next, it got to the stage when Mum wouldcall to collect me and I would turn to Kinjahand say, ‘But we have that thing tomorrowthat we can’t miss …’

I’d throw him a look and he would say, ‘Ohyeah. That thing.’

And Mum, not fooled at all, would read itand smile and say, ‘Okay, okay.’

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It went on like that. The first time wecycled together I was on school holidayshome from South Africa and I went on tworides with Kinjah and the boys. After that itgrew and grew until I was spending moreand more time at his tin hut and with theteam whenever I was home.

We had so much fun, riding out in themorning to visit one of Kinjah’s family mem-bers and stopping there for lunch. We wouldmeet the rest of the family, have some ugaliand sukuma wiki for lunch and then turnround to ride home. Some rides would be upto 200 kilometres, which meant eight hoursin the saddle with only one food stop in themiddle. When we got back, the other side ofKinjah’s life would take over – making bikerepairs to earn a living. Local customerswould bring in their bikes and he would of-ten let us help, and teach us how to fix them.

This was an education, and a level of ex-pertise far above anything I had known up

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until this point. Like at the market, where Ihad watched the local mechanics at work,Kinjah didn’t have the kind of money avail-able to pay for expensive repairs, and even ifhe had, it was unlikely that the local bikeshop would have those parts available. Hecouldn’t, for instance, just buy and fit a newderailleur. Instead, he would fashion piecesof metal himself and skilfully attach them tothe bikes. Hey presto, it would work.

By the time I was sixteen years old, I hadstarted training during term-time in SouthAfrica too. I saved up for a set of rollers – apiece of indoor training equipment – for myroom at school and I would spend hours onit. There were also shorter training rides thatthe school had come to tolerate me leavingthe grounds for, and I would fit a longer ridein on a Saturday or Sunday, which normallylasted five or six hours.

When I went back to Kinjah, I could testout how much progress I had made by seeing

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where I ranked among the group. He had agreat ability to judge exactly where you wereat with your performance levels and your ca-pacity for suffering. He knew how to take youup to your absolute limits, and how to keepyou there, but he would also show you that atany point he could ‘drop’ you, or leave you inhis tracks.

Kinjah said that I was a good sufferer. Per-haps our hard labour in Bloemfontein hadmade men out of boys, stoics out of sufferers.

Shandy had never settled in quite like Rockyhad. After I moved to St Andrew’s he wasstill very aggressive, and a constant nuisancefor my mother. The two snakes were alsogrowing. Their latest caged enclosure had asmall wooden structure built inside in theshape of an octagon, with a lid on the topand a narrow entrance at the front. This wastheir den within the cage if they wantedsome darkness during the day; pythons liketo hide away from everyone. However, they

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had got so big that only one could fit in thecramped den at a time. As they were snakes,there was no point in drawing up a timesharerota.

While I was away from home, I knew thatin order to clean the cage someone elsewould have to regularly risk their limbs to liftRocky and Shandy out of the den. Anna, ourayah at the time, made her position clear.She wasn’t touching any snakes. Ditto thegardener. So poor Mum was elected bydefault.

Before my departure I had tried to teachher a good way of evacuating the snakes.

‘Mum, you just need to put a kitchen clothover the python’s head and then pick it up bythe tail and they’ll be fine. You’ll be fine.’

I always did this if I was ever going to pickone up and I could see they were in a badmood. A cloth over the head and they wereimmediately placid. It was a shame it didn’twork on the prefects.

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Anna’s reservations were understandable,of course. One time in a house in Karenwhere we were staying, Rocky went missing.It was a house with thick vegetation andforest at the end of the garden. I thought hewas out there somewhere. Three weeks hadgone by since anyone had seen him, until oneday Anna was in the house cooking a mealand my mother was the only other personhome. There was a small sort of vent in theceiling, a power outlet which had created ahole. I don’t know how it came to be butAnna turned round and Rocky was hangingdown into the kitchen, upside down, with hishead precisely at eye level with her. Shebumped straight into him. Anna’s blood-curdling shrieks must have been heard inparts of northern Africa. My mother thoughtthey were being burgled or kidnapped.

I was still at Banda at the time. Rocky wasprobably hungry or something. Neither Annanor my mother asked if he was peckish. They

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closed all the doors and they stayed closeduntil I got home from school. I had to go in-side, pick him up and put him back in hiscage.

That should have been the end of Annaand my pythons but she actually had a mo-ment of great heroism soon after this. Siafuants are an African plague. You might besleeping and they will march into a forma-tion on your leg and in inexplicable unisonthey will all bite you at exactly the same time.The ants can get into your skin to the extentthat many of the tribes use them for stitchingwounds. They hold a siafu just above thewound and let it bite into the sundered fleshand then they break its body from the headand the pincers will still remain in the skinholding the wound together.

These ants got into Rocky and Shandy’scage in such numbers that the ants were go-ing to kill them. The snakes were thrashingaround inside, uncontrollable and incapable

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of getting the ants off themselves. Annascrewed her courage to the sticking point.She threw a towel over the snakes, scoopedthem up and ran with them to the bathroom.Next, she dropped them into the bath, filledit up with water, and then began brushingthe ants off the snakes. The snakes, unappre-ciative as ever, and in some pain, tried to at-tack Anna. It would have been far easier forher to turn a blind eye to them and pretendthat she hadn’t seen what was going on, butshe didn’t. She wasn’t that kind of person.She knew how upset I would have been. Theynever appreciated it, but Rocky and Shandyreally owed their cushy existence to the lov-ing natures of Mum and Anna.

For Mum’s sake, I let Shandy go free intothe Nairobi National Park on the way to theairport at the end of a trip home for theschool holidays. It was just Rocky at homenow, and one python was far easier to man-age, particularly as Rocky was quite a chilled

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guy for a snake. I think that secretly Mumkept him around because he reminded her ofme. She would never admit that though.

By this time, Rocky was just over twometres long and as thick as an adult’s arm.He ate chickens and fully grown rabbits.When I was at home I sometimes accidentlyleft the cage open or left a bolt unlatched andhe would find a way out. Or I might fallasleep holding him. When I woke up hewould be nowhere to be seen, slithering offaround the house somewhere. Rocky escapeda number of times, but if he was loose in thehouse I could usually find him quite quickly,lurking somewhere that was dark or covered.Usually …

‘CHRISTOPHER!’When she used my full name I knew it was

trouble. Rocky had actually slipped into bedwith Mum. He was lying right in front of herface where he could get the warmth of her

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bosom. She woke up eyeball to eyeball withRocky.

‘CHRISTOPHER! Get your bloody snakeback in the bloody cage!’

It wasn’t a good time to remind her of ourdeal about shouting. I couldn’t help butlaugh.

Mum was extremely tolerant. She put upwith the snake and she enjoyed my endlessstruggles to be a good provider. When I washome I would set traps on the way down tothe Ngong Hills. If we saw rats crossing aroad we would stop for a moment and followthem with our eyes because they normallyran along particular trails. If we found a trailI would leave a trap there and come back thenext day and look for it. Sometimes I wouldeven catch elephant shrews, small rodentsthat jump in a similar way to kangaroos. Theelephant part of their name comes from thelength of their nose, which slightly resemblesa miniature trunk. But there the likeness

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ended; they were tiny and wouldn’t makemuch of a meal for a python.

In the end Rocky kept on growing until hewas too big for the largest possible home-made enclosure, and when I was away atschool my brother Jeremy went with mymother and released Rocky into the wild in aforest in a nearby National Reserve. It was ahabitat that would have suited him well. Bythis stage he was too large for an eagle or akite to bother him and far too big for mymother to wake up with.

Noz brought me to the bus station in Johan-nesburg and loaded me on to the bus toBloemfontein. Half-term was over and it wasback to the gulag. The bus was a jalopy andthis was a long journey at the best of times.When we finally chugged into Bloemfonteinthe clock was crowding midnight. We werefive hours late. The Free State was deep intowinter and although I was better preparedthan I was when I first experienced

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Bloemfontein’s chill, here I was again, stillfreezing.

The school was several kilometres away.My stuff was in a large, heavy, old-fashionedtrunk. I would need porters or Sherpas totote it. The housemaster was supposed tohave met me at the bus hours ago but therewas no sign of him now. I looked for apayphone. Then I decided to arrange ahanging.

‘Noz, it’s me. I don’t know what to do.’‘What’s wrong?’‘I’m at the bus station in Bloemfontein. It’s

cold and I’ve been waiting more than anhour for the housemaster. I don’t know whatto do.’

‘You just wait there, Chris.’Noz got on the phone and gave a good

piece of his mind to my Afrikanerhousemaster, riot-act stuff. No quotesemerged but I could tell there had been abollocking when the housemaster screeched

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into the station in his pyjamas. He waswarmed only by his seething rage. He prac-tically threw me and my trunk into the car.At the dormitory he physically dragged me inas if he were tossing a troublesome inmateinto the prison cooler cell. He was rough inthat muscular Afrikaner-meets-teacher way.

‘If you ever go to your father again and tellhim that I’m not doing this or that …’

Not long after that Noz came up to Bloem-fontein and I told him what had happened.

‘I’m not going to keep you here,’ said Noz.He went to see the headmaster and told

him the story. The headmaster’s heart didn’tbleed too profusely when he heard about mywoe. He didn’t offer Noz the response that hewanted.

Noz said, ‘Right, I’m taking him back toJohannesburg.’

And away we went. It was as simple asthat.

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The timing was good. The business wasstarting to grow and Noz could afford a bet-ter school for me now, called St John’s.

This new place was more expensive, buteven though I entered a boarding house,which wasn’t cheap, the school still cost lessthan Hillcrest. I loved that Noz was justforty-five minutes’ drive away and that Icould go home most weekends.

St John’s had the feel of five-star luxury.In the boarding house there were no doorson the rooms but each little cubicle had itsown bed. It was one cubicle per person,which blew me away.

A matron showed us round the boardinghouse. There were duvets on all the beds andit looked so messy that I fell in love with theplace straight away. There was a boy in therewho had overslept and missed his breakfast.He was still in bed!

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The matron said, ‘Come on, Bradley, getout of your bed, you’ve got to go to schoolnow. Put on some clothes and hurry up.’

My mouth was open. She made classesseem like an option. A lifestyle choice forBradley. I knew then that I could live thereand be happy and it made me feel betterabout Bloemfontein. Apart from having meta lot of good guys at St Andrew’s, without go-ing to that school I wouldn’t have appreci-ated my new place so much.

First in St Andrew’s and now in St John’s,I wrote often to Mum. Maybe she noticed thechanges in me. Butterflies, bunny rabbits,snakes and rodents no longer had anythingto fear from me – they were too distant to re-main as obsessions. I had even been a de-voted collector of scorpions for a while butthe gentle ambience of St John’s didn’t seemcompatible with that.

The big news headline for me was that StJohn’s had a cycling club. My stunt bike and

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my wheelies suddenly seemed like childishthings to be put away. St John’s viewed cyc-ling as a cultural activity and every Friday af-ternoon there was a team ride for a couple ofhours. Matt Beckett was in charge; he hadthese hugely chiselled legs that the rest of uswould have killed for. Matt would become alifetime friend.

On Fridays I rode along with the club onmy old supermarket mountain bike. Most ofthe guys had proper road-racing bikes and Ibarely managed to keep up with the groupbut … I loved it.

Madly.Deeply.Completely.Matt said that the Friday jaunts were in

preparation for a race that we were all goingto be in. I was part of that ‘we’. My head wasfull of it. When I wasn’t on the bike themuscles in my legs ached for the company of

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the pedals, for the pain of the hills and thesweet adrenaline of riding catch-up.

Officially, I was now in training for a race.

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5

Growing up as virtually an only child, Ifound Kinjah’s world to be a revelation.

We were cheek by jowl, together all day,every day, at his tin hut or out on the road.Kinjah saw me, I think, as this eager youngskinny kid who was incredibly keen to learn.There were a few of us – me and some otherlocal teenagers – and we would all end upsleeping head to toe in the one bed that wasthere. We would lie awake for ages someevenings, talking about Kinjah’s time racingin Europe.

After seven or eight hours on the bikesearlier that day, the guys would be tired anddropping off to sleep, but I would lie awakeeven after Kinjah had gone quiet and ima-gine the world we had been talking about.

Kinjah! He’d been racing in Italy. From thistin hut in Mai-a-Ihii, he had made it that far.There was no reason why I couldn’t do thesame.

While a lot of the kids I had grown up withhad moved from the Banda School toHillcrest, and were now getting into drinkingand the nightlife of Nairobi, I was lying in aworld they could never imagine and was per-fectly content in this small tin hut. Thesheets, which were more like heavy blankets,always had a strong musty smell. It wasn’t anissue, just an observation, a scent that stillcomes back to me when I am thinking ofthose days.

I was a strange sight in the village. Theonly mzungu. People would ask Kinjahwhere he got me from, and did I even haveparents. But they came to accept me. It tooka while to be absorbed into the group withinKinjah’s hut, for me to be able to really jokeand talk with them, and for them to come

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out of their shells with me. We had to sharesome time and some history together first.We’d find a point where we had a little gag toshare or something to recount. If you fell offyour bike in front of one of the others, for ex-ample, and he had to brake not to run youover, you felt like you almost owed himsomething for not flattening you. Things likethat helped to dismantle the barriers.

There was banter between us all day long.They had nicknames for each other and I hada few which I never fully understood, as theywere generally in Kikuyu. They were mainlyalong the lines of ‘White Boy’ or ‘White Kid’.I was the murungaru, which means a sort ofgangly kid. There was constant teasing. Ifanyone did something clumsy or silly, wewould rag him all day about it. We spent longrides teasing each other and laughing thewhole way.

I imagine that initially the guys probablythought there was something in it for Kinjah,

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that my mum was paying him to coach me,or something like that. That was never evendiscussed. Once we had shared a few storiestogether, suffered on a few rides together,they began to open up to me a bit more.

There was Njorge. That is a very Kenyanname. Njorge was one of the younger adults,always up for anything. He was very happyand smiley and was a decent rider, much bet-ter than me. All of them were pretty muchbetter than me. Njorge was one of the mostopen members of the group and easy to getto know. Then we had Njana, which was anickname. He was a bit mischievous and youcould see that he had the inclinations of anopportunist. Njana was very quick to findpeople’s faults and then to prey on them. Ithink if we had all gone out drinking, he def-initely would have been the ringleader, push-ing us to do silly things. I say that but I don’tremember anyone in the group ever drinkingany alcohol; I never even saw a beer around

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the house, it was just not part of the lifestyle.Njana quit riding at a fairly early age and theguys who are still around give him griefnowadays for being chubby.

Samson Gichuru was another one of theyoungsters who started out back then. Heprogressed well and would go a long way incycling, becoming a good professional inKenya and even spending a bit of time withthe UCI development team in South Africa.

George Ochieng was around at that timetoo. He was Kinjah’s training and racingpartner for a number of years, but eventuallytimes got tough for him financially and hesold one of Kinjah’s bikes without Kinjah’spermission. That was the end of theirrelationship.

Kamau was one of the more prominentriders who was always on the training ridesand would lead the charge with Kinjah at theraces. He was a quiet guy with a hard, chis-elled face, but he was very likeable once you

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got to know him. He started off in life withclose to nothing, but he would eventuallyhave a proper house of his own not far fromKinjah’s, with brick walls, electricity and wa-ter. He would also set up a matatu businessin Nairobi.

I always enjoyed being in their company. Ilooked forward to those times immenselyand thought that the longer I could staythere, the better it would be for me; all Iwanted to do was ride my bike. If I was athome on my own, riding would be more dif-ficult and far less fun.

Up to the age of seventeen I was definitelyone of the weakest in the gang until someyounger guys came along and I discoveredthat I was more capable than they were. Thatwas good for me, and I realized that as timepassed, and I came back a bit older and witha bit more experience, I could start pushingthem all harder on the rides, particularly theclimbs in the hills.

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Before I started to improve, though, theywere incredibly accommodating. The groupwould often cycle quite a bit faster than me,but at times they would give me a push orthey would slow down so that I could staywith them, or ride in their slipstream. Theywould all be taking turns at the front, eachacting as a windbreak temporarily so that theothers could draft behind them, whereas Iwould be at the back barely hanging on, tak-ing advantage of all of their hard workwithout reciprocating. But they neverminded that. Close to home they would fi-nally push on ahead and I would arrive backa good ten minutes after them.

Kinjah was terrible at time management.He would say, ‘Okay, we’re leaving at nineo’clock tomorrow,’ so I would pitch up ateight. But he would be cooking somethingand then he would be talking. We wouldeventually leave the house at one o’clock.Naturally, we would be extremely late for

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whatever meeting or appointment we weretravelling to, so we would be riding extrafast.

If Kinjah had no meetings or visits sched-uled, we would be out all day. We wouldleave early in the morning, and then ride agood three or four hours before stopping fora meal somewhere, and then ride the samedistance back. These were big, long days.

I say stop for a meal somewhere as if wewere clicking our fingers for waiter service.We would stop at a place where we knew wecould find food. It wouldn’t be a restaurantas we all know it, but it would be somewherewhere we could get a plate of ugali, the whitepap. Ugali is maize flour cooked with waterinto a sort of doughy porridge. It is very pop-ular in Africa and incredibly wholesome butalso stodgy. We would have ugali andsukuma wiki, a kind of kale or spinach, orwhat Americans would call collard greens.Kenyans have a fantastic way of cooking and

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eating this which is really tasty and simple.We would break off a piece of the doughyugali with our hands and eat it together withthe sukuma wiki vegetables. There wasn’tmeat very often because that was generallyquite expensive in Kenya and more difficultto procure. However, after a really heavy dayof cycling, we would make an effort to sourcesome protein. If we could find some beef toadd to the ugali and sukuma wiki, we wouldmake a stew with it.

One of my favourite meals was introducedto me by Kinjah. It consisted of avocados,which were plentiful, cocoa powder, whichyou could buy from the local kiosk shops,and a sprinkling of sugar. We would mash itall up and make a brown, creamy, chocolateypaste. After training, when we were low insugars, we really enjoyed that.

On other days we would head off togetherto one of Kinjah’s meetings in the CentralBusiness District and we might end up

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stopping for a meal of chicken and chipsfrom a local fast-food place. We would allpush ourselves even harder on the roadhome to burn off the excess calories. Chickenand chips wasn’t a normal meal for cyclists.

It was a Friday afternoon and I was ridinghome from St John’s. I was fifteen years old.I hit the motorway on my bike. My backpackwas filled with my schoolbooks and home-work for the weekend, as well as someclothes. I swung into the fast lane and got be-hind a small bakkie. Sitting behind the slip-stream, I was comfortably riding along ataround 50 kilometres an hour. I was feelinggreat. Yes! I had finished school for theweek. I was home for the weekend. I evenhad a race on Sunday. Life was –

He had a large, angry Afrikaner faceperched on top of a large, stocky Afrikanerbody. He virtually grabbed me by the scruffof the neck and dragged me across severallanes of traffic on his motorbike.

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‘Kom hierso!’He was shouting in Afrikaans as he

dragged me.‘Kom hierso jou klein bliksem!’His big, volcanic face was close to mine.

He had taken off his helmet.I was busted.On the weekends, if we were not racing at

school, I usually went home to stay with Noz.He lived forty-five minutes away by car inMidrand, halfway between Pretoria and Jo-hannesburg. The easiest way to get there, theway that we would drive to and from school,was on the motorway that connects the twocities. Motorways, it was pointed out to menow, were not for bicycles. The back roads toMidrand would get me there safely.

I had worked out, however, that Friday af-ternoon when it was time for me to go homewas actually the best time to take a bicycleout on to the motorway. Traffic was generallybumper to bumper most of the way. The cars

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in the fast lane might reach speeds of 40 to50 kilometres per hour, the sort of speed de-signed as an invitation to a young cyclist whowas happy to tuck in behind a truck or car. Itmeant no traffic lights and a quick ridehome. Until the police officer, who was nowbreathing fire into my face, had seeminglyidentified me as the biggest threat to thequality of life for God-fearing people in all ofJohannesburg.

It had taken much persuasion to make Nozand the school see that cycling home andback to school would be in everybody’s bestinterests, but most of all my own. With reser-vations they had both agreed.

I could understand their concerns. StJohn’s was in Houghton, which is middleclass and expensive. But Houghton bordersHillbrow and Yeoville, tough precincts closerto the central business district in Johannes-burg. Hillbrow was once urban hip. Now itteemed with people who had fled the

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townships to a different sort of poverty. Ifyou look at a picture of Johannesburg, Hill-brow is the area beneath the long slendertower which is a landmark of the city. Thetower once had a revolving restaurant in itbut now it serves as a geographical warningfor those who do not dare risk the hinterlandbelow.

Yeoville suffered a similar fate to Hillbrowin the nineties, transforming during justeight years of white flight from being aneighty-five per cent white district to ninetyper cent black. The whites took their busi-ness with them. Banks redlined the area,denying loans to members of the black popu-lation, which meant they had to rent andcouldn’t buy.

Hillbrow and Yeoville were areas bestavoided by kids on bicycles, but when I washeading home the quickest route was to cyclestraight through them – quickly. I didn’t

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want to puncture. Then there was the motor-way issue.

‘Is jy fokken mal? Wat dink jy? Op diehoofweg? In die vinnige laan? IS. JY.FOKKEN. MAL?’

I had no legal training but I knew the tackI must take here.

‘I’m sorry. I don’t understand Afrikaans.’Mum had said to me once that if you ever

got into trouble with the police you shouldnever try to argue with them. It neverworked as they would always use their poweragainst you. The best thing to say would be‘I’m sorry’ and then they couldn’t carry onbeing angry with you. So, I was working thefool’s pardon stratagem.

He switched to English but he was a littledisarmed now.

‘What are you doing on the motorway?’I wanted to say something smart like ‘do-

ing the crossword’ but I knew better.

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‘I’m really, really sorry, officer. I’m reallysorry but I’m new to South Africa and I’mgoing to school now in Johannesburg. Whenmy father brought me here first, he broughtme here on this road and I don’t know theway home on any other roads so I have touse this one.’

I hoped it sounded like my father was aSomalian pirate who had abducted me andbrought me here for some reason to the poshschool. I was not to blame for myfoolishness.

‘No, no, you can’t do that. Follow me.’He threatened to impound my bike. My

most treasured possession.‘I’m taking your bike to the station. Your

parents can come and pick you up fromthere. Or you’re not going home tonight.’

This was harder work. I had to increasethe sob quotient in my story.

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‘Please. My mum is in Kenya and my fath-er is working. He can’t come and pick meup.’

He reprimanded me at length and mademe follow him to the next exit ramp, explain-ing to me the route home on the back roadswhich I knew precisely, but I kept noddinggratefully as he explained every twist andturn. I used the back road for about five kilo-metres and hit the motorway again soonafter that. For safety, I now rode even closerto the car in front of me so I could stayducked down behind it and out of sight.

A couple of times back in Nairobi I joined oldfriends from the Banda School for partiesand nights out. Being teenagers, and fairlyaffluent, my friends were drinking andsmoking joints. With Kinjah and the group Inever insulted their intelligence by pretend-ing to be what I was not. I may not have beenthe wealthy kid they imagined me to be, butat home and in St John’s I still had a life of

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considerable privilege by comparison. I men-tioned the nights out to Kinjah and he wasnot at all impressed. I was surprised at howstrict and stern he was with me. That was notthe way to go, he said. It definitely made animpact with me. I realized I couldn’t live fullyin both worlds. I would have to choose. Be-ing a good sufferer on the bike, the choicewas easy.

With a role in each place, though, I learneda lot. Even about food. With Kinjah and theboys, we had meals when we were hungry. Ifwe had eaten a substantial meal in themiddle of the day we didn’t need to eat again.However, in Karen or Langata we had break-fast, lunch and dinner, and those were setmeal times. We had to attend those meals re-gardless of the energy we had spent inbetween. It was definitely a different take onthe priorities of day-to-day living.

Kinjah’s family had their own home andsome land, which we in Kenya would call

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their shamba, a plot up in the highlands. Iset off with the Safari Simbaz one morningthrough tea plantations and on a long ride uptarmac into the hills before heading off on adirt road for a couple of hours. When we ar-rived at his family’s place, Kinjah broughtout the gifts that he had carried with him: anassortment of shirts he had collected fromsponsored events. They were new, and wouldhave been expensive, still in their packets.His family loved them.

At the shamba Kinjah’s brother Dan tookus away for a walk through the land to showus what they were growing. They had allkinds of vegetables. They’d live off what theywere growing and sell anything extra to thelocal market in order to buy other foods thatthey couldn’t cultivate themselves. They hada few acres in total. We walked for nearlytwenty minutes around the shamba and Dantook us down a steep cliff where he told us ofhis plans to grow more crops.

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The land there was fertile and green andvery lush, with a small stream running at thebottom. After we walked back up we spent acouple of hours relaxing, sharing food withthe family, before eventually heading home.It was a slice of Kenya that very few mzungusget to see.

When we left we were given a huge load ofvegetables, which were very awkward tocarry. I couldn’t help thinking that surely wecould buy these cheaply ourselves for aboutfive shillings (less than 50p) from the localmarket near Kinjah’s village, but now wewere going to be carrying it all for a hundredkilometres. And there were hills all the wayback to the village.

It was an unworthy thought after theirhospitality and, more embarrassingly, theother guys wouldn’t let me carry any of thevegetables myself. They took everything offme and loaded themselves up with about tenkilos each. Then, to my amazement, Kinjah

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and the group just exploded away on theirbikes. They were burning up the dirt tracks,which were incredibly steep and tough. Ithought to myself, ‘Okay, I’ve got a real ad-vantage here, I’m not carrying ten kilos ofthese wretched vegetables. I can get homefirst today.’

I could see them labouring and sweatingbut still I couldn’t keep up. After an hour Icould feel jelly legs coming on. I was morti-fied. Now they weren’t just carrying the food,they were starting to take turns pushing mefrom behind on my bike up the steep climbsbecause I was lagging. Once we reached themain road I was content to cycle in their slip-stream, and get sucked back to Kikuyu.

When we arrived back in the evening wedidn’t eat much at all. Just a few pieces ofbread with avocado and some milky cinna-mon tea before we were off to bed.

I used to wonder how I would ever get thebody I needed to get to the world I wanted to

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end up in. Or whether ugali and the dirtroads would get me there. I knew I didn’thave the muscles; Kinjah had explained tome that it would take years on the bike to de-velop them fully before I could really push onthe pedals properly.

That became the long-term obsession. Thegoal. To develop the way Kinjah said I would,by doing these long rides and putting in thehours. Hour after hour after hour.

St John’s was situated in a wondrousterracotta-coloured building in the middle ofgenteel Houghton. Nelson Mandela had ahome nearby. On Fridays a group of school-friends and I would sweep out in a cavalcadeof bikes down St David Road, on toHoughton Drive, and we were away.

We were highwaymen, kings of the road.We rode from gladed Houghton to the

wealthy oasis of Sandton and then backagain. Johannesburg was notorious for manythings and its homicidal traffic was one of

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them. We would hit the most densely traf-ficked roads in the city, Rivonia Road andJan Smuts Road, where the cars and truckswould be gridlocked and irritable in both dir-ections. In order to move at all we pedalledstraight down the middle of the road. If a cardoor opened suddenly, one of us would gettaken out instantly. If a newspaper hawkeror a beggar dawdled in our path, there wouldbe tears.

We were in the channel between the veinand the artery of Jo’burg traffic, racing eachother. One of my friends would be on the in-side of the cars while I would be on the out-side, pedalling for my life to get past them.We saw fleeting faces of motorists, their eyesfilled with alarm, pity and sometimes rage.Who were these wild, senseless kids on bikesspeeding down the middle of Jan SmutsRoad? Had it come to this?

For us, it was the best part of the week –pure exhilaration and freedom. I especially

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loved a stretch near the school, the hill onMunro Drive leading up to Elm Street. It wassteep enough to make me yearn for biggerhills and proper mountains. That sinew ofimagination linked all of us boys. This wasfun but we knew there was a world of profes-sional cycling out there that we were seriousabout. There was madness but there was loveand dedication at the heart of it.

I had started getting a few results in theraces we entered locally. We had changedhousemasters and our new overseer, AllanLaing, was an enthusiastic cyclist himself. Hewas supportive and I also had an ally inSister Davies, the school nurse, who headedup our cultural activities on a Friday after-noon. She and her husband were very keencyclists themselves and they liked to enterthe mass participation cycling events thatwere increasingly popular in South Africa. Ioccasionally saw the pair of them at the racesand we huddled to compare times.

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Sometimes the races would have a coupleof thousand people riding. On weekends,poor Noz would have to wake up at 4.30 a.m.to get me there on time. He would have todrive me to the start line by 5.30 a.m. withthe race commencing at 6.00. One morning,Noz drove me an hour and a half south at4.00 a.m. to Vanderbijlpark. When we gotthere I realized I had forgotten my racingshoes. I didn’t want to tell Noz I had forgot-ten them and considered trying to do the ridein my sandals. Noz, who was always support-ive and interested in my racing, figured outmy mistake quickly enough.

‘Right, that’s it. We’re going home.’He swung the car round, back towards

Midrand. I learned not to forget my cyclingshoes.

No matter how many people raced, Iwould have won the prize for being the mostearnest. I wouldn’t start in the early groupswith the pros but I would race against the

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clock for the 100 kilometres, record all of mytimes and would try to better my personalbest each week. I went along to more andmore of these races all aroundJohannesburg.

I was still riding my old mountain bike butI had developed enough to be able to keep upwith some of the racers. That was a short-term goal: keep up with the guys with the ex-pensive, fast bikes. I still couldn’t get close tothe racing times of the professionals, but myfitness was improving.

Driving to the races every weekend, Nozand I spent hours together that we probablywouldn’t have had if it wasn’t for cycling. Ithink it was a challenge for both of us but itwas fun. He was learning more and moreabout what I was doing, and he was proud ofmy results. Eventually I got the confidence toraise an important issue with him.

‘Noz, I really need to get a road bike.’

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We enquired, we saw the prices, and thenwe retreated for talks. Finally, we came upwith a system. I would start by performingsmall jobs for him to earn some money.These ranged from washing the car, to a per-sonal courier service on my bike, to adminwork for his conference business.

Next, I was resourceful. School was likeprohibition America and I saw an opening,supplying certain goods that were needed.With my growing reputation in the school-yard as an obsessive cyclist who had influen-tial allies in Allan Laing and Sister Davies, Ihad far more freedom to be outside theschool than most other boarders did. Alcoholwas in big demand. I would go out to the li-quor stores and get bottles of vodka andbrandy for the boys in my year and sell themat double the rate I had bought them. It wasa tax to justify the risks for the mule. I couldput cigarettes and other small items of

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contraband into the handlebars of the bikeand bring those back too.

I was a teenage bootlegger. And so good atit that I even became a prefect at St John’swithout them getting wind of my extra tripsto and from the school. I found work at a Jo-hannesburg bicycle shop too, called CycleLab, in Fourways. I was paid by the hour andtried to work as many hours as my weekendwould allow. Later, I even started instructinglocal spinning classes, taking back-to-backclasses so that I could also make them aworthwhile training session for myself.

The money mounted up.Eventually, I found a bike in the classifieds

that was almost identical to the bike MattBeckett, my buddy at the school cycling club,owned. It belonged to a man who had boughtit to try to get fit and then hardly used it.

I thought I was getting a great deal. Hewanted R10,000 for it, which was less than£1,000. It was sleek and so much faster than

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anything I had ever ridden before. Eventhough it was actually about three sizes toobig for me (the frame was a 60-inch or per-haps even a 62-inch – today I ride a 56), Ifelt it was the right size for me at the time. Icould grow into it.

After eight months of saving, it was mine.It was Italian. A Colnago, with a blue and

pink aluminium frame. It was a thing ofbeauty.

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6

It’s 5.00 a.m. It’s dark. Dawn is still just apromise. The temperature is in the minusfigures as I head towards the school sanat-orium. I’m wearing my tracksuit and carry-ing a bag for my helmet. I’m shivering.

I saunter casually now, clearing my headin the fresh air. When I arrive I unlock myColnago and go inside. I do the Clark Kentthing and materialize in my cycling gear.

Getting out of the school is easy in thedark. Getting back in, when things are busy,will be much harder, like a Colditz operation.I usually attempt re-entry during thebreakfast-time rush. But the cold is turningme blue now. My hands grip the familiarcurves of the Colnago handlebars. I hate thecold. Passionately. I am wearing thin school

gloves. This is the only concession I make tocommon sense. The school gloves are warm-er than my fingerless cycling ones. I thinkthey are, anyway. There is no equipmentcapable of calibrating the difference in thecoldness of my fingers when swaddled inschool gloves as opposed to cycling gloves.I’m so numb that I simply can’t imagine any-thing being colder. I ride out like this everywinter morning, wearing only bib shorts anda short-sleeve top. No long-sleeve jerseys. Nogilets. No arm or leg warmers. Occasionally,I put plastic bags on my hands before I putthe woollen school gloves on over the top.Not big with the Eskimos, I imagine. Theyhelp me stay warmer for maybe sixtyseconds.

I leave the school at 5.00 a.m. each day inthis icy darkness. Matt leaves his home at thesame time. He is a day boy; I board. I ride to-wards Matt’s house; he rides towards theschool. When we meet we spin off into the

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brightening morning for a full-tilt trainingride. We are competitive with each other. Itis kudos for me if we are closer to Matt’shouse than to the school when we meet inthe morning. It is a small victory for him ifwe meet at any point nearer St John’s. Some-times I leave the school at ten to five just toplay with his head.

The dark roads are empty and mysterious.The morning stillness is punctuated only bysudden birdcall and the odd bakkie ferryinglabourers to their jobs, the men stoic andsleepy in their flat-backs, leaning into theangles of the hills so that we think they areabout to tumble out.

As we ride, the air pushes against us andbumps us about. My lips are cracked fromthe cold. When you are on a bike the air hasmultiple personalities. I don’t like descend-ing into dips and hollows because all the coldair that has collected at the bottom freezes useven more as we pass through it. It’s like

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being dipped in frost. Flashing over bridgesor streams, the air is more robust, it shakesus down and roughs us up. I shiver andshudder down the slope of long dark hills. Idescend in a blind fury because the act ofpedalling gives me some warmth. Generally,if the sun is aiding and abetting me, I lookfor hills. Hills are an unrequited love early inthe morning though. The air on the waydown is unkind to me. Sometimes I even pullon my brakes just so that I have to pedalagain to get going.

It’s love though. Every ache and chill. Meand my Colnago and these hills. In love,everybody hurts. If you are serious abouthills and bikes, it hurts.

Life made for a strange tapestry. The halls ofSt John’s and the beloved chaos at Kinjah’swere two of the bigger strands of my life as Ileft my childhood behind. With Kinjah andthe guys, the bike was a staple of existencethat tied us all together. In St John’s, the

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bike was an instrument of subversion and es-cape. A minority interest.

In St John’s there is one dominant faith. Ienjoy rugby without being devout about it.The school is quite fundamentalist about thesport though. Rugby. Then cricket. If youdon’t play rugby, some form of observance isstill compulsory. You go and watch fromamong the congregation while the school’sfirst team plays at the weekends. You helpwith the rite that is the special school cheeror war cry. This isn’t voluntary. It is like thedraft. No dodging.

Matt and I were the two most ardent lob-byists for cycling. That placed us on the out-side. We were not the cool kids, or even inthe orbit of the popular crowd. We didn’t runwith the jocks or the big rugby players. Myfriends and I were a small and harmless sub-culture. We weren’t nerds, nor were wetroublemakers. We flew under the radar.

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One day we fell in behind the headmasteras he was striding from one building to an-other. He had too much to do alreadywithout making time for a special meetingwith the cycling posse. We urged him to un-derstand the extraordinary time demands ofcycling training. It had no beginning and noend.

‘It would really help if we could be excusedfrom coming to cheer for the rugby team, ifwe could have your special permission.’

‘Gentlemen, I can’t let people just comehere and go off and do whatever they want.We have our school sports here. They takepreference. That’s how life is.’

However, life for a cyclist had becomemuch easier since Allan Laing, our newhousemaster, had joined. He turned a blindeye to me arriving in the middle of breakfastand sitting down at a crowded table, takingthe spot to which a sympathetic friend hadalready carried down my morning meal.

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Runnels of sweat gave my game away but Al-lan was a cycling man and looked the otherway.

Buying the gleaming Italian Colnago en-couraged me to increase my commitment toa level befitting the bike’s beauty. Matt and Iboth joined the local Super C CyclingAcademy, named after the Super C energysweet. This was the first time we were part ofan official bike set-up.

The father of another junior schoolboy hadfinagled some sponsor money and an agree-ment to support the academy. I was verycompetitive with Matt at the time and he wasalready at the level I aspired to be. Matt hadmore of a natural build for a cyclist. He hadhuge quads and an impressively lean upperbody. Take either end of him and you hadthe body of a genuine rider. I just had theskinny upper body. It came as a matching setwith the rest of me. My relationship with cyc-ling was like a detective with a puzzling case.

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I knew what I wanted to solve. It was justworking out how that was the trouble.

The Super C Cycling Academy was arudimentary set-up. We rode with young-sters from different backgrounds including afew Afrikaans kids. We had enough riders tomake an A team and a B team. We would goon to enter the national Junior Tour of SouthAfrica for two years running. The race tookplace (and still does) in Ermelo inMpumalanga. The Junior Tours gave us anannual serving of humility. It was more hardevidence for me of how far I had to go. Mostof the stages were flat and by the finish weweren’t even in the same postal district asthe leaders. I would be dropped. Most of theteam would be dropped. We would getnowhere and I would think of how muchharder I needed to train.

I recognized that I had come into the sportrelatively late, only starting to ride properlywhen I was thirteen, and that I had a lot of

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learning to do, and a lot of growing to do, be-fore I could catch those front-runners. Thatwas fine by me though: I knew I was in cyc-ling for the long game.

We were still really just kids. I rememberbeing absolutely intimidated waiting at thestart line and looking across at some of theother guys who had giant quads and fullbeards. I hadn’t even started shaving yet.

The team time-trial day, in particular, wasthe one stage where we got up out of bednervous and then spent the day proving toourselves that we had plenty to be nervousabout. It was a day of trying to coordinate aneffort between the six of us in the team whenwe didn’t really know what we were doing,and didn’t have access to any hard informa-tion that might cure our ignorance.

We were sappers coming out of thetrenches and charging into no-man’s-land.In a team time trial you ride together as agroup against the clock, taking turns at the

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front of your mini-peloton in order for therest of your teammates to draft in the slip-stream behind, in theory. However, for us,one person would often cycle too hard andleave the rest of us behind. We lost most ofour guys in the first few kilometres and wereconstantly dropping each other. Occasion-ally, somebody would decide to prove a pointand drive hard until they fell off their bikewith exhaustion.

I was one of the riders who always clungon until the bitter end. It was just doggedperversity, managing to endure the suffering.But I actually enjoyed those time-trial daysmuch more than I did the road stages. Therewas more to do and I relished the unpredict-able racing dynamic. There were certainskills to hone tactically but also a lot of painto bear. I did whatever I could to survive, be-cause pain had to equal learning.

Matt rode for a good few years but margin-al pains killed him in the end. He didn’t love

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it quite enough when cycling really started tohurt. He was sane that way. He simply de-cided that professional cycling was not forhim. I, on the other hand, found some sort ofsolace in the suffering. More than that, Ifound that from the pain came satisfaction,from the suffering, joy. The older I got themore I liked being off on my own, pushingmyself through the various stages of exhaus-tion for seven or eight hours at a stretch.

My school terms in South Africa left mymum on her own back in Nairobi. However,she had regular physio work at a clinic on theNgong road and she was still in touch withKinjah. In fact, it was more than that. Shehad practically become a member of the Sa-fari Simbaz, acting as a soigneur, or carer,for the team; she would be on hand to offerany assistance, particularly during races ortraining rides. Kinjah had no back-upvehicles whenever he or the team raced, soMum would drive behind as the support car,

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having bought plenty of bananas and waterbeforehand. She would do this even when Iwasn’t there.

She never told me the full extent of howinvolved she became and I only found outabout what she had done for them manyyears later. She would often, for instance,drive up to Mai-a-Ihii with a car full ofposho, a few pots of Cadbury’s hot chocolateand some bags of sugar. Posho was used tomake ugali for the team (it is the maize inpowdered form) and the other ingredientswere added to the boys’ avocado paste. Inthis way, she looked after them, and theyloved her for it.

Perhaps her involvement was a connectionto me while I was away, but she saw too thatlife in Kinjah’s hunkered hut, and out on theroad, was about more than just the bikes. Itwas about opening up the world. For the Sa-fari Simbaz, the hub of the world was

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Kinjah’s house. Their individual journeyswere the spokes that radiated outward.

Teaching a boy the discipline required forriding and training, as well as self-denial, puthim on a road to the sort of self-fulfilmentthat he might never have dreamed about orhave been able to achieve on his own. It gavehim his first sense of possibility. The kidswho buzzed in and out of Kinjah’s hive, justlike I did, would probably never get thechance to see the inside of a great universityor go on to change the world. But they couldwork to be the best at something, and if notthe best, they could get the best out of them-selves. They could journey until they foundthe limits of what they were capable of,without the speed bumps of race or class.Mum saw that. She saw the enjoyment, thepride and the discipline; gifts that Kinjahgave away every day to us all.

I don’t believe that Mum ever had dreamsof seeing me grown up in a tie and bespoke

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suit, attached to a briefcase and a job thatmight make me a senior vice president someday. If she had, she never projected that vis-ion on to me. From Rocky and Shandy,through to my obsession with bikes, she washappy to see me content so long as I was adecent person. She encouraged a sense of in-dependence in my brothers and me, and theworld and its infinite variety was somethingshe loved and appreciated more than mostpeople did.

She always enjoyed travelling out from theepicentre that was Karen, Langata andNairobi. The Safari Simbaz races were partlyan outlet for that, but I had left her withouther fellow explorer for our adventures to theRift Valley or the highlands. She loved thecoast though. If Jeremy and Jono were homefrom England I would try to get back fromSouth Africa, Mum would take time off workand we would head for the beaches of Diani,which fringes the Indian Ocean.

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These trips were a bonus. When I was inSouth Africa I always returned to Kenya atleast once a year, for the long summer holi-days, but those days and nights were mainlygiven up to the bikes with Kinjah and theteam. Generally, though, during most of mytime in South Africa I managed to get backhome more than once each calendar year.Paying for flights was a difficulty, of course.Noz could manage one return ticket for mein the year but a second trip was costly and Iwas expected to contribute.

It turned out that I was wearing the solu-tion. In school in Johannesburg I had de-veloped a habit that I still have. I had begunwearing kikoys, the very colourful type ofsarong wrap garments which Kenyan peoplewear, not so much in Nairobi but typicallyalong the coast. In St John’s my kikoys werethe subject of some curiosity and even mildadmiration. I was a walking advertisementfor the clothes, which sadly weren’t available

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in Johannesburg. The city needed a kikoyoutfitter.

On a trip to Mombasa with Mum and mybrothers I bought twenty to twenty-five kilosof the things. Kikoys in Mombasa sold for200 shillings a go – about £1.50 per kikoy.Back in Johannesburg, to the discerningfashionistas of St John’s, I sold them on forR100 each, about £7.00. I had to sell arounda hundred of them to keep myself in airlinetickets.

There was a hitch. Bringing so manykikoys back to Johannesburg meant not be-ing able to carry very many of my ownclothes with me. It was difficult enough fly-ing my bike back and forth, so I ended uptravelling just with bags full of merchandiseand my bike.

There weren’t enough pupils of taste in theboarding houses of St John’s to buy the fullconsignment of kikoys but I persisted withmy business plan. I dangled them before the

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staff who worked with Noz in the office.Some felt sorry for me, others seemed togenuinely like them. Either way, they paidup. There were a few local workers whothought they might look good in them too.Done.

I diversified the range, bringing in trousersand handbags made out of kikoy material. Iwent to a flea market in the Midrand shop-ping centre where they had an arts and craftsmarket and applied for a spot, setting myselfup on a foldable table. After races on week-ends I would head straight to my kikoy busi-ness. Some people loved the kikoys whileothers thought they were a bit kooky, but Imustered enough customers to sell three-quarters of the stock, covering my flights anda little bit extra for bike parts.

Having to save the money made me treas-ure our special trips to the coast even more.Mum looked forward to these excursionswith her three sons – two accountants and

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the daydreamer – and my brothers and I en-joyed them because we didn’t often get tospend much time together. Mum would al-ways get me to go with her to the beach earlyin the morning, to do yoga with her. Shewould tell me how good yoga was for me. Iwas doubtful. I would look at the dawn skymaturing into morning and wait nervouslyfor people we knew to begin passing us onthe beach, who would steal furtive glances atme and Mum stretching by the surf, smirk-ing as they went.

They might have mistaken my red face forsunrise but Mum never cared what peoplethought. If we were all in a beach bar or acafe having some drinks or something to eat,and they piped up some music that she liked,she would get up and dance. Her three braveboys would be examining the cutlery as ifthey didn’t know her. I think that just addedto her enjoyment of those moments.

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Mum dancing. Yoga on the beach in Diani.The boys. These things are stuck fast andfond in my memories of Africa.

Kinjah had set me believing that once I haddeveloped physically, the mystery of how tobe a full-time cyclist would be solved. Isimply needed to keep training along thesame lines. If I gave time to the bike, the bikewould give the strength to my legs.

It was a healthy position to take. I couldn’tforce the muscles to grow. I needed to spinmore. Kinjah always encouraged me to pedalat a high cadence, instead of grinding aheavy gear. By the time I was sixteen, I wasriding the bike on a set of rollers in my room,as well as continuing to hit the cold, morningstreets with Matt before dawn. I would oftenpretend to play squash (an approved schoolactivity) with Matt in the late afternoon orearly evening as the two of us headed offagain for another training spin. I was still inconstant contact with Kinjah, reporting to

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him on my progress and asking him morespecific questions now about which gear wasthe best to use, and what my ideal cadenceshould be.

I watched the 2002 Tour de France withmy mouth agape. It was the first Tour I eversaw. Ivan Basso and Lance Armstrong’s duelin the mountains was like an epic dogfightbetween two World War One pilot barons. Aresidual of hero worship for Basso lingeredwith me until I came to learn the shady phar-maceutical secret of his success. You neverget over that feeling of betrayal. Basso wasmy first and last hero of the peloton.

Sometime around then I met RobbieNilsen. Robbie was a man with fingers inseveral pies. A lawyer by trade, he had a pas-sion for cycling and performance. He ran ajunior cycling academy in Johannesburgcalled the Hi-Q Supercycling Academy (Hi-Qis a car servicing chain). Our meeting wastimely. It was beginning to dawn on me that

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the typical South African fun race with acouple of thousand people involved wasn’tgoing to be adequate preparation for a life onthe lofty peaks of the Tour de France.

Kinjah and I were still exchanging ideasand training concepts but Robbie becamepart of the conversation too. We spent longafternoons together on weekends discussingpractice ideas. I was coming to realize thatthe social aspects of the fun races I had beenentering had trace elements that could befound again in the group training rideswhich we were now spending hours puttingourselves through every week. As harsh as itsounded, the group always tended towardsthe lowest common denominator. No matterthe will or the intention, the capabilities anddesires of the strongest rider in the groupwere normally tethered to the limitations ofthe weakest rider. The weakest guy may ac-tually have been pouring all of himself intothe road and the strongest guy may have felt

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like he was doing the same. But he wasn’t.There would be some part of his inner selfthat he would never touch.

For these reasons, from then on I would beriding more on my own. It wasn’t a hardshipbut I did miss the company of Matt, and thefun that I used to have back in the highlandsabove Mai-a-Ihii with Kinjah and the crew.Robbie and I developed a training systemthat began to make me feel stronger andlighter. I yearned to get better on the termsof a different continent; I wanted to be arider of long epic races, not the flat shortstories that we were enjoying in South Africa.I needed to be good after 200 kilometres; notexplosive after that distance like a sprinter,but strong and powerful enough to finish inthe main group. I needed bike habits likethey had in Europe.

It became an obsession to me. I began do-ing these crazy rides. I would push the bikeout the door, ride hard and try to maintain

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the same power output until I got back sixhours later.

That was the sort of perversion that lim-ited my choice of training partners, even ifI’d wanted one. I wasn’t able to train in agroup any more, doing their five- or six-hourbase training rides, coasting down hills andresting for enjoyable, but leisurely, coffeestops. I still had to ride the same kind of dis-tances but at a pace that was consistent (andalso progressively more uncomfortable) fromstart to finish. It obsessed me to the extentthat I wouldn’t even stop for water, thinkingthat if I stopped to fill up my bottles at a pet-rol station it would give my body time to re-cover. I wanted to train my body to recoverand survive without breaking pace.

I attached a time-trial bottle cage under-neath my saddle so that I could have two ex-tra bottles stashed there. I had a small coolerbag attached to the front of my bike and Icarried bottles in there too. I needed to have

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at least one bottle an hour, so I would carryup to six bottles on the bike at once. I wouldalso take food with me and eat regularlywhile I was riding – but I would avoid havingbreakfast.

I managed to get a second-hand powermeter, which became a really useful tool totrain with. Robbie had done extensive read-ing about training according to power andpower-to-weight ratios. I fed him my statsand we worked out what kind of numbers Ishould be aiming to maintain right throughthe five- or six-hour rides. We aimed for apower output of about 240 watts. For a teen-ager that’s a bit grippy. Even years later atTeam Sky that would be an effort. I wouldundertake those sessions three times a weekand then on other rides in between I wouldtake it easier or do shorter, sharper and moreintense sessions. Some days I would do moreclimbing. Hills were no hardship. With thelong sessions I would try to map out mostly

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flat courses for myself because it was easierto keep the power sustained. On a verylumpy course I would be pedalling like maddownhill to try to keep the power up, andthen really relaxing on the uphill because theclimb was hard already.

There I would be, somewhere outside theturmoil of Johannesburg, like a characterfrom a comic strip streaking around theGauteng province, with my legs in hell andmy head in the clouds. The first ninetyminutes would be quite bearable. After thatthe pain would start gnawing. My legs wouldput forward their case for a little freewheel-ing time on any slight downhill, just a smallwindow to allow them to get a bit more sugarin the system. The brain had to win those ar-guments and keep the show rolling. Pushingand pushing.

By the end of the six hours the pain was ascreaming presence. The last thirty minuteswere the worst temptation but the best

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triumph. I had been doing this for five and ahalf hours. Maybe I could cruise home? Justtake it down a notch? I had done the workand could feel the pain. Surely I had earnedmy parole? But my brain had to keep mybody honest. The compartment that feltpleasure from suffering had to be the castinginfluence. Just do the last half-hour. Don’tsurrender having done so much. Then, mira-culously, when I was so near the end, mybody tripped the adrenaline switch and I hadthe strength for one last effort. Faster, faster,and no pain any more.

I look back at it now and I can see themadness, but I like that. It was necessary. Itwas purging and transformative. And interms of my fundamental attitude to train-ing, not much has changed.

For most of those rides I would head outfrom Midrand where I was staying with Nozand Jen. I had matriculated from St John’sby this time, taking a sabbatical before

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university, and real life. I would hit the tar-mac heading east. I would flash past stopsigns where I should have been braking, or atleast taking the precaution of glancing at thetraffic. But I would go straight through, feel-ing bulletproof. The need to keep the powergoing would override all other considera-tions. I pored over maps like an ancient car-tographer, devising routes full of left turns.Faced with an unhelpful red light, I couldturn left without having to cross traffic.There was a triangular course that I devisedwhich was perfect. All left turns and thenstraight back; east and west were the twoways that I would go. Left. Left. Left. Simplenavigation.

They were big loads at that age but endur-ance is the winning hand. Robbie and Ispoke about the science, and how we couldhelp the circulation needed for the removalof toxins from my legs. Our theory was thatthe body had to develop an oxygen delivery

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system which would be more dynamic andfluid.

If we had only known it, this was preciselythe work I would be doing at Team Sky yearslater. Tim Kerrison, the future Team SkyHead of Performance, and resident scienceboffin, would give a name to these rides: SAPrides, or SAP intervals. Sustained AerobicPower. They are basically low-carb rideswhere we hit the road without having eatenbreakfast but then start feeding within thefirst hour. We would be teaching the body toburn more fat as fuel, and we would emailTim with our power stats when we weredone.

I look back in wonder now. The rides I wasdoing with Robbie were exactly the same. Wedidn’t have a name for them, and we didn’teven fully realize why we were doing it, butwe knew it worked because I had respondedwell to it. We knew it was good before weknew what exactly it was.

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Kinjah was an independent spirit. He taughtme many things but there was one traitabove all that he always shared, one stand-point. It was to never put up your hands andsurrender to the real world. You might beoutgunned and outnumbered but you nevergive up. Fight for the dream.

When I finished at St John’s I knew that ifsurrender had to happen, it could wait. Iwould have to run out of road and have myback to a wall somewhere. University agreedto hang on for a year, but no more than that.I enrolled to study Economics at theUniversity of Johannesburg. A couple ofyears on the lower slopes of academic lifewouldn’t kill me. I planned to spend as muchtime as possible tutoring myself (or torturingmyself) in the saddle. With some balance, anacademic degree could be earned without ex-tinguishing the dream of becoming a profes-sional cyclist.

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To minimize the risk of abduction by anaccountancy firm, I let my hair grow longand lank, wore bangles, dressed in hemp andkikoys and drove around in a rickety whiteVW Golf car with tinted silver windows. Itwas the sort of car that only a cyclist couldlove.

I was a student of cycling in one very spe-cific and focused sense: I studied my owncycling and the ways to get better andstronger. With Robbie and with Kinjah I un-derwent the forensic analysis of every statist-ic and every ride. That was all. I wanted to bea professional rider in Europe, but I knewvirtually nothing about what went on there,or how riders filled the eleven months whenthey weren’t riding up and down France inthe Tour.

I had started to enter more local races inKenya and was granted a racing licence fromthe Kenyan Cycling Federation, whom Kin-jah had introduced me to at the time. He was

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still on talking terms with the Federationback then, but I knew enough already fromhim about the antic failings of the organiza-tion, and how there would be no rope ladderthrown down to me by the men in blazers.The powers that be seemed very resistant tothe notion that they should nurture thedreams of the country’s best cyclists withfunds and facilities.

I was also racing in South Africa. In theyear I turned twenty I did twenty races forour Hi-Q Supercycling Academy, startingwith the Berge en Dale Classic in Roode-poort, Johannesburg, in January 2005. Fromthe start my cycling was decent but not awe-inspiring. I finished in the top half of thefield after 105 kilometres of the Berge enDale Classic. The pattern was set. In theseraces, where the distances were modest andthe roads were flat, nobody was hurting. Myparty trick was my ability to suffer the

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longest when the going got tough, and theseraces weren’t made for that.

Still, that year brought my first taste of thebig time. In late August we travelled toMauritius to compete in the Tour deMaurice. In the scheme of the cycling uni-verse this wasn’t a particularly importantrace. Nobody would gasp if they saw it onyour list of achievements. But for me it was amilestone, my first time cycling overseas.

The Tour had a few modest riders whoentered and a few small hills. On day two weraced to Curepipe. Not an especially long daybut the road rose maybe 2,000 feet towardsthe extinct volcano of Trou aux Cerfs. It wasenough for me, and I broke away from themain pack on the climb.

I won the stage.That small glory was the stuff of short

paragraphs on back pages, a minor entry inthe record books. It was no game-changerbut it encouraged me to believe that I could

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get into the game. Whatever I was doing, itwas working.

When 2005 flipped over into 2006 theteenage years were gone and I had a modestachievement under my belt. I didn’t knowwhere the door to European racing was, but Iwas determined to continue fumbling aboutfor it. Maybe 2006 would be even bigger.

It turned out to be a year in three acts.All comedies.

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7

2006 Act I: The Tour of Egypt

WHY DO YOU HATE US MR JULIUS MWANGI?

Despite the very publicized win at the selections to

the 9th All African Games, the Mr Julius Mwangi alias

‘Kamaliza’ denied the Simbaz yet another chance to

represent the country. David Kinjah, Davidson Kamau

and Anthony Mutie who finished 1, 2, 3, respectively

were termed as ‘banned’. Kamaliza, as he is well

known, said that he has banned them for misconduct,

upon further investigations and meetings with the

Kenya National Sports Council, he cannot give satis-

factory evidence and reasons for this …

Kenyan cycling blog

Nairobi

At one time or another, each of us SafariSimbaz had fallen asleep in Kinjah’s hut withthe embers of conversation illuminating acommon dream. It was a dream of riding ourbikes in a tour in a foreign place, the worldopening up to us in the way Kinjah had de-scribed when he had told us of his Italiandays racing in Europe. In early February2006, the dream began to take shape, or sowe thought.

A gang of seven Safari Simbaz, includingmyself and Kinjah, cycled into Nairobi to theEgyptian embassy on Kingara Road. Stand-ing outside in our cycling gear, we lookedlike athletic harlequins among the sensiblediplomatic suits filing past. We were waitingon Julius Mwangi of the Kenyan CyclingFederation to honour us with his presence,and to sign the forms which would allow usto represent Kenya at the forthcoming Tourof Egypt. It was my first time representingthe country as a professional rider, but it was

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an adventure for all of us and the first timewe had been on tour together as the SafariSimbaz.

Earlier that day, we had briefly been al-lowed inside the embassy, only to be sentback outside again to have our visa photostaken elsewhere. This happened a number oftimes – back in, and then out again. Soon thewhole day had passed sitting on the pave-ment, a day which we could have spent rid-ing. This was far from ideal training prepara-tion for the biggest race of our lives.

Most federations would take responsibilityfor the visa requirements of their nationalcycling team as a matter of course. TheKenyan Cycling Federation was differentthough. Mwangi, the chief poobah, wasknown everywhere as Kamaliza, whichmeans finisher or someone who ends things.He ran a security firm of the same name, so Iassumed the name didn’t offend him. Nordid it entirely misrepresent his contribution.

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From South Africa I had been sending myrace results to his offices for some time. IfKamaliza or his cronies were impressed withme they had done a very fine job of dis-guising it. I wasn’t sure that they knew I exis-ted until Kinjah twisted their arms and gotme included on the team for this trip toEgypt.

That is, if we ever got to Egypt. The em-bassy was closing in an hour and there wasstill no sign of our man. If we missed theday’s deadline, we certainly wouldn’t be ra-cing past any pyramids. Finally, cool as abreeze, Mr Mwangi turned up at the last pos-sible moment. He signed the forms. He hadto really. He had put himself in charge of theentire trip. No team. No trip. He signed forall seven of us. Good of him to give us someof his time.

Cairo

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A few days later we stepped out of Cairo air-port. We decided that we needed a teamphoto to mark the momentous occasion.Gathering outside the terminal in a line, withour trollies and bikes held proudly in front ofus, Julius Mwangi and the seven-man cyc-ling team of Kenya. Happy as clams. I stoodout, of course, like a sore, white thumb. Wewere all grinning and thrilled. It had beenchaos getting here. It would most likely bechaos staying here. But for that moment, allwas good with the world. Cheese.

All seven of us were Kinjah men from Mai-a-Ihii. Kamau was here. At that time he wasworking in a slaughterhouse in Kiserian. Hegot into cycling having ridden a boda boda, abicycle taxi, in Nairobi for a while. He hadgreat promise. Mischievous Njana was heretoo, and Michael.

I had transported my bike in a black,purpose-made bike case, which I had bor-rowed from a friend in South Africa. My

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fellow Safari Simbaz were fascinated by thispadded container and had never seen onebefore. Rather than feeling proud of my ex-pensive piece of kit, I suddenly felt like thewhite swell out among the people. ‘What amzungu! A case for his bike.’ I knew thiswould take a while for me to live down andthat I would be mercilessly teased; everyoneelse had covered their bikes in clear plasticwrapping and hoped for the best.

The good news was that we had arrived inone piece, which logistically was no small tri-umph. Nobody had missed the flight, ourvisas were stamped, and miraculously all ofour bikes had arrived with us (we had all hadvisions of them ending up in Frankfurt orsome other place halfway around the world).On the other side of the balance sheet, therewere some less comforting things to con-sider. Julius Mwangi was our team manager,accompanied by a trinity of know-nothingbluffers from the Federation who would

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make up the rest of our support unit: asoigneur, a mechanic and a man with no des-ignated task but whose presumed ‘versatility’meant that he could fill in for any of theother know-nothings, without us riders noti-cing. Between the four of them they wouldneed a long semester of tutoring just to learnhow to change a back wheel. Not that theywould be interested in that type of educa-tional opportunity.

We suspected we knew the real reason whythe Tour of Egypt had been graced with ourpresence. Coincidence or not, the pelotonwas mainly formed of African teams, repres-enting the various nations or constituencieswho would be present in the next electionsfor the African Cycling Federation. An invitehere, we thought, assumed a vote in returnfor the Egyptian Federation. Elsewhere,there were two or three lower-echelonEuropean teams in the race, including thePoles and the Slovenians, as well as a few

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other countries who were not known fortheir cycling prowess. The South African na-tional team were the favourites by far.

Still, when we arrived at the accommoda-tion the night before the race, we were smil-ing like lottery winners, raring to go for thebiggest ride of our lives. The Tour of Egyptseemed to be reasonably well organized andthere were elements that we associated withpremier bike racing. There was a race book.There were clearly planned stages with astart and finish banner. A convoy of carswould follow the race. Somewhere in thatconvoy would be our support car containingour top-level support team. How excited wewere just to be there.

We were given the Kenya national teamkit: one pair of shorts and one shirt. One setof kit for the entire tour meant washing ourown kit every evening. Washing it in the sinkor shower in the undrinkable water, wrap-ping it up in towels and jumping on it, trying

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to force the moisture out, then hanging it upto dry for the next day. Despite these relativeshortcomings, it still felt like we had arrived.

The Race

The first stage took us out and around themajestic deserts of Cairo. It was a short pro-logue, an individual time trial of 8 kilo-metres, to determine who would wear theleader’s jersey. We had no issues. I was theonly rider in the team with a time-trial bikeand I managed a respectable 5th on the day.

For the next three stages over consecutivedays the winds were a nuisance, blowingfiercely across the desert. The stages weremostly flat, which was disappointing for me,but at various points the crosswinds buffetedus, which made the racing tougher. Kamauhad a bad crash when he was blown offcourse on to the side of the road on one ofthe few uphills. The bike canted him straightinto a gutter. He lost minutes of time to the

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peloton, which meant there was no way backfor him in his aim to finish highly in the finalstandings. In terms of competitiveness andthe Safari Simbaz, it was just Kinjah and Iwho were left to compete for the GeneralClassification for the second half of the tour.The rest of the guys were hanging in there,but looking up to us to produce the sort ofresult that we could brag about back inKenya on our return. Kinjah and I were teas-ing each other in a master vs pupil sort ofway.

The fourth day was a very long flat stagefrom one Egyptian town to another withmainly desert in between. Maybe 230 kilo-metres, the most exciting thing we would seeall day were sand dunes. Otherwise it wasjust plain sand without the dunes.

Less than halfway through we were allbarely surviving and trying to make the mostof it. But it was harder than it needed to be.Unlike other teams, we spent much of our

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time, and precious energy, filling up our ownwater bottles. We each had two bottles forthe race, and when we emptied them we hadto drop back to the team car and pass themthrough the window to be replenished.Riders from other countries, meanwhile,equipped with an unlimited supply in theteam’s travelling cool box, would cavalierlythrow away their bottles as soon as they hadfinished them.

It wasn’t ideal but up until this point atleast our system had worked. Suddenly,though, the car was nowhere to be seen. Wetook turns dropping back into the convoy buteach time we would confirm each other’s as-sessment of the situation – our supportvehicle was gone. We dropped back again toask other team managers if they had seenour car, but the answer was the same.

The sun was high and hot. Our bottleswere now completely empty, and we werestill expending every ounce of energy,

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pouring ourselves, mind and body, on to theroad. We couldn’t figure out what was goingon, but the car wasn’t the problem now. Theproblem was the stark fact that we were de-hydrating in an Egyptian desert.

I dropped back from the peloton to theSouth African team vehicle. I had recognizedthe driver as Bart Harmse, a commissairefrom a number of the South African races Ihad taken part in as a junior.

‘Oom Bart, can I please get some bottles ofwater from you? Our support team has gonemissing.’

I tried to make the request sound as reas-onable and as respectful as I could, but theway Bart looked at me, his face said that thiswas one of the most half-assed things he hadever heard.

So half-assed that he took pity on us. Imanaged to get two or three bottles out ofhim and we shared them around the team asbest we could. Still, there were seven of us,

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all thirsty and burning up. We were like ashipwrecked crew in a great ocean with thelast canteen of water on the lifeboat longsince drained. Except that, unlike a ship-wrecked crew, we were all workingmanically, outputting as much wattage as wewere humanly capable of. The water didn’tlast long between seven of us.

Poor Michael, it wasn’t supposed to be likethis for him. It certainly wasn’t the dream.He was thirsty and struggling, and seemed tobe pushing uphill in a place where there wereno hills.

Between us we tried to imagine that wewere at home, that we were riding in our be-loved Ngong Hills, swapping sharp insultsand teases. We pretended for a while that weweren’t toiling through this vacant desert.There was so much sand that it had lost itsnovelty. The road behind and ahead wasendless and our water had been finished longago.

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We were all feeling it. When we looked ateach other we could see the effects of this im-posed drought. We were slowing and gettingweaker. This was happening to us at differ-ent rates but Michael looked the worst. Theshine had gone from his eyes and his grinhad vanished. This was no ride through thehills. This was desperate.

I tried to imagine what was going throughMichael’s head. Above all, there would havebeen his pride. We were here together, ridingthis tour. It was another country and anotherchapter. When we returned home to Kenya,when we were back in Kinjah’s place, wewould tell stories of our big race adventure.The stories would be funny but with a spineof steel to them. This was the scenario: we allgave some and some gave all. The guy whowilted would be remembered, seized uponand turned into a figure of laughter.

Like the rest of us, Michael would neverwant to be remembered as the one who was

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dropped and left behind. No. He wouldn’twant to be the first.

On the other hand, this was a just bikerace. Bad things happened but usuallynobody died. So why wait until he fell off hisbike through dehydration or heat stroke?Why be a fool? How would the stories soundif he keeled over and got taken to hospital fora few days? Not good, either.

Something had gone wrong but it was outof our control. Broom wagons, those largebuses to collect stragglers, followed races forexactly this reason. If things got too much,then we could get off our bikes and it wouldpick us up and take us home.

With these thoughts whirring in ourminds, we pedalled on, each of us withdraw-ing into our own world of thirst and worry. Ihad an advantage here, probably. I like tosuffer. I like it better when I know that thepeople around me are suffering too. For ayear and a half I had been rehearsing this

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pain on the roads around Johannesburg.Nobody told me there would be days likethis, but I trained for them. Just in case.

Eventually Michael’s brain made a publicservice announcement to his body. This wastoo much. He was dehydrated, it was too hot,he had nothing.

He stopped, got off his bike and stood atthe side of the road. I imagine he was halfembarrassed and half relieved, waiting forthe broom wagon to come. It would at leasthave bottles of water and air conditioning.

Michael’s Tour of Egypt was over.

There was no broom wagon. Or if there was,it had driven past Michael and had left himstanding on the side of the road in the desert.

He sat down by the roadside and didn’tpanic. A car coming from either directionwould be visible from miles away. He wouldflag it down and hitch a ride. If they had noroom they would have some water, surely.

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No one came. Peering into the shimmeringheat vapours coming up off the tar, itdawned on him that this road through thedesert was a route that nobody used. The af-ternoon sun was focusing its heat right downon him now. Mad dogs and Englishmen, yes.Kenyan cyclists, no.

He sat and sat. Nothing. The wait wentpast the point of being funny; his life wasebbing away. He had to get out of the sun be-fore he fainted. Or died. He actually had thisthought: ‘Right here in this desert, on myfirst ever tour race with the Safari Simbaz,this is where I will die.’

He started to dig. When he got past thesurface heat, the sand there was cooler. Hedug a trench and rolled himself inside,pulling the desert sand in on top of himself.His helmet was all that was protecting thetop of his head, which was the only part ofhis body that stuck out from above the sand.In this hole it was cooler for a while but he

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knew that he had dug a provisional grave forhimself.

By this point, he must have thought therest of us had finished the stage. Surely wewould look around, and go back to check onhim? We must have realized by now that hehadn’t been chauffeured to the finish. Whatwould we do? Surely we would find the teamcar and drive back along the road? What ifwe couldn’t find the team car? Suppose weassumed that he was okay? He might besomewhere with Julius Mwangi and theknow-nothings?

Meanwhile, he lay there, dying in thedesert.

After we finished the stage from hell, therewas no sign of our team manager, Mwangithe Exterminator, and no sign of the car.There was also no sign of Michael.

The race organizers provided us with ourkeys for the hotel nearby and we checked in-to our rooms. We had been warned about not

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drinking the tap water there so our thirststayed with us. Riding for Kenya and we hadno water to drink at the end of a stagethrough a desert. It felt like madness. Iwalked to a local shop and bought a few five-litre drums of water and hauled them backfor the guys.

There was still no sign of Michael. Wethought he must have been having a time ofit with Mr Mwangi and the ‘support’ team.

Finally Mr Mwangi pitched up later thatevening. He had a big grin on his face andwas showing us postcard photos of the pyr-amids and Mount Sinai. Mr Mwangi hadbeen sightseeing up in Moses’ footsteps,where he’d received the TenCommandments.

We had two questions for Mr Mwangi.One. Had he really been off playing touristall day while we were riding in the desert?Two. Did he happen to have Michael withhim?

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The eleventh commandment: Thou shaltnot abandon your riders, Mr Mwangi.

We checked with the race organizers, butthey had nothing to report back. No one hadseen Michael, and no one was taking controlof the situation, either.

When a cycling team functions as normal,the riders get up early in the morning, eatsome breakfast and head off to their race.The clothes and belongings they will not usein the race are brought along behind them inthe car with the support team. That gear usu-ally arrives at the next hotel room before theday’s racing finishes. However, that day oneof the soigneurs from the Polish team hadscrewed up. He had collected all of the char-gers for his team’s radios and placed them ina bag for safekeeping. Then he had driven offand left the bag behind in the previousnight’s hotel.

In early evening, just as it was gettingdark, the team had the option of continuing

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the race without radios for the remainder ofthe week, or sending the soigneur off to driveback through 235 kilometres of desert to col-lect the chargers. He would then have todrive the 235-kilometre return journey to getback in time to charge the radios so theywould be ready for the next morning. Unlikein our own team, radios were the lifeline of aproper support unit, so the soigneur droveoff into the dusk and the desert. He was anunhappy man. Although the road was emptyand straight, it was time already for head-lights, and the sheer monotony of the drivewas a worry after a long day. He tried to keepcool and alert.

Odd. Was that a bike lying in the sand justthere? It couldn’t be. He pulled off the roadand reversed. Holy shit. It was a bike restingon the vague border between road anddesert. Maybe it had been left by one of theteams and somebody was supposed to comeback along and retrieve it?

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He stood there on the road looking downat the bike. What should he do? If he took itand the team came back to retrieve it, theycould be there half the night searchingaround. But it seemed too weird to leave itbehind.

Over there – what was that? He was surehe could see a helmet on the desert floor, ly-ing on its own. He tried to figure it out in hismind: rider abandons, then leaves bike andhelmet there for collection when he steps in-to the broom wagon. That would make sense.He walked over and picked the helmet up.Sweet mother … there was a head under-neath it.

Michael had been lying in his little graveas darkness fell. The grim irony hadn’t beenlost on him. His last chance of being spottedwas vanishing with the light. Yet the dark-ness was bringing a coolness to the desert. Inhis hole, his head tilted into the sand, he hadfallen asleep. Empty.

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He wasn’t going to die from the heat. Hewas going to die from the cold and the sheerexhaustion.

But suddenly Polish hands were franticallyscrabbling the sand off him, pulling him outof his grave. He was shredded with exhaus-tion and dehydrated to the point wherestanding up was a challenge. The Polishhands offered him water. Slow. Sensible. Itflowed into him like life itself.

Welcome to the Tour of Egypt, MichaelNziani Muthai. Your Federation thanks youfor your efforts.

We raced on until the end of the tour butMichael took the tourist option. He quite en-joyed travelling from hotel to hotel. Alive togive witness to the story of the week.

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8

2006 Act II: The Commonwealth Games

This was the beginning. Of the end. TheCommonwealth Games.

This felt far better than Egypt. It evensmelled more like the big time. As riders wewere staying in the athletes’ village in Mel-bourne along with the rest of the Kenyanoutfit in our country’s quarters. There weresix of us: Kinjah and me, Michael NzianiMuthai of the desert, Davidson Kamau, hisbrother Peter Kamau and Simon Nganga. Wewere pleasantly surprised to be treated likethe rest of the Kenyan team, on par with farmore high-profile athletes.

I enjoyed discovering who was who. Wepopped along to a couple of the track

sessions. Watching Kenya, and being in theKenyan stand when the team won a goldmedal, was extremely special. There was anamazing atmosphere. I loved that Gamesspirit.

I had brought two bikes with me. I wantedto max out on the experience and to ride inboth the road race competition and the time-trial competition.

If I was being truthful, my time-trial bikewas a makeshift sort of thing, and definitelynot an appliance of science. It at least haddeep section wheels and aero bars. Theseprovided a more aerodynamic positionwhere my hands and forearms were lower,further forward and closer together to reducedrag. It all helped, but it was still the bareminimum. Kinjah had the same intention forthe Games, to enter both races, and hadcome armed with the same equipment.

When we first arrived in Melbourne, Kin-jah took me aside.

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‘Chris, it’s a bit of a joke here at themoment.’

‘What’s new?’‘No. They want me to do the track events

as well.’Kenya had no competitor for any of the

track events. Kinjah had tried to explain, tomake them understand. He used shortwords. He. Could. Not. Ride. The. Track. Itwas a completely different discipline. Kenyadidn’t even have a single track in the wholecountry.

The argument was ongoing. Julius Mwangiand the Kenyan Federation felt that Kinjahwas being disrespectful and rude. They as-sumed he wouldn’t agree to do the events be-cause he was too full of himself. Theymustered all their expertise and explainedthe situation to him again and again: ‘Listen,it’s on a bicycle. You race on a bicycle. Youneed to race. So why can’t you ride thetrack?’

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Kinjah held firm and resisted. He wasn’tgoing to humiliate himself in front of theworld for Mr Mwangi’s benefit.

‘Listen to me, Chris. They also want us toride the mountain bike race. There are threeplaces. You, me and Davidson Kamau.’

It was easy to end that argument; I didn’thave a mountain bike with me.

Kinjah relayed the bad news to Mr Mwangiand his organizers. They offered us a deal. Ifwe agreed to ride the mountain bike race,they would provide us with three mountainbikes through the Commonwealth Gamesfunding.

Kinjah and I both recognized the samepatriotic opportunity; we were each going toget a free bike out of this. Kamau too. Afterthe Games, we thought, we could send thesemountain bikes back with Kinjah, so thatother Safari Simbaz could use them. Kinjahwas in charge of the budget and a deal wasorganized at a local cycling shop. He

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squeezed everything he could out of the poorshop owners. The bikes were decent and farmore disposed for racing off-road than any-thing we had ever owned. Although theywere not fitted with disc brakes, they wereequipped with front suspension forks andthey were much lighter than we were used to.The rear stay was made from carbon, whichwas elaborate enough for us. We were readyto go, or as ready as we could have been.

The mountain bike event that we had nev-er planned to ride was coming two days afterthe time trial and three days before the roadrace.

The Time Trial

The next day I had a warm-up ride on thetime-trial course along the beautiful beachroute situated on the St Kilda Foreshore.Skirting the long sandy beach, I spottedsome riders in their pristine English gear.Wow, they looked so professional. All

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wearing the same gear, skinsuits and aerohelmets, and they were only warming up.

I made a mental note: borrow an aero hel-met and pin the Kenyan gear on tight tomake it look like a skinsuit.

When the morning of the time trial arrivedthey sent the African nations out first. In or-der of weakness. Christopher Clive Froomewas listed to go first. Then Tumisang Taabeof Lesotho. Next, Rajendra Singh of Fiji. Alsofrom Fiji, Percival Navbo didn’t have a time-trial bike at all; he was on a standard roadbike, and he got to ride closer to some of thegenuine time trialists! It was nothing person-al, but I knew that the purpose was to get ussupport acts out of the way first.

The time trial took us out on a fairly flatroad along the coast. I would have preferredhills but my time-trial bike was quite heavy,it weighed over ten kilos, so the flat wasn’tbad. The course was just over twenty

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kilometres each way. I recorded a time of 53minutes 58 seconds.

The next rider didn’t beat me. Or the next.Or the next. I knew nobody serious had star-ted yet, but I realized that my time wasn’tthat bad, either. I was in the hot seat; I wasthe leader.

The hot seat isn’t hot but it is literally aseat. It’s at the finish line and the top threeguys are taken there when they finish. Whensomeone beats the time of, say, the third guythen the third guy gets bumped off and thenew guy takes his seat. If there is a new guywho beats everybody and comes in first, thenthe first and second move down the seatsand the guy in seat number three leaves.After the finish line they took me straight tothe hot seat and I sat there in my cyclinggear, having a drink. I had my first fifteenminutes of fame for a performance thatwasn’t even yet a result.

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Somehow, I continued to be the top manfor a very long time. There were about eightyriders in the field and forty-nine more hadgone out before anybody beat my time.

All of my family saw me on TV. The broad-cast kept on switching back to the hot seatand this young, skinny guy. Cyclingnews.comcalled me ‘Chris Froome, time trial revela-tion’. I was sitting there in the hot seat whentwo managers from the English team firstnoticed me. Their names were Dave Brails-ford and Shane Sutton.

‘See what that kid has done?’‘Who?’‘That Kenyan kid. Wearing the sandals.’‘Doesn’t look like a Kenyan.’‘Well, he is.’I wound up 17th overall in a field of

seventy-two riders but, thanks to spendingover an hour sitting in the leader’s chair, theresult seemed to bestow more attention onme than a 17th-placed finisher had ever

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received before. Nathan O’Neill of Australiatook gold. Kinjah was 31st.

Another member of the British Cyclingmanagement team spotted me later that day.His name was Doug Dailey. He made a men-tal note.

It had been a day to cherish for me.

Kinjah had endured enough. This was theCommonwealth Games, after all. When themedia asked him about the Kenyan CyclingFederation he had replied that the organiza-tion did not run with the efficiency of a Swisswatch. One of his frustrations was that thiswas a competition on the world stage and wedidn’t even have any team kit. In the end wehad been forced to purchase plain white andblack jerseys ourselves and have the wordKENYA laminated on to the backs.

Before my time trial we had all been calledinto a meeting in the Kenyan quarters in thevillage. The Kenyan Federation had beenbullyragged in the media and they needed to

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express their hurt and displeasure. Themeeting grew into a disciplinary hearing.Kinjah wasn’t there, but he was in the dock.

The Kenyan officials were furious. Yes,they conceded that we had no kit, but draw-ing attention to that fact, as Kinjah had done,was a worse crime. Our team, who were allKinjah’s guys, were quiet and we kept ourheads down. We were intimidated as thiswas a huge opportunity for all of us. At theGames here in Melbourne we were a longway away from the tin hut in a Kikuyu villageoutside Nairobi. The officials held all of thestrong cards.

This was Kinjah though. In essence, hehad brought us all here. So I decided to voicemy opinion before Kinjah was completelyhung out to dry.

They lined us up, and asked us one by oneif there was anything we would like to con-tribute to the meeting. Too scared to say any-thing, everyone passed. I was the last one in

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the line. I didn’t hold back. I said that it wasclear what was going on, and that I could seethey were trying to use this situation to des-troy Kinjah. As soon as I had finished speak-ing, all of my teammates suddenly lit up likea fireworks display and began arguingpassionately.

Kinjah was being set up. We were here torace. The meeting and the argument was nothelping at all.

The Mountain Bike Race

The novelty of our new mountain bikes evap-orated as soon as we visited the mountainbiking circuit at Lysterfield Park, the day be-fore we were due to race. When they hadtwisted our arms to ride the event we hadasked ourselves, how bad could it be? Wehad grown up riding off-road so surely wecould at least get around the course and fin-ish? We could ride off on our bikes after-wards and chalk the day down to experience.

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But as soon as we saw the circuit, we knewexactly how bad it was. What had we gotourselves into?

The circuit was tight. We rode around ourfirst practice lap through the dense forestand over worryingly large rocks. SuddenlyKinjah, Kamau and I screeched on ourbrakes at the top of what looked like anabyss. Surely there was no way we were go-ing to ride off this? We looked at the sidesand the barriers but they were all guiding usto the same conclusion: jump off the greatrock, at speed. There had to be some kind ofmistake.

We were still all looking around for an al-ternative route to descend when a group ofother riders went steaming past. They flewstraight off the edge and over the void. Kin-jah and Kemau just stared at me. I staredback.

This was quite serious now, and the coursewas only beginning to unfold. After

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negotiating the jump as carefully as wecould, and down several narrow descents, wemade our way on to parts of the course thatwere elevated on planks of wood. Thesewooden sections were about the width of agarden path, but raised up off the groundabove boulders and trees. It scared us out ofour wits. If we fell off the planks, we knewthe drop was big enough to ensure that wedefinitely wouldn’t be competing in the roadrace three days later. We had never racedlike this before in our lives.

It was going to be a three-hour race for uson a 6.4-kilometre circuit from hell. Wewould cycle around its perimeter eight times,and we knew that it would become scariereach time; the law of averages, as applied tochancers like us, meant that if we didn’t falloff on the previous lap, we had a far greaterprobability of doing so on the next one.

We cursed Mr Mwangi for getting us intoanother fine mess.

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I had heard that Burry Stander, a profes-sional South African mountain biker, was inMelbourne. I knew he could help me in mypredicament. Burry would later go on to be-come World Under-23 Cross-Country cham-pion in 2009, and finish 5th at the London2012 Olympics.* After a couple of sleeplessnights I sought him out. I found Burry andMannie Heymans, the Namibian mountainbike champion, in the athletes’ village.

They took me through the course gener-ously, even though we had some languagedifficulties; I didn’t speak ‘mountain bike’.This was the gist of it:

‘Okay. Here’s how you are going to mud-dive the swampy section. Got it? And this ishow you are going to get through the rockgarden full of death cookies [small rocks]and baby heads [slightly bigger rocks]. Andnow you have all these tricky bits. Thewhoop-de-do’s where you can sky. Be care-ful, no yard sale [a crash landing that leaves

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a rider and his bike scattered all over theground]. Land badly and you could potatocrisp your wheel [bend it slightly out ofshape] or taco it [I could guess]. Here’s whatgearing you should use. Dude. No grannygears. This hill is a bit of a roid buffer [sosteep going down that your ass would comeinto contact with your rear wheel]. And becareful in the wooded areas that a branchdoesn’t clothesline you.’

Burry and Mannie were two very kind,open and confident guys. I took that muchfrom them. Most of the rest was lost in trans-lation. I thought to myself, ‘Right, I’m defin-itely going to give this my best shot. I’m fit.I’ve been training.’ I knew I wasn’t very goodtechnically, but I was confident I could keepup.

It began badly and got worse.Standing on the start line worrying meant

that I didn’t get into a very good position. Iwas surrounded by hard-core mountain

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bikers, who were all pressed up against me.When the gun went off I was still trying toget my foot into my pedal. The ridersbunched up just after the first corner and Iwound up quite far back. I thought to myself,‘Okay, just work your way through the field,’but it didn’t work – the other riders soonvanished into the distance and I was leftchasing in a cloud of dust.

At this point, when it was already too late,I remembered Burry and Mannie’s advice: itwould be vital to push really hard in the firstkilometre, almost at full sprint, before therace got to the single-track section. If I wasstuck behind somebody when I reachedthere, I had no chance of getting past.

I pushed myself to the limit for the firsttwo laps, chasing as hard as possible to huntdown the main pack. But I pushed too farand crashed badly. I had let my growing con-fidence get the better of me on the big drop-off, and ended up sprawled face first in the

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dirt. I picked myself up and gave myself atalking-to.

‘Chris, this is the Commonwealth Games.It’s a joke that you’re even competing in thisrace at this level. Not only are you not goingto do well today, but you have a road race inthree days. Accept that you are not a moun-tain biker; get through this. You’ve got your-self a mountain bike so just ride around.Gently.’

I had a brief but exciting tussle with thegold and silver medallists, Liam Killeen andOli Beckingsale, two English guys. There wasabout an hour of racing left and I was sur-prised to find that anybody was still behindme. When I realized who they were – andthat they were lapping me – I was a bit dis-appointed, but I moved off the track politelyto let them past. A couple of other riderscrashed out or stopped, so I ended up mak-ing up a few late positions, finishing 24th outof twenty-six finishers (three retired).

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Kamau and I were listed as OVL (over-lapped) in the final standings. So was Kinjah,but he had to be different. He had hustledhimself into a good position at the start ofthe race and had ridden well for four lapswhere he stayed in the top ten or fifteenplaces. However, when he reached a pointwhere he knew he couldn’t maintain thesame level, he jumped off the circuit. Theyput OVL after his name but his thinking wasthat he was a DNF (did not finish). No onepassed him, so no one beat him. He lovedanalysing things differently to the rest of theworld, so he was very proud and happy afterthe race, telling everybody that he was in thetop ten or fifteen riders* and that no one hadovertaken him. He could have been acontender.

The Road Race

The road race took place on the 166-kilo-metre course around the botanical gardens

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in Melbourne. It was a long, lively race rid-den in still, searing heat and it started veryquickly. The course was twisty and the fa-vourites were anxious to burn off the novicesto ensure there would be no pile-ups at thecorners. Kinjah went in an early breakawayand stayed at the front of the race.

Tensions lingered from the time-trialmeeting and again Mr Mwangi and hissidekicks chose to pull another vanishing act.We had come round to the feed zone andthey were nowhere to be seen. Early in therace a Scot named Duncan Urquhart hadmade a break. Kinjah was still in a group offour who had caught him and the group hadstayed out ahead of the field for over anhour. This was a more than reasonableachievement for Kinjah, given the week hehad undergone. What people watching ontelevision wouldn’t have noticed, however,was that every time he came to the feed zone

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he was attempting to recruit spectators to fillhis bottles and to pass the team our food.

He had to slow down in the zone and pointto where our officials had left our bottles andfood before they had answered the call oftourism. He would point and shout withDoppler effect as he passed: ‘Those are ourbottles! Can somebody fill them? Please! Andfeed us!’

Eventually he managed to enlist a numberof volunteers to look after us. They weresome of the other Kenyan athletes who hadalready participated in their events who hadcome out to watch us race. To make mattersworse, while he was still riding strongly Kin-jah had dropped the first feed bag that hehad been given and had lost his rhythm. Hemade his way back into the group of five, butthe incident and the two hours of stress, re-cruitment and drought had extracted a toll.

Meanwhile, being in the front group of fiveand looking so distinctive meant that Kinjah

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had received a large amount of face time inthe television coverage. In a bar or a cafesomewhere our brave officials must havespotted him and sensed that they were indanger of missing some reflected glory.

By the time we had reached the latter partof the race the rest of us had settled into arhythm and were set into a routine of receiv-ing our bottles from our newly recruited sup-port crew. However, when we came round tothe feed zone for the next lap we saw that ourofficials had finally arrived and were puttingon a wonderful show for the cameras oftending to us conspicuously. Kinjah saw red.He grabbed bottles from other riders andtables and threw them at the Kenyan offi-cials, screaming abuse at them. The crowdloved the ‘Punch and Judy’ show which erup-ted every time Kinjah came back round.

The casualty rate was high that day. Notonly among the Kenyan officials. Two of themany non-finishers, partly due to the

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insufferable heat, included the English ridersIan Stannard and Geraint Thomas. I wouldcome to know those names well in the yearsafterwards.

As the drama settled and the peloton wentabout its business, swallowing stragglers likea python digesting its prey, Kinjah and Iwere still performing well in the race. Therest of our teammates had dropped away;Kamau was the last of them to leave ourKenyan group.

I sat back in the peloton waiting, feelingreasonably comfortable, waiting for the finalbreak in the race. I watched Mark Cavendishmaking his break for glory on behalf of theIsle of Man, but he was hauled in quickly. Iwaited and waited and finally I had a mo-ment that was the highlight of my Common-wealth Games. It was nearing the end of therace, on the penultimate lap, and we hadreached the hardest part of the course wherethere were climbs. Kinjah was now out of

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contention and I was the last Kenyan leftwith any hope in his pocket.

The peloton suddenly slowed up; it wasthe lull before the proverbial storm. We wereon the flat but were fast approaching twotough climbs towards the end of the circuit. Ithought, ‘Well, I’m close to my limit here,and I think I’m going to get dropped, so I’mgoing to put in one last big effort. Why not?’

It worked extremely well. When the pelo-ton slowed on the flat I burst ahead, hopingthat I could stay out in front before the realcontenders began driving hard, knowing thatI wouldn’t be able to follow them.

Here was another of these crazy Kenyansin their makeshift jerseys. Another lunaticfrom the unknown. They let me go. I gotquite a decent gap before the climbs, I’d say Istretched it out to maybe 30 seconds.

The Aussies had been cycling tactically allday, and hung back to see if anybody elsethought I might be a threat. It was Ryan Cox

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from the South African team, however, whoreally lit things up at that point. He brokeaway and came across to me. It was just thetwo of us up front. I sat on his wheel. Thecommentators ratcheted up the tension:‘Wow, here’s one of the favourites, Ryan Cox,with a Kenyan, it looks like, but we’ve neverseen him before.’ I spent a bit of time in thebreakaway with Ryan, until the pelotonclosed our show down. They came after usquickly, or rather, they came after Ryan; Ijust happened to be in the vicinity. I gotpassed on the final climbs as the Australiansclosed the race off. Matt Hayman won goldand Allan Davis got bronze. David George ofSouth Africa squeezed into the silver medalspot.

I finished 25th, 5 minutes 15 seconds offthe winner’s time. Kinjah finished well thatday, all things considered, placing 27th, at 10minutes 32 seconds off the leader’s result.He got cheered all the way home as word

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spread of the smiling, dreadlocked Kenyanwho had raced half the day without evenbread or water and took time to recruit feed-ers and bottle-fillers for himself and histeammates.

Kinjah gave a post-race interview, mowingdown the Kenyan officials. We did the bestrace we could but again the Kenyan CyclingFederation had let us down. They weren’tthere to feed us.

The interview came over the PA system. Ispotted an angry Mr Mwangi looking frantic-ally around to see where Kinjah’s voice wascoming from. Kinjah and I grabbed our bikesand we made a swift exit to the athletes’village.

In the pits afterwards, the English guywith a Scouse accent, Doug Dailey, came byto say hello. He gave me his email addressand I gave him mine. He said to keep intouch.

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9

2006 Act III: World Championships inSalzburg

Full disclosure. While we were in Cairo forthe Tour of Egypt, Mr Mwangi pulled measide and asked for a favour. He needed meto help him on his computer to take care ofsome business, and had asked me to log in tothe Kenyan Cycling Federation email,providing me with the username andpassword.

I thought it was odd that he had given methis information; he knew that I was a goodfriend of Kinjah’s. Regardless of the peculiar-ity, I sat there and typed out the few emailshe wanted done. They were administrativetasks to be sent to various people, and there

was nothing of any significance. Mr Mwangiwasn’t too confident of his written English,so I assumed he had found a good use for hisspare mzungu. I made a mental note of thelogin details.

After Egypt and after Melbourne I had anidea.

I had already begun sending out my CV tocycling teams in Europe. A two-pager that Ihad typed up, which included all of my res-ults from everywhere I had been racing inAfrica, together with a few photos pasted onthe side. I thought it looked great. In theback of my mind I was aware that Europeancycling teams were really only interested inseeing CVs which provided evidence of hav-ing raced in Europe. A few people got back tome and asked that very question. ‘Have youdone any races in Europe, sonny?’

I thought that if I did the Under-23 WorldChampionships in September, in the city ofSalzburg, which was definitely in Europe, it

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might be a giant step towards becoming aprofessional. Things were bad between theKenyan Federation and the Safari Simbaz.Asking the Federation to enter me into therace and fund me to get there would be awaste of time. They knew I was on Kinjah’sside.

So I sat down and logged on to the Federa-tion email address. Posing as Julius Mwangi,I wrote a short letter to the UCI, informingthem that I would like to enter ChristopherFroome, one of my country’s most promisingUnder-23 riders, into the World Champion-ships at that grade in the autumn. Thankyou.*

It is September and I am in Salzburg.The entire Kenyan cycling team and offi-

cials. C’est moi.I have a suitcase and two bikes in bike

bags. I am like some weird refugee. I am anoptimist though. I’m hoping there will be acourtesy car. I look for a sign welcoming me.

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The sign will be held by a driver, who will askme if I had a nice trip and wonder where Iwould like him to drive me. He will insist onlifting my bikes on to the roof rack byhimself.

There is no courtesy car. I am unattached.There is a bed and breakfast. I booked it

myself online. It is the cheapest bed andbreakfast in Salzburg. Possibly because it is 7kilometres outside of Salzburg.

It turns out that two bus rides will stillleave me a kilometre away from my lodgings.I walk the last kilometre with my two bikesand suitcase, shuffling along. The perfectmidpoint to an epic day which began yester-day with a (very) long-haul flight andstopovers.

That evening I made my way to the teammanagers’ meeting. I had assembled mytime-trial bike and commandeered a map. Astorm introduced itself to the day. I tried tomemorize the map before the rain took care

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of it but after a couple of minutes I couldn’teven hold the map any more, let alone readit. It crumbled in the torrential rain and witha gust of wind it was gone. I was left with awafer of paper between each thumb and in-dex finger.

I found my way to the city using signpostsbut inevitably I got lost in the city centre. Onthe map, as far as I could remember, it alllooked very simple. Now, there were so manyroads with names that sounded vaguely fa-miliar. I was lost.

I asked some slightly scared strangersabout the venue for the meeting. It was to beheld in a creaky old auditorium or a hall or atown centre or something – did this ring anybells? After asking what must have amoun-ted to a good sampling of the citizenry, I waseventually pointed in the right direction.When I arrived at the location, I found thesigns for the meeting, took a deep breath andwalked into the auditorium. I had entered

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through the wrong door. I was not at theback as I had hoped to be. I had walked in atthe front. A drowned rat. With his bikeoutside.

Everybody stopped what they were doingand looked up in horror. Then down at therainwater that had fallen from my kit andwas collecting in a tiny puddle around mycycling shoes.

The man who was making his presentationstopped the whole show and looked at me,aghast.

‘This is a managers’ meeting, only for themanagers, not the riders. I am sorry.’

‘I’m here for the managers’ meeting, yes.’‘But –’‘I am a manager.’He gave me a shrug, as if to say, ‘I’ve seen

everything now,’ and asked me to sit down.The meeting was already half over. I was abit disappointed that I didn’t hear anythingabout the support vehicles. I was still

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expecting somebody to at least produce a boxfull of keys and to start to call out names:‘South Africa, Kenya, Lesotho … Please takeyour car keys.’

When they reached the end of the meetingthey showed diagrams of where the supportcars needed to be during the race. Rubbing itin, I felt.

Tony Harding was the South African man-ager in Salzburg. He had been quite instru-mental in Robbie Hunter’s professional ca-reer and I had seen him often at the races inJohannesburg. He came over with a big grinon his face and whacked me on the back ofthe head.

‘What are you doing? Idiot!’I told him my story. How Robbie Nilsen

had helped me to train specifically for thetime-trial event, doing lots of 20-minuteblocks. And how Robbie had gone to Hi-Q,who had generously agreed to pay my air-fares. I had instructed ten spinning classes a

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week to cover the rest of the costs, leadingback-to-back classes so that I could treatthem as training sessions, structuring thelessons around the intervals that Robbie hadplanned for me to do each day.

‘Probably a bit hard on the corporatepunters but that’s life. It was hard on me too.Ever tried pretending to be warming down,pretending to be doing five minutes of veryeasy pedalling and looking relaxed and smi-ley and speaking accordingly while you arestill actually pedalling like crazy? That ishard.

‘Oh, and then I should tell you that I im-personated Julius Mwangi by email and I’min a B&B so far out of town it might as wellbe in a different country.’

‘Well,’ said Tony Harding, more amusedthan impressed, ‘you obviously want to behere.’

Then I got my big break. Daryl Impey, an-other young rider who went to St John’s rival

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Jeppe High School in Johannesburg, wasstaying on his own in a twin room for theduration of the competition. Tony put mytime-trial bike on his roof, drove me back tothe B&B, and helped explain to the ownersthat I would be moving out before I hadproperly moved in. He then installed me atthe South African team’s hotel in Daryl’sroom.

It was a different world. Suddenly I wasstaying in a decent hotel with an organizedteam. I was driven everywhere. I was fed andwatered. They even had a mechanic.

The mechanic had taken one look at myracing bike and said, ‘Chris, you can’t race onthose tyres, they’re old, they’re falling apart.’He put these really smart tyres on my bike.First thing I did when I got home again wastake them off my bike, so that I didn’t dam-age them during training. I would keep themfor a special race.

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I could see that this team meant business.I absorbed their earnestness and filled mylungs with expectation.

The Time Trial

The time trial came first. It was actually oneof the reasons why I time-trialled intoSalzburg to the managers’ meeting. Plan-ning, management, strategy.

This race meant everything to me. Iwanted to build on my previous hour in thehot seat in Melbourne, and the training that Ihad been doing with Robbie had made meappreciate the skillset required to put in agood ride. Hitting a high output of wattageand staying there was the pain that I hadcome to enjoy.

It dawned on me that I was at a worldchampionship. I felt like I had partly shiftedthe earth off its axis to get myself there, andif I could make an impact now, it couldchange my life. If I could show the promise

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that was growing in my quads with everymonth of hard training, I thought I might fi-nally get a shot at joining a European team.

As I waited for the countdown, in everysense of the phrase, I was on the startingramp. It was my opportunity to seize the day,to shake the world. It was my moment, and Iwas ready.

There were riders on the roster who werebeing billed as the ‘real deal’. People werealready talking about them in terms of whatthey could achieve later in their careers atthe Grand Tours. Their places in the land-scape of the professional world seemed un-questionable. I, on the other hand, was ahead-in-the-clouds kid who rode on his ownoutside Johannesburg, keeping left all thetime. I was someone that even the cyclingcommunity in South Africa didn’t take seri-ously. Maybe this adventure was too much,too soon?

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I was more flustered than I should havebeen as I headed down the ramp. I had per-formed my warm-up on the turbo trainerand while on the starting ramp I was still try-ing to get my bike computer to reset. Ineeded to get it back to the zero setting be-fore I started, but the countdown had alreadyinitiated. I was preoccupied as I pushed offdown the ramp.

The first corner was 200 metres down theroad. It was a 90-degree right-hand bend infront of a grand old building. The drivewaywas cordoned off by crash barriers coveredin advertising, and there was a marshalstanding on the bend peering down into abunch of papers, which seemed to resemble astart list.

The building was situated on an intersec-tion in such a way that when there was no ra-cing you could drive up this road and headright or slip left at the edifice. They had leftthe slip without a crash barrier or advertising

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boarding because the race route wasn’t goingin that direction. We were clearly taking theright-hand bend on the bike. I knew that. ButI was agitated and wasn’t in the headspacethat I needed to be in. When I approachedthe corner, still trying to pick up speed tomake up the lost time spent worrying aboutresetting my bike computer, the unguardedslip to the left caught my eye. I was consciousof both the marshal and the turn, but whensomething attracted my attention to the left,my brain for just one-hundredth of a seconddecided to say, ‘Hey, maybe we go left?’Subliminal. Then it issued a correction. ‘No.We go right. You know it’s right.’

I was wired though. I had already driftedto the left side of the road because my brainhad raised the possibility of a left turn and Iwas now heading in a straight line towardsthe marshal, whose nose was still buried inhis papers.

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He was directly in my turning line. Yes, Ihad messed the corner up a little bit but Icould still make it round easily. Only this guywas standing in the road. Did I swerve?Surely he was going to move out of the way,or he would jump back? He was standing onthe road during the time trial, at a worldchampionship. He must have been aware ofriders coming down this way at high speeds?

I needed to keep my speed up. I hadn’tstarted well and if I slowed down here Imight have been a couple of seconds off mytarget before I had even taken the first bend.

I kept my line.He didn’t move.We collided.Or rather, he stood there and I hit him at

speed. He hadn’t even braced himself for theimpact. My aero bars went straight into hischest. Poor man.

He went flying to my right, his feet up inthe air, while I tumbled to the left. We both

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hit the ground. It was shown on television,and there was a photographer there, too,who caught everything. He captured thewhole crash, frame by frame, as the marshalflew through the air with his papers.*

Behind me, as I got up, there was a largeadvertising sign. It said, ‘Salzburg, Feel theInspiration’.

I was devastated. After all my planning toget to the race, I couldn’t believe that I wason the tar ten seconds into the race. I hadgone from medal hopeful to comedy gold bythe first bend.

But this was still the time trial. This wasstill Europe. I had nearly 40 kilometres leftto show the cycling world my worth. Igrabbed my bike as quickly as I could andgot straight back into the race again. I didn’teven check the marshal. Not so much as a‘sorry’ or a ‘how are you?’ I almost bouncedback up off the ground and was gone like thewind. It was over so quickly I could have

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fooled myself into thinking that the accidenthad never happened. I rode on. My braincalmed a bit. I thought that surely I couldn’thave lost more than 15 or 20 seconds at themost? I had to get straight back into it. Ireasoned that there was enough road aheadof me to claw back the time.

My intermediate placings were encour-aging. After 10.1 kilometres the first split hadme down in 52nd place. By the next interme-diate check at 23.7 kilometres I was up to40th. The time trial ended at 39.5 kilo-metres. I could tell myself that I had run outof road.

All things considered, I’d had a decenttime trial. I had set off from the start tryingto chase the power level that Robbie and Ihad calculated beforehand, something that Icould sustain for the whole distance. OverallI came in 36th out of a field of over one hun-dred Under-23s from around the world.

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There were some fine names racing thatday. Dominique Cornu, the winner by 37seconds, was one of them, a twenty-year-oldBelgian rider who had already signed up forthe professional Lotto team (sponsored bythe Belgian lottery). Alexandr Plius¸chin wasalso there, a Moldovan prodigy who did notperform quite as well as expected and fin-ished only two places in front of me. EdvaldBoasson Hagen from Norway, RigobertoUrán from Colombia and the Brit IanStannard, all future Team Sky colleagues,finished further up the field ahead of me, in5th, 23rd and 25th respectively, as didMikhail Ignatiev, the Russian time-trialler,who placed 2nd. Tony Martin, the Germanwho would later became the world time-trialchampion, finished 18th.

I saw the marshal a few days later. He wasbruised badly on his chest whereas I hadn’teven drawn blood on my knees. The traumafor me was more about the shock of what

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had happened and knowing that everyonewas watching. I felt like a red-faced kidagain.

Although it clearly wasn’t the Europeandebut of my dreams I was quietly happy. Icompared myself to the riders that I hadbeaten, many of whom were racing for thecontinental teams that I had emailed in theprevious months.

That was an achievement for me, and abase to build on. I would go home and getbusy with Google Translate and my school-boy French to write to Italian and Frenchteams, informing them of my news in lan-guage which would amuse and intriguethem: ‘Hey, I beat your guys in the time tri-al.’ No, I wouldn’t quite say that, but I wouldhave liked to.

It was after the time trial that the strange-ness of being the entire Kenyan cycling teamand management really struck me. Therewas nobody to talk to. I’d had a time trial

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which would be an internet comedy clip forever. It was finished though. Over. There wasno crowd to chat with. No management todebrief me.

Tony had organized a neutral service forme for the race, so that if I punctured Iwould get a spare. But neutral meant justthat; the mechanics weren’t there for moralsupport, or to mend my punctured psyche. Icould have phoned a friend or family mem-ber but I decided not to. I persuaded myselfthat no one would want to receive a call fromtheir boy who had ridden a time trial, on thebiggest day of his life, and had managed toride straight into a race marshal before thefirst bend. What was the right tone to takewith information like that?

I went back to the hotel where the SouthAfrican pros were milling about in the lobby.These were big names in the cycling worldthat I lived in and men whom I respectedand looked up to: Robbie Hunter, David

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George, Ryan Cox and Tiaan Kannemeyer.They had all been riding the pro-scene for anumber of years. David George had beenLance Armstrong’s teammate for a while atUS Postal, whereas Robbie had alreadyachieved a great deal, having won stages inthe Vuelta a España and raced in the Tour deFrance.

When I walked in I hoped that they hadn’twatched the race or at least hadn’t heardabout it. I tried to blend in and kept my headdown as I passed through the lobby. A coupleof them were sitting there, talking casually.

‘How’d it go?’ they asked as I passed.Phew. They knew nothing.‘Ah, it went okay. Could have done a bit

better, but yeah, it’s all right. Came in 36th.No complaints.’

I kept walking, looking around franticallyfor the lift. Behind me I heard roars oflaughter. The penny dropped. They knew.They hadn’t watched the race but they had

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been alerted to the highlight, who was nowwalking through the lobby looking sheepish.

‘What were you thinking?’‘What did you do?’‘How did you crash?’‘Did you have something against the

marshal?’They renamed me. I became Crash

Froome. That name would stick with me fora good few years afterwards. Tony Harding,Robbie Hunter, Daryl Impey and the boys – Iwas Crash to them.

The Road Race

The road race was 177.2 kilometres of hardroad, three days after the time trial.

A hilly course, there was a climb every lap,which would normally have favoured mystrengths, but the inclines were really steepat points, more than ten to fifteen per cent.This meant that they were brutal and short,as opposed to long and gruelling – my

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speciality – and they were not effectively‘breaking’ anybody over the course of awhole race. It was better, though, than a flatcircuit and I felt proud to be in the frontgroup approaching the close of the race.

It came to a sprint. A bunch of around fiftyof us were left towards the finish, out of afield of two hundred. I was in there with Ed-vald Boasson Hagen, Mark Cavendish andRigoberto Urán; riders I would never out-sprint. I finished 45th in the lead bunch, 5seconds behind the winner, Gerald Ciolek ofGermany. The Germans had a strong teamand had controlled the race well.

It wasn’t a result that Europeans could re-late to. In cycling, the judgement ofEuropean bosses was all that mattered. Iknew that nobody would scan down the pla-cings and say, ‘Do you remember that kidwho has been riding properly for a couple ofyears and who hustled and hassled to gethere? Well, he raced on his own with no

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team and he came in ahead of riders like DanMartin, Daryl Impey and Geraint Thomas.He might be worth a shot.’

I could say that I had finished in the leadpack at the World Championships. I couldleave Salzburg feeling disappointed if Iwanted to rummage for it or feeling muchbetter about myself if I was realistic.

That was the end of my racing year. Istayed around for a few days to watch theprofessionals race on the same course thatwe had ridden. Paolo Bettini, a strong Italianrider, was the overall victor and I watchedwith awe as he attacked in his big chainringafter 250 kilometres.

Even being in the big chainring was un-nerving for me at that time. I had ridden thesame race in the lowest gear possible, strug-gling to get up the viciously steep slopes. Butthere was a man who was riding against un-imaginable resistance and he was sailingaway from everyone else. There were 15

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kilometres left and I watched him, thinkingto myself, ‘I’ve got a really long way to go toreach anywhere near that level.’

I flew back home to Africa encouraged, butrealizing that my future lay elsewhere. Theraces in South Africa simply couldn’t give mewhat Europe had to offer, or even what Imight be good at.

The 2006 season was coming to an end, soI contacted the UCI again because I hadheard that they had registered a mixed con-tinental team for riders from developingcountries. Based in Aigle, Switzerland, cyc-lists from a range of nationalities could trainand compete in competitions wearing theUCI’s blue and white kit. I continued to writeto other teams too, telling them about myresults at the World Championships, as wellas my performance at the Tour de Maurice amonth previously where I had repeated myfeat from the previous year by winning thesecond stage, and then winning the third

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stage, too, before eventually going on to winthe whole race for my first stage race victory.It wasn’t as prestigious an event as famousFrench races such as Paris–Nice, but my pal-marès was nevertheless starting to show re-spectable results.

The UCI came back to me. They said, ‘Yes,let’s give this a go. You’re from Kenya, racingon a Kenyan licence. We’ll give you a chancebecause Kenya is an underdeveloped cyclingcountry.’

Underdeveloped? Man, they didn’t knowthe half of it!

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Part Two

EUROPE

10

The big chainring. It was time to move on up.If Kenyan cycling was underdeveloped,

then I was a child of Kenyan cycling. I wastwenty-one years old and had ridden once inEurope. My bike handling was poor, I wasjust a few years on from being the kid doingtricks and jumps in their backyard, and I hadnever steered a bike round a serious hairpinbend on the fast side of a mountain. The bigchainring, also known as the real world ofprofessional cycling, was still a dream.

I longed for Europe but I could feel the re-lentless peloton of time catching up with me.If I didn’t get a move on, it would pass me.

When I had finished in the chasing bunchin Salzburg a rider called Peter Velits crossedthe line somewhere close to me, but

sufficiently ahead to be given 22nd place, in-stead of my 45th. Peter and I shared manytraits. He was from Slovakia, which wasn’t atraditional cycling country. He was a stagerace rider who liked the climbs but time-tri-alled well, too. He also hadn’t gone toSalzburg in 2006 to finish 22nd.

Peter had been a professional since 2004.He had finished 7th in the 2004 Tour ofEgypt, although nobody from his team thatyear had been forced to bury themselves inthe desert, while waiting for death. He hadcome 3rd in the Giro delle Regioni in 2005. Ihadn’t even heard of the Giro delle Regioniin 2005.

Peter had gone to Salzburg with far morerealistic hopes than mine in 2006. The racewas part of his professional calendar by thenand this was his third attempt. In Salzburghe had time-trialled badly, finishing behindhis twin brother, Martin, and behind me,even without the impediment of starting the

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day by crashing into a race steward. In theroad race that 22nd place finish wasn’t thestuff of his dreams. Indeed, he would comeback and win the Under-23 Road Race at theWorld Championships the following year inStuttgart.

Peter’s name and story were well known tome by the time I got to Salzburg. Earlier,back in the spring of 2006, riding for thesecond tier Team Konica Minolta in SouthAfrica, Peter had won the Giro del Capo, themuch-missed annual stage race in the coun-tryside around Cape Town. He was onlythree months older than I was, but he waslight years ahead of where I needed to be.

That win in South Africa for his small andresilient home-based team was a bit of acoup for both Peter Velits and those ridingwith him. Despite the high-tech sponsor’sname, Team Konica Minolta ran on the sortof budget that aspired to be called ‘shoes-tring’. Yet it was a fine proving ground for

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African cyclists. The team specialized in pro-ducing buds and blossoms out of arid earth.

Having grabbed a few headlines throughPeter Velits’s win in Cape Town, the TeamKonica Minolta roster was quickly hooveredup by wealthier teams. That’s how it was andhow it was supposed to be. You rode for ateam like Konica Minolta on the way up. Andperhaps on the way down.

Without the means to attract a new waveof Europeans, the team boss, JohnRobertson, opted to fill the gaps with home-grown talent for 2007. He pulled in TiaanKannemeyer and Jock Green and entered in-to negotiations with David George, the SouthAfrican who had ridden with the US PostalTeam alongside Lance Armstrong in 1999and 2000. David had come home to win theGiro del Capo back to back in 2003 and2004 with Team Barloworld, for whomRobertson had worked at the time.

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I had known John Robertson for about ayear, bumping into him regularly at races. InNovember at the end of the 2006 seasonJohn asked if we could have a chat. Nostrings attached but he had a team to fill. Ihad a sliver of credibility with some of theraces under my belt and having been accep-ted into the UCI school. And my diary wasn’texactly full.

We met in Pretoria and got on well. I cameaway without any promises but filled withsome hope as I went back to studying in Jo-hannesburg. Unbeknownst to me, David Ge-orge was still exploring his options as thedeadlines for team rosters were looming.Finally, John Robertson opted to put myname down as the last on his list for the2007 season. The line-up was eight SouthAfricans and one Kenyan.

I was a shot in the dark for John.

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If the other riders or the sponsors hadasked to see my CV, he could have shown itto them on the back of a matchbox.

Starting in January 2007 I would be paid€300 a month for riding a bike. No morespinning classes. I would ride the Giro delCapo for the team in March and then head toEurope and the UCI school in Aigle, Switzer-land, for three months or so until being re-united with Konica Minolta when they cameto Europe in the early summer.

I didn’t care about the threadbare CV.For now, the country ahead was Lesotho.

We arrived at Clarens near the border forTeam Konica Minolta’s early-season trainingcamp.

I was a professional cyclist with profes-sional colleagues. It is true that I turned upon our first day of training riding a bikewhich was by some distance too small forme, a bike kitted out with components thatmost of my teammates wouldn’t consider

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suitable for a ride to the shops. I didn’t care.I was a pro.

On the training camp, though, there wereregular reminders that I was very much thenewbie. I didn’t have nearly as much experi-ence as the other riders in terms of howthings were done in a professional outfit. Theguys would joke with me about my positionon the bike: head down, elbows out. I didn’tfit the slick, pro-cyclist mould. Plus therewere the kikoys and the numerous braceletsand necklaces that adorned my body.

On the last day of training, John organizeda tough ride for us – a good number of milesfinishing on a stiff climb. I was keen but theolder riders had a different idea. They de-cided that we shouldn’t ride it flat out be-cause this was only training after all. Instead,to keep John happy, we should simply makeit appear as if we were riding at our limits.

This was awkward. John had told me be-fore the ride that I would need to impress

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him to make the Giro del Capo selection. So Iraised my issue with Jock Green and TiaanKannemeyer, the older guys on the team,telling them that I really needed to do mybest to show John that I was good enough tomake the cut. It was different being a rookie.

Jock and Tiaan agreed to let me ride aheadas if I were ‘attacking’ them. The caveat wasthat they told me to ride at about eighty percent of my maximum effort and they wouldkeep a reasonable distance.

When we got halfway up the climb, acouple of the sprinters dropped off the backof the group, giving the impression that wewere going fast up at the front. This was mycue. I did a little acceleration, as if I were at-tacking, and it all seemed to be working con-vincingly for about two minutes. Then Johnpulled up next to me in the car, looked me upand down for a moment, and shouted, ‘Chris,ride your fucking bike!’

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There was no choice. I pushed as hard as Icould for the last kilometre to the top. I feltreally proud of myself when John came up tome afterwards and said, ‘Listen, if you canride like that in the Giro, you can win thefucking thing.’

I clung to Africa until the last moment. Notfrom sentiment, but because I wanted to getas much training into my legs as I could be-fore I went to Europe. Maybe in Europe thesix- or seven-hour days that I felt I neededwould be frowned upon. So I did the Giro delCapo in early March for Konica Minolta(coming 6th overall and winning the bestyoung rider’s jersey), and quickly went backto my training routine.

Lesotho again.The lowest spot you can find in Lesotho is

1,400 metres above sea level, and eighty percent of the country is at least 1,800 metresabove sea level. It is lumpy terrain. If thepeople had bikes they would produce

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climbers for export. As it is, Lesotho’s na-tional resources are water and diamonds andin late 2006 in the Maluti Mountains theyeked the fifteenth-biggest diamond everfound out of the mine. It was a white dia-mond that they called Lesotho Promise.

Much further down the other end of theworld economic spectrum, my €300 a monthmeant that I was able to establish a basicaltitude-training camp for myself on theSouth African side of the border near Four-iesburg, just outside of Lesotho.

I went up there with a South African girlnamed Andrea I was seeing at the time. Ithink she expected some kind of a romanticgetaway but she came up for the ten days ofmy home-made altitude camp and scarcelysaw me.

I loved riding over the border with mypassport in my pocket, ready to go up intothe mountains, to leave all of my energythere and to return hours later.

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Lesotho gave me a parting taste of realAfrican soil. It is not a wealthy place and Ineeded to be careful of where I was riding. Awhite guy on a racing bike in the highlandswas a rare sight. In fact, the bike alone wouldbe a rare enough sighting for a Lesothan. Ipushed myself hard up there. Sessions of fiveto seven hours doing huge miles with justone recovery day during the time that I wasthere. It was a strange feeling going from thefamiliar training routes around Johannes-burg but my legs were ready. Even in Johan-nesburg I had been doing the same longhours most days, so these big days and bigclimbs were exactly what I had been gettingready for.

Life in Europe was due to start properly inItaly with the Giro delle Regioni, the annualsix-stage road race for Under-23 riders. I ar-rived in Switzerland with just a couple ofweeks to spare.

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The UCI have had many bad ideas downthrough the years but the World CyclingCentre (WCC) on the land surrounding theirheadquarters at Aigle, in a crook of the SwissAlps, was not one of them. For the first timeI was part of a proper team set-up: bikes, kit,a room to ourselves, velodrome, gym and acanteen for all our meals.

After some days’ training in Switzerland,there followed a trip to Belgium to competein the curtain-raising Liège–Bastogne–LiègeEspoirs race for Under-23s. This is the fact-ory floor for European cycling – the longrides, the one-day classics, the short, sharpclimbs, the shoulder-to-shoulder jostling, thenarrow and rapid descents – where ridersare made into racers.

I didn’t like it much. I enjoy the first hintof elevation on a steep mountain, and if themountain dwarfs us all, so much the better. Ilike stage races, those long wars of attrition.Who can suffer best? Who can suffer

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longest? These long hauls around the low-lands were never going to be my thing. Icame 28th that day up in Liège, ahead of myUCI comrades but over a minute behind thewinner, a rider called Grega Bole from Slove-nia. It was a useful experience but I wantedto race in countries where the hills weremountains, and the climbs went on and on.

A few days later, in Italy for the Giro delleRegioni, a gang of us were in an SUV, head-ing to our hotel. It’s like the start of a badjoke. A Frenchman is driving. Sebastien issmall and compact and drives with com-pacted fury. The team around me are twoKoreans, a Colombian, an Algerian, aChinese guy and me, a Kenyan, often mis-taken for a Brit despite never having been toBritain. Haijun Ma is the Chinese guy. Wekid him all day about being too old for anUnder-23 race. We demand to see his pass-port. He grins and says, ‘Shhhhhh!’

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Travelling together like this was still a nov-elty for our team. We tucked in behind theGB team car in front of us. The car was beingdriven by a ruddy-faced guy whom I wouldcome to know as Rod Ellingworth. Some-where in the car were Ian Stannard and BenSwift, who were learning their trade at Rod’sItalian academy. They are riding under thename 100% Me, an anti-doping initiativetaken by David Brailsford at British Cycling.

100% Me was a very worthy and ground-breaking ethical statement but we were giddyand Sebastien was overexcited and aggress-ive and he drove our car right up Rod’stailpipe. Rod, as I know now, is sensible andsolid, and always law-abiding. He was in nomood to engage with a garçon racer on thiswindy climb. But Sebastien decided to pushhis luck and when we got to a really danger-ous stretch of road, a bad bend on a blindhairpin corner on the windswept mountain,he overtook at speed.

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There were whoops in our car but I re-member thinking that we were about to be-come a carful of dead foreigners if we met avehicle coming the other way. I looked acrossat the driver of the GB car and I could see ablack cloud of rage crossing his face. Rodrage.

We were unpacking the car at the hotelwhen Rod arrived in the car park having ob-served the speed limit and all the other rulesof the road and driver etiquette along theway. He was furious with Sebastien. ‘Howdare you drive like that with youngsters inthe car, you fool!’ he shouted. For most ofthe guys on the UCI team this was a comedyand Sebastien was their champ for drivingreally fast when some people would havebeen afraid to drive at all. I remember look-ing at the red-headed Rod as he seethed andthinking, ‘Wow, he’s so angry that his facehas gone the same the colour as his hair. His

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face and his hair are both really, reallyfurious.’

Day one of the Regioni was a standard affair,a circuit race followed by the predictablebunch finish. My main problem was stayingin contact with the bike and with the road. Atone point I even rode at speed into the drive-way of a private house, coming to a halt justbefore I hit the garage. John Robertson, whowas there with the South African Under-23team, said later that his main memory of theday was frequent reports including the words‘Chris’ and ‘Crash’ on the race radio. Therewere three riders called Chris in the race thatday, but it didn’t take long for John to figureout that this series of unfortunate events washappening to the same Chris.

I had journeyed from Africa to Aigle withnot much more in my account than potential.The roads I had worked on alone or withKinjah and with Robbie had never offeredthe challenges that you find in the Alps, or

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any other self-respecting European moun-tain range. I had an odd flappy-bird style ofriding, poor handling skills and, despite mytraining methods and eternal diet, stillneeded to lose at least a couple of kilos. Ontop of those handicaps came my lack of ex-perience, which might have been consideredharmlessly eccentric if it hadn’t been so an-noying for other riders. When I had thestrength in my legs to push on at a criticalmoment in the race, I was invariably startingfrom too far back and would try to overtakeby weaving through the middle of the pelo-ton where the traffic was most dense. Curseswould follow me through the congestion.

My descending was also terrible. I wasn’tscared of falling off or of the speed of thedownhill, but it might have been better if Ihad been. I would take risks, trying to gofaster than everyone else on the corners, andalthough I had the cojones I lacked the bike-handling skills, a combination that led to a

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lot of crashes. Rod Ellingworth would latersay that his riders spoke of how much space Iwas given on the descents. No one wanted tobe too close. I could understand that.

I was suffering from a basic misconcep-tion. I know now that most of the brake workon a descent is done on the front wheel. Backthen I reckoned that on a downhill the frontbrake would catapult me over the handle-bars. The long, mostly straight descents inKenya were no preparation for the windingroads of Europe. But as Rod would also saylater, his riders also mentioned that I waspretty good going uphill.

I invested my hopes in the second stage,the first of the two mountaintop finishes.This stage was a loop around Città Sant’An-gelo, a medieval town near Pescara. Therewere some decent climbs, including a good6- or 7-kilometre ascent to the finish.

There were attacks all day. Under-23 racesare filled with riders who have a desperate

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need to make a name for themselves. If youdon’t succeed as an Under-23, it’s unlikelyyou’ll get the chance to do so afterwards. Ihung in going up the final climb and as mylegs felt good I rolled the dice and took achance. I pulled away from the bunch in thecompany of a Russian rider, Anton Reshet-nikov, and the Slovenian Grega Bole, whoseback I had watched cross the finish line firstin Belgium the previous week.

At a kilometre from the top we were clearof the pack behind us. Belgium hadn’t beenmy sort of terrain but this was.

Bole was on my wheel. I was sucking himalong up the hill and I could tell from hisquickening breaths that he was panicking. Ifhe lost touch with me the peloton mightswallow him up and then he would finishwith nothing to show for his efforts. Hewasn’t in a position of strength but he de-cided to negotiate:

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‘Don’t drop me, don’t drop me. You canhave the stage but don’t drop me.’

I had been in Italy in this dream world ofprofessional cycling for only two weeks. Thismust be what the guys do, I thought. Theycut deals. I have the power and I don’t needto start making enemies; I know I’mstronger. He can stay on my wheel and gethis 2nd place.

We toiled round the last hairpin and thefinish lay ahead of us, one last uphillstraight. At this point in big races the smallcaravan of vehicles in front of the leadersvanishes, leaving the riders with nothing butclear road. With 100 metres to go, the carsand the motorbikes veered off to the right. Iturned up the power and followed thevehicles.

Grega Bole rode straight on towards thefinish line. I chased the vehicles. I chased the… uh oh.

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By the time I realized my mistake and dida quick U-turn, the best I could do was claim2nd place. As he watched me disappeardown that side road, Grega forgot about ourdeal, though I couldn’t blame anyone butmyself.

Still, the good definitely outweighed thebad that day. People were aware of howstrong I’d been on the climb and I wasstartled to realize how comfortable I’d felt. Iwas losing too much time on the descents soa good overall GC (General Classification)result wasn’t going to happen that week. Butwhile you can coach technical problems outof a rider, you can never turn a non-climberinto someone who can win mountaintop fin-ishes. I was pleased with how I had per-formed on the climbs and, overall, I waspleased with the way the week was panningout.

In any stage race the road gives and theroad takes away. The third stage was the

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longest and by the time we got to Cignolo Ihad come off on another couple of descentsand surrendered over a minute in timethrough poor handling.

Stage four was better and passed withoutmajor incident and then we were into seriousclimbing territory again. We were headingout from the quaint spa town of ChiancianoTerme and finishing on Montepulciano, ra-cing through 149 kilometres of rollingTuscan hills.

Again, there were attacks all day. With 20kilometres to go I was feeling strong andmade a play of my own. I was followed byCyril Gautier of France, Christoff Van Heer-den of South Africa, the Australian CameronMeyer, Claudio Apolo of Portugal and twoBelgians, Tim Vermeersch and DetlefMoerman.

I don’t remember if it occurred to me howstrange it was for a kid with the air of theNgong Hills still in his lungs to be riding

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through Tuscany with French and Belgianriders by his side. If I entertained thatthought, it was briefly. With 3 kilometres togo, Moerman and Meyer made a break oftheir own. Myself and Gautier chased themdown.

On and on up the climb we went. The stagewas going to fall to me or to the Frenchman.The pack were behind us but I felt strong andsensed they wouldn’t have enough left forboth the chase and the aftermath. Withabout a kilometre and a half to go, at the spotthey call Porta al Prato, I kicked on. I feltcomfortable again and the gap stretched.Gautier kept in touch like a relative whoknew that if I died he would inherit thestage. With the finish in the Piazza Grande insight, I emptied the tank.

A stage win. UCI code KEN 19850520 –this was the first Kenyan code to appear atthe very top of a stage classification in a pro-fessional European race. The first ever. The

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world didn’t shake but there were decentriders on the mountain that day, includingRui Costa, Bauke Mollema, Ben Swift andIan Stannard. Years later, people would saythat I came from nowhere, but on this day Ifelt that little corner of Tuscany wassomewhere.

Rod Ellingworth had his base not too faraway at Quarrata. Rod watched me win andmade a mental note.

Two meetings from that week stand out forme. Luca Scinto, a guy from Tuscany whowas quite well known in Italian cycling, wasthere at the Regioni with an Under-23 feederteam. He grabbed me at the finish line oneday and had someone translate the words ofseduction. He wanted me to come to histeam the next year. I was flattered. But whenI relayed the story to a friend who’d spentsome time racing in Italy, their response wasnot what I had expected: he was a

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controversial character. As it turned out, in2013 two of his riders tested positive in theGiro.

The other meeting was with Rod. On thenight of that fifth stage I didn’t waste anytime, and with my stage win fresh in Rod’smemory I looked for his name on the roomroster stuck to the lobby wall, and went andknocked on his door. He was there with the100% Me team.

It would be interesting to ask Rod exactlywhat we said to each other because I don’tquite remember. He knew who I was by then,which was a start, and I know I would havetold him that I wanted to get to Europe on amore full-time basis. I imagine he mentionedto me about racing under a British as op-posed to a Kenyan licence.

It was a constructive talk which had nofirm conclusions but at the end Rod said tome, ‘Listen, you’ve got talent and you’reheading in the right direction. Keep it up.’

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Doug Dailey had been keeping an eye onme since the Commonwealth Games in Mel-bourne and now Rod Ellingworth was, too.Their attention encouraged me.

I had only been in Europe for a few weeksbut this was what I had come for: big days inthe mountains and a few mentions in keydispatches.

Réalisant mon espoir, as the old TalkingHeads song says.

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11

One day I was learning to paddle in the stilland familiar waters of Johannesburg. Thenext I was shooting the rapids down moun-tains with magical names. In professionalcycling the speed of events picks you up andcarries you along. You look up from the roadand from the race and there is a strange newlandscape rolling past on either side of you.

Breathe it in and ride on.I was dividing my time in 2007 between

Aigle in Switzerland and the Team KonicaMinolta house in Tielt in Belgium, thoughthere wasn’t a lot of time to be divided. JohnRobertson was keen on us entering the clas-sics and criteriums in the Low Countries, butI tried them and didn’t like them. Or theydidn’t like me. The bends and the

accelerations and the short cobbled climbssuited some. For a boy raised in Nairobi, farabove the sea, I might have had a chance inthe south of France but the grey north wasnot going to be my terrain de prédilection.So the guys would head off and race and Iwould spend the day training, looking forclimbs, doing my own thing.

After Italy, the Tour of Japan was the nextdecent stage race of the season. In my head Idrew a ring around any stage race weentered. These were for me, my provingground and my shop window. Japan was sev-en stages starting in late May. We began inOsaka on my twenty-second birthday. A yearearlier I had been back in Johannesburg andthe thought of being paid to spend a week ra-cing in Japan was about as far away as Japanitself.

I grew into the race and on the penultim-ate of the seven stages I got my chance. Thestage, 128.5 kilometres beginning in the

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Shujenzi Stadium in Tokyo, took us outaround a circuit corrugated with stiff climbs.There were so many climbs that I couldn’thave designed the stage better myself.

I went with the first break. There were ten,eleven, twelve of us, but I felt strong. Wechipped out a solid lead, but the relentlessclimbs took their toll on my breakaway com-panions. The peloton started reeling us backin, and morale and speed were diminishingquickly. With two laps and over 30 kilo-metres to go, I attacked the break. Thesewere the scenarios that Robbie and I had inmind when I used to hold my power outputas high as possible, for as long as possible,around Johannesburg. No crashes today, norookie errors. I felt in control. I won by about50 seconds. The stage put me 6th on GC be-hind an Italian, three Kazakhs and anotherItalian.

I was still 6th after the race finished infront of big crowds the next day.

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I rode for Kenya that summer in the AllAfrica Games. Daryl Impey won gold in theroad race; I took the bronze for Kenya, fin-ishing between two Eritreans. I rode Mi-Août en Bretagne, a modest four-day stagerace in north-west France, and won. The GPTell in Switzerland went well, especially onthe mountain stage, the fourth, from Chur toArosa. A big Alpine climb. I finished 2nd be-hind a serious climber, Mathias Frank,nearly catching him on the long haul to thesummit finish.

Like many smaller teams, Team KonicaMinolta offered its riders the chance to de-velop. I could feel through 2007 that I wasdoing that. I made rookie errors but I knewthat the more rookie errors a rider made, thelonger he would be a rookie. I tried to learnsomething every time.

Not everything was perfect, of course.John wanted me to ride the Tour of Britainin September but I thought the race was too

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flat. I would have preferred the Tour del’Avenir, which was a more suitable race, andan event renowned for young riders announ-cing their talent. A young Greg LeMond wonL’Avenir by more than 10 minutes, and fromthat moment people believed he would go onto win the Tour de France. I thought if Icould do something in L’Avenir, Europeanteams would be paying attention. But beingin Britain was important to John Robertson.

By then, though, I was getting enoughnibbles of interest from bigger teams that Ifelt I would be able to secure a contract forthe following year.

I remember getting a call out of the bluefrom Robbie Hunter. How he had got mynumber, I’m not sure, but he left me a mes-sage saying, ‘Hi, Chris, Robbie here. Can Igive you a call sometime to have a chat aboutyour plans for next year?’

To paraphrase the line from JerryMaguire, he had me at ‘hi’. Robbie was a guy

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whom we African riders always looked up to.The most successful cyclist in South Africa,he had ridden the Tour de France severaltimes. Daryl is crowding him for the titlethese days, but at the time of that phone call,Robbie was the most successful road cyclistthat South Africa had ever produced. He gotthere on his own will, no academy or any-thing. He fought to get where he had to go.He was the model. And Robbie Hunterwanted to talk about my plans!

I took the hard negotiating position thatwhatever his plans were for me, they weremy plans too.

Robbie was with Barloworld, a team with astrong South African flavour. Barloworld hadreceived a wild-card entry to the 2007 Tourde France and done well, taking two stagesand the polka-dot King of the Mountains jer-sey. Mauricio Soler won stage nine and thejersey. Robbie won stage eleven and finished

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2nd in the competition for the green pointsjersey for best sprinter.

Those of us on the lower rungs of the lad-der were surprised and impressed.

Off the road, the Tour of Britain workedout well for me. Barloworld were there and Ispoke with Robbie about their plans and myplans. Once I spoke with Barloworld I hadmy heart set on joining. I didn’t even explorethe other options that were floating around.

Robbie wrapped our talk up with an invit-ation. ‘Come to the Worlds in Stuttgart in afew weeks’ time. We’ll have the contractready for you to sign. We’ll sign you up for2008.’

Stuttgart. I came. I raced. I was conqueredby my own fatigue. I had been pushingharder and harder since that meeting withJohn Robertson in Pretoria in 2006. Now, atthe World Championships, I didn’t hit any-body at the start but time-trialled worse thanI had in Salzburg. I found a shard of energy

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at some stage in the road race but finished21st, a good way behind Peter Velits.

Signing my name to a contract was theonly exertion I was fit for.

There were no fireworks or marchingbands when I showed up in Stuttgart. Clau-dio Corti, the Barloworld team boss, askedthe team soigneur, Mario Pafundi, to see tome. Mario is now with Team Sky, but backthen he was to keep an eye out for a tallKenyan kid who was coming to the team bus,as instructed, to sign a contract.

I went along at the appointed time andstood outside the team bus obediently.Knocking on the door or sticking my head inseemed too cheeky. I waited for somebody toemerge for the meet and greet; I had nevermet Mario before. Meanwhile, he was acouple of yards away scanning the crowd,looking for what he thought a tall Kenyan kidshould look like.

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Time passed. In Mario’s part of Italythey’re not familiar with mzungus, so I stoodoutside the Barloworld bus for a long timebefore the penny dropped. Eventually I wasfetched inside. The contract was signed.

It was minimum fare. I don’t think it evenmet the UCI standards. The money was inthe region of €22,500 a year. As a neo-prothe UCI rules state that the minimum dura-tion should be two years.

Inside, I was offered a one-year deal. Theyignored the two-year rule.

So did I.I’d told myself that I could be up there

with these guys. I took my one year at min-imum and prepared to grab the big brassring. Secretly it was my intention to makethe Barloworld Tour de France team.

T. I.E. my friend, T. I.E.

This is Europe.

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Mid April 2008: I rode yesterday. Thismorning I am in France but yesterday I wasin Holland. Racing. I raced more than 200kilometres of an event I’ve already forgottenthe name of. Me and Félix Cárdenas, the Co-lombian climber. The sponsors needed apresence there. Cárdenas pulled a shortstraw. So did I.

We rode. We finished. We did our jobs.Then they put us in a car for five hours anddropped us at a hotel 80 kilometres north ofParis, near Amiens. At 2.00 a.m. That’s thefirst lance they stick in your romanticthought bubble about Paris–Roubaix, theQueen of the Classics. It doesn’t start in Par-is. Not since the revolutionary spring of1968.

Cárdenas and I weren’t sharing a room.That would make sense. I went to my roomwhere another rider was already sleeping. Iam meek, too meek for Paris–Roubaix per-haps, too meek to switch on the light. I

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fumbled around for a while. Found the bath-room, found the bed, found some sleep.

In Holland yesterday, after about 150 kilo-metres, we hit the infamous baby heads. Thepavé is what they call those narrow stretchesof cobblestoned farm paths. The cobbles areas big as melons. Or baby heads. A very longtime ago it was somebody’s idea of fun tomake cyclists ride over these things. Mayberiders were upholstered differently then.Maybe fun was different then.

We hit the pavé and the bikes did theshake, rattle and roll that people had comeout to see. The pavé was a one-way system,so the highway bottlenecked drastically whenwe hit the cobbles. All around the riders be-come erratic as their tyres found purchaseand then slipped on the smooth, dampstones. Keeping the rubber on the road andour craniums off the cobbles was all any ofus cared about.

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The marriage of the rider and the bike hitsa literal rough patch on these lumps. Thebike doesn’t want to know you any more. Itspits out the water bottles that haven’t beentaped in. It jolts and jounces and makesnoises it has never made before. The bikewants to throw you off like a stallion buckinga rodeo cowboy. You grip the steel of thehandlebars, hold on for your life, squeeze un-til your knuckles are frost white. You woulddie this way rather than take your hand awayfor a second to squeeze a brake.

And you have to ride aggressively if youwant to survive. Very aggressively if youwant to win. You don’t simply have to sub-due the violent uprising of your bike, youhave to beat those around you at the sametime. To win without risk is to win withoutglory, Eddy Merckx once said. Belgians lovecobbles*.

When riders hit the pavé, the peloton getscompressed, then shattered and scattered. If

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somebody falls or rides too gingerly, youcan’t get past them. The line ahead gets awayfrom you. There are distractions. Tyres giveway with a hiss of surrender. Spokes buckleand wheels bend like surrealist art installa-tions. Bikes, even support motorcycles, justslew off the road.

In Holland yesterday we clung to our bikesas the cobbles sped past below us. The or-ganizers had erected a line of yellow plastictape along the route to keep us on the course.On the other side of the tape was a nicesmooth cycle path. Concrete and flat andinviting.

I had a revolutionary idea. Those who lovecycling on baby heads could feel free to doso. Who was I to judge them? I like concretethough. So I ducked under the tape and rodealong on the concrete bike path. Cry free-dom, brothers.

Soon I was passing up through the peloton– well, parallel to it. I was bellowing at the

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odd farming family who had come here towatch: ‘Guys, can you please move out of theway!’ I felt great. The hard stares from themud-stained faces of the other riders burnedholes in my back. I felt even better. ‘How isthat pavé working out for you fellows?’

Of course, pretty soon a commissaire ar-rived alongside as if he were chasing a three-alarm fire. He had his car window down andhe was blowing a whistle. Multi-tasking. Noman in history ever looked so excited to beblowing a whistle.

My new friend was very agitated to see abike on the bike path and not on the cobbles.

‘No, you’re finished. You’re out of the race.You’re disqualified. Stop! Stop! Stop!’

It was like a psychopath you had brieflydated telling you that it was all over. It is ashame but it was good while it lasted. Basic-ally, phew!

Listen, mister commissaire, it’s not you.It’s me.

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I put my hands up in the air.‘Okay! I’m stopping!’I dropped back and said to the team car

that the commissaire had told me I had tostop. Their eyes narrowed. I thought aboutsuggesting that maybe he didn’t like Africansbut the eyes within the team car kept lookingat me.

The Italian mechanic cut the silence with arazor grin.

‘Well, what did you do?’‘I was just riding on the path.’‘Ha! You’ve got a lot to learn, Chreees! A

lot to learn.’

I had been in Europe since January. Arrivingin Italy at that time of year, I was assaultedby the cold.

The team gofer, a guy called Romano,picked me up at Milan Malpensa. He hadDaryl Impey and Mario in the car with himand together we drove the motorway. Youpicture olive groves and sunshine. This was

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just autostrada and industrial premises andsnow.

I had one thought: We train where? Thismay not be for me.

Romano spoke Italian. So I thought. Rap-id, staccato sentences. I couldn’t catch any ofit. Romano is missing a finger, he’s got a bitof a stump there on one of his hands. He’sfrom Bergamo and actually speaks Ber-gamesque, which is a Lombard dialect andonly barely related to Italian. It sounds likesomebody trying to speak excitedly with apotato in their mouth.

I remember Romano driving quite fast onthe autostrada, talking with his hands, ges-ticulating all the time to get his points acrossto Mario beside him up front. He was so loudI assumed they were having an argument. Iwas mesmerized by the missing finger.

It was a new and strange world.We drove to Adro in Brescia, which was

where the team had the magazzino, or

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warehouse. Claudio Corti’s house was overthe magazzino. The team bus was there too,along with all of the bikes and equipment.

There was nothing special at all about itand, again, no mountains in sight. I was ex-pecting mountains. The Italy I rememberedfrom the Regioni was all Tuscan villages andnice climbs.

We ate, Corti and some mechanics and thegang of us from the car.

I’d been warned by the older guys aboutthe etiquette of eating in Italy. Salad first.Then a plate of pasta or rice, followed by aplate of meat or chicken or fish. You don’tjust go and pile everything you want on to aplate. So I just sat there watching whateveryone else was doing before getting up toserve myself.

I’d lived in Karen, in Kinjah’s, in SouthAfrica, in Switzerland and in Belgium overthe previous few years. And yet I had never

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felt so foreign. I was way beyond the bordersof my comfort zone.

We were a small squad, just nineteen ofus: six Italians, two Brits (Geraint Thomasand Stephen Cummings), one Austrian, onePortuguese, three South Africans, one Swiss,two Colombians, one Spaniard, one Australi-an and one Kenyan.

Daryl Impey, John-Lee Augustyn and my-self were coming in as neo-pros. RobbieHunter had been there a year or two. Mauri-cio Soler, the Colombian climber who hadmade such an impression on the Tour deFrance, was there. Enrico Gasparotto was theItalian national champion at the time. PaoloLongo Borghini, Giampaolo Cheula andFrancesco Bellotti were the main Italians.Corti had his son Marco starting off in theteam as well.

Geraint Thomas and Steve Cummingsspent most of their time down in Tuscany, sowe seldom saw them. Corti wanted the rest

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of us living close to the service course fortraining, but seeing as the two Brits lived inTuscany, I took it that this wasn’t an iron-clad rule.

I shared an apartment for three weekswith John-Lee Augustyn and then struck outon my own. I didn’t want to live in Adro witheverybody, including the team boss, right ontop of me. My girlfriend, Andrea, was comingover from South Africa later in the year tofollow a career in modelling. We had metwhile I was at university in Johannesburg,and living together was going to be a seriousstep. I found us a place in Chiari, 15 kilo-metres south of Adro, but on the main railline to Milan where she hoped to work.

It meant that to train I had to ride up theroad to Adro and then keep going north forthe same distance again to get to the moun-tains and the lakes near Sarnico. A 60-kilo-metre extra tariff on the training day. I likedthat.

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Chiari was bigger than Adro. It had super-markets, a rail station, canals and a nicepiazza. All the benefits of space and beingable to do my own thing.

Mostly I trained alone. I already knew thatthe social aspect of a big group ride cansometimes seduce riders into training at alower intensity. I dipped into the companyevery now and then but mostly I stuck to myseven-hour rides, punishing myself as muchas I could. The others called me a trainingfundamentalist. I didn’t argue.

I loved the mountains around Lake Iseo.Flying through mountain tunnels and littlevillages. Music thrumming 0n the iPod.Dreams of the Tour in my head. The workpattern remained the same but the rideswere tougher than in Johannesburg. Find thethreshold and hold it there for as long aspossible, twenty minutes or more. Long in-tervals. Again and again. And again.

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The place I found was the upper floor of atwo-level house. It had one main bedroom,one smaller bedroom and a kitchen-cum-lounge area. The landlord asked for a veryreasonable rent, I think about €600 amonth, and I was happy to go with that. Itwas more expensive than sharing with theguys in Adro but the word was that in Adro,Claudio Corti knew every move you made. Iwasn’t so keen on that.

I remember there was considerable fussabout signing the contract for the place onceI had agreed to rent. I didn’t have a resid-ent’s card and, as the landlord wasn’t used toforeigners renting, Italy’s bureaucratic mazeturned what should have been simple intosomething deeply complex. Eventually, wegot it done.

I settled in, and started to learn Italian.Most language students buy tapes and listen,but I printed out common Italian words, cut

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them up and taped them to my handlebarsevery day.

The guy who lived downstairs, also a Ro-mano by name, lived with his mother, Sante.She was an absolute angel, always askinghow I was, and even though we couldn’treally speak we would sit there and trade afew words every day. When I first arrived itwas just before Easter, which the Italians callPasqua, and everyone was getting togetherfor a big meal on Easter Sunday. Romanoand his family asked me to join them fortheir gathering. I went straight into theirfamily meal for Easter, a huge spread of Itali-an food and hospitality. There were littleparcels of pasta, ravioli, cannelloni, theworks. I remember thinking I was going tohave to do seven hours’ hard training towork it all off. And then they broke open theEaster eggs.

Paris–Roubaix

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Saturday in Holland. Sunday in France.It is five minutes before 11.00 a.m. on

Sunday now, 13 April 2008. We mill aroundin the Place Charles de Gaulle in Compiègne.There are 198 of us. All clean for now. Thelocals smile at us as if we were farm boyswaiting in line to go off to the trenches.They’ve seen real war in these villes though.This is their fun, conceived in 1896.

Welcome to the Hell of the North. Par-is–Roubaix.

The posters for this year’s race show arider coming towards the camera with a bigapocalyptic sky above him and a longstraight of pavé beneath him. ‘La Dure DesDures’ is the slogan, ‘The Hardest of theHard’. When they ran this race for the firsttime it took the German Josef Fischer 9hours and 17 minutes to ride the 280 kilo-metres from Paris to Roubaix. For somereason (perhaps the thrill of seeing a German

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suffer) they decided to hold the race againand again after that.

All this history is new to me.Cobbles and more cobbles is the forecast.

Expect widespread cobbles after Arenberg.The clear sky itself is a small mercy. Nothingmore. The roads are a little damp from yes-terday’s showers but heavy rain is what givesthe Hell of the North its most lasting flavour.Sean Kelly, an old warrior of these rides,once said that a Paris–Roubaix without rainis not a Paris–Roubaix. I can live with that.I’ll take the dry, bland version any day. Yes-terday’s drizzle will keep down the dust wemight have been swallowing today.

When I woke up this morning I didn’t feellike a professional cyclist. I felt hungover.The race and the travel yesterday subtractedsomething from me. I’m not sure what isgone or what remains. My insides felt likethey had spent time in a blender. My handswere sore from gripping the handlebars on

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the pavé. I asked some of the guys this morn-ing, ‘What do we do for our hands? We’reriding Paris– Roubaix today, what do youguys do?’ I’m asking because the gloves don’tseem to offer sufficient cushioning againstthe expected battering.

Every rider had his own theory. I was sorryI had asked. One guy tut-tutted. He didn’tuse gloves. The more padding between theglove and the handlebars, the greater thefriction generated. The greater the friction,the greater the chafing, and so on until thechafing causes sparks which cause bike andrider to burst into flames.

Other contributors had come up with vari-eties of home-made padding and strappingwhich they would put underneath theirgloves. Simple.

I thought that sounded good. It mademore sense. I taped my hands before gettingon the bus. I felt like a boxer. On the bus aswe drove here I looked down at my hands

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again and again. Like a boxer, except I wasn’tjust going into the ring. I was going into war.

Off we go. All 198 of us. We know thatmany of us won’t finish. That’s the point. At-trition and suffering.

I have learned a couple of things about thesesorts of races since coming to Europe. One. Idon’t like them as much as I like stage racesand mountains. Two. The meek shall inheritthe broom wagon. So, if there is a breakaway,go with it. If there is a gap, barrel into it. Thestretches of cobble aren’t quite the hell theyare made out to be, but you need to positionwell before you hit them. If somebody wantsto pass you, make his life hard, very hard.Today I shall not be meek. My flappy-birdwide-elbows style will keep me near the frontof the group for when we hit the pavé in thesecond half of the race. That’s the plan.

The legends of Paris–Roubaix just add tothe allure. Two years ago George Hincapiewas gripping his handlebars so hard over the

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cobbles that they came away in his hands –literally detached from the bike. As a meta-phor for the race, Hincapie holding his use-less handlebars as the bike skittered aboutthe pavé is perfect.

They abandoned the race for obvious reas-ons during World War One and Two butstarted back even before it was reasonable todo so.

The ‘Hell of the North’ tag came from a re-port by two journalists sent out to recce thecourse in 1919. The war had claimed the livesof two men who had been winners of fourprevious editions of Paris– Roubaix: three toOctave Lapize and one to François Faber.The journalists, Victor Breyer and EugèneChristophe, drove the course. Breyer de-scribed ‘shell pieces one after the other withno gaps, outlines of trenches, barbed wire cutinto one thousand pieces … nothing but des-olation. The shattered trees looked vaguelylike skeletons, the paths had collapsed and

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been potholed or torn away by shells … here,this really is the hell of the north.’

Recce duly done, they resumed with theorganization of the race immediately.

Next time around they didn’t even wait forthe Second World War to finish. In 1944 aFrench rider, Jean Robic, fell and cracked hisskull on the famous cobbles. The legends andthe stories kept coming though. FaustoCoppi won in 1950 after chasing down twoescapees from the pack then taking an or-ange from his pocket and eating it as he en-couraged his two rivals to head off again. Hewould catch them up, he said. And he did.Coppi rode the last 100 kilometres all alone.

Two years later, though, in maybe themost famous race of them all, Coppi’s geniusjust couldn’t shake Rik Van Steenbergen.The two entered the velodrome in a state ofexhaustion and Coppi lost Paris– Roubaix ina sprint to the line. Van Steenbergen was, ofcourse, Belgian.

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The history of crashes and wounds is justas long. In 1998 Johan Museeuw crashed inArenberg and his wounded leg became gan-grenous so quickly that he almost lost it. Hecame back to win the race another couple oftimes. Museeuw was Belgian too.

Bernard Hinault once described this raceas bullshit and a con. He won the thing in1981 though. That was a day when he fellseven times and ran over a small dog. At onepoint he ended up having to put his bike onhis shoulders so he could run past a commis-saire’s vehicle. His dues paid, he competedonce more, but never did Paris– Roubaixagain after 1982.

If Hinault could ride through the babyheads and the bullshit, so can I. So must I.It’s a rite of passage. An observance. A pil-grimage that every rider should do at leastonce. I love suffering and this is the place ofhigh suffering. This race, one of the five

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monuments of the classic season, is also partof the soul of European cycling.

When today ends, in the old velodrome inRoubaix, there is a communal shower blockwith cubicles that reach shoulder high, andeach cubicle bears a plaque with the name ofa previous winner. We are told by men withshaking heads that this time, for the firsttime ever, the water will be hot. They tell usthis despising our modern-day softness.

On the road there are breaks from early on.Nothing serious. Nobody panicking. Onegroup goes but by the time they get to thepavé at Vertain they are among us again.Still, even the first pavé sectors do some seri-ous damage to our numbers. It isn’t hellthough. You can figure it out. Today, at least,the race doesn’t live down to its name.

I get one puncture early on but recoverquickly. I try and try for about 100 kilo-metres to follow team orders: ‘Get into abreak.’ Two or three of us have been told to

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do this for the first half of the race. There areno really serious breaks, though, until threeguys get away from us a short while beforewe reach Troisvilles. They go but I am not apart of it. I miss the break. Now it’s a differ-ent game. I’ve already spent a lot of energytrying to get into the breakaways and I’vemissed the serious one. I’ve just got to sur-vive as long as I can.

For nearly 100 kilometres there are nocobbles at all, then just a few patches, atQuiévy, at Quérénaing and more at Haveluy.From Arenberg to Roubaix, however, it’slumps and bumps as often as not. Most ofthe 50 kilometres or so of pavé lie betweenhere and Roubaix.

It takes the race over 160 kilometres toreach Trouée d’Arenberg. Paris–Roubaixdidn’t always come along this route, butwhen they discovered a long-forgottenstretch of pavé in the forest here, they de-cided this was too good to miss. This is

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where the cobbles cease to be a novelty. Thedifficult patches of cobbles on Paris–Roubaixare rated like hotels and three stretches areof five-star difficulty. This is the first of thosethree and the most eerie. The pavé is threemetres wide, fringed by grass, and then thereis a sheer wall of birches and cypresses,towering so high that it feels like twilight inearly afternoon.

The stones here have been in the groundsince Napoleonic times. There were minesunder this forest too, but they have gonenow. Arenberg, according to the wisdom ofthe elders, is not where you win Par-is–Roubaix but certainly where you can loseit.

Not for me though. By the time we getthere I have already lost the race.

On the way to Arenberg, the three ridersout front are still hanging tough like desper-ados, ahead of the posse of about sixtychasers. From Haveluy, the last cobbles

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before Arenberg, the pace increases. Twokilometres before Arenberg, there are inevit-able casualties. A big crash. Bikes and bodiesare scattered everywhere. And this is wheremy race effectively finishes.

I am not far behind our team leader,Baden Cooke, a tough Aussie with a talentfor sprinting. Baden gets a puncture. I amnearest, so I sacrifice my back wheel to himand wait for the support car as he speeds off.A small thing.

I feel okay, I’ve done something pretty use-ful today. I was right there when the leadman punctured so I gave him my wheel. Atthis stage there were only two or three of usleft on the road anyway. Robbie Hunter hadpacked it in on the first cobbled section andgot into the car. He wasn’t feeling up to ittoday and he said he wasn’t going to sufferfor nothing. Inwardly, I smiled. Suffering fornothing – so many times I’ve thought that’sexactly what I do.

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By the time the car comes, Baden hasjoined up with a group of about thirty riderswho will come out of Arenberg in pursuit ofthe three leaders. My hands are batteredfrom gripping the handlebars but I decidethat I might as well go after the group.

As luck would have it, Daryl Impey ridespast just as I am getting going again. Darylgot dropped on the last pavé section. I am in-tent on getting back to the race though. Mywar isn’t over.

Daryl is surprised. ‘The race is gone,Froomey. Don’t worry about it. There’ll beother days, mate.’

‘No. I want to catch them.’So off I hare after the group, leaving Daryl

behind shaking his head at me. Not for thefirst time.

The race comes on to another stretch ofcobbles and having waited for our team car Inow find myself behind a line of supportcars. The group is on the far side of the cars.

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I think to myself that maybe I can use thecars to move up again and I start making myway through the convoy. All of a suddenthere is a screeching of brakes and a carshudders to a halt just in front of me.

I am not even holding my handlebars bythis point. I am perching on the saddle andresting my arms on top of the bars, trying toguide them as opposed to holding them withmy hands, which are extremely tender andsensitive. There is no feeling left in myhands. Pain from gripping the bars throughall the vibrations has surrendered to numb-ness from the cold. With my hands largelyredundant, I don’t even attempt to brake. Iride at speed straight into the back of one ofthe commissaire cars.

Another day; another commissaire.‘Hello again!’I tumble over the side of the boot, sliding

off the car and rolling on to the grass. I lookout on to the cobbles and see that I have

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damaged the front wheel of the bike prettybadly. I have to wait for the team car oncemore and change the front wheel. By thetime that is done I will be too far back.

Of course, before the team car arrivesDaryl Impey comes upon the scene again. Hefinds the young sapper whom he last sawspeeding back to the action now lying on thegrass with a madly bent front wheel in hishand. He explodes with laughter and shakeshis head again. I realize – again – that I’vestill got a lot to learn.

The car comes but Daryl and I must rideon for another 20 kilometres. There is nochoice; the car is full. Of 198 starters only 115riders will finish the race and all the cars arefull.

We ride through the Arenberg Forest and Iremember thinking that even a Belgiancouldn’t love the cobbles in this tree tunnel.They are large and really uneven – almostdesigned to do you damage. The Friends of

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Paris–Roubaix love and preserve this stretchfor that very reason. It is treacherous. Thetop riders hate and avoid this place for thesame reason. No summer contender wants tocatch a gangrenous leg on Napoleoniccobbles in April.

Daryl and I push on through anothercouple of pavé sections. The feeling of beingtwo soldiers making our way home after thewar is hard to avoid – this landscape is soevocative, so unchanged. Eventually we getto the second feed zone where our soigneurs,surely with space in the car, are waiting.

Our soigneur that weekend was a tempwhom the team had hired for the day. Hehad brought his friends along in his car.What sort of a soigneur would fill his carwith friends on a workday among the pavésof northern France? A Belgian sort.

Our Belgian soigneur looks at me andDaryl, tattered and mud-splashed veterans of

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Paris–Roubaix by now. He shrugs hisshoulders, gets back into the car and leaves.

We sit there asking each other the samequestion: ‘Well, what now, genius?’

A couple of graduates from two of theposher schools in Johannesburg, sitting bythe side of the road in France. We respectthis race but by now we don’t really want toride another 60 kilometres of it. There arestill a lot more cobbles and the stuff under-neath my gloves, the taping which made mefeel like a boxer this morning, has waddedand grown dirty and chafed my hands raw.By the end, when it was just the two of uschugging along, even though I had been try-ing to steer the bike with my elbows on thecobbles, the jostling which the bike was tak-ing was causing my forearms to get allbruised too. Paris– Roubaix, I’ve hadenough, thanks.

Finally the sweep vehicle comes into sight,the broom wagon, with a trailer on the back

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to throw the bikes into. We throw ourselvesinto a couple of seats on the bus amidst thebrotherhood of the wasted. Two mzungus, along way from home.

Strangely, I didn’t dislike the day. I wassorry it ended. I liked the way that it was afight for position before the pavé. On thecobbles themselves there was pain but it wasalmost like a time trial. You got in your lineand you just rode it.

And the pain and suffering? A pleasure.I remember sending Robbie Nilsen an ex-

cited email afterwards saying that Par-is–Roubaix was just like the intervals weused to do at home. An interval every timeyou hit the pavé, a 20-minute threshold ef-fort over the cobbles.

It was a taste of European cycling likenothing else.

Oh, and Paris–Roubaix 2008 was won byTom Boonen. A Belgian. What did youexpect!

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April 2008. Another week in the life.20 April: Amstel Gold Classic. Finish

139th.23 April: La Flèche Wallonne. Finish

115th.27 April: Liège–Bastogne–Liège, La Doy-

enne (‘The Oldest’).Today. Finish 84th. Shattered.

I’m 160 kilometres into the Liège, wonderingwhat all the fuss is about.

Then we ride down a hill and turn right.Suddenly there is a race on. I’m not in it.

Three times this week, in the Amstel, inthe Flèche and now in Liège, my objectivehas been to get in the first key breakaway. Inall three of them that just seems impossible.I ride the narrow roads. I get battered by thecrosswinds. I get to the front when nobodycares about who is at the front.

I know next to nothing about these racesor how they unravel. I hardly know who iswho. As an amateur, I dipped into the Tour

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de France on television. Otherwise I havelived in my own little world of training andnutrition. Paris–Roubaix was a revelation.This is a week of three revelations.

When the race starts, through those earlymiles, I cover the waterfront and go with allthose little moves. In the phoney war I am aphoney hero. I cling like a limpet to breaksthat go nowhere.

A rule of thumb: you wouldn’t want to be apart of any break that I am a part of.

When a real break opens up, I can’t getback to the front.

Again and again I have been spat all theway to the back of the bunch. I try to moveup but riders seem to close in around mewordlessly and I just get spat out again.

The roads are skinny and crowded. I find itreally difficult to be anywhere at the front ofthe bunch when I have to be. This war forposition, it’s something you don’t really seewhen you are watching a race on TV. It’s like

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being in a washing machine. You go up themiddle. Guys come up on either side. You getthrown backwards until you are so far be-hind that you try to go up the outsideyourself.

That works and you get to the front. Thenthey come round you and spit you out theback again.

No respect. Not yet.This afternoon after 160 kilometres I never

see the front of the race again.Afterwards, I ask Robbie Hunter about

this: ‘How do I stay in the race until the racestarts?’

He looks at me like a disappointed father.‘There’s no secret. You have to fight.’ He saysit in quite an aggressive way. ‘You’re not infucking Kansas now, Dorothy. You have gotto fight.’

‘Fine.’For the next few weeks I am always look-

ing for Robbie Hunter. Tracking him and

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following him. Sticking to him. Shovingpeople off his wheel if I have to. No backingoff. Earning position. Seizing respect.

Try to move me off that wheel if you want.I’ll be asking you, what’s your fucking prob-lem? I’ll be taking elbows, giving elbows,come what may. It’s not me, but it has to beme. I’ll be there. You’ll be testing me. I’ll betesting you.

Learning the rules of Fight Club.

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12

Nobody was happier than I was to see theback end of April.

My secret plan to winch myself into theTour de France field had taken a few seriousknocks as we chased around northernEurope.

That was okay. It had been a long shot inthe first place but I had needed the idea inmy head on those seven-hour training rideswith no company except the techno comingthrough the iPod. Dreams are what keep usall fuelled. I had always dreamed of a blind-ing sunburst of breakthrough but instead Iwas looking at a watery dawn.

In Barloworld I knew my place. The Aprilcalendar didn’t suit me but there was nopoint in crying about it. We were a small

team and I was the rookie. This was what Ihad signed up for. So I kept quiet, learnedwhat I could and did what I was told. And Iknew that the month of May would be better.

I was still learning Italian. Claudio Cortihad only a little more English than I hadItalian, so we didn’t interact too much.

His thoughts and wishes were transmittedto me through Robbie Hunter or his PA,Francesca. Living down in Chiari alone(Andrea wouldn’t arrive until late summer)kept me out of harm’s way. When the teamneeded me for a race, Romano would drivedown to collect me.

Otherwise I worked alone and I workedhard.

Life in Chiari was enjoyable to the extentthat there was actually a life in Chiari. Sinceleaving school the idea of home had taken onmany different guises: Johannesburg, Aigle,Tielt, Chiari. I’d laid my head down in each

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of those places but home was probably stillMum’s place back in Nairobi.

One day I thought about it and realized Ihadn’t been home since the Christmas of2005. Andrea had come to stay with us for awhile and we had gone up to the Mara like inthe old days. And then I went back to the fastside of life.

I kept in touch with Africa as much as Icould, sending reports, questions and storiesback to Robbie and to Kinjah. The path toChiari and to Europe had been laid down bythose two key influences. Now that I washere I was surprised by how much they hadtaught me – and also by how much there wasstill to learn.

Those rides with Kinjah and the SafariSimbaz had mined out a huge well of enthu-siasm and passion in me. The sense of funand the pure thrill of riding is something thatcan get lost when you start doing it for

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money. Kinjah’s joy stayed with me thoughand still does.

Robbie’s ground-breaking theories ontraining were the foundation for what wasbeing built. His ideas were still serving meand I was conscious that I was doing thingsdifferently to the other professionals aroundme. So many times now I follow Tim Kerris-on’s training programme at Team Sky andthink, ‘This is what Robbie had me doingyears ago.’

What had to be learned though was the de-termination to keep pushing hard even whenthe thrill was gone. I had to develop thehardness of a drill bit to drive through thefield when necessary. And my bike-handlingtechnique needed constant work and tam-pering. Robbie and I talked about thesethings through emails and the occasionalcall.

Although I hadn’t been home in so long, Iknew Mum was still willing me up every hill

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and through every field. She was pleased tosee me doing something I loved andsomething I seemed to be good at. For a longtime she had taken Kinjah’s word that I hadsome talent. And whenever I talked aboutcycling, she recognized my passion and said,no matter what, I was to follow it. Thankyou, Mum.

In her own way she had given me as muchof a foundation to build on as Kinjah andRobbie had.

With Mum I don’t remember ever beingtold, ‘You can’t do that,’ or ‘These are therules.’ She didn’t believe that rules existedmerely to be followed. ‘Do it if you want to,’she’d say, ‘and you can find out for yourselfwhat it’s like, what the cost is.’

I really loved that philosophy. I still do.She made me think about how stupid itwould be to do certain things, about how ac-tions would hurt other people or hurt myselfor betray the things I believed in. It was a

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sensible philosophy. Obeying rules just be-cause they are rules isn’t the same as havingyour own moral compass. Mum knew thatcharacter is what you do when nobody iswatching.

Mum instilled a sense of responsibility andgood morals in me that I live by to this day,and I know that diverting from these wouldbe a betrayal of her. Cheating would not bean option for me.

I never felt rebellious. I never felt thatbreaking rules just for the sake of it would bea rite of passage or something to emphasizemy individuality.

I remember one incident in particular thatreflects Mum’s philosophy. She happenedupon one of my older brothers attempting tosmoke a cigarette. He was trying to hide itbut she said to him, ‘Hey, come on then, let’shave a smoke.’ And she pulled one out of herown pack and made him smoke it in front ofher. He just coughed all the way through it

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until he got nauseous. He never wanted tosmoke again.

And we never wanted Mum to smokeagain either. That was another story.

From Europe I would speak to her over thephone. I’d try to call her every other weekendif I could, though more often than not wecommunicated through emails.

It was only the previous year, when I rodethe Giro del Capo and then the Regioni forKonica Minolta, that she seemed to appreci-ate for the first time that I could actually be aprofessional.

It was funny. She would support me inthat indiscriminate way that mums have. Icouldn’t detect any difference in tonebetween the ‘Wow, well done!’ she wouldsend to me if I’d done something in a racethat meant nothing in South Africa or the‘Wow, well done!’ she would send if I hadplaced well in a serious race. She gave the

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same support, no matter what. And I thinkshe did know the difference.

After I left Kenya and then left Africa, shestayed in touch with Kinjah, and continuedto be an integral part of the whole effort withthe Safari Simbaz.

My cousin, Sarah Penfold, had moved backto Kenya. Sarah was a photographer, and onweekends she and Mum would drive behindthe Simbaz wherever they were racing. Sarahwould take photos and help Mum with thefood and the water for the riders.

Mum became an avid supporter of cyclingand continued to be a great friend to Kinjahand the boys. She would still arrive with bas-kets of food for them, and as her appreci-ation of things grew, she became very, veryangry about the Federation and how it wasn’tsupporting these riders.

She grew extremely passionate about thewhole thing. Not only because of what Kinjahhad done for me, but because she saw

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something in the purity of cycling that ap-pealed to her. She loved adventure and beingout in the world, and cycling was opening upthose things to so many kids.

She knew what was important and whatmattered in the cycling world and that wasn’tbig races or big money. It was the sense ofwho you were that you carried with you. Thepossibilities. I think when she said ‘welldone’ it referred to more than just finishingplaces or winnings.

Even though I wasn’t home often, hergrowing passion for cycling and her constantencouragement diminished the distance.

April had been significant for another reasonapart from the frustration of the classics. Ibecame a British rider just before riding LaFlèche Wallone. The trail which had startedwith Doug Dailey back in Melbourne andcontinued through contact with Rod Elling-worth had led to this. I swapped my Kenyanlicence for a British one.

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My feelings are complex and maybe im-possible for somebody from a less complic-ated background to understand. I knowpeople who feel they are from Yorkshire andBritain; from Merseyside and Britain; fromthe Isle of Man and Britain; and so on. Well,we were raised in Kenya feeling that we wereof Britain. My brothers were sent to Englandwhen they were old enough. We lived in Kar-en, which was a little piece of England. Weate Sunday roasts with Yorkshire puddings.We had pythons not ferrets, scorpions notcorgis, but there was a duality in us. We werefrom a tribe of interlopers, a line which hadcome to Kenya, whereas true Kenyans hadsprung from the soil. Our relationship toKenyan earth was different. Our people hadcome to make a living from that earth. TheMasai and the other tribes had a more spir-itual tie to the land. We were on it. Theywere of it.

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Still, we loved Kenya. Always will. But giv-en the failings of the Kenyan Cycling Federa-tion – not just failings but vindictiveness – itnever felt like a betrayal to explore the otherpart of the Froome family identity. I wasn’t aproduct of Kenyan cycling. I was a product ofKinjah cycling. And Jane Froome cycling.And Robbie Nilsen cycling. Mr Mwangi andhis blazers did nothing for any of thesepeople and were in a constant state of warwith Kinjah. There are people runningKenyan cycling who carry grudges until theirshoulders bleed.

Naturally, the process was made more dif-ficult than it needed to be. The first step wasthe surrender of my Kenyan passport. TheKenyan authorities wouldn’t accept it as theydidn’t have the documentation for such aprocedure. A receipt, in other words. So Icreated a document. I drew up an affidavit ata lawyer’s office and went to the Kenyan em-bassy in Pretoria, gave them my passport

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and asked them to sign the affidavit confirm-ing the transaction.

Done.After that it should have been blue skies. If

both countries are agreeable to a transfer inthese circumstances the process is usuallyquick and smooth. So long as Kenya didn’tobject I could be travelling, pending selec-tion, to Beijing for the 2008 Olympics.Kenya objected.

The process passed from my hands andpeople at higher pay grades began negotiat-ing with each other. I got on with riding.

The Vuelta a Asturias began in the city ofOviedo on 3 May. For me this was an oppor-tunity to demonstrate to Barloworld that Iwas a better rider than I appeared to bewhile slogging around the Ardennes.

Stages. Mountains. Time trials. I washungry.

Things started well. Day two containedtwo stages: a regular road ride out of Gijón in

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the morning, and a time trial of 17 kilometresin the afternoon. Samuel Sánchez Gonzálezwon the time trial and went on to win thegold medal in the road race in the BeijingOlympics later that year. I finished 5th in thetime trial, 26 seconds off the top.

Then two days later on stage four fromPravia to the mountaintop finish at Santuar-io del Acebo, a stage I would have ring-fenced as full of possibility, I blew up. I was26 minutes off the top this time. It was sick-eningly disappointing.

The team divided into two after that, somegoing to the Giro in Italy, the others to theTour de Picardie.

I went to Italy. Not to the Giro but back toChiari to train.

Corti, the old pragmatist, had told every-body in the team that they were on the longlist for the Tour de France. I still trainedhard and said the right things if asked, butmy hopes were slender.

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It was around this time that my brotherJeremy got in touch. He had been working inDublin for a while but had decided to pack itin and move back to Kenya. The first thinghe had to deal with back at home was badnews. Mum had cancer. The doctors said itwas cancer of the bone marrow.

Mum had always smoked and we had al-ways hated it. My brothers, Jeremy andJono, and myself grew up giving her a hardtime about it. She smoked about twenty aday, cutting down to ten a day if peoplebadgered her enough about it, but always go-ing back to her pack-a-day habit.

To be honest, we were horrible to herabout it. We’d hide her cigarettes when wewere away somewhere, and we knew that shecouldn’t get to a shop. Or we’d put little fire-crackers into her cigarettes. We’d tip outsome of the tobacco from the end so she’d sitthere and light these things and they wouldexplode cartoonishly right in her face. Mum

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would be left with the filter dangling fromher mouth. Sometimes we’d break the littlefirecracker open and pour the gun powder inthere, so that when she lit the cigarette thewhole thing would start fizzing up. It wasmean, but she understood what we were try-ing to say. We desperately wanted her to quitand perhaps there was too much of the stiffupper lip in us for us to express that in anyother way.

She tried. For our sake. She never smokedin the house and never smoked in the car.She’d always get away from us to smoke. Werespected that, and we knew that she genu-inely did have a hard time stopping. Shetried all the patches, all the chewing gumsand whatever remedies were going.

News like that swings into your day like awell-aimed sledgehammer. Things had beenlooking up for Mum. She had a couple of re-lationships after Noz left. She was involvedwith Kinjah, the boys and the weekend races.

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Her job was going well, and with all her sonsin Europe, she had been doing some work onan American army base in Iraq.

If we worried about Mum it was becauseshe was in Iraq, even though the base was ina safe area. The job gave her a shot at sometax-free earning for a few months. She couldcome back from a three- or four-month stintdoing massage or physio with soldiers andhave a large cheque to cash.

Despite our concerns, she was determinedthat she would not become a burden on hersons. She was reaching retirement age and,having been a homemaker for most of herlife, she had minimal savings.

My goal was to be able to buy Mum ahouse near Nairobi, where she could live andset up a physio practice. Since leaving WindyRidge, she had never stayed anywhere formore than a year or two, and I wanted some-where for her to settle down. It was one ofthe driving forces in the back of my mind, if

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ever I needed the motivation to push thatmuch harder. I was determined to be suc-cessful enough to make this happen.

She came back early from this latest tourto Iraq because she was feeling ill. She wentinto hospital in Nairobi for tests and thenews was bad.

Jeremy told me they were looking at doinga bone marrow transplant but in the interimshe had developed quite a bad lung infectionwhich turned into pneumonia. She wascoughing really badly. All that would have tobe dealt with first.

There is an agony of indecision at timeslike that. Should you go home and maybecomplicate the process of her gettingstronger, by your presence? Mum wouldworry that we were worried. Seeing us gatherin Nairobi would alarm her. Yet, if she wasreally bad, I wanted to go back.

In the end, we decided that there waslikely to be a long road ahead with the

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transplants and her recovery, and thatJeremy would need relief or help at somestage. In early June I went with the team tothe Euskal Bizikleta, a stage race in theBasque country. That year, 2008, was thelast year that the Euskal was staged.

It was a short affair. Three days and threestages. I rode the first two days in mediocreform, finishing 51st on stage one and 80ththe next day. That evening I remember hav-ing a long talk with Jeremy. Mum was still inhospital. She was struggling with the infec-tion, but the doctors had her on antibioticsand were keeping a close eye on her. Whenthe infection was cleared out, they stillwanted to look at the possibility of doing thetransplant.

Mum was quite ill but she was fine fornow.

The next morning, about 11.30 or so, notlong before the start of the stage, we were allkitted up and had put the radios on. We were

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ready to go to sign on when Robbie Huntercame to speak to me.

‘Listen, if you need to go home just say.Don’t mess around. You don’t have to behere.’

I was moved by Robbie’s words. I ex-plained that Mum seemed to be all right – ina battle, but doing okay. If things got worseJeremy would tell me.

Half an hour later my phone rang. Jeremy.‘Bro, I’m really, really sorry. There’s noth-

ing we can do. She’s gone.’Mum was fifty-eight. She had suffered a

cardiac arrest related to the chest infection.They brought her round once, but she arres-ted again not long after.

And that was it.I couldn’t breathe. My lungs closed up.I remember standing outside the team

bus, so angry and so distraught. I hit the sideof the bus with my fist. I sat down on the

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ground behind the bus, talking to mybrother.

When we finished talking, I got on the bus.The team looked up at me with a single set ofeyes as I walked on. My tears told themeverything. They were around me and thenthey were gone.

Robbie said to me, ‘Just sit down, takeyour numbers off, take your kit off. You’regoing home.’

It was a really long bus journey back to thehotel. I sobbed all the way. Gianni, the busdriver, kept on looking at me in the rear-viewmirror and shaking his head in sympathy.

The only flight to be had was the nextmorning. I don’t remember the details of get-ting home. I was taken to an airport andafter a number of transfers ended up inNairobi. I can’t recall where I flew. I just re-member getting back to Kenya and beingwith my brothers. Jono had flown straightfrom London. I was the last of us to arrive.

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There are hard moments and soft mo-ments in my memory from those weeks athome.

We shared our memories and told storiesabout the trips we had taken together. I hadmy own recollections of the times when justMum and I lived together, and how she lovedall the possibilities in life and nature. Shetook such pleasure in sharing those things.The three of us grew up with our maker’smark on us. Mum had always been colour-blind when it came to race, completely so,and we all took that from her. And we all,even my two accountant brothers, took someof her openness to life.

So many stories. Sarah recalled a shoutingincident between Mum and Julius Mwangi ata race. Kinjah and the boys and Mum andSarah had turned up for a race and Mwangihad barred them, as they had no licences.Kinjah pointed out that Mwangi had refusedto issue the licences. Mum flipped and told

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Mwangi he had no right to behave the way hedid. He was taken aback. He shouted back ather, ‘What’s your problem?’ and told her sheshouldn’t get involved with the politics, itwas nothing to do with her, she should get inher car and go back home. At which pointSarah, who is quite petite, whacked Mwangiwith a camera bag or something.

That tickled me a bit. Still does.Me, my brothers, Sarah and a few others

from Mum’s life – that was the farewellgroup.

Seeing her body before the cremation wasa tough blow.

Together, we went into the room wherethey had prepared her body and dressed her.We all said a few words.

Jono had been really fantastic. As the old-est brother, he’d taken charge of the familyand had sorted out most of the logistics andarrangements, along with all the legal stuffthat needed to happen for us to take over the

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estate, which was basically an envelope withthe cash that Mum had earned on her lasttrip to Iraq. There were some shares, too.Not much; she wasn’t a material girl. Whenshe had money she gave it away or lent it topeople knowing it would probably nevercome back. Much of the work she did, shedid for free. She could never turn anybodyaway.

After a couple of days we took Mum to alocal crematorium. I found it hard butsomething about it would have pleasedMum. It was basically a tin roof with opensides, like a warehouse with no walls, and abig fireplace in the middle.

We brought my mum’s coffin through, un-loaded it and put it on top of the open fire-place. We all took a burning branch and litthe fire, watching the flames slowly gathermomentum. It was hard to stomach, in thatthe coffin disintegrated quite quickly andthen the body was just there burning. I don’t

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know how long it was that way. I stoppedlooking.

I hadn’t prepared mentally for this. Ihadn’t expected the really pungent smell ofburning flesh, I guess. At least a week hadpassed since Mum’s death. My memories ofthat day at the crematorium are about howharsh and brutal it was compared to the san-itized version of death that other parts of theworld have become used to.

I had imagined flowers, soothing musicand togetherness. This was raw. I cried myeyes out.

Afterwards we all sat together. Around thiswarehouse there was grass and a wall. It wasSunday and there must have been a Sundayschool in session somewhere nearby. As wesat, the African hymns just came to us in theair. It was a beautiful coincidence that Mumwould have loved, our grief mingling withthis lovely high-pitched singing.

Very emotional. Very African.

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When it was time to go we gathered someof Mum’s ashes. One thing we maybe didn’tneed to know was that they had to keep stok-ing the fire to make sure that the biggerbones would burn. They need a higher heat.Again this was raw, but in Africa that’s howdeath is. There are no sugar coatings.

A few days later, we held a memorial ser-vice at the St Francis Church in Karen. Thechurch was overflowing with people whoselives had been touched by Mum, many ofwhom I’d never met. It was moving andemotional, and the memories still bring meto tears.

I stayed in Kenya for perhaps another twoweeks. There was no bike, no training. It wasgood to be with my brothers and to gothrough the process of our grief together, be-fore separating again.

I remember thinking at one stage, ‘Wow, Ihaven’t even touched a bike now for prob-ably a week or two.’ I was still pretty

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emotional and not in a very good place, butthat amount of time away from the bikewould have been a record.

Then one day Claudio Corti called me fromItaly.

‘Froome, how are you doing?’‘Okay, Claudio. I haven’t really been train-

ing or anything, but I’m with the family andwe’ve had a good time together. Thank you.’

‘Froome, do you want to go to the Tour?’I just went quiet. I didn’t know what to

say. I didn’t give him an answer other thansilence.

‘Froome, you do the Tour. Okay? Bye.’I put the phone down, went back to my

brothers and told them that the team wantedme to do the Tour de France. More silenceand shock.

The talk, when it started, came down towhat Mum would have wanted. What shewould have said. My brothers knew. I didtoo, but I wanted them to tell me.

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‘Why stop living your life?’ she would’veasked. ‘Don’t mourn. Don’t be miserable.’

Jono had said this to us a couple of daysbefore the crematorium. We were all in tearsand Jono had said, ‘Listen, she’ll be lookingat us and telling us not to be ridiculous.She’ll be saying, “Get over yourselves. Don’tsit there crying for me. That’s not living. Liv-ing is making the most of life. Celebrating it.No wasted moments.” ’

Jono and Jeremy said those things to meagain and I knew they were right.

As it happened, it hardly mattered. Whilewe were mulling these things over, a pressrelease went out in Europe. I was named inthe team for the Tour starting two weekslater in Brest.

Three years later, Jono, Jeremy and I wentdown to the coast, to Diani, south of Mom-basa, where Mum used to come and had sooften brought us. We went out on a boat tojust beyond the reef. There, we scattered her

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ashes. It was beautiful and graceful and webrought many flowers too.

We had thought we might scatter herashes on the Rift Valley, but when wethought of Diani and the ocean, it justseemed more appropriate for Mum.

Life is strange and often funny.Sometime later Jono found a note on

Mum’s computer. It was her will. She left usher possessions, such as they were, andasked us to scatter her ashes in the ocean atDiani.

The four of us, my brothers, myself andMum, shared a last smile with each other.

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13

2008: The Tour de France

Three days of the Tour de France. Pleasemake it stop.

Merciless. Helter-skelter. A war zone. Along daily grapple for survival.

Three days in and I was 168th in a field of178. At least one of those guys behind mewas an injured teammate.

This bipolar peloton was in a differentmood than I had ever seen it in my limitedexperience, rolling with a shocking, wickedmomentum once it got past the daily pleas-antries of the neutral zone.

I was out at sea and completely out of mydepth. Whatever happened to those leisurelypicture-postcard rides through fields of

sunflowers? This was faster than any race I’ddone before.

Could I just have the old dream back,please?

Three days and already my ambitions hadbeen whittled down to merely gettingthrough it. Hang in there and get to Paris. Iwanted to finish the Tour and to have thatexperience. Any other fanciful notions hadbeen purged. Despite my shiny new Britishracing licence I was still being written up asthe first Kenyan to ride the Tour de France –okay. If I could be the first Kenyan to finishit, that would be enough – better thanenough.

They say that all good things take time andthat all the crap gets delivered by same-dayexpress. They’re right. It started badly. Dayone was Brest to Plumelec. We had only 10kilometres or so to go when our team leader,Mauricio Soler, crashed. He had broken hisleft wrist on the Giro earlier in the year and

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he damaged it again now before any of ushad crossed a finish line. It was the rightwrist, too. He also ripped a hole in his shortsand in the flesh on his leg, high on his leftthigh.

Soler was our leader and the hero in themountains a year previously. He had earnedour loyalty. There was nothing for it but forFélix Cárdenas, Giampaolo Cheula and my-self to wait for Mauricio and to attempt tonurse him back to the group. Mauricio wasshaky. He almost took himself out on a barri-er a couple of kilometres further down theroad but we survived.

Giampaolo and I finished stage one 4minutes and 4 seconds adrift.

‘Happy’ days.

I wanted to finish for myself. For Mum. Forthe past and for the future. But already I feltlost. The race was being decided somewhereup ahead of me every day. Most riders get arecce of the key stages in the weeks and

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months before the Tour. I just had a map. Irode blind into the valley of death and rodeblind up the climb that led out of it.

In June I had travelled to Africa to grieve.I took at least two weeks’ sabbatical from thebike, and when I got the news from Corti, Iwent out for two long runs and found out thehard way that runners use different musclegroups to cyclists. I ached in places I had for-gotten existed.

When I flew back to Italy I went straightout on the bike for six hours. I rode six hoursevery day for six days in a row. No recoverydays. Then I joined the team up in Brittanyfor the hullaballoo of Le Grand Départ,which was as underwhelming as the weatherwas overcast. For the last couple of days inBrittany we were restricted to two-hourtraining sessions. My body needed more.

The peloton hit the road carrying forty-three of us who had never ridden the Tour

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before. I wondered how the other forty-twohad spent the previous month.

Stage two. More of the same. Not wavingbut drowning. Soler was wounded and therewas nothing we could do for him after awhile except leave him to his agony. Both ofhis wrists were bandaged up now. He camein last on the day, over 7 forlorn minutes be-hind everybody else. I lost another 2 minutesor so. Again, the race and the main group allfinished ahead of me, and I only crossed theline when the drama was over.

Next day, on the third stage, we lit outfrom the walled town of Saint-Malo on theroad to Nantes. The rain came at us with fre-quent ambushes. We would think we hadseen the last of it each time the skies teasedus with a show of blue. Then the delugewould resume. We rode through a forest. Thewater seemed to have gathered in the leavesabove to fall on us in engorged droplets. Andthe winds never settled on their plan. Most of

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the time they hit us sideways. Crosswindsleave you with few defences and nothingsplits a field quicker. I found myself yo-yoingfrom the back of the peloton into the convoyof support cars and back out. The vehiclesoffered some protection from the wind butamidst the cars was not where you wanted tobe.

It was not a bad day for the team though.Up at the front, Paolo Longo Borghini waspart of a small break which built a good leadand kept it. He finished 4th. Robbie Hunterwas 12th. I was almost 5 minutes behind butpeople told me that my race would start thefollowing day with the individual time trial.

I wanted to believe them. I wanted a smalltaste of whatever Paolo and Robbie werehaving.

We were a platoon of nine carrying the hopesof Team Barloworld through this twenty-onestage counterclockwise yomp around France.Me, a mongrel with a Kenyan flag on my

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dossard and a British passport in my bag.Two Colombians, Félix Cárdenas and ourleader Soler, both skinny like saplings, as ifbred for climbing. Baden Cooke, the sprint-ing Aussie. Two South Africans, RobbieHunter and John-Lee Augustyn. Two Itali-ans, Paolo Longo Borghini and GiampaoloCheula. And one Spaniard, Moisés Dueñas.

We were not a close bunch. That’s how it isin pro teams. Language, experience, senior-ity and different schedules mean we gener-ally have just a superficial relationship witheach other. I was friendly with the two SouthAfricans, of course, but with, say, MoisésDueñas or the Colombians I had little morethan a nodding relationship unless weneeded to communicate during a stage.

I roomed with Giampaolo Cheula, one ofthe Italian riders. He was a tough fellow:squat with blond hair and a blond mous-tache. He finished the Tour the previous yearand had been with Barloworld since 2005.

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That gave him some seniority and he didn’tmind letting me know about it. But it wasn’tjust me. I think John-Lee Augustyn andDaryl Impey also felt that Giampaolo liked togive us a bit of a hard time. Probably becausewe were all neo-pros or because our back-grounds and our accents didn’t fit the pictureof the typical European professional.

Earlier in the season, back in the Vuelta aAsturias, I was fussing with the mechanicslate one evening getting the bike right for anindividual time trial the following day. Giam-paolo, who had a ‘neo-pros should be seenand not heard’ attitude, couldn’t help butgive a thin smile and ask me, ‘Well, Chreees,what thing will you do tomorrow on this spe-cial bike of yours?’

As it happened, the time trial went verywell. I came 5th. I didn’t say anything but thenext day I thought to myself, ‘There you go,Giampaolo. See?’

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He wasn’t a bad guy. He was once given allthe tough flunky jobs and I’m sure he justfelt a responsibility to preserve the peckingorder that he came up through. It was fairenough.

Ah. Stage four. They told me that my racewould begin here on a cheekily short timetrial at Cholet. The stage was a shade under30 kilometres – a bit too abbreviated for anyreal suffering, or so I thought.

Soler came down to breakfast with the res-ults of an X-ray, which revealed a brokenbone in his right hand. His left hand was stillso sore that he was finding it hard to applythe front brakes. The poor man was getting aworse reputation for crashing than I had, buthe said he would do the time trial anyway.

It was a race of three parts: headwindsstarting out, crosswinds in the middle and atailwind pushing you the last 10 kilometreshome.

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Soler finished close to the bottom of thepile, fresh evidence that the Tour was break-ing him day by day.

For me, it turned out that the wisdom ofthe crowd was correct. The first good day ar-rived. There were no worldwide headlinesbut some encouragement dripping slow. Ifinished 33rd, which was the best of TeamBarloworld, and 6th in the young riders’ cat-egory behind guys like Vincenzo Nibali andAndy Schleck. I felt like I was just coming in-to my strength when the finishing lineloomed.

Giampaolo, my room-mate, came in 118th.It wasn’t my place to offer consolation or ad-vice to an elder though.

The next morning brought the longeststage of the Tour, a 232-kilometre ride toChâteauroux. It was long and flat and Mauri-cio Soler’s heartbreak came to an end. Hecrashed in the neutral zone and gave up theghost. We rolled on, knowing that the day

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was a play with the drama all packed into thefinal act. It was a stage loaded for the sprint-ers, and Mark Cavendish won the battle.

I was far behind, hanging in there andthinking of the mountains.

We had a couple of transition stages to go,and then another long flat stage on theSaturday before we would get to stage nine,and go up where the air was rare.

Until then I would be watching from a seatnear the back.

When we hit the mountains I felt at home.Not at home like a guy banking on a stagewin, or even at home like a rider rolling allday with the front group. I just had a littlesurge of confidence. Any ambitions for GCwere gone in the first couple of days, but thatwas okay. I’d made it this far in what wouldprove to be an accident-prone team – acci-dent prone or disaster prone, take your pick.Now I could test myself.

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I’m neither superstitious nor religious, butfor me, of all people, to escape the variouscalamities raining down on Team Barloworldfor those three weeks of the Tour meant thatmaybe somebody was looking down on me,giving me a steer when she wasn’t enjoyingthe flora and fauna of France. Getting to themountains was the first suggestion of that.

Stage nine ran from Toulouse to Bagnères-de-Bigorre, taking us into the high Pyrenees.Riding out of Toulouse, there was a static ofexcitement buzzing through parts of thepeloton. Everyone has their talents and whenthe Tour route is announced each rider cansee the days where he might thrive morethan others, and the days where he might toilharder than most.

This was a day that we mountain goats hadbeen looking forward to. Four category-fourclimbs as appetizers. Then a category threeand finally two category-one mountains, Colde Peyresourde followed by Col d’Aspin and

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a roll down the other side of the mountain tothe finish.

I wasn’t in the front group all day longastounding the race commentators butneither was I back in the society of the grup-petto, in the blurry ranks of the indistinctand undistinguished.

I did have a brief shining moment as thestage leader on the road though.

At the bottom of the Col d’Aspin the groupI was in must have been about forty or fiftystrong. We were maybe 5 kilometres up theclimb and I remember being towards theback of the group feeling relatively comfort-able. ‘I’m in the group,’ I thought. ‘We are onthe climb. I won’t be picked off here.’

I looked across and saw David Millar, theScottish rider, a couple of yards away. Myknowledge of the pros was limited but DavidMillar, though never a climber, was still a bigdeal to me. He was in difficulty. He was on

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the tip of his saddle, really squeezing out anyenergy that he had left.

It was strange but that put some iron inmy soul. I remember the feeling that seeingDavid Millar struggling gave me, and the en-ergy that shot through me. If he was suffer-ing and I was feeling just about okay, thenthat had to be a pretty good sign.

‘All right,’ I said to myself, ‘if David Millaris about to go out the back pretty soon now,there must be others around here that will begoing with him. Time to get out of here.’ Istarted moving up through the group maybetwo-thirds of the way up the climb.

The Col d’Aspin isn’t a legendary Tour deFrance ascent but it is one long haul. I got tothe front of the group probably two or threeminutes later.

I was in the front tip of the leading groupas we ascended but knew that I wasn’t likelyto be with them when we came down the far

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side. ‘So what the heck,’ I thought. Iattacked.

I remember thinking that I was going quitefast. ‘I’m not going to rip the field apart butI’m going to do this for a few more minutes.I’ll blow out of the picture soon enough but Iwant to have my moment in front while Ican.’ I never got more than 20 metres infront. And my lead hardly lasted more than aminute.

What happened next was that the ItalianRiccardo Riccò came flying past me as if Iwere standing still at the side of the roadposing for an oil painting. He was on his bigchainring, no doubt, out of the saddle. Hejust burned past and went sprinting off. Bynow I couldn’t even turn the pedals anymore. I looked at Riccò’s disappearing formand thought that I had never seen suchtalent.

People said that evening that Riccò’s ex-plosive burst had reminded them of Marco

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Pantani, one of the best climbers of his era,although his career was filled with doping al-legations. They were still saying that a weeklater.

I got back into the bunch and was dulydropped just as they were cresting in the last500 metres of the climb. I rolled over the fin-ish line in 51st place, second best of the teamafter Moisés Dueñas.

‘Okay,’ I thought. ‘These are my moun-tains. Game on.’

Wrong. Next day, stage ten, I came home120th, 33 minutes behind Leonardo Piepoli.Col de Tourmalet nearly broke me and mylesson for the week was to respect the course.But there was lots still to learn as we pausedfor the first rest day of the Tour. The tutori-als were just beginning.

Oh my God. Had he murdered Cárdenas?Félix Cárdenas, the Colombian rider, had

been rooming with Moisés Dueñas, the quietSpaniard who sat just across and in front of

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me on the bus as we went to and from therace each day.

We had come out from breakfast down-stairs to find the hotel lobby full of Frenchpolice. Reporters were being kept out. Every-body else was being kept in. This was theHôtel le Rex in the middle of Tarbres; it wasnot a normal morning. Chris Fischer, theBarloworld company rep on the Tour, told usto stop rubbernecking and to head to ourrooms. We got up to the sixth floor and therewere police there too.

We went to our rooms and left our doorsopen. There was activity around room 604.

The next thing I saw was Moisés Dueñasbeing led away by the police. He was 19th inGC, our breakout success of the Tour, and hewas being frogmarched out of the place.Claudio Corti and Massimiliano Mantovani,the team doctor, were accompanying him tothe police station.

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You have to worry about the quiet guys.Had he killed poor Cárdenas in some madrow about leaving the cap off the toothpaste?

It wasn’t too long before somebody men-tioned the word ‘doping’.

I was stunned. More stunned than ifCárdenas had been butchered. Looking back,I am stunned by my naivety. He was our GChope. I couldn’t believe it could happen. Ofcourse, I knew that professional cycling hada massive, long-term infection that it wasstruggling to get rid of. Manuel Beltrán, an-other Spaniard, had already been thrown outof the Tour, having tested positive on stageone. Yet I never imagined that a symptomwould be so local. Our team? This guy? Heseemed like such a nice man, very quiet butalways friendly, and always with the hint of asmile on his face.

It was shattering.Dueñas had returned a positive test after

the time trial back at Cholet. EPO. As soon as

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that was announced the police turned up tosearch his cases and raid his room. The wordcame quickly that they had found a privatepharmacy in there.

We left soon after to ride stage eleven. Iwas distracted, mad, disappointed, betrayed,confused – all or any of those things at anygiven time.

The more I thought about it, the moreangry I got. I remember feeling that this guyhad cheated us all. He had got in there andtrespassed all over my dreams. He was ruin-ing the sport I had always wanted to be apart of. I had come to this Tour, to this life asa pro, with my warped vision that it hadcleaned up, that the past was the past, thatthe big doping/cheating scene was an aban-doned and sealed mineshaft.

Now this. This wasn’t the sport I hadthought I was getting myself into.

I knew enough about the team to knowthat this wasn’t an organized operation. It

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wasn’t done through the team. Dueñas hadbeen freelancing, taking a risk at our ex-pense, and that struck me as incrediblyselfish. We all had our journeys and ourbackstories about getting to this level. Itwasn’t easy for any of us but he had put all ofour careers at risk. Barloworld were alreadyspeaking about how this was going to havehuge repercussions in terms of their spon-sorship. Who could blame them?

Our team was in jeopardy, our careerswere in jeopardy and, if this continued, oursport was in jeopardy. Again.

People wanted to interview us, not aboutcycling but about Moisés Dueñas anddoping.

For Barloworld, things got worse when weset out on the road. The team was in a bunchwhen we came to a situation where we had tocross a very narrow bridge at the same timeas the road turned, descending from the Colde Larrieu.

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I wasn’t involved but Cárdenas and PaoloLongo Borghini got their handlebarswrapped around each other’s while they weresqueezing over the bridge. They took eachother out and Borghini got flung into a smallravine. Robbie Hunter came down too, buthe was okay to continue. Cárdenas hurt hisankle and had a bad, deep cut on his kneeand ripped a muscle in his thigh, but he rodeon for a while. Borghini broke his collarboneand abandoned immediately. They were bothtaken to the hospital by the end of the day.

The crash was fate’s gift to conspiracy the-orists – one Barloworld rider arrested afterbreakfast, another couple having to with-draw a few hours later. Nobody wanted tohear about X-rays and scans and freakaccidents.

Finally, Robbie Hunter got very angry witha journalist who asked him if it wasn’t just abit too suspicious. Robbie went for him andtold him where to shove his microphone. I

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thought, ‘Good luck to the next guy whowants to ask Robbie that question.’

To infinity and beyond. That seemed to bethe route of the Tour de France 2008. Nineof us started in the Barloworld platoon andby stage twelve there were just five of us left.

Then Baden Cooke came down heavily offhis bike halfway to Narbonne. He rode on fora while but had to abandon, so we lost anoth-er one.

Baden wasn’t the big news of the daythough. He was just a footnote. They bustedRiccardo Riccò in the morning. He hadtested positive for a sophisticated new vari-ant of EPO back on the individual time trialin Cholet. Just like Moisés Dueñas. The dif-ference was that Riccò had made a ham-fis-ted attempt to escape the testers after thestage but had got stuck in traffic.

Journalists and fans had nicknamed RiccòThe Cobra because of the way he struck so

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suddenly on days when he was in the mood.Luckily, genuine reptiles aren’t litigious.

None of his teammates in the SaunierDuval team turned up for the start in themorning. We heard later that the Tour or-ganizers had sacked Leonardo Piepoli as wellas Riccò after being dissatisfied with his an-swers about doping. Piepoli (one) and Riccò(two) had won three of the Tour’s first tenstages between them. If Riccò showed theaudacity of dope with his lunatic charge pastme up the mountain, Piepoli had been just asodd. This was the Tour de France 2008.Piepoli was born in 1971. Stage ten in thePyrenees was his first ever stage win on theTour.

Piepoli and Riccò stole three stages fromgood riders. By the end of the year we wouldknow that Bernhard Kohl, King of the Moun-tains and 3rd overall, had been cheating usalso. So too had Stefan Schumacher, whotook both individual time trials on the Tour.

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Riccò got a twenty-month ban. A couple ofyears later he was banned again. Twelveyears this time. The Cobra was taken to hos-pital having become seriously ill after givinghimself a blood transfusion with 25-day-oldblood.

We were a forlorn quartet in the eveningsback in the hotel: me, Giampaolo Cheula,Robbie Hunter and John-Lee Augustyn. Wemade jokes about the space we had on thebus and why we were still sharing rooms butthe atmosphere was heavy with worry.Would we have pro careers after this mess?What would happen next? Would any of usget to Paris?

What happened next would wait untilstage sixteen, just when we had begun torelax.

Before then, we knew we weren’t blessed,but maybe we weren’t cursed, after all. Al-though stage fifteen over the border in Italyhad been a bad one for me – I spent too

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much of it in the gruppetto – I was still aliveand it had been a few days since one of theteam had last left the race.

We were in the mountains again. Stagesixteen was an attractively lumpy Alpinestage with two massive out-of-categoryclimbs. First the Col de la Lombarde andthen the Cime de la Bonette-Restefond or LaBonette. We would descend down the otherside and into the tiny hamlet of Jausiers forthe finish.

I was going okay. John-Lee was having agreat day. On the way up La Bonette, John-Lee was part of a lead group of nine. Barringdisaster, the stage was going to go to one ofthe nine. Near the top they rode over a nar-row ledge high on the mountain and John-Lee decided to make a move. He upped thepace and went for it. If he didn’t get the stagehe would still get some mountain points atthe top and a slice of televised glory. It wasthe highest point of the 2008 Tour.

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It worked. John-Lee stole a small lead. Hehit the top first. The descent from La Bonetteis incredible, just shale and escarpment toyour left as you ride hell for leather. John-Lee was fearless though as he led this madscatter down the mountain towards thefinish.

Next thing, the road veered right, butJohn-Lee didn’t. He misjudged the turn, rid-ing over a bank of mud like a mountain bikerdoing a trick and landing quickly. Then hefell down the side of the mountain.

He slid thirty or forty metres down screeand shale before he managed to stop his ownmomentum.

Above him, on the road, two of the motor-bikes from the convoy pulled in. One motor-bike man scrambled down the shale towardswhere John-Lee was lying. Like a woundedanimal, John-Lee came to life in a panic. Hebegan crawling back up the scrabble on hishands and knees, climbing on pure

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adrenaline. When he got to the top, anothermotorcyclist leaned down and took his handand pulled him up on to the roadside.

There is some madness in us all, I swear.John-Lee could have died just there. But thatwas far from his thoughts. Instead, he re-membered his bike. He immediately startedpointing down the slope at it, where it hadcontinued the descent for some time after hehad stopped his own fall.

‘What about my bike?’The original rescuer had made it back to

the top. He shrugged his shoulders at John-Lee. The second motorcyclist did the same.You could almost hear them say, ‘You havegot to be joking, man.’

John-Lee had to wait until the team car ar-rived with a spare bike.

He got his fifteen seconds on TV though.Still, he wasn’t happy.

By the time John-Lee went down the moun-tain I had settled into my survival strategy.

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On the mountain stages, and in the secondhalf of the race in general, I was attemptingto ride one day fast, where I could punishmyself as much as possible and try to be inthe front of the race or the breakaway at themost important points, then the next day myaim would be to get to the finish by expend-ing as little energy as possible. I would ridethis day lagging back in the common roomthat was the gruppetto, even though I couldprobably go faster on the climbs.

The day John-Lee came off I was goingeasy in order to save my body for what wasto come, which was my first trip up Alped’Huez.

It was a massive stage, involving 210 kilo-metres over three out-of-category climbs:Galibier, Croix de Fer and Alpe d’Huez.

The peaks got lower in that order − Galibi-er being the highest − but the cumulativesuffering made the day more interesting thelater it got.

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Galibier is an epic adventure; a long, hardmountain. A four-man break instigated byStefan Schumacher reached the top first butI was comfortable in the group which fol-lowed them as we crested the peak of thelunar-landscaped mountain and headeddown towards Col du Télégraphe and on tothe small town of Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne.

Next was the Croix de Fer. Jens Voigt wasdoing an incredible pull for his Saxo Bankteammate Carlos Sastre. Jens was known asa rouleur, or a good racer on the flat, but thisday he was riding at an absolutely phenom-enal pace and I was hanging on at the back ofthe group, just pushing it as hard as I could.

This was my day and I was in a bullishmood. I held my ground, fending off a fewFrench riders who came up beside me andwho expected me to yield to somebody moreworthy, or more French. They dropped back,cursing my name, as I waved off the sugges-tion of food.

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I rode for a kilometre or two on the wheelof the double Vuelta a España championDenis Menchov, who was weakening. Histroubles attracted the cameras and I got intothe shots – ‘Who’s that following DenisMenchov?’

Jens took us up and up. I think he waspulling for three-quarters of the ascent ofCroix de Fer, before he just peeled off and lit-erally stopped pedalling. Job done.

I was hugely impressed. I rememberthinking, ‘Well, now he’s out of the race, he’sout of the stage today. Alpe d’Huez has to beas tough as they say, if even Jens has givenup.’

As he was dropping back he was beside mefor a few moments. He looked across.

‘You must eat,’ he said. ‘Think about feed-ing your legs.’

He was right. I had made a mistake andhad only one energy gel left in my pocket,and all of Alpe d’Huez ahead of me. It was a

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compliment that he had taken the trouble tonotice and to care. Jens was saying, ‘Look,you’ve done well to get this far, but now youneed to eat something because I know whatis ahead of you, and you don’t.’

Less than 2 kilometres later I droppedback to the car and took his advice.

Corti looked at me with a smile. Of courseI needed gels and food.

I came home in 31st spot, which left me88th in GC out of a field of 150 survivors.

It wasn’t a headline result for me but itwas an indication that I could get there. Ijust needed a bit more experience. I wasgrowing into the Tour. I definitely felt thesecond half of the Tour was better for methan the first half had been, when I was stilltrying to retrieve my lost fitness.

For the first time I was confident that Iwould get to Paris.

The team was hugely supportive. ClaudioCorti, Chris Fisher and even Alberto Volpi,

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the hard-to-please directeur sportif, all saidencouraging things. ‘You just need time andexperience,’ they told me.

Paris. Four of us rode into the Champs-Élysées. Although we were a subplot, and ourpresence was no distraction from the pompof the day, I took a spin at the front on one ofthe eight circuits which took us up the mainstreet. The crowds, the city, the school-is-outgiddiness, it all blew me away.

Reasons to be Cheerful

1. Survival.

2. The mountains.

3. The second individual time trial of the Tour. This

took place the day before Paris, and it was longer

than the previous one – a full twist. Schumacher

won again but I came in 16th, just behind Jens

Voigt. Today, if I subtract the names of the guys

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ahead of me who I now know to have doped, I feel

even more pleased than I did then.

4. Final reckoning. My position was 84th out of the

145 who finished the race, which made me the

best of the four Barloworld boys who made it to

Paris.

It was done. We went out and had dinnerand cocktails with the sponsors on the Bat-eau Mouche, up and down the river, livinglarge for a night.

My brothers, Jono and Jeremy, had followedme to France and showed up at differentstages. Jeremy arrived on one of the moun-tain stages, on a day when I had decided tostay with the gruppetto and save myself for amore promising tomorrow. Unfortunately,Jeremy wasn’t in on my plan.

I was riding as slowly as I dared when Iheard Jeremy’s voice from the side of theroad.

‘Go on, Chris. You can do it.’

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‘Oh no,’ I thought. ‘I can go faster, but Ican’t tell Jeremy that.’

He’d been waiting by the side of the road,looking for his brother. Now here I was inthe final group.

‘Go, bro!’I was mortified. I tried to communicate

with my eyes and eyebrows that I could gofaster, but not today. I wanted to shout,‘Come back tomorrow! I’ll be pushingharder.’

We went around a switchback and weregoing so slow now in the laughing gas gangthat Jeremy had made it to the next bendahead of us.

‘Hey, bro! There you are again. Keep itgoing.’

It was the same for the next bend, and forthe one after.

‘Don’t give up, bro!’‘Great to see you, Jeremy,’ I thought, ‘but

this is embarrassing.’

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Robbie Nilsen came over to France too,and brought a mutual friend, Gavin Cocks.Gavin was responsible for a lot of the moneyand a lot of the heart behind the Hi-QAcademy back in South Africa.

When I was about eighteen years old andstill in St John’s I did a race in the highcountry around Lesotho. Noz came with me.The race wasn’t long, less than 100 kilo-metres, but the attraction was the three hugemountain passes, each about 20 kilometreslong, which we would ride over.

In my enthusiasm I went out too hard anda kid of about fifteen or sixteen years oldtook me on and beat me. His name was Ed-win Cocks.

Edwin loved his bike. He gave the hours toit and I knew that we would be followingsimilar paths.

Not too long afterwards, Gavin, Edwin’sdad, came home from work one day andfound Edwin hanging from a door handle

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with a belt around his neck. Edwin had beenhaving a hard time in a romantic relation-ship and for three years Gavin and his familylived with the thought that Edwin had takenhis own life. Then some friends of Edwin’sapproached Gavin with something to tellhim, something they should have told him along time ago. Edwin had been playing agame which they all played at school. Theidea was basically to suffocate each other andto give each other some sort of natural ‘high’by just passing out for a few seconds andthen releasing the choke. They labelled it thechoking game and Edwin had tried it alone.It had gone wrong.

Gavin now actively travels around thecountry giving presentations at schools andtalking about how dangerous it is. I knowthat when he looks at me, Edwin is in histhoughts. It must be incredibly hard for him,but he has a huge heart. He and Robbie havegiven the joy of cycling to so many other kids

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in the years since Edwin’s death. Without theHi-Q Academy, I for one wouldn’t have de-veloped the way I did, so I owe much to him.

My first Tour is forever sandwichedbetween memories of Mum and of Edwin.I’m proud that I finished.

I never rode alone.

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14

Early 2009: Tour Méditerranéen

We had been looking forward to this. After asuccessful time trial earlier in the week, andhaving worked hard to get our team leader,Mauricio Soler, up to 3rd place in the stand-ings, we were now in contention going intothe final day of racing, which would send usup Mont Faron, overlooking Toulon. It wasnot a bad effort for a team on the verge of ex-tinction, but if we wanted to win, this wasthe day to put in a performance. The racewas most likely going to be decided on thebig mountain.

There was a huge fight just to get into theclimb and everyone scrambled for position. Iremember thinking that this was nuts. I

couldn’t believe how fast we were going atthe bottom, considering that we hadn’t evengot to the ascent yet.

Very quickly, however, a pattern started toemerge, with riders pulling and calling ‘grup-petto’. In other words, they would do theirwork, take their turn and then form a groupand head up the mountain at their own easypace.

There were about thirty of us left after acouple of minutes of the long haul, withmaybe 10 kilometres remaining. We hadgone up the first little rise and then the roadflattened out for a way and there was a lull.We were all looking around to check whowas still with us when Mauricio Soler sud-denly took off. Swoosh. He went for it andattacked.

‘Good luck to him,’ I thought. He was obvi-ously feeling good. The rest of us, mean-while, continued to watch each other.Nobody wanted to get on the front just yet.

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It suited me. I just had to stay on thewheels of those chasing Mauricio. All of theteams had crumbled and there weredifferent-coloured jerseys speckled all overthe mountain. In front, we were just a groupof individuals by now, responsible only forourselves.

We were all happy to let Mauricio go butthen a rider from the Cofidis team attacked. Ihad no idea who he was but I went with himbecause he looked like he meant business. Isped up and got on to his wheel.

He turned out to be David Moncoutié, whowas quite an established climber and a veryinteresting man. He had come 13th on histhird Tour de France in 2002. Higher if yousubtract the dopers ahead of him (five riderswho finished in positions above have sinceeither served bans or admitted to doping).One thing that everybody agreed upon wasthat he, Moncoutié, was never a doper.

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I later heard that he had turned down bigcontracts at various teams who wanted himas a team leader because he didn’t want toride GC. He wanted to ride races his own wayand target certain stages. In this way, hestayed with Cofidis his whole career. He wasinto homeopathy, vegetarianism, breakingearly on mountain stages or hanging with thegruppetto if not. He dealt with doping by ra-cing for and against himself, getting the mostout of his own talents.

I have huge respect for David Moncoutiénow, but that day I didn’t really know who hewas. He just looked like a good bet to followup the mountain. Mauricio was up the roadso I sat on Moncoutié’s wheel. He never onceasked me to try to come through or to take apull. If he had asked I would have told himthat I was fine where I was. ‘My man is upfront. You can take me to him, Tonto.’

Instead, he just glanced back a couple oftimes to check I was still there.

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I liked my odds. Moncoutié was a big guyand he was riding well but surely he wasn’tgoing to last too long up there doing all thework?

Still, it felt like he was going fast. Withevery kilometre we went up he seemed to begaining a kilometre per hour in speed. Littlesprouts of worry began to form in my brain.This shouldn’t have been happening.

With 3 kilometres to go, my legs felt likethey were tweeting my brain: This guy is go-ing too fast for you, sucker.

Suddenly, Mauricio was in our sights a fewhundred metres in front of us; it was the firsttime we had seen him for quite a while. Theroad behind looked empty. I could sense thatMauricio was starting to die a little. He hadto be. His back was getting nearer to us and Iwas tiring too. But this guy in the Cofidisgear was just getting stronger. I stayed sit-ting on his wheel thinking that this wasn’t

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going quite as well as I had imagined itwould. He was not blowing up.

Mauricio never looked back at us andMoncoutié kept pounding away on the ped-als in front of me, never out of the saddle,never relenting from the huge pace. We gotwithin 100 metres of Mauricio, going roundswitchbacks with a kilometre to go, when Irealized that the only way Moncoutié was go-ing to fade now was if I threw him off themountain. That wouldn’t get me signed upwith another team for next year, at least notwith a French team.

We didn’t have radios on, so I leanedround the side of Moncoutié, shouting up themountain like a put-upon mother calling herson in for dinner.

‘MAURICIO! MAURICIO!’Finally, Mauricio looked back and saw us.

He had thought he was clear and could goeasy. Now at least he knew we were coming,but ominously his speed did not change.

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With 800 metres to go we passed Mauri-cio. I gave him a push to get him in on Mon-coutié’s wheel, hoping that Mauricio hadmore left in his legs than I had. Neither of usis a sprinter but this Cofidis guy who haddragged me up the mountain, he surelycouldn’t be a sprinter either?

The road flattened out. Maybe he wouldease up here and leave the door ajar? Go on,Mauricio. He didn’t. With 100 metres to go,Moncoutié blew us away. Mauricio finished2nd. I was 3rd.

On the team bus afterwards I sat downand began telling it from the mountain.

‘I don’t know who that Cofidis rider wasbut for quite a big guy, he could climb so welland –’

Robbie Hunter guffawed.‘Chris, did you really not know who that

Cofidis rider was? Seriously?’After that I always looked out for Mon-

coutié in the races. This was the guy who

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would be in the breakaway on a climbingday, when the GC riders had let a big groupget away from them that didn’t have any con-tenders in it. This was the guy I wanted to bewith to get to the finish.

He would choose the right kind of movesbecause he was older and knew how theraces worked. ‘Look and learn, kijana,’ Ithought. ‘Look and learn.’

I was in Johannesburg at the end of 2008,just as the year was sliding into 2009. It wastime for a term report to my old friend MattBeckett, to catch him up on my news.

I told him that I had committed to Barlo-world for another year and even had anagent now, a man called Alex Carera. Alexhad received some interest from the Lottoteam, and had something on the table, al-though I felt like I still owed Barloworld asthey had put me in the Tour.

‘Are you on the big money yet?’ Mattasked.

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‘I went up from 22,500 to 30,000 euro. Soyeah, crazy.’

‘Maybe you could get work packing bags ata supermarket, double your money and buy ayacht,’ he replied sarcastically.

I mentioned that the Kenyan OlympicCommittee had dragged their feet on releas-ing me to get my British cycling licence untilit was too late to go to the Beijing Games.

Matt asked if I was sad or upset.I was. I felt sad because it was so petty and

because they had nobody going there to rep-resent Kenya anyway. Also, the road racecourse – and this was rare for the Games –was long and lumpy, which meant that itmight have been perfect for me. Finally, Iwas sad because poor old Kinjah would beputting up with all of this rubbish long after Iwould.

Matt wanted to know about the otherthing, that thing everybody was askingabout: doping.

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There’s an unspoken rule, isn’t there? Callit a code among professional athletes. It waslike Fight Club again. In the same way thatthe first rule of Fight Club is no talking aboutFight Club, the first rule of professionalsports is no talking about doping. No matterwhat you have seen or what you have heard,you say nothing. If a doping story breaks,you are always surprised. You never heardanything, you never saw anything andnobody ever spoke about it. ‘My, oh my, thisis a shock.’

It was different among friends.‘What’s the story, bwana?’ Matt asked.He knew about the Tour bust, but the

whole world seemed to know about that one.Matt wanted inside juice.

‘Does the dark side have a gravitationalpull?’

He knew that as Moses of the Hemp I wasprobably too naive to even sense it but surelythere was something I might know?

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I told him about Fanny.I liked Fanny, or Christian Pfannberger to

give him his full name. Fanny is Austrianand typical of the Austrians I’ve met – soblunt that they make Germans look diplo-matic. I enjoyed his company though.

I roomed with him for a one-day race lateduring the previous season and he had mademe laugh. He was complaining about hishead being sore because he had been drink-ing too much over the summer. Apparently itwas the right time for the wine in Austria orsomething and Fanny did his bit as a patriotand drank plentifully. Now he had come tothe race and he was saying that his head washurting because he hadn’t had a drink in afew days.

Earlier in the season, in the spring of2008, Fanny had set the world on fire. Hemade top ten in each of the three bigArdennes classics:

Amstel Gold – 6th.

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La Flèche Wallonne – 9th.Liège–Bastogne–Liège – 5th.That was impressive work. But there were

cryptic things that he liked to say. ‘It doesn’tmatter what the muscles look like,’ he’d tellme, ‘it’s what’s in the muscles that counts.’

Daryl, John-Lee and myself, being theneo-pros in the bunch, discussed our suspi-cions. We knew that Fanny had form. He hadserved a two-year doping ban a couple ofyears before he joined Barloworld so therewas certainly the whiff of dark-side sulphurabout him.

One of the things he would commonly askus was, ‘Have you been tested at home?’

He wanted to know when they would come– was it in the morning or in the evening?And would they do urine and blood or justurine?

It felt like he was trying to work out anysort of pattern that the testers might befollowing.

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We all liked Fanny and maybe it was justhis robust Austrian way, but we always foundthat side of him to be strange. After the Tourbust knocked some of the innocence out ofus we found his behaviour more worrying.

And yet … he asked these questions toguys he hardly knew. Surely he was toobright to do it again after a two-year ban?And he drank wine. If he was still dopingsurely he would be more sober? Or morecloak and dagger, at least? He was good com-pany and a funny man. He couldn’t be anoth-er one putting all of our careers in jeopardy,could he? Or could this all be far worse thanwe thought?

Fanny was moving on to ride with theKatusha team in 2009. We were sorry to seehim go, but there was some relief among ustoo.

‘That was some scary shit, Matt. Findingout during the Tour that other guys mightstill be doing it.’

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‘Yeah, but think of it this way. You’ve onlybeen a professional for a year and a half, ortwo years. You’ve already been able toachieve top-ten results and top-five results insome of the Spanish races. If you are com-peting against guys who are doping theneither it’s not helping them that much, oryou have serious talent. You should beencouraged.’

Matt was right. I was encouraged, butangry too. I trained harder.

Barloworld had given us just twelve months’worth of further lease on the dream. We hadonly one more season together, so for 2009we would be ‘Team Dead Men Walking’.

The news of the end being in sight was an-nounced at our training camp in January inTuscany. When they came out and told us itfelt like we were being given months to live.Then all of our bikes were stolen in themiddle of the night. My room was the closestto the bike storeroom. I heard noises early in

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the morning and thought it was unusual forthe mechanics to be working already butwent back to sleep. I woke up properly a fewhours later at about eight o’clock and every-one was standing about scratching theirheads and looking around. Thirty bikes haddisappeared overnight.

Andrea had arrived in Italy before theTour de France and was soon to departagain. Neither her career nor our relation-ship had ignited in Lombardy. It’s tough liv-ing with a cyclist. I had one day at home afterthe Tour before leaving again to race in Hol-land for a week, which is just how it goes.

Cycling was changing too. We had biolo-gical passports now. It was a novelty to be apart of it, to have to log on and tell the com-puter where you would be at any given time.If you left the house you had to say exactlywhere you would be going, even if it was thesupermarket or the shop round the corner.

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I literally put down every movement and Iwas fascinated by the process. If I went shop-ping for half an hour, somebody wouldknow. If I took a walk, the same thing. Oneevening, Andrea and I went out for a meal inSarnico. It was a rare occurrence for us to goout like that, but I logged in as usual, puttingdown the name of the restaurant and that Iwas going to be there from seven o’clock tillten thirty.

I was sitting with Andrea and our food hadjust arrived when I got a phone call.

‘Chris Froome? We’re here to test you,we’re standing at the restaurant reception.’

I was blown away. It worked.‘I’m just going to pee into a beaker, dear.

Back soon.’Of course, I didn’t really know how we

would proceed, given that we were in a res-taurant. We got a few funny looks until Iasked one of the waiters, who gave a shrug asif he were used to this and waved us to a

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quieter and more private area of the restaur-ant which wasn’t being used.

We sat at a table there, filled out the pa-perwork and then I went to the bathroom forthe urine sample. Next, I sat in a dark cornerto do the blood.

It was an odd introduction to the new era.I don’t know what I would have told Fanny ifhe had still been around to quiz me.

Early in the summer of 2009 I was riding theGiro d’Italia, another Grand Tour. Over thefirst few days I performed a new trick: ridingand puking at the same time.

Barloworld’s view of me for a while wasexpressed with a mix of encouragement andconcern. Claudio Corti would take me asideon occasions for one-on-one chats. Duringthe 2008 Tour, after the day I went withMenchov on Alpe d’Huez, we had one that Irecall clearly. He offered me advice to dial itdown a bit sometimes.

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‘We know you are strong,’ he said. ‘Youdon’t have to show us by attacking, attack-ing, attacking. You don’t have to prove any-thing to us.’

I understood his point, but he didn’t getmine. I felt that if I attacked earlier in races Icould be at the front for a while. I wanted toget my piece in there because I knew thatwhen the big guys made their moves in earn-est, I would be dropped. I didn’t see why Ishould wait around for that. Maybe it wouldget me a better GC position but I wanted totry lots of situations and learn from them. Iwas stubborn about wanting to do it my waywhereas Claudio thought it was more a mat-ter of me having an itchy trigger finger. Hewanted me to just stay calm.

But here I was, getting sick, and it was be-cause I insisted on doing things my way. Itstarted as soon as I got up, when I ran intoJohn-Lee at the hotel.

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‘John-Lee, I’m feeling bad. I don’t knowhow I’m going to make it through the day.Seriously.’

I told him what I thought the problem was,but he just smiled and patted me on theback.

‘Keep it quiet, my friend. No need to betelling everybody.’

I knew what he meant. What I carriedabout in my suitcase was worrying to Claudioand company. I was dabbling with differentthings that might help extract the best out ofmyself, and had spent some time with a Scot-tish friend of mine the winter beforehand, aguy called Patrick Leckie. He was incrediblybright and a straight-A student, but dis-guised it well. You could speak to Patrick anddecide that he might be a little bit slow, but Ihad known him since school and knewdifferent.

Patrick wasn’t bad athletically but sportwasn’t really what got him out of bed in the

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morning. He had been on a trip to India andthen done some community work withmonks in Thailand. I think that sort of lifewould have interested me if the bike hadn’tclaimed me as its own.

Patrick came back from his travels and hewas a hundred per cent vegan – the wholenine yards. I went to see him at St Andrewsin Scotland and spent a few days with him,sleeping on his floor.

I loved the trip and remember Patricktelling me about all the amino acids and nu-trients that your body can get from eatingsprouting vegetables. When a vegetable be-gins sprouting it has an extremely high con-tent of amino acids, which are good for re-covery and energy. It was just a cornerstoneof basic healthy living for Patrick, and heconvinced me that I needed to have at leastthree handfuls a day of these things.

So I bought into it. Soon I was mixingthem with porridge in the morning or with

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muesli, and throwing sproutings in withwhatever I was eating.

I had started a miniature gardening allot-ment in my suitcase and every evening Iwould take the little transparent trays outand rinse them, before stacking them on awindowsill where they could grow. I wouldrotate the trays so that the new vegetableswould be at the bottom, the three-day-oldones would be the next level up, followed bythe six-day-old vegetables, and so on.

I would be swapping them around as theraces went on. The crops were mung beans,alfalfa shoots and quinoa. I mainly grewmung beans, which were little green beansthat I would pour water over after a few days.I would then wait, and after a few days morethey would already be several centimetreslong. They grew rapidly.

To the Italians, this was all blasphemy,even offensive. They would set about eatingtheir pasta in the morning, whereas I would

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be there with these strange shoots that hadbeen growing in my suitcase, scattering themon my breakfast cereal. It worried Corti, inparticular.

‘Please, you really need to do things theway that we’ve done them in the past.They’ve worked for us. We know how to eatbefore a race and you don’t need to eat thesethings.’

I would nod, but I kept cultivating andwould eat the harvest in secret after that.

During the Giro, though, I was sick and itwas my fault. I had grown some quinoa buthad put too much water on it. It had startedfermenting, or hadn’t grown properly, and itstarted to go slightly fizzy.

I ate a whole bowl of it in the morning,thinking to myself that it didn’t really tastevery nice, but I ate them regardless. I put itdown as a credit in the ‘sufferings’ account.Quinoa is used as a substitute in SouthAmerica for rice and it is supposed to have

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many health benefits for your body.Normally you should cook it but I had beensprouting the seeds and eating them raw andnow I could taste the mistake as I chewed.After eating a whole bowl of the stuff I feltvery sick.

My stomach rose up against me and everytime I threw up I could see the little quinoagrains, and the fermented taste would comeback to haunt me. It was one of the longeststages of the Giro – or at least it felt that way.

2009 was the year of treading water. Barlo-world had been granted wild-card entries tothe Tour de France for the two previousyears but weren’t going to make the cut for athird time in a row – bad results, a dopingscandal and imminent extinction had takencare of that.

Although we raced in the Giro, we hadn’treally done enough racing beforehand tomake a success of it.

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I was now living out in Nesso, a village onLake Como. I had a small house in fine isola-tion about 15 kilometres from Como itself onthe winding road around the lake. It shouldhave been perfect but in March I came downwith a cold that I couldn’t shake for a fort-night. I was off the bike for a couple of weeksbecause I knew that if I even pushed the bikeout the door I would weaken myself andmake things worse. I had to sit it out to getbetter, which left me behind for the season.

During the Giro, even when I wasn’t sick, Ihad struggled. I hated the stages where wewent up into the snow; I had never felt socold in my life. Stage seven is still in mybones. It was a freezing cold day, or a freddo,as the Italians say. We came down from theheights of the Maloja Pass, which was a maddescent, and I was so numb and so miserablethat I couldn’t change gears or brake prop-erly. It should have been a good day for mebut I came in 120th.

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I was overweight and unfit. When I wassick I lost form and conditioning and let myeating go off track. I raced the Giro at 71kilos. Back then I would normally race at 69to 70 kilos. These days I ride at 66 kilos.

I also found that it was a very strange andfar more unpredictable style of racing. In themiddle of the stage, when everyone would beriding hard and the leading team were con-trolling on the front, all of a sudden fourguys would attack, even though there was abreakaway in front. It was different to everyother race I had done.

The best day was stage fourteen, althoughit may also have been the worst day.

I asked the mechanics before going out forextra gears but the feeling was that I wasmerely making a fuss. Most people wouldhave been running a compact and a 27 forthose kinds of gradients, which were reallysteep. I remember that the day before thestage I went to the mechanics and said I was

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aiming to get in the breakaway the followingday, and for that I would need really lightgears to get up the climb. But their attitudewas macho-dismissive and they said that 25would be ‘fine’ as a climbing gear. ‘What doyou want more than a 25 for? You should beembarrassed even for asking! You’ll be fineon what we give you.’

I wasn’t really able to argue and I wasslightly intimidated. But this was anotherlesson – I should have fought harder. Whenit came to the key moment in the race, I liter-ally couldn’t turn the gear when I needed to.

Up the last climb, the Aussie Simon Ger-rans and I had the stage between us. Theroad kept going up, and getting steeper as itdid. I felt strong, but I sensed that Gerransdid too. In the end, I broke first. My legsseized up and Gerrans pushed on. I wasstruggling and a group of four other riderseventually picked me off on the last kilo-metre, so that I finished 6th.

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The gears farrago actually ended as an em-barrassment to us all. In an attempt to di-minish the gradient I began riding zigzags upthe hill, pushing over and back across theroad. As I got to the sides to turn, people inthe crowds were pushing me to try to get meup because I was almost coming to a stand-still. Naturally, the papers got pictures of thisfun.

Unfortunately, when the Barloworld teamcar reached the same point on the hill, it toobroke down and the same crowd were photo-graphed pushing it up the slope. The nextday there were two photos in the press: oneof me being pushed up the stage, and anoth-er of the car. The caption read somethinglike: ‘Hill 2 Barloworld 0’.

It was no wonder we didn’t have a sponsorto save us for the following season.

Despite all of this, I finished 36th overallin the Giro, which wasn’t a bad result, butstill disappointing.

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The year lagged by.I was British now and competed in the Na-

tional Road Race championships in Waleslate in June.

A few times on the Giro I had ended upriding close to Bradley Wiggins, the formerOlympic track rider, and in Wales on theIron Mountain, as the most celebrated climbwas called, it was Bradley Wiggins and mewho were left to summit the top of the climbtogether.

We had a lead of a minute on the chasinggroup as we went into the laps of the finish-ing circuit. The group started chewing intoour lead quickly enough and I looked acrossat Bradley. Then I looked at the shrinkingmargin and made a break for it. Bradley gotswallowed up whereas I stayed out on thefront for longer. Only on the final stretch didKristian House, Daniel Lloyd and Pete Ken-naugh go past me. I settled for 4th but it was

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a good day of racing and the welcome fromthe crowd was warm.

After Wales I had nothing substantial onthe road ahead. My body didn’t have any-thing substantial left in it either. I was oftenfeeling poorly and having to take time off thebike, which sucked away my spirits.

When I watched the Tour de France ontelevision, I kept an eye on Bradley Wiggins.I was interested in his approach – he waslively and lithe in the saddle and he time-tri-alled well and competed decently in themountains. I felt our strengths were similar.

Wiggins was carrying no extra weight. Iknew that if you wanted to ride clean, yourdiet and nutrition are huge issues and I wasalways exploring that side of cycling. I hadbeen training for a long time without break-fast but race days were different. Youcouldn’t go out to race without food insideyou. That seemed logical. But on race days Inever felt the same hair-trigger lightness that

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I did when I was training. I watched Bradley,wondering how I would forge the gap.

The silver lining was that I had a team forthe following year. David Brailsford, whoseemed to have been Yoda to Bradley Wig-gins’s Luke Skywalker in the track days, wasstarting a road-racing team with a Britishflavour.

Most of the staff who would form the back-room support for this new team had been in-volved with the British set-up at the 2008Worlds in Varese. I had known some of thembeforehand but that week put me firmly intheir minds and I was comfortable withthem. The riders Steve Cummings andGeraint Thomas from Barloworld were talk-ing to Sky at the same time. It was an easydecision and though the line-up wasn’t an-nounced until December, I knew from aboutApril onwards where I would be racing in2010.

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The summer petered out without leaving anymarks on me, although two small thingsclose to the end made me happy to be mov-ing on.

In September I raced the World Champi-onships for GB in Mendrisio, Switzerland. Ibrought my Barloworld Bianchi time-trialbike and the GB mechanics simply crackedup when they saw it.

‘You actually race on this thing?’‘What’s wrong with it?’The mechanic put pressure on the bottom

bracket with his foot to show me how flexiblethe bike was. The whole thing moved andflexed.

‘So?’‘So that’s what happens when you stand up

on the bike and whenever you get out of thesaddle. Basically, when you put the powerthrough the pedals it’s being lost in that flex-ion; instead of being transferred into a

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forward direction, it’s becoming a sidewaysmovement on the bottom bracket.’

I made a mental note. Don’t stand up.Stay seated.

He wasn’t finished.‘And your gears!’‘What about them?’‘They’re a bit of a joke. Half Shimano and

the other half Campagnolo? Sort of a nine-speed chain with a ten-speed cassette. To behonest, your whole bike is a joke – the cablesyou’re using are the wrong cable housing andyou’ve got brake housing on the gear shifters.We’ll re-strip it for you.’

They did, and I came in 18th. It was stillnothing to write home about. I was threespots ahead of Brad, but that didn’t meanmuch as he had suffered a mechanical andditched his bike midway through his timetrial.

I was disappointed with the diagnosis onthe bikes that we had been using at

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Barloworld. Then, at around the same time, Ihad to compete in a race about a hundredkilometres from my house on Lake Como.

I got a lift down with somebody but Iwasn’t feeling too good; I’d been sick againand I really just wanted to shut down theyear to sort out my health. I wanted to getready for 2010 and a new start.

It was a hilly one-day race, and I had com-pleted about three-quarters of the coursewhen I pulled out. It was a lost cause. I hadbeen dropped and I didn’t feel great. Therace was being run on laps so I just pulled into the team bus when I came around to it onthe circuit. Instead of going back with theteam to the hotel and returning home thenext day, I put my backpack on and gotready to ride the 100 kilometres homemyself.

As I was leaving, Alberto Volpi, the direct-or, stopped me and told me that I needed toget myself together. Volpi basically accused

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me of pulling out of the race on purpose be-cause I knew I had a 100-kilometre ride toget home.

It was a pointless, silly sort of argument. Isaid, ‘Listen, I was dropped. It wasn’t be-cause I didn’t want to be here, I’m just not ingood form and I couldn’t be at the front ofthe race any longer. It’s a hard circuit and Idon’t feel well. I need to get home and I don’thave a car. This is how I’m going to get backnow.’

I finally arrived back at my place at about10.00 p.m. after doing the long ride. I wasstill annoyed.

Our last race together as teammates withBarloworld was in October. It was a one-dayrace in Italy, and one of the smaller events,with only seven of us there to ride. We didn’treally have a leader for the race, and we feltlike we were mainly there to make up thenumbers.

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The night before the race, we had a finaldinner together. It was a chance to swapsome old war stories and to say goodbye, andthe guys decided to order a bottle of winebetween the seven of us. The waitress cameover to uncork it and we nodded as if weknew something about wine. She was readyto pour the glasses when Volpi walked overfrom another table and seized the bottle.

‘No’, he said sternly. ‘Tomorrow there is arace.’

He walked off, and with him went the wineand all of the sentimentality in the room.That was Barloworld, over and done with.

That story of the wine reminds me ofFanny. The following month Christian Pfan-nberger got a life-long ban having tested pos-itive riding for the Katusha team. He had en-joyed another good spring in the Ardennes.In 2010 he became the first athlete to benamed in the Austrian National Anti-DopingAgency’s investigation of athletes allegedly

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involved with illegal blood-doping with acompany called HumanPlasma.

We liked him – we really did. But we wereyoung and naive and learning.

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15

GOALS SET BEFORE THE START OF THE2009 SEASON

Medium-long-term goals (next 2–3 years)

Minimize difference between performance on good

form and bad form – more consistent and predictable

performances.

Ride the Tour again and focus 110 per cent on that.

Medal in CW Games TT in March 2010.

Look realistically for first Tour stage win in 2011

(mountaintop finish).

Long-term goals (next 3–5 years)

Reach top 5 in the Tour.

General goals

Develop mentality to keep focusing on next goal

and keep improving. Assess mistakes and learn. More

discipline in everything I do. Stop letting others influ-

ence my riding negatively – be my own leader!

Learn more about my body as far as diet is

concerned.

Challenge the conventional system.

No idols as they only test positive – only aim to

beat them.

(Memo sent by me to Rod Ellingworth.)

Rod Ellingworth. I can still see his outragedface looming behind the wheel that day whena car full of cycling hoodlums from the UCIschool sped past him on a hairpin bend highon a mountain.

Now he was my coach.Contact with Rod was constant and always

useful, but an email that I sent to him beforethe start of the 2009 season sticks in mymind. I had written down a list of goals witha five-year plan with my aims as a cyclist. I’m

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surprised now at my presumption. Backthen, Rod probably was too. I planned for anincreasing number of podium finishes overthe five years that would follow, and an im-provement in consistency.

We had been working together for threemonths and Rod was still having to explainthe basic facts of cycling life to me. My bliss-ful ignorance of the pro world wasn’t charm-ing him at all and would have to end. He toldme that we could not forget about the off-the-bike work, and everything that we didwhen I wasn’t riding. He said ‘we’, althoughhe meant me. He talked about my day-to-dayorganization around the team, and of how Ineeded to understand the ‘where’ and the‘when’ if I was told to be somewhere. Thiswas essential.

Another thing was my cycling knowledge.Every day I needed to be watching races andreading cycling results to help me move for-ward tactically; I was still very poor in this

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department. Despite all of this, Rod saidthere was an outside chance of me riding theTour de France that year.

I am sure, looking back, that this sentencewas the only one which properly registeredwith me. ‘Really?’ I thought. ‘Great.’

Rod continued. Other areas to work on in-cluded my climbing ability, how to cope withcrosswind sections, how to improve my posi-tion in the peloton, how to get on the wheelin front faster and my general vision in thepeloton of where my teammates were. Hewanted me to have a better strategic under-standing of what the team needed, using theriders around me to find out, and the teamradio more often to get the information Ineeded. He told me not to be scared of ask-ing simple questions.

He was right. I still saw myself as ‘kikoyand sandals’ type of guy, a serene presence inthe dog-eat-dog world of cycling. I was veryquiet within the team and grateful that

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people at Sky were interested in a man whogrew sproutings in his suitcase. I certainlywouldn’t have been one for suggesting any-thing over the race radio.

I realized that I was about to become awell-chewed bone if I didn’t shape up. Ki-jana, welcome to Team Sky.

There are certain catchphrases and accessor-ies which are lightning rods for criticism ofTeam Sky. Many people seem to hate the ‘ag-gregate of marginal gains’, for instance. Andthe bus. Some day a large finger will pointdown from the clouds and issue a bolt oflightning which will destroy our vehicle in aflash. And lo, a godly celestial voice willboom out, ‘How’s that for marginal gains?’

I suppose it all depends on whether youare on the inside of the bus looking out, oron the outside looking in.

Stepping on to the Team Sky bus was likebeing upgraded on an aeroplane. You wentfrom the cramp of economy to the sinful

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indulgence of first class. You didn’t feelguilty; you just felt that this was the way itshould be for everybody, that nothing wastoo good for the working man.

There are nine riders in a race, so there arenine reclining seats with all the clip-ins forour MacBooks, a reading stand and a plugpoint right next to the seats so that we cancharge all of our devices. There is also aholder for our drinks, and a big sound sys-tem. The bus alone was something to writehome about.

The faces of those who would be on thebus were launched at a grand affair at Mill-bank in London in early January. DaveBrailsford had apparently sat down withsome journalists three years previously out-side a bar in Bourg-en-Bresse during theTour de France and mused openly aboutstarting a British Pro Tour Team. They be-lieved him then and this was the proof. Daveis a guy you believe. He radiates energy. I

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believed him when he came looking for mebecause his record already said more thanenough. He had hauled the British track cyc-ling team to a couple of gold medals at theAthens Olympics in 2004, four golds at theWorlds a year later, a crazy rush of ninegolds at the 2008 Worlds and then sevengolds at the Beijing Games.

There was something about all the energyand all the talk of innovation and detail thatwas irresistible. I signed a two-year deal on€100,000 a year. This was not a fortune incycling terms, but I figured that this wouldbe my finishing school as a professional.

By the time we got to Millbank, twenty-five other riders had heard the siren song in-cluding my old teammate John-LeeAugustyn. We were a British team with un-derlying flavours: eight Brits, three Aussies,three Italians, three Norwegians, twoFrenchmen, a Canadian, a Spaniard, a

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Belgian, a Finn, a Swede, a Kiwi and John-Lee the South African.

When the media wanted interviews it wasBradley Wiggins, 4th in the previous year’sTour de France with Team Garmin, and Ed-vald Boasson Hagen (Edvald had won four ofthe eight stages of the 2009 Tour of Britain)whom they buzzed around, like bees readyfor the pollen of hype. Bradley and Edvaldwere the marquee potential. When journal-ists recalled Bourg-en-Bresse and DaveBrailsford’s thinking-aloud session, they re-membered his belief that a British Tour deFrance winner could be produced by a Brit-ish team within five years of the team beingcreated. At Millbank, with Bradley havingbeen aggressively recruited, they could seethat future. It didn’t have sideburns yet but itsoon would have.

We were duly launched and then went offto Valencia to train. Our enthusiasm was anadvantage in itself. There were no old lags

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insisting on things being done the way theyalways had been done. However, in thebroader world of cycling there was an under-current of resentment. The Hollywood-stylelaunch, the money, the aggressive recruit-ment and the Jaguar team cars, while all ofthe other teams had more regular makes, an-noyed some people. There were smallertouches too, such as the thin blue line downthe spine of our jerseys and its representa-tion of the slender border between winningand losing. As 2010 got rolling, these pettygrievances preyed on the minds of othersmuch more than they bothered us.

We were in good hands. Take the bus as ametaphor for the rest of the set-up. I had re-ceived help before, from Kinjah and Robbieespecially, but I had never had a coach be-fore, someone like Rod who was calling meon almost a daily basis to catch up on train-ing or talk about what we were going to be

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doing tomorrow or the day after or for therest of the week. It was day-to-day contact.

My career had always been a walk on highwire. I had always felt alone out there andnot too far away from the slip that would de-liver me to the pavement again. Now therewas this safety net, this web all around metelling me how to stay on the wire andspreading a safety net in case I tumbled.

There were simple things, such as thesoigneurs. Or carers, as Team Sky calls them(something else that gets up the noses of theold school like pepper spray). At Barloworldthe majority of the soigneurs were formercyclists in their sixties. They gave massagesand grumbled about how it was better backin the day. There were only two youngsoigneurs in the Barloworld team: MarioPafundi, who is now at Sky, and HanliePerry, who is now at British Cycling. Theywere more representative of Dave

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Brailsford’s carers: young, incredibly hard-working and attentive to all our needs.

As for coaching, at Barloworld nobody hadever really called. I had found that quitestrange, expecting somebody to check up onme every day. A pro cyclist has a mountain ofwork in front of him always, and a circus ofdistractions elsewhere. Barloworld had justsort of said, ‘Okay, see you at the next race,kid.’ Nobody ever checked to see if I was onthe mountain or at the circus. The assump-tion was basic: ‘You have turned pro so puton your big-boy Lycra shorts and keep doingwhat you have to do, and whatever the hell itwas that got you here.’ After the races wewould get some token advice from Volpi orCorti: ‘Now you need to do a bit more longtraining.’ It was as vague and as general asthat.

Micro coaching and long-term planningwasn’t a marginal change. It was massive.

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To me it is a big challenge to the legacy ofthe mass-doping era. I believe the prevalenceof cheating and the fatalistic belief that‘everybody’ was doing it retarded the pro-gress of clean science in cycling training. Yousee it in the recidivist guys like Riccardo Ric-cò. Even though they’ve been caught beforethere was no way they could contemplate ra-cing clean. It wasn’t an option for them be-cause they believed first that everybody wasdoping, and second that no matter how intel-ligently or how long they trained, theycouldn’t beat a doper without dopingthemselves.

Many people still believe that. To trainhard and to train scientifically, to be skinnyand to be innovative? That can’t possibly beenough. You must be doing something ontop of that. The proof?

‘Don’t know. You just must be.’Things have changed. In the culture of the

peloton they have changed. I was training in

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Tenerife in 2012 when the Cannondale teamwere staying up there too. One of theirriders, Ivan Basso, approached me. He hadbeen suspended for two years after Opera-tion Puerto in 2006, a doping investigationthat had involved some of the world’s mostfamous cyclists. He wanted to ask me a fewquestions about what training I was now do-ing and what I was eating after the races. Heasked the same of my teammate RichiePorte. He even asked Richie about our pro-tein recovery drink, and how he might beable to get some for himself.

He listened intently to everything that wesaid and I was happy that he came to us. Hewouldn’t have asked if he believed we weredoping. He would have believed that he hadthe answers already.

It was like talking to a neo-pro. His jour-ney had taken him full circle and he was wel-come to the information. I think Ivan Bassobelieved (and I think he was right) that he

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was coming back to a peloton that wasn’tdirty in the majority. It was not pristineclean, and probably never will be, but interms of the peloton’s culture, we havepassed the tipping point.

Back in 2010, in terms of detail, I was find-ing more and more that Sky was at the otherend of the spectrum compared to my experi-ence at Barloworld. They were obsessive,which was the way I liked it. The team nutri-tionist, Nigel Mitchell, knew every morsel offood that passed through our lips. And why.On the Barloworld bus we commonly hadpackets of biscuits, Italian biscotti, in thecupboards. We would arrive, hungry after along journey, and demolish a packet betweentwo or three of us. Compare this to the TeamSky bus, where the closest thing to junk foodyou could find would be a fruit yoghurt.

The list of those small, good things, whichare different about Team Sky, is endless. And

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yet 2010 was not a good year for me in termsof results; there was no lift-off.

It culminated when I went to the Girod’Italia in May, which is the best I can say: Iwas there. In racing terms, I got my headkicked in, bought the T-shirt and camehome.

I hated that. I had come to believe that Ihad some genuine potential. A serious teamhad signed me on as a future star; theywould drill down in the right places and thegreat gusher of my potential would be un-tapped. They had offered the people and theequipment to shape me into a real climberand GC contender.

However, by the time we got to the Girothat view would seem to have changed. Orthey had never had the view at all. I had be-come the guy whose job it was to get on thefront and start pulling on the flat days. Thatwasn’t my strength, but it became my role.

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Through the previous spring I had beenthe odd-job guy that the team were calling onfor hard labour. Maybe that was why I hadbeen signed, after all – for being quiet anduncomplaining. I thought to myself, ‘Blessedare the meek for early in the race they shallinherit the front of the peloton.’

My highlights of the season were few andfar between.

2010: A Brief History (pre-Giro)

January

THE TOUR DOWN UNDER

The days were long and flat and hot. I likedthe weather, but nothing else was my cup ofEarl Grey. The race was suited to leading outsprinters and pulling on epic flat stages. Ifinished 76th.

I was still innocent in the ways of the pros.One day I was going back for bottles or forsomeone’s feed bag during the race. I was

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very happy with how I was going and contentto carry out this extra errand. The bunch wasquite strung out and I was coming back fromthe very front where I had been workinghard. I was drifting backwards through thefield and Sean Yates, our sporting directorfor Team Sky, was at the front of the motorconvoy in the car, waiting for me. And wait-ing. I was happily coming back slowly but Ihadn’t stopped pedalling; I was just lettingmyself be carried back through the group.Sean was getting impatient although itwasn’t really registering with me. Suddenlyhe was shouting in the radio.

‘Froomey! Where are you? Put your effingbrakes on and stop!’

My new team turned out to be first-rateSean Yates impersonators. All week long Iheard it. ‘Froomey! Where are you? Put youreffing brakes on!’

February

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TOUR DU HAUT VAR

Two days of good climbs corresponded to mybest result of the season so far: 9th overall.

GRAN PREMIO DELL’INSUBRIA-LUGANO

A snappy title with a snappy finish. I crashedout.

March

VUELTA A MURCIA

No mountaintop finishes and only a shorttime trial. I found myself asking, ‘Why am Ihere?’ I finished 55th.

VOLTA A CATALUNYA

Two good days of riding and then I was asweak as a kitten. I finished 72nd.

April

A volcano erupted in Iceland, cancelling allflights.

I took this personally.

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I had been trying to organize my life offthe bike as per Rod’s guidance. We weretravelling north to the three Ardennes Clas-sics (the Amstel, La Flèche Wallone and theLiège–Bastogne–Liège). I assumed that asthe first race was on a Sunday we would betravelling up on the Friday at the earliest. SoI didn’t read the email. As it turned out, theteam flew up on Wednesday without myknowledge and I missed the flight. Then thevolcano erupted and it wasn’t just a case ofbeing on the next flight. I felt bad for Rodand drove to the Ardennes all the way fromTuscany, realizing that Europe was far longerthan it looked on maps.

AMSTEL

After such a long journey, another disap-pointing placing: 76th.

LA FLÈCHE WALLONNE

I died on the Mur de Huy hill, or at least Iwas dead for the eleven minutes that I lost

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there. I came in 119th. Afterwards, an envir-onmental splinter group tried to sue me forlittering after I threw away a drink bottleduring the race.

LIÈGE–BASTOGNE–LIÈGE

I was sick and I didn’t tell anybody, finishing3rd from last, or 138th, if you want to look atit like that. I made a note to the Ardennes:‘Goodbye, I never liked you anyway.’

TOUR DE ROMANDIE

I felt sick and weak again, this time on thetime trial. I rode straight on at a right-handturn near the finish line and ended up in aflower bed, crocked. It was the end of myTour de Romandie.

I would like to say that apart from the sick-nesses, the crashes and the bad results, I washappy. Except that I wasn’t. I seemed to bein a catch-22 with the team. I wasn’t feelingone hundred per cent or even ninety per centmost days and they were giving me the job of

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going in the early breakaways. I would spenda lot of energy trying to do that, but if I evergot into the breakaway, I knew that it meantbeing dropped when we got to the moun-tains. If I didn’t reach the breakaway, I knewI didn’t have the strength at that time to doas well in the mountains as I felt I could havedone, even if everything was all right. So Ilooked bad on the flat and bad in the moun-tains. I had the best care and coaching I hadever received, but I felt inexplicably weak.

2010: The Giro d’Italia

The race started in Amsterdam on 8 Maywith a time trial. Bradley burned the place upwhereas I was as limp as a dishcloth. On thesecond day, though, Bradley was taken downin a huge crash. Although we got him back tothe race, another even bigger crash with 7kilometres left held us up. He lost 37 secondsthrough the chaos.

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Day three brought even more chaos. But itwas a better kind, if you liked that sort ofthing: evil crosswinds, a long-haul stage anda scattered field. My job was to lead out forGreg Henderson, the Kiwi sprinter, so thathe could have a crack at winning the stage,and so that Brad could get some GC timeback. With 10 kilometres to go, riders fromother teams were surprised to swing round atight corner and find most of Team Sky lyingon the ground. We had crashed. Most of ourbikes suffered damage and Brad lost 4minutes. Greg didn’t get to the ball. He hadthe strutting confidence common to mostsprinters and was seldom happy, especiallynot now.

The mountains were days away butalready I felt hollowed out. Stage four was ateam time trial, which was something Ishould have been good at. Unfortunately,after I had done a number of solid pulls on

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the front, I was one of three Sky riders to getdetached before the end.

Team Sky have an aggressive race philo-sophy. The team happily assumes responsib-ility for controlling a race, and if that meanssticking four or five of us out at the front forthree hours, then that is what we will do. Ifother teams can keep up with us, that is goodfor them. If not, it is still good for us. Eitherway, though, it is a hard gig as a rider. Youdon’t get many days swinging the lead withthe gruppetto. In the Giro I would race up to200 kilometres on the front of the peloton,swapping off with maybe three or four otherguys.

I limped on. I remember a couple of daysof bad rain when the dust of early summerturned to a porridge of mud. On the lowestpoint of the revolution when pressing thepedal down our feet would dip into waterand the cold started to insinuate itself intoour feet and then on up through our bodies.

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When racing there is only one thing I hateworse than the cold, and that is the coldstiffened by rain.

On stage seven I was 7 minutes behindCadel Evans. The mountains were waitingfor us the next day. Maybe I would feel hap-pier in their arms?

Steve Cummings and I had to chase downa breakaway group the next day, then hangback and pull Brad into contention. The lastclimb was up a mountain hidden in a soup offog. We got Brad into a good position and al-though he lost a little time, he moved upfrom 26th to 23rd in the GC. Steve and I col-lapsed with the effort. Steve lost 5 minutesand I lost 12 in the closing kilometres. It wasa decent day of work but my right knee wascausing me pain. There was a sharp,stabbing sensation just above my knee, witha bruise forming in that area. In the moun-tains it was especially bad and I knew there

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was something seriously wrong; it was reallyhurting.

Every time I pushed down on the pedal onthat side, the pain shot through. I tried tocompensate by using my left leg more, butthen that leg began to get very tired.

I started getting physio strapping everyday in an effort to support it. On the flatstages that worked okay, but on the climbs,where I was putting more pressure throughmy knees, was when I really felt it.

So, I was in trouble in the mountains andhaving to do big pulls on the flat. Those dayspulling on the front are tough for any rider,and although I remember thinking that ifBrad won or if Greg took a sprint stage Iwould feel part of the glory, neither eventual-ity happened. The job, though, means youkeep doing your long pulls. You ride on withhope in your heart and pain in your body.

I rode on until stage nineteen. Not all ofthe days were bad but I was bothered in the

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long term by a lack of direction in where Iwas heading as a rider, and in the short termby the nagging pain of my injury. My kneefelt as if there were something pulling insideat the tendon.

I was also still learning the politics of thepeloton on Grand Tours and I was naive andunsophisticated about reading the race. Onstage eleven, for instance, we rode in mon-soon conditions. Brad and three others fromthe team got into the right group after just20 kilometres of the 262-kilometre stage. I,meanwhile, got into the wrong group, so thatwhereas Brad picked up 12 minutes on theleaders, I lost 46 minutes in the gruppettofrom hell. I was the lowest-ranked Sky rideron GC that evening. An Aussie rookie namedRichie Porte ended up in the maglia rosa ofrace leader when the rain stopped.

On stage nineteen out of Brescia to Apricamy knee howled at me all day. There were

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three big climbs on the stage and the last onewas Mortirolo.

Mortirolo fights you – it is brutal and re-lentlessly steep all the way up with just a fewstingy gaps for recovery. On the climb justbefore Mortirolo, I had dropped off the frontof the race and gone to the gruppetto but aswe were riding along I noticed that GregHenderson was off his bike. It was lying onthe side of the road because he had gone intothe bushes to go to the loo. His stomach wasbad that day.

I waited for Greg and the two of us rode tothe top of the climb together. I thought tomyself, ‘Okay, the two of us will work togeth-er to get back to the gruppetto now.’ It wasraining again and I struggled for a momentto get my rain jacket on. Then Greg suddenlyshot off down the slope and left me there. Icouldn’t believe it.

A few members of the team had a go athim for that afterwards. Despite my waiting

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for him just moments before, he had left meon the descent to push on alone. He hadmanaged to get behind a passing team car inthe next valley and had rejoined the gruppet-to, so now I was the very last rider on theroad.

When I reached the Mortirolo I could feelthat I wasn’t going to be riding anywherequickly. I rode the first 3 or 4 kilometresmostly pedalling with one leg, and I was allalone, well behind the gruppetto.

The team car radioed at that point, andsaid that the gruppetto was 17 minutes infront. I knew that was the end for me. Thesuffering seemed foolhardy and unprofes-sional, and it was time to call it a day, or costmyself the season. I radioed back to our dir-ecteur sportif, Steven de Jongh.

‘I’m done here. Finished. I need to stop.’The message from the car was, ‘Okay, just

keep going at your own pace, don’t do anymore damage to your knee. Gemma, one of

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the soigneurs, is up on top of Mortirolo, giv-ing feed bags out to the riders. You can get inthe car with him.’

There was a commissaire vehicle close tome and an Italian policeman on a motorbike.The team car was up with the gruppettomaking sure that everybody had their rainjackets and the commissaire vehicle drove onup ahead too but kept coming back down tocheck on me.

I remember fans on the side of the roadreally trying to push me on. They wereshouting, ‘Grinta, grinta!’ which meansgumption or dig in. But sadly all I was think-ing was, ‘If only they knew that I’m justheading for my lift at the top.’ There was nopoint in encouraging me.

The policeman kept looking across. I wasgrinding so slowly that he would stop hismotorbike every couple of metres and put hisfeet on the ground. He knew I was done.

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After he had looked across a few times Ispoke to him in Italian.

‘I’m going to stop on the top of the climb.’‘Okay, do you want to hold on?’ He indic-

ated for me where to hold on. ‘I’ll take youup.’

I didn’t want to do it.I didn’t want to disappoint the fans that

were cheering me on with such heart, so Ipushed on for another 2 kilometres.

He asked me again, smiling sympathetic-ally. Clearly his patience was wearing thin atthe speed I was riding up the climb, and Iwas starting to feel guilty about keeping himthere.

I held on for barely 10 seconds. We wentround just one hairpin bend only to find thecommissaire car waiting round the corner.The doors opened and they leapt out and ranover to me.

‘Stop! Stop! Stop! Disqualificado!’

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They made a huge drama of taking a largepair of scissors and cutting my number offmy back. A camera crew from the Italian sta-tion Rai happened to be with them to filmmy disqualification. Rai were competitors ofSky Italia, and seemed to be enjoying themoment.

I initially didn’t think much of it as in mymind I had already retired and was focusedon getting to Gemma at the summit. Thesound of me clipping back into my pedalsquickly drew the attention of the commis-saire holding the scissors.

‘No, no, no! You can’t ride any further.’I asked if they were going to give me a lift

to the top but they told me there was nospace in their car. We stood for a good fewminutes arguing about how I was going toget to the top before they conceded that Iwas allowed to ride on, after all, but only be-cause they had cut my numbers off.

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It was just another 2 or 3 kilometres to thesummit, but it took me half an hour. The po-liceman was still nearby but, having beenscolded for taking a lift, I knew better than tohold on again.

Finally, I reached Gemma at the top. AfterI climbed into the car I ate some food, put onsome warm clothes and we drove back to theteam hotel. However, when I arrived back itwasn’t over. I was inundated with press en-quiries about being disqualified for holdingon to the motorbike.

It was typical of my luck that season, but Iwas beyond caring really. What nags longterm is the show-trial element – I was de-mobbed on the mountain with the camerasrolling. That, and years of people whohaven’t got the faintest idea of what actuallyhappened deciding that somebody whowould take a pull up a mountain would def-initely dope and betray his sport.

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I knew the truth. And I knew that I didn’thave to get on the bike any more that week. Iwas going to put my knee up and rest for awhile. It was time to regroup.

Back in the peloton, Brad’s Giro d’Italiahad fallen apart that day as well. He had lost37 minutes. Meanwhile, our teammate Gregstill hadn’t won any sprints during the race,unless we counted his breakaway from me,when he found his strength on the descent.

There was a ‘back to the drawing board’mood about the entire team.

In that first year I felt that Team Sky wastoo corporate. We had our spreadsheets, ourpie charts, our plans and our targets fromday one, and part of the sense of control hadbeen to make the year unfold exactly as ithad been planned.

But after the Giro I definitely got an ink-ling that things were unfolding very quicklyfor us, too quickly perhaps. The season wasgetting to the business part at a galloping

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pace. Suddenly the Tour de France loomedand we didn’t seem flexible enough to dealwith it. As a team we believed that if we paidour customary homage to the god of smalldetails everything would work out in the end.

Dave summed it up well afterwards: wespent too much time worrying about the peasand no time considering the steak.

There was certainly a lot of planning andpreparation that had been done aroundBrad. He had been doing recces of all theTour routes but I don’t think there had beenmuch structure put in place in terms of as-sembling a Tour group and of training andracing together as a team. There was lots oftime spent Brad-building but little timespent team-building.

I remember talking to Steve Cummingssome time after the Giro and not long beforethe Tour. Steve had his doubts. He wasknackered and felt that the Giro had been forhim, as it had been for me and Brad and

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every other member of the team, a far harderexperience than we had anticipated. Itknocked us about. Steve said he had put onsomething like four kilos in weight after re-cuperating from the Giro, and now theywanted him to go into the Tour and do thesame job but even better. Why?

Because that was the plan. And we had tostick to our plan.

I took a few weeks off after the Giro. I hadn’tmade the cut for the Tour so I nursed thewounded knee and tended the woundedpride. The Giro experience had deflated me.

Noz had flown to Italy during the Giro andeven though I stayed with the team until theend of the race, I saw plenty of him duringthe days after I had abandoned. He thencame to stay with me for a while. We visitedRome together for a few days and enjoyedeach other’s company before we went back toTuscany.

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At some stage while Noz was still around Itook a quick trip to Manchester in the hopeof addressing my knee problem.

I felt that my position on the bike wasquite a big problem. We had changed myposture earlier in the season and I seemed tobe battling with that. I felt as if I were a littlebit too high on the saddle, which was puttingan extra strain on my knees.

This was where I was paying the price forbeing an unusual specimen within the cyc-ling world. Riders who had entered the pro-fessional scene in their teens would have hadtheir riding posture and position sorted outearly in their careers. I was aware from nu-merous jokes that I looked ‘kinda funny’ interms of style, but I had never had a profes-sional come up to me and say, ‘Your positionshould be like this.’

I had always simply got on a bike and rid-den in a way that felt natural to me. Maybe I

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was right. Maybe I was a chiropractor’s worstnightmare. I didn’t know.

When somebody finally took me throughthe posture and position work, I was keen tolisten. It was Phil Burt and Matt Parker fromBritish Cycling who analysed me initially.They had come over from the track team.Matt is a performance analyst and Phil is aphysio. I was happy to receive their profes-sional opinions.

Now, I’m not sure if it was their trackbackground (they had not worked withclimbers before) or my unorthodox ridingstyle but I think we made a fractional, honestmistake when we were first doing the bio-racer set-ups. That process involves captur-ing the bike’s measurements and puttingthem into a computer to calculate all of therequired angles for your knees and yourbody. Then a decision is made on what is op-timum in terms of height and position.

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From the start I had a feeling that I was alittle too high in my saddle but it was all somarginal that I assumed I would get used toit. I didn’t.

Meanwhile, back in Manchester on the fly-ing trip, I had an MRI scan on my knee,which showed that it was inflamed but hadno lasting damage. I told them that it felt asthough I was having to stretch to reach thebottom of my pedal stroke and this was put-ting additional pressure through the saddle.Matt and Phil were open to the idea ofslightly lowering the saddle. I had done a lotof reading up on positioning by then and hadread that climbers should typically be a bitfurther back behind the bottom bracket sothat they can use the leverage to get up theclimbs. Flat riders would typically be a littlefurther forward where they can be on the tipof their saddle and pedal over the bottombracket, a bit like time trialling.

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I went back to Tuscany to recuperate andthen experimented.

I lowered my saddle from about 81.5 centi-metres down to about 80.5 centimetres, soaround 1 centimetre lower. I tried that for aweek and then I moved it back up again.

The comparison was interesting. When thesaddle was higher both before and during theGiro I had been getting bad saddle sores.With the saddle lowered these stoppedstraight away, and only returned when Iraised the saddle again a week later. It wasjust an extra bit of pressure. Even now, ifsomebody puts a new saddle on my bike andit is a millimetre too high I feel it straightaway.

The impact on my knee was just as obvi-ous. The pain I was getting along the side ofmy knee and on the top of my knee camefrom having to stretch further than I nor-mally did. When I lowered the saddle itstopped.

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(Also, with the high saddle I’d get constantsaddle sores on my undercarriage. I had thisfluorescent yellow chamois in my shorts andat the end of many a long stage, I could seeexactly where the sores had burst. Not muchfun.)

The trial and error worked. I moved fur-ther and lower back on my bike and have rid-den that way ever since. It’s actually an ex-traordinarily low position for someone of myheight, and my inseam, but that’s just whereit feels most comfortable.

The happier the undercarriage, the betterthe rider. Who said that? Merckx? Coppi?

Later that year I watched the Tour on TV,and then rode the British Nationals, followedby the Commonwealth Games in Delhi. I hadone or two other adventures but generally Ilet 2010 slink away to its own unmarkedgrave.

I don’t visit there very often.

Postscript: The Odd Couple

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While 2010 faded away, I would always haveGreg Henderson.

After it was established that I was quietand easy-going, it was decided that Gregwould be my room-mate. Blessed are themeek for they shall also inherit the Kiwi.

I remember being in rooms with Gregquite often. I knew he had strong opinionsand a way of expressing them that didn’tneed amplification. The other riders wouldsee me in his company and wink at meknowingly: ‘Enjoy!’

Greg was a bit of a strange one. Even for aKiwi. He would perch on his bed in his boxershorts and headband, and sit there playingthe harmonica. He always brought a littleharmonica with him wherever we travelled. Iwasn’t about to complain about his dresssense; I was sitting there wearing a tradition-al Kenyan skirt.

His musical talents were a different mat-ter. A music lover is someone who can play

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the harmonica but chooses not to. Greg wasthe opposite: he couldn’t play the harmonicabut did so anyway. I would put myearphones on and watch something on mylaptop to drown out the noise.

That was how we spent most of ourevenings.

We didn’t talk much, even though Gregwould talk a lot himself. He had very strongopinions and was quite intense, so he wouldget worked up about things and always hadan axe to grind. CJ Sutton was the othersprinter on the team, and Greg would spendhours deconstructing CJ. I would be listen-ing and nodding: ‘Yep. Yep. Sure.Interesting.’

I did feel sorry for him in a sense. He was alittle bit of a loner and didn’t seem to haveany close bonds with anyone on the team. Ididn’t think he was necessarily a bad guy, butjust slightly socially inept. I think he wouldsay the same about me.

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Like me, Greg didn’t make the Tour deFrance team that year. He was left out in theend in favour of Michael Barry. Dave ex-plained that if a team was going for the yel-low jersey, it had to put all its eggs in onebasket, which was Brad. The lesson of theGiro seemed to have been that there was alot of energy spent on riding for Greg and CJwhich had produced no stage wins and leftBrad exposed. Dividing resources had di-luted the effort.

After the Giro, not putting me in the Tourteam had been an easy decision. However,Greg had enjoyed a more successful start tolife in the team and excluding him was atougher decision.

That August we did the Eneco Tour, a pre-dominantly flat race in Belgium, which wasone suited to the punchy riders. Edvald wasdoing really well in the race, as it was madefor him, but Greg had already won a stage. Itwas the last night before the final time trial,

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when Greg decided that he wasn’t going todo anything much the next day and thoughthe would have a few drinks.

He came back into the room at around1.00 a.m. and got on the phone to his wife.He was complaining about an argument he’dhad with someone downstairs.

‘Ah, I’m gonna kill ’im,’ Greg was saying.This was 1.00 a.m. I had been asleep for a

couple of hours already and the time trialwas a far bigger deal for me. I wasn’t thechampion of serenity at that moment andturned the lights on.

‘Greg? Just leave it, man. Please. Just turnoff your phone and go to sleep. Sort it out inthe morning, whatever the problem is.’

At 7.00 a.m. Steven de Jongh came to ourroom.

‘Greg, pack your bags, you’re out of here,you’re going home. You’re not starting therace today.’

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Apparently Greg had been down in thebar, and at some stage somebody had urin-ated on the front door. The owner of thehotel was there, who also happened to be aspecial guest of the race, and possibly even asponsor, so not someone we should havebeen upsetting. And there had been an argu-ment not over the urine but the mop. Whowas going to mop it up? Greg got involvedand offered typically strong opinions in hisrobust way.

It was not only that, but Greg had alsobeen winding up the mechanics and otherstaff by telling them they would soon be outof a job, because he had heard they weren’tgoing to get their contracts renewed.

I don’t know the details but, fairly or un-fairly, they sent Greg home anyway. I don’tthink he quite fitted into the Sky model. Hejust didn’t tick all the boxes for Dave and theguys, even though that year I think he wasour most successful rider.

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If only he could have played guitar.464/1106

16

After hours in the last-chance saloon, down-town Kraków.

It was early August 2011 and somewhereBradley Wiggins was recuperating from thebroken collarbone he had suffered during theTour de France. Team Sky were frettingabout him as saving the season hinged onBrad’s health.

Meanwhile, I was in Poland: flat, unforgiv-ing Poland. The Tour of Poland had justended and I had finished 85th on GC – notexactly knighthood territory.

The team were flying out the next morningbut my flight home was later in the day forsome reason. I had worked hard all week ona predominantly flat course only to end upburied on the foot slopes of the GC.

That night I did something I had prettymuch never done before – I went out on thetown. The race finished in Kraków and Ipainted the town red. Well, sort of salmon-coloured; I was new to the game.

I switched off from it all. I’d put so muchinto the year: the races, the training, theweight loss, the Biltricide, the altitude workand the life lessons. But now people wereavoiding my eye and I felt like a dead manwalking. Sometime in the next few weeks thehints would start falling, and then the chat.

Obviously, Chris, we have to makechanges … regenerate the team … we appre-ciate everything you have done … we wishyou … whatever you do …

I had never done anything after races, orin between, for that matter. The candle in mylife had only ever burned at one end and Iscarcely existed off the bike. However, onthis night in Kraków my friend Adam Blythe,the British rider, was hitting the town. For

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once, I got on his wheel and went with him.We met up with a few other riders, includingTom Boonen, the king of the cobbles, as wellas a couple more Belgian guys.

You’ve been a good guy to work with, youwill be missed here … I think you’ve madefriends … unfortunately you’ve had somebad luck … some illness …

Now I was feeling good. We had a fine din-ner and went on to a club afterwards. Thiswas new territory for me but all I rememberis a lot of fun. We were dancing like fools,drinking like fish (well, not like fish, but likecyclists on a night out), telling jokes, tradingstories and laughing a lot. We were blowingoff half a season’s worth of worry and stress.

We are all under pressure … let me justsay this was the hardest decision … the bestof luck in whatever you choose to do … yougave it a shot, Chris, you really did …

Shot. Yeah. That was one thing that stoodout in Kraków that night: one euro for a shot

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of vodka. If you’re in the valley of despairand can’t see the road back, don’t head to thebars in Monaco. You would need a mortgageto buy a round of drinks. Fly to Kraków in-stead. Even with the airfare you would comeout ahead.

It was getting bright when I got back to thehotel, and due to some administrative quirk,probably my own doing, I was staying in adifferent hotel to the other guys. At least Ihad no room-mate to worry about.

I was drunk. Not completely drunk … just,you know, happily so, happily so … happilywhat? I didn’t know. I just thought, ‘Whatthe hell, we’ll always have, um, Krakówdrunk.’ Happily so.

I lay on the bed, looking up at the ceiling,content for now: I had gone a whole nightwithout thinking about my career. I was re-lieved that nobody had asked me with graveconcern about how it was going with me and

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Team Sky, and whether it was terminal, orhow long I had left.

If they had asked I would have said theonly thing I could say:

‘Well, it’s not going. I’ll definitely have torethink things in the next week. Rethinkeverything. We won’t be having a reunionlike this in Kraków next year.’

That would have killed the atmospherenicely.

So, Chris, this is goodbye … hopefully wecan meet somewhere down the road … I’dlike you to keep this chamois as a mementoof your time here … yes the saddle sores … Iknew you would enjoy that. You knowwhere the door is.

My seasons had a bad habit. They wouldslouch off in late summer to die quietlysomewhere in the shade: 2010, 2009, 2008,2007 – those years all died young.

In 2007, I had gone to the World Champi-onships in Stuttgart intending not to do

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anything more vigorous than sign a contractwith Barloworld. I raced but my heart wasn’tin it and I had rolled around the roads think-ing of home; I wasn’t in good form and I wasquite tired by the end. The year was done.

After the race I was sitting in the airportwaiting for my flight. I was going to Zurichand from Zurich onwards to Johannesburg.In the boarding area I spotted a guy in a seatfacing me. He was lean and trim – the cut ofa cyclist – and he also looked familiar. Thereweren’t many professionals at that stage whoI would have felt confident about recogniz-ing, but this man I knew. I had watched thedocumentary Overcoming, about a year inthe life of Team CSC, and he had featuredheavily, along with Bjarne Riis, Carlos Sastreand the rest of the riders. I glanced down athis feet, and he had a sports bag with hisname on it.

It was definitely him: Bobby Julich.

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He was interesting to me for a number ofreasons. Firstly, he was a late starter like meand in the early nineties he had trained alonehoping for a pro career to come along. Whenhe finally did get picked up by a team, againlike me, he had shown that he was not just agood time trialist but as a rider had morethan one string to his bow. He had later fin-ished 3rd in the infamous 1998 Tour thatwas marred by doping, crashed in the indi-vidual time trial the next year, but then neverseemed to take it on to the level that peoplehad expected of him, even though theytalked him up as the new Greg LeMond.

He had started in the Motorola team, join-ing a group that already had Lance Arm-strong in its ranks. When Bobby Julichcrashed out of the 1999 Tour, Armstrong wason the cusp of his long, dark domination ofthe Tour and became the only Americanrider that mattered. There wasn’t any lovelost between Bobby and Armstrong.

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I knew Bobby Julich’s story so I said, ‘Hi,’and introduced myself. I remember beingblown away by how open and approachablehe was; he was just very easy to talk to. Hewasn’t some remote cycling god demandingreverence, but a good guy who seemed genu-inely interested in what I was doing. Stut-tgart had been the final race of his career. Hehad just retired and although I’m sure he hadsome big matters, like the rest of his life, onhis mind, he asked me what I was doingthere. I told him that I had just signed on asa professional with Barloworld.

He might have said, ‘Good luck to you withthat, sonny, the team’s barely professionaleven if you intend to be.’ He didn’t though.He wished me all the best and gave me a fewbits of advice.

Bobby became technical director for hisold team Saxo Bank after that for two years,before quitting in 2010 to move to Sky. Latein the same year, as my season was looking

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for a tree to die under, I was told that Iwould be working with Bobby Julich in 2011,instead of with Rod, whose Tuscanclassroom was getting too crowded.

I was fascinated by the karma. Our pathshad crossed by chance the day after Bobbyhad ended his long pro career and I hadsigned up for what I had hoped would be mylong career. Now Bobby would take up thejob of putting the paddles to my chest andshocking me back to professional life.

I wondered if he had been quietly lookingout for my results in the years since we hadmet.

No, actually, he hadn’t.Bobby cheerfully told me later that he even

had to google my name when he was told bySky that he would be coaching me – I clearlydidn’t make big first impressions.

When I reminded him of the brief en-counter at the airport he recovered wellthough. He said that he remembered me as

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being very keen and enthusiastic and that Ihad really been picking his brain. He told mehe reckoned it was going to be fun to worktogether. I felt like a Labrador.

I told Bobby I was going to move toMonaco.

‘You’re not a millionaire, are you?’‘No. But I’m going to do it anyway.’If it was enthusiasm Bobby was looking

for, he had found it.

I needed to change. Quickly. I was riding at adecent speed through the back door of thelast-chance saloon. On the way out, that is. Ihad one year left of a professional contractwhich might be my last. I was earning€100,000 in that year, which was not exactlyenough to retire on, and hardly enough tolive on if I moved to Monaco. I decided togamble.

Whatever ability or talent I possessed wasgetting lost in translation from training to

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races. I kept all my training data, and everypage told its own story.

An SRM power meter file from April 2010,for instance, pre-Giro, showed that I was do-ing a lot of what I called ‘over-under’ inter-vals. Robbie Nilsen and I had come up withthe name and structure for these, which in-volved taking my power to above my lactatethreshold and keeping it there.

The intervals were all pretty consistent.For 3 minutes at a time I would go over mythreshold, which meant pain. There wouldbe 1 minute of recovery in between, but thiswasn’t complete recovery – it was at a levelthat would allow the burn to subside ever soslightly.

Nowadays, it has become one of the inter-vals that we do most often with the teamwhen we’re getting close to peak fitness, butthat April I was doing the over-under at avery high-power output all of the time. Andalthough I was producing these impressive

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numbers alone, I would never reach any-thing close to them in competition.

In my race results from 2010, nothingreally stood out. Comparing my training withmy racing was like looking at the stats of twodifferent cyclists.

I needed to be better. If 2011 went poorlythen I would be all out of chances. The foot-notes of professional cycling are filled withthe one-line obituaries of careers that lasteda year or two – short stories with differentbeginnings, but all with the same end: ‘Hehad promise, he never fulfilled it, and theycut him loose.’ ‘All he ever wanted was to bea pro cyclist, but he couldn’t cut it, so hecame home.’

I didn’t want to be one of those guys.

Team Sky was the standard bearer for mar-ginal gains and attention to detail but inevit-ably there was a hierarchy. Twenty-six ridersdon’t all get the same attention. The guyswho would deliver stages, who would win

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classics or contend in Grand Tours were notexpendable and Team Sky was in a constantprocess of honing and perfecting them.

The domestiques, however, who wouldhelp them, were more of a batch lot. If one ofthem wasn’t functioning you would rattlehim about a bit to see why. If nothingchanged, then you unplugged him and gavehis €100,000 to some guy who wouldfunction.

That was life. Everybody is equal but someare more equal. In that corporate contextTeam Sky would do its best for me, but deliv-ering performances was what counted. It wasup to me to produce.

The move to Monaco would be a hugechange for me, sorting out a lot of my life offthe bike. And although Bobby Julich hadprobably been given a lot of the team’s waifsand strays to work on, he suited me. Rod hadtaught me many invaluable things, refiningmuch of the work Robbie and I had done

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over the years in South Africa, but Bobby hada long career as a professional and somehowbeing able to tap into that experience becamea vital resource for me. He could tell how Iwas feeling before I had even expressed it.

Italy could be so chaotic that it wasn’t a greatplace for somebody with my administrativeskills to be living in. Often I would go awayfor a week of racing and come home to findthe electricity was off. A missing comma or astray apostrophe in the detailed instructionsto the bank would have stopped the pay-ments to the electricity company.

I’d spend a week with no lights and nofridge.

I would have to make at least one visit tothe council, one visit to the electricity com-pany and one visit to the bank. I would writeletters struggling with the Italian words re-lating to bureaucracy. Just as I was settingoff for the next race a week later, the lightswould come back on.

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Another complication was that if you werenot a resident, you couldn’t register a car inyour name, get the internet at your home, oreven, in theory, rent a home. My life off thebike was disorganized at the best of timesbut Italy wasn’t helping. I loved the countrybut we were a bad marriage.

I had managed to buy an off-road motor-bike with big suspension, knobbly tyres anda great guttural roar through the friend-of-a-friend’s-cousin sort of thing, and I wouldride it through the mountains, exploringTuscany on the odd day off.

One hot day in the late summer of 2010,another season fading into disappointment, Igot on the motorbike wearing a helmet, T-shirt and shorts and rode the four and a halfhours from Tuscany to Monaco to meet anestate agent.

You can imagine what the Monaco estateagent thought of this guy in his T-shirt andshorts. She showed me three or four

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apartments and in the end I chose thecheapest, which was a room, or, as the estateagent called it, a studio apartment.

I went back to South Africa over the winterand stayed with my good friend Matt Beckettin a cottage on his parents’ property. Itrained very hard, with my sessions startingat 6.30 a.m. and going for six or seven hours.Some days Matt would come out on a scooterto motor pace me for hours at a time in orderto simulate that feeling of being in a race. Igot myself ready, Skyped Bobby a lot, dis-cussed what I was doing and fed off hisencouragement.

In January 2011, after I had returned toEurope, the team travelled to Mallorca totrain. The first race of the year would be theTour of Murcia in Spain, in early March. Notlong before that, I settled up everything withthe landlord in Tuscany and left. Bobby hadsaid that the trauma of moving house couldcost me a chunk of the season. He didn’t

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know me well then. I owned just a bed andsome drawers and the move took place on arecovery day. A friend of the landlord packedmy things into a truck and drove my belong-ings and me to Monaco. I was training asnormal the following morning, just in a dif-ferent country.

Rod had often talked of sorting out my lifeoff the bike. Ironically, the move away fromRod was a big part of that. I had internet inmy home now instead of having to findTuscan cafes where I had sat slowly sippingon a pot of green tea while using their Wi-Fi.I could now Skype family and friends. Therewasn’t an alpine range of red tape to climbthrough every month. I could go to a raceand lock the door and come back to findeverything still working.

Yes, it cost a fortune, but it was a betterlife. I was more balanced and more focused. Ialso discovered what had been eating me andmy potential up: parasitic worms.

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Looking back, my tweets through 2010 arean odd mix of defiant optimism shot throughwith chips of worry. There are several refer-ences to getting sick, followed up by grandproclamations that all ailments and badtimes were soon to be a thing of the past.

In truth, I didn’t know what was going on.I was the domestique who lived on his ownand did things on his own, which was goodand fine if I was producing. But I couldn’t af-ford to be the domestique who also com-plained constantly of not feeling too good.

Or maybe I should have complained more– at least I might have discovered the causemore quickly.

Before and after the CommonwealthGames in Delhi in October 2010 I found myway back to Africa. The season had fizzledout and I was drawn home. I spent a coupleof weeks in South Africa before going to Del-hi. Afterwards I made my way to Kenya tospend some time with Jeremy, who had

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relocated home and was by then working in agold mine (as an accountant, that is). His lifehad progressed but personally I felt as if Iwere working in a coal mine, with a knife andfork.

In Kenya I was called on for the usual UCIbiological passport tests. I never mind thosetests; they are no intrusion at all comparedto the benefit to the sport. And I had goodreason to be grateful for them. I was sick ofbeing sick, tired of being tired, and it was theextra nudge I needed to seek medical help.The labs where I could have the tests donefor my biological passport were adjacent tothe offices of Dr Charles Chunge, a tropicaldisease specialist in Nairobi. Jeremy knew ofmy ailments over the previous year, and hadrecommended that Dr Chunge check meover. Jeremy had recently been treated forbilharzia by the doctor and had suffered sim-ilar symptoms.

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Dr Chunge listened as I told him about myrecurring pattern of illness and fatigue, andordered a full blood-screening to check foranything out of the ordinary.

The UCI was looking for things whichmight have enhanced my performance,whereas Dr Chunge was looking forsomething that might be sabotaging it.

He came back to me within an hour.‘Chris, you’re riddled with bilharzia, just

like your brother.’Gulp.Quick, Batman. To the Wikipedia.

Bilharzia is a disease caused by parasitic worms of the

Schistosoma type. It may infect the urinary tract or

intestines. Symptoms may include: abdominal pains,

diarrhoea, bloody stool, or blood in the urine. In those

who have been infected a long time, liver damage, kid-

ney failure, infertility, or bladder cancer may occur. In

children it may cause poor growth and difficulty

learning.

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The disease is spread by contact with water that

contains the parasites. These parasites are released

from freshwater snails that have been infected. The

disease is especially common among children in de-

veloping countries as they are more likely to play in

infected water. Other high risk groups include farm-

ers, fishermen, and people using infected water for

their daily chores. Diagnosis is by finding the eggs of

the parasite in a person’s urine or stool. It can also be

confirmed by finding antibodies against the disease in

the blood.

In other words, on a trip home I had comein contact with infected water. It was hard tosay exactly on which trip that was as theywere annual post-season events and bilhar-zia can remain dormant for years. Where, isalso a mystery; it could have been while fish-ing, or mountain biking through stagnantwater – the possibilities are endless in Kenyawhere over twenty per cent of the populationis infected. Somewhere along the way thesetiny snails had issued their larvae that had

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pierced my skin, got into my system, trans-formed themselves into tiny flatworms andhad set up a community inside me, feedingoff my body. They were literally dining onmy blood.

In Europe, bilharzia is virtually unheardof, so every time I had complained of illnessor abnormal fatigue, doctors assumed fromthe symptoms that I had glandular fever ormononucleosis, as Americans call it. Notknowing to look for bilharzia, they hadn’tfound bilharzia.

Bilharzia had found me, though.The definition of the parasite, like many

medical definitions, sounds scarier than thereality. If you subtract the uncomfortableknowledge of having a parasite living insideyou, what remains is a reality that manypeople live with from day to day in ruralAfrica. Sometimes it is detected, often itisn’t.

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Unfortunately, for an endurance athlete,life is spent running the system down andthen recovering. The bilharzia caused me tofeel extraordinarily tired at times and left meopen to colds and infections. It was debilitat-ing enough to hinder my career but not badenough to set alarm bells ringing. The teamsaw the inconsistency and saw it as a part ofme. With help from those worms, it was.

The parasite gets into your system andpenetrates your organs. The more time it hasto colonize, the more difficult it is to get ridof, and it feeds off red blood cells, which for abike rider is a nightmare.

If you are lucky, and catch it early enoughthrough a screening, one dose of treatmentshould work. If not, you are into a war of at-trition, nuking the parasites every sixmonths, until finally you win and they’rebanished.

In November 2010 I had my first dose ofBiltricide, whereby I swallowed the large

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white pills and hoped for the best. The sideeffects are like an exaggeration of whatBiltricide sets out to cure. For the best partof a week I was pretty wiped out as the stuffflooded my system and went to war. After acouple of days, though, I was thinking aboutgetting back on the bike. There would be an-other blood test and maybe another dose ofBiltricide in around six months down theroad.

For now, though, I had a new year, a newhome and a new coach, as well as a matchingnumber of challenges:

1. Learn the tactics of race riding.

2. Improve technically.

3. Wipe out the worms.

I got lucky.I found the worms and I found Bobby Ju-

lich. The worms had been eating my

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potential and Bobby saw and believed in mypotential.

When I first started working with Bobby,he sent me out on some tough training ridesto push me to my limits and determine whatI was capable of. He was amazed with whathe saw and went straight to Rod with hisfindings. Same old, same old – the sorrowfulmystery of Chris Froome.

My training files belonged to a guy whoshould have been on the podium at the Tourde France, whereas my race results belongedto a guy who should have been on the couchwatching the Tour de France. It made nosense. Bobby thought my power meter had tohave been incorrectly calibrated. Rod knewthe story as he had been watching me forlonger than Bobby had.

‘No, the data is spot on. That’s Froomey.’So it began. Bobby set about enacting my

finishing school and I had some structure in

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my life now. Surely it had to translate intomy racing?

The first change would be less tinkeringand experimenting on my own. I had alwaysbeen fiddling with diet, equipment and bikeset-up. Even worse, I had experimented ran-domly with training, pushing myself waybeyond my limits just to see how far I couldgo. I enjoyed the suffering because I thoughtit would help. But it depleted my energylevels on long races and that in turn ate myconfidence.

Secondly, Bobby was frank about things. Ididn’t know how to race. My heroic chargeswhen people were least expecting them gaveme a couple of minutes in the spotlight butdidn’t produce results. Bobby set aboutteaching me how I could get the right wattsout at the right time. Videos, race reportsand stats – I learned to study them all differ-ently. I learned that the key parts of the racewere when people were holding back, and

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the highlights were when everybody was go-ing flat out.

Thirdly, my style and technique needed tobe sanded and polished. So I began doingPilates and started to respect rest a littlemore. I became the parasite, feeding onBobby’s racing experience.

I was still going towards the back door butI had a hand on the brake and my feet on theground, fighting the momentum of the exit.For the first time in a long while I felt excitedabout the road ahead.

A typical morning conversation withBobby went along the lines of:

‘Okay, we need to put in a good efforttoday, so keep the intervals at this level here.’

‘Can’t I do them at a higher level?’Bobby wanted me to back off. I always

wanted to train harder. Usually wecompromised.

The Tour of Murcia came and went. Overthree days there were no highlights for me

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other than a top twenty in the individualtime trial on the last day. Back in the Sky of-fices in Manchester I knew that nobody wassitting bolt upright wondering what washappening.

The Volta a Catalunya was better. Not thatmuch better, but I had one of those dayswhen I felt all the parts coming together. Ithappened during stage five when four of usbroke away and stayed ahead for most of theday. We were never going to get away with it,and when the gap was big enough so that itmade one of our number, Francesco Mas-ciarelli, the race leader on the road, the bigguns duly hauled us back in time for thesprint finish.

But I was learning about using my energyat the right times, and whether it was that orthe bilharzia, or both, my strength seemedmore evenly spread out over the week inCatalunya. On the last two stages I finishedin the main group.

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On to the Vuelta a Castilla y León. I beatAlberto Contador, a Tour de France winner,on a mountain finish on stage three and thencame in the top ten in the time trial. I fin-ished 14th overall, only about a minute and ahalf down on the winner. Today, somepeople still say that I had never done any-thing before my results during the 2011Vuelta a España, but I’ve always smiled atthat opinion. Were these insignificant res-ults? Not to me.

Still, I admit, there were no congratulatorytelegrams from Manchester, but I hoped thatsomebody was noticing. Bobby was offeringfavourable assessments and I began to day-dream about getting another contract.

I was a replacement rider for the Tour deRomandie. I can’t recall who pulled out but Igot a late summons. I’m sure they had erec-ted special crash barriers around the flowerbeds of local residents when they heard I was

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coming, but fortunately I managed not to laymyself out amidst the blossoms this time.

I climbed well. There were a couple of bigcategory-one climbs on stage one and I fin-ished 8th. The next day was lumpy and Icrossed the line just 2 seconds off the guywho won the stage. More importantly for me,and for the team, was that I was turning ingood performances. I was doing my pullsand being effective in the mountains; I wasearning my corn.

I took a few days off after Romandie,struggling with a chest infection. It was thesort of thing I had hoped would be banishedalong with the worms, but fortunately my re-cent performances (and whatever Bobby andRod were saying now about my potential)had been enough encouragement for DaveBrailsford to take a gamble on me. At theTour of California I would be team leaderand our designated GC rider.

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The team consisted of Kurt-Asle Arvesen,Alex Dowsett, Mathew Hayman, my old mateGreg Henderson, Jeremy Hunt, IanStannard, Ben Swift and myself – not a badgroup at all. As a bonus, I would get to roomwith Greg again, so it was harmonicas andkikoys all round.

Stage one at Lake Tahoe was designed forme. They had front-loaded the race withclimbs and there were good hauls up hillswith great names such as Spooner Junction,Brockway Summit and Emerald Bay. Bobbyhad a house close to Lake Tahoe and we didsome training rides up there to take a look atthe route.

However, the day before the race theweather moved in and it snowed heavily. Theorganizers still wanted the race to go aheadbut we would be starting on the lake shoreand riding straight up into the mountains allday. We were standing on the start line, kit-ted up and ready to go, and I remember

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being so heavily wrapped up that only myeyes were showing; I had a beanie on and abalaclava covering my nose and mouth. Inever remember being that cold before orsince, and although I’m stoical about all sortsof pain, I hate the cold.

I’d had about three or four shots of es-presso in the camper van before braving theoutside, when the organizers told us that therace had been called off.

It was a big relief, but by now we werealready on our bikes, buzzing on caffeine,and we had to get to the next hotel. I don’trecall whose idea it was that we should rideas far as we could towards our hotel, with theoption of jumping into the camper van if itgot really bad. I don’t recall it, so I don’tknow where to direct my bitterness.

We did about half an hour on icy, sleetyroads, and then it started raining hard too. Itwas freezing, and despite heavy winds andmore snow, we just kept going.

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Only the Team Sky riders had opted forthis madness. We were the only ones outthere like dogs in the rain. Marginal gains? Idon’t think so!

After an hour I got into the camper van,with snow all over my face. I was shiveringand numb beyond pain although I knew thatthe pain would come when the numbness lif-ted. I had to dry off as best as I could withtowels and then wait until we reached thehotel.

The race was a big deal to me. It would bethe first time, and maybe the last time, thatthe team would ride for me. I went to thesauna in the hotel with a couple of the guysto sweat out whatever hadn’t been sweatedout on our failed attempt at a training ridethrough the blizzard.

I had come to California confident andlooking forward to it, but after the disaster ofthe snow-and-sauna day I had a cough thatstarted small but grew. I told Bobby that I

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wasn’t feeling quite right; Bobby told me Iwould be fine. ‘Training has been good,’ hesaid. And he was right. I planned to repro-duce those numbers on the mountains stagesin California.

The race went okay at first. I took someantibiotics and got through the first couple ofstages, which were made for sprinters. Wewon them both – Ben Swift one day and thenGreg the next. All was good and I was 33rdon GC, just 10 seconds off the race leader’sjersey, which Greg wore.

The next day was a summit finish on Si-erra Road and my kind of stage. I finished 2minutes 53 seconds behind the stage winner,and was now nearly 3 minutes behind on GC,even though I had moved up to 17th place.

‘Oh well,’ I thought. We had finished thatevening in the town of Modesto. The Americ-an poet Robert Frost was born just about anhour up the road in San Francisco. He fam-ously wrote about the woods being lovely,

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dark and deep, and how he has promises tokeep, and miles to go, before he sleeps. Sodid I. Frost also said that what he hadlearned about life could be summed up inthree words: ‘It goes on.’

So do stage races. I was bruised but therace went on, and I kept on.

I felt no better but hung in there. I did apoor time trial on stage six, where I got itwrong tactically. Although I had known therewas a time trial coming I had spent the pre-vious day riding about 200 kilometres in abreakaway. I time-trialled 1 minute 39seconds off the winner but stayed 17th onGC, which sounded a lot better than it was,as the Tour of California was the week afterthe Giro and many of the top riders wereeither tired or away.

I had hoped for better.On stage seven, the ride to Mount Baldy

promised more. The stage started with atough climb only 10 kilometres into the race,

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and the plan was for me to go into the break-away on that first climb. It wasn’t a top-secret strategy – everyone knew there wasgoing to be a breakaway of the really strongguys who were trying to climb the GC ladder.That was the breakaway to be in.

The breakaway formed without me. Swifty,a gentleman and selfless rider, worked like adog to pull me across the gap. I had the lux-ury of sitting on his wheel, and once there hepeeled off and dropped back to the bunch,job done.

The pace was rattling with 3 kilometresleft to the top of the climb and everybodywas pushing it. I stayed in the break but Iwas on my limit just to be there, and I knewthat I wasn’t going to do any damage. Wewere approaching the summit when I real-ized that I was not going to be able to staywith them at all.

I was blown off. Soon the peloton cameand swallowed me. Ben and the rest of my

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teammates tried to pretend it wasn’t an is-sue, but I could feel their disappointment,and all the more acutely because I’d been intheir position so many times before.

Before I knew it, I was slipping backthrough the peloton. GC leader? I couldn’teven stay in the peloton! I tried really hard tohang in there, and to save some face. But Icouldn’t.

I ended up in the gruppetto. And soon Iwas barely hanging on to their tails. Over thetop of a climb, I was just managing to staywith them and I knew that if I dropped offthem I would be out of the race entirely.

I think that day was one of the hardestdays I’ve ever had on a bike. I rememberfighting to be with the gruppetto, hanging onwith my fingernails. Mentally, it was such aknock for me. I came in 118th of 126 finish-ers and lost 32 minutes. I wrote in my racediary that night: ‘Felt okay before the raceand went in the break up the first climb but

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blew my tits off, couldn’t even get into thepeloton and ended up in the gruppetto 30minutes down.’

There was nothing else to be said.A year previously Team Sky had chosen

me for the Giro. This year I hadn’t made thatcut but I had been given this chance to be theGC leader in California. The guys hadworked for me as well as I could havewished, but I had failed. I had been given mychance and had blown it.

I didn’t feel myself but I could imaginethat evening some people in Manchester tak-ing calls or going online: ‘Thirty-twominutes. That’s Froomey for you.’

After California I knew I wasn’t a realisticchoice for the Tour de France and I was backto being anxious over whether I would get acontract for the following season. The Tourde Suisse might have helped. Its nine stagesbegan in Lugano in mid June with an indi-vidual time trial on day one and day nine.

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I time-trialled well on both of those stages,but in between, my graph was basically thestory of my life: good rides recognized onlyby those who read the small print, contrastedwith bad rides that screamed for attentionand could be picked up on anothercontinent.

I was 11th in the prologue and decent inthe mountains the following day when Maur-icio Soler, my old crash-prone colleaguefrom Barloworld, took the win.

And then on stage three I lost 10 minutes,dropping from 9th on GC to 30th. It was justmy good fortune that Dave Brailsford, notingmy respectable results on the first two days,flew out to be in the team car for day threewhen I attacked much too soon and rode likea novice. He saw me drop like a stone fromthe lead group. ‘Well, that’s Froomey, isn’tit?’

With that, my confidence flew out the win-dow. Though it was a bad day, I’ll never

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forget how my teammate Dario Cioni nursedme through the stage. He was so strong thatday but he stayed with me, encouraged me inthat calm way of his, and without him, 10minutes would have been 15.

But I had no energy and over the next fewstages I slowly dropped down the GC. I knewthat riding a good overall position was nolonger on the cards, so I looked for oppor-tunities to get a stage result in the days tocome.

I was offered some perspective whenMauricio Soler came off his bike on stage sixat high speed. He hit a spectator and then asolid fence, head first. He suffered a frac-tured skull, a cerebral oedema and other in-juries. They placed him in an induced comathat night, and although he recovered, henever raced again.

Over the last three days I began to feelmore comfortable. I finished 9th on the timetrial on the final day and left Switzerland

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wishing that the race had another ten days torun.

For the Tour de France, I opted not to sit andwatch it on TV and depress myself. It goeson, I thought to myself again, and there wasstill one last shot at redemption – Bobby andI regrouped and he pointed me towards theVuelta a España.

I kept my head down, focused on my train-ing and watched everything that I ate.

I rode up into the mountains every day,occasionally with Bobby in tow on a scooter,overseeing some of the more specific inter-vals he had set for me.

I rolled straight on to the Tour of Poland. Iwas feeling good physically now, and hadlost some weight (I was down five kilos forthe summer). Although I felt strong, Icouldn’t help noticing that there weren’t anyPolish Alps.

The team didn’t seem to be using me righthere.

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But I had no choices – I hadn’t earnedchoices. The team wanted me to go in all theearly breakaways and be the go-to guy on flatstages. I would end up sitting on the front forlong pulls, doing hard labour. Later, I wouldmiss out on the key breakaways.

I kept quiet, and did my job, but I couldn’thelp feeling that this wasn’t for me.

I remember speaking to Bobby at the endof the Tour of Poland. He was frank.

‘Listen, Chris, it’s going to be difficult toget you into the Vuelta. There are other guysthat they want to take, but I’m trying to con-vince them to put you in. It’s between youand Lars Petter Nordhaug.’

Lars Petter was in his contract year too.He’d ridden the Giro earlier in the year,whereas I hadn’t.

I spoke to Alex Carera, my agent, and itwas a back-to-the-wall talk.

‘Alex, I don’t know if I’m going to get intothe Vuelta. We need to start talking to teams

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now to see what my options are. Worst-casescenario, we can use those offers to try andset a benchmark for Sky, in case they want todecrease the salary I am on.’

At this point I was thinking that the de-crease in salary might be my best possibleoption. Any time Alex called Dave Brailsfordto talk about my future, Alex was hearing alot of ‘hmmmmms’

and some ‘umming’and a bit of ‘ahhing’.Alex wanted to play hardball but Dave

didn’t want to play anything. The best I washoping for was that they would cut my wageto €60,000 or €70,000 a year and keep meas a cheap and cheerful adornment so that Iwould get another shot at proving myself.Surely they looked at the training numbersuploaded to them every day? Surely theycould see something in me? On my gooddays, I was doing what barely anybody elsein the team could do. On my bad days,

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unfortunately, the same could be said. Icould still live in Monaco on €65,000. Well,just about.

Later, Alex would show me texts he hadbeen getting from Dave. Things were worsethan I’d thought: ‘What has Chris done allyear? He’s done nothing,’ and ‘We don’tknow if we’re going to keep Chris.’

At the end of the day, I was a commodityand this was the corporate world. If you’renot performing, or if you don’t deliver,they’re going to cut you and move on,without looking back. Adios.

I saw it with other guys on the team. Guyswho I thought were pretty good riders andreally good teammates would get cut fromteams all the time. 2011 wasn’t going particu-larly well for the team in general and therewas a rumour that there would be a lot ofbloodletting before 2012.

It is quite cut-throat in that sense. In thecocoon of the bus and the hotel there is this

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manufactured feeling of ‘We’re all friends,and we’re all in this together, we are almost afamily,’ that kind of thing. But there is a verythin line, probably a blue one, between be-coming a made guy in the family and beingkicked out of the family.

Lars Petter finished 16th on the Tour ofPoland. I came 85th. It’s true – sometimesyou don’t need a weatherman to tell youwhich way the wind is going to blow.

I got home the Monday evening after Po-land, a little delicate from the night before. Ihad a short recovery ride, just an easy hourto get some air into my lungs. The next dayBobby called, with bad news I assumed.

‘Chris, you’re going to the Vuelta. Lars Pet-ter has gotten ill. He’s in bed with a bad fluand he’s on antibiotics now. They’re not go-ing to take a chance with him so they’re tak-ing you instead. You’re in.’

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It was that close. Scarily close. But Bobbyand I started making new plans, big plans:Vuelta plans.

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17

2011: Vuelta a España

Stage One: Another Fine Mess

The pre-race plan was distributed.‘Objective: GC with Bradley. TTT is an

important kick-off for the team. Kurt and Ianwill take care of Bradley and his positioningon the easier days. Dario and Thomas willgive Brad protection on all the mountain fin-ishes and will help Bradley with his position-ing. Xabier, Morris and Froome will do theirbest to survive as long as possible and willfetch bottles etc. Then in the sprint stages,CJ is our sprinter.’

Okay – I certainly wasn’t coming in as thehigh-mountains domestique that I’d hopedto be. I was going to have to work extra hard;

I wasn’t going to neglect my bottle duties butI decided I was going to be there in themountains when Bradley needed me. I hadto be.

Away we went, tilting at windmills. Bradwas Don Quixote and in my head I was hisSancho Panza, at least when we were in themountains, which were my red-ringed daysof heavy work. We were rooming together,which was interesting because we are not agood mix. Brad is shy and reserved withpeople and I am much the same, whichmeans we don’t bring the best out of eachother. Actually, we don’t bring anything outof each other. It was a quiet room and, asSancho Panza tells the Don, a closed mouthcatches no flies.

It was especially quiet on the evening ofthe first day after the time trial which, if I’mbeing frank about it, we messed up.

Bobby J had been in charge. Team timetrials are all about the group dynamic. Your

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time is taken from the fifth man home in ateam of nine so you have to stay together foras long as you can and at least five have to betogether at the finish. The guy doing a pullon the front has to maintain a certain speedand as soon as it drops, he moves aside to letthe next guy through.

Bobby was nervous, but we all were, andmaybe we overthought it. This was beach-front, Benidorm, during heatwave time, andwe had our time-trial suits and helmets on aswe did about three laps of the circuit ataround eighty to ninety per cent beforehand,working out who would pull and where. Wewere just making ourselves tired.

The course started off up a climb of about3 kilometres, which made it quite tricky. Wedidn’t want to drop any guys too early but CJSutton is a sprinter and Stannard is a big lad.If they lost contact on the climb, they couldstruggle to finish inside the time limit. Weneeded to keep them with us, so that they

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would be able to do some big pulls after theclimb.

The greater danger is the one you don’t ex-pect. Just a kilometre in, Kurt-Asle Arvesenand Xabier Zandio overlapped wheels andcrashed. We lost Kurt, and Xabier was heldup and fell behind, so we had a split. Werode conservatively, hoping the others wouldcome back to us.

On the descent we let Brad, our best timetrialler, pull us on his own so that he couldpick his own lines and wouldn’t have to peeloff while navigating one of the four round-abouts before joining the beach road. In ret-rospect, that wasn’t the best thing to do – itwas too conservative. On a descent you canmake up a lot of time if you are interchan-ging the lead because it’s really easy for theguys on the wheels and quite hard for theguy on the front taking all the wind. Asstrong as Brad was, his leading the entiredescent didn’t help our time. We got to the

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bottom and felt we really had to dig in deep.We did and immediately lost a couple moreguys off the back.

With 5 kilometres to go there was acommunications mix-up. We were on the flatnow, passing through a town and riding afull-out time trial. CJ, our sprinter, had satup as his race was done. At the same time,Xabier, who had pulled himself back to therest of us, had done a big turn on the frontand then sat up, which left just four of us.This spelt disaster and the radio had to tellXabier the bad news: ‘You have to get backon, Xabier. Vamos!’

He did a huge effort to get back on but bythe finish our pace line was breaking up allover the place. We finished 20th of twenty-two teams, 42 seconds off the winning time.Footon, who were a second behind us, andAndalucia, who were even further back, werethe only teams with worse times.

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It was just one bad day. Nobody said muchafterwards and we put on brave faces – wehad lost 42 seconds but over three weeksthat shouldn’t matter too much on the GC.

We hurt though for Bobby, who had put alot into this, and for Brad, who had comeback from his broken collarbone to try to sal-vage something from the season.

One other thing that I recall from aroundthis period was that I had been looking atvideos of time trials. I had said to Bobby thatI didn’t feel my racing position was aggress-ive enough – I felt comfortable but too highup on the front and was taking too muchwind.

Bobby said, ‘Okay, let’s give it a go,’ and weliterally took two whole spacers out of thehandlebar, dropping it by about a centimetreand a half. This was a huge difference and itfelt fantastic. It felt fast and it felt like,without compromising the power, I had

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adopted a position that was far more ag-gressive and that my back was flat.

I am a man of constant marginal gains.

Stage Two: Fuhgeddaboudit

We talked together on the bus in themorning.

Dave B said, ‘Yesterday is yesterday, soforget about it, the real race starts today.Forty-two seconds in the mountains is noth-ing, don’t worry about it. Get on with therace now.’

I nodded.I needed to impress the team here. In my

mind I wanted it to be like one of the stagesback in Murcia where I had been the last guywith Brad over all the mountains. That wasthe job I wanted to do again; to show them Icould be useful up there. A high-mountainsdomestique was what I wanted to be – fornow.

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Alex had told me that Jonathan Vaughtersat Garmin had been on to him wonderingabout my availability for next year. So therewas a worst-case fall back if I needed one butI had a chance here to persuade Dave to keepme at Team Sky, even if it was for lessmoney.

I could reschedule the daydreams. I couldsurvive. ‘It goes on.’ There would be otherdays and if I did well here maybe I could goto the Tour the next year as a high-classequipiér. If I got a chance, maybe then Icould go for a stage myself, and do the sort ofthing that David Moncoutié would do – getin the early breakaways that survive to themountaintop finishes. Not being a GC rider, Iwould not be a threat to anyone and wouldstay under the radar. They would let me goand then one of those days I would win astage.

That would be enough.

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For now though I was the ninth man onthe team. I knew Thomas Löfkvist was in-tending to be the last man with Brad in themountains. I would do what I was told to do.I thought the heat was going to be a factor:Thomas grew up in Scandinavia and I grewup in Africa. But maybe I was clutching atstraws.

Since breaking his collarbone, this wasBrad’s first day of real racing. He would beriding gingerly so I needed to mind him.There would be a sprint at the end so I alsoneeded to see if I could get CJ into position.

Once we started, the racing was on the flatand there were crosswinds so the job wasjust to protect Brad. Kurt was captain on theroad and he called the pulls according to thetactics we had laid out that morning on thebus. I could do a long pull if needed. Theycertainly weren’t saving me for later – theyweren’t sure where I would be later.

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The plan was simple and it worked. Wehad a good day and kept Brad buoyant in theGC. CJ timed his sprint perfectly and wonthe stage.

Yesterday? Hey, fuhgeddaboudit. It’s abike race. It goes on.

Stage Three: Hurt Locker

Tougher than we thought – days with lesser-category mountains sometimes turn out thatway. Some people hung back waiting for thebig climbs, while others wanted to make apoint. The heat also hurt us, although wewere not alone – the sun seemed to messwith my SRM power meter, which meantthat mine read four degrees at one point.

We had lined up proceedings for Brad go-ing up the final category-three climb. Tho-mas Löfkvist had done a long pull on theearlier slopes then pulled off. I felt like Imight blow a kilometre from the top but Ilooked around and everybody else also

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seemed to be struggling. Good. I endure painbetter if everybody is suffering; you drawmorale from wherever you find it.

I led Brad over the line in the lead group: Iwas 12th, he was 13th on the same time. Mis-sion accomplished.

We did well and in my mind I had proveda point in my private mission to show I couldbe Brad’s main man when the going gottough. I hung in there till the end.

Tomorrow was the Sierra Nevada.

Stage Four: Starsky and Hutch

The first uphill finish to the Sierra Nevadawas to take place in the afternoon: 2,112metres in height, 39-degree heat, with 23kilometres of ascending. One long haul.

We followed the wheels and a group offorty broke off as we approached the moun-tain. With 7 kilometres to go there was aminor breakaway but I stayed close to Brad –we were becoming a duo.

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Daniel Moreno and Chris Anker Sørensonhad gone away in the break a little bit earlier,and they stayed away. For me it was the firstmountaintop finish where I alone had beenwith Brad. I had stayed with him and beenon the front at times to keep things undercontrol, but, most significantly, I was nowthe only guy left with him.

We finished together in the bunch behindMoreno, Sørenson and Daniel Martin. I wasstill on duty right to the end.

I got some words of praise; in my ownmind I was being promoted to the job of lastguy with Brad.

The adrenaline, the excitement and thebuzz – it was all running through me forhours afterwards.

Stage Five: Darkness, My Old Friend

We slept the night before at the hotel up inthe Sierra Nevada. A lot of people come hereto do altitude training, where the land is

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barren and dark volcanic earth is all around.I didn’t sleep very well.

I felt terrible most of the day and any ef-fort to move up in the peloton hurt. At onepoint I dropped back to the team car to col-lect bottles and ice and then pushed back uphard through the peloton with them. I tooknine bottles: seven in my jersey and two onthe bike – one for each rider.

Over the last 50 kilometres I seemed tofeel comparatively better. This is a theme Inotice. When I’m going well, the start of thestage seems to be the hardest part. I struggleto shake that sluggish feeling but towards theend of the race, particularly in the last 50kilometres of a 217-kilometre stage, I’mstarting to feel good again. I’ve flushed mylegs from the hurt of the day before.

I felt very much at ease as we went up thelast category-two climb. The final kick to theend was sharp and steep, less than a coupleof kilometres up a pavé road to the finish. I

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stayed with Brad, helping to close any gapsopening up in front of him in the madscramble up the harsh gradient to the finishline.

At the finish Brad nodded in my direction,a hint of a thin smile. It meant ‘thank you’,but that’s about as chatty as we got. In theroom when we turned out the lights at nightwe said, ‘Goodnight now.’ In the morningwhen we got up we said, ‘Morning.’

That was it, really. No hostility, just longminutes of silence.

From the beginning – and I did find this alittle bit odd – we wouldn’t talk about therace much. Any discussion we did have feltslightly strange. I remember going to talk tosome of my teammates about it, saying, ‘It’sreally weird in the room with Brad – if I sayanything, he’ll just say “yeah” or somethingin agreement, and that will be the end of it,there won’t be any further discussion.’

Stage Six: The Hangover

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This was the hardest day so far. I was sorefrom start to finish and badly positioned formost of the stage. I knew in future I wouldhave to be further forward when it got linedout like it did.

Sometimes when the peloton was strungout and I was near the back of the line,Steven de Jongh’s voice would crackle on theradio:

‘Chris, you are too far back now, you needto move up.’

My legs were okay over the last climb, acategory two, but the peloton started split-ting on the downhill, which put us in the redagain to close it. Although the stage wasn’t amountaintop finish, it was a long 200-kilo-metre haul in the heat, and the SierraNevada and the sleepless night on top of itwere catching up with me now. Two daysafter a really big effort is usually when I paythe price. That day was no exception.

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Brad and I finished in the group 23seconds behind Peter Sagan, the stagewinner.

We lost Kurt-Asle Arvesen. He had a badcrash the previous day after colliding with aspectator at high speed. Today his body wasspent and bandages and dressings could onlydo so much to plug the seeping energy fromhis skinless limbs. CJ wasn’t feeling greateither. And tomorrow looked like it was go-ing to be dull.

Stage Seven: The Cure

I woke up feeling much, much better. Therewas a relaxed start from the peloton too,which helped. The race kicked off towardsthe end in the crosswinds, but it was only 25kilometres and there were no major dramasapart from a messy crash in the final stretchthat we luckily avoided. It was a good day allround.

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This meant there was no change in the GCpositions for Brad and me: I was 21st andBrad was 22nd. It had turned out to be a nicerecovery day before tomorrow’s trek fromSan Lorenzo de El Escorial, which promisedto be a tough day of climbing.

Stage Eight: Crash Froome, the Return

I was using the compact osymetric chain-rings for the stage, which meant that no SRMstats other than my heart rate and speedwould be recorded. I would need the lightergears when the gradients reached close totwenty per cent later on.

There was a crash halfway through thestage, but we didn’t escape it this time. Therewere winds again and the bunch was allcrammed up on the left. Someone in front ofme braked too hard, or I hadn’t reactedquickly enough, and I went into their backwheel and subsequently off the side of theroad. There was a small drop which sent me

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tumbling off into a ditch of brown desert-likesand. After a soft landing I rolled on to someprickly shrubbery but my ego hurt more thananything, as I had to clamber back up and re-join the race.

I tried to hold something back during thestage, and not to go too deep while maintain-ing position in the front group. Bobby’s les-sons were getting through to me. Even in thefinal shakedown I stayed close to Brad, andwhen it kicked off I rolled at his tempo to theline. We didn’t go too far into the red, whichmeant another good day. There would behigher mountains tomorrow.

Stage Nine: Szrekkie for Ever After

A massive day! I punctured on the run-up tothe final climb, just as the race was hottingup. When I changed the wheel the new onehad the magnet attached at a different pointso I had no speed-readings on the finalclimb.

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If you’re missing the speed, you’re missingthe distance too. That is not so crippling anissue on the last climb as when it happensearlier in the day, but still it made me edgy. Ijust don’t like not having all the data.

Luckily after my puncture the peloton hadstarted gradually up the climb so it was notthe usual helter-skelter I had expected. Asthe climb ascended, so too did the tempo un-til we met the crosswinds with 4 or 5 kilo-metres to go.

We hit a ribbon of flatness on La Covatilla,which was a relief after climbing for so longbut the reprieve was only for about a kilo-metre and a half. Then there would be a3-kilometre hustle to the finish. By now thefront group had whittled to twenty and Bradand I moved near the front. We were theonly Sky riders up there.

I could feel a really strong wind from theright, and when nobody wanted to take

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responsibility for working, the opportunemoment presented itself.

‘This is it,’ I thought. ‘I’m not just going topull normally and wait for someone to at-tack. I’m going to pull with everything I have.Let’s go.’

The wind from the right meant that every-one was riding over on the left-hand side ofthe road, trying to get some shelter from theguy just to their right. That created a diagon-al line, or a diagonal echelon. The guys onthe edge of the road were almost in a line be-hind each other, coming close to riding offthe edge.

The guy at the front, who was me, was in atough position but I exploited the hand Ihad. I moved just two feet from the edge ofthe left side of the road. That space of twofeet offered shelter to one rider only: Brad.His front wheel was side by side with myback wheel and nobody could get shelterfrom Brad as there was no room. They would

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have to ride directly behind him. It was aperfect crosswind scenario and I pushedreally hard. I squeezed the watts higher, upover my threshold.

Depending on what I have ridden before-hand, I know I can push for half an hour on amountain at, or at least close to, mythreshold. Behind Brad, the fielddisintegrated.

When we got to where the road climbed upagain and I had pulled for the flat section, Iknew my job was done. There was no one leftapart from four guys, including Brad. Ipulled off, expecting the four to rush pastme, continuing their battle for the summit.But no – they seemed to slow down, showingno sign of wanting to maintain the tempo.They almost seemed to have stopped andwere just looking at each other. I realizedthey must all be pretty tired because no onewas taking it up.

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So I pushed on again, back to those fourguys. As I got to the rear wheel of the fourthrider, Brad took it up, and got on the front.The wind was still coming from the right butnow we were going uphill again. Brad put itright in the gutter. I don’t think he knew thatI was back on; he’d seen me pull off and Ihad done my turn. Now I was clinging on to5th.

I wasn’t thinking about the GC. I had donea great job today and this was bonus territ-ory; I wasn’t completely spent. I wanted toget back to Brad to be able to say to him,‘Well, let’s ride again a bit more like we justdid,’ but Brad had taken it up. He was intime-trial mode, going hard, and I was nowpinned to the back on the edge of the road,trying to steal any sliver of shelter from therider in front of me, but there was not muchshelter to be had.

Getting to the last kilometre, the metalbarriers appeared at the edge of the road. I

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saw the first barrier at the last second andpulled out, just missing it. I pushed to getback on the wheel ahead of me again, turn-ing myself inside out with effort, myshoulders almost touching the hoods of myhandlebars. And then, boom! It was sprinttime. Daniel Martin won the sprint, BaukeMollema was 2nd and Juanjo Cobo was 3rd.Brad and I were 4th and 5th. Race leaderJoaquim Rodríguez, meanwhile, finished 50seconds off.

Brad and I moved up to 13th and 14th inthe GC and that night I knew things hadchanged. This was probably the best dayTeam Sky had experienced since we hit themountains. I got it right in the crosswindsand we blew the field to pieces.

Steven de Jongh, our race director, cameand patted me on the back.

‘Where did that come from, Froomester?Great ride, man.’

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He told me that I had basically put Bradleyback in the race and that my pull on the frontblew away the contenders like seed heads offa dandelion.

I had matched my training numbers andadded some grown-up thinking on the road.

At last.I went to see Stefan Szrek, the Belgian

soigneur who was giving me post-race mas-sages over the three weeks. As I walked inthe door I could see it on Szrekkie’s face: hisbeaming smile that said, ‘Good job’. Hedidn’t need words. He was just shaking hishead, smiling and laughing. I grinned back athim.

I always have a good chat with Szrekkiewhenever I am on his table. He sticks on thelatest music he has downloaded, usuallyhouse or trance, and massages me while he ishalf dancing with a big grin on his face. He’sgreat company: he speaks English with avery Flemish accent and sometimes he’ll

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stick his Flemish words into the middle of asentence just to keep you guessing.

For those three weeks I had him all to my-self, which meant I didn’t have to queue for amassage. However, as he was the onlysoigneur with just one rider to massage, hehad other jobs to do. These included doingeverybody’s laundry and being responsiblefor matters at the finish line, such as givingus our recovery drinks and producing clothesfor anybody who needed to go to the podium.He would also escort riders to the changingcamper or go to anti-doping with them. Thiswas the stress of Szrekkie’s life as far as theVuelta went, and it kept him in a state ofconstant panic.

I thought I had problems?

Stage Ten: The Pain Mutiny

Time-trial day: 47 pounding kilometresaround lovely Salamanca. Or Bradley’s play-ground, as Steven de Jongh said.

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The plan for the day was clear. Brad wouldbe going flat out and the stage would bebetween him, Tony Martin and Fabian Can-cellara. The rest of us would fight for scraps.Well, I would. In a nod to my new statuswithin the team, I was allowed to go flat outtoo, whereas everybody else would be ridingwithin themselves. It was time trial today,and a rest day tomorrow. The team could re-charge the batteries.

When we went out to look at the time-trialcourse I took headphones and music alongwith me. I listened to the beats and focusedon the route, concluding that I really likedthe look of it. It wasn’t pan-flat but rolling,which was perfect for me.

Brad and I were using osymetric chain-rings. When you start off with them it feels abit odd. It isn’t a circle that your pedalstrokes are forming any more but more oval-shaped. However, after one long ride the newmovement seems very natural.

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I enjoy the feeling when I stand up on thepedals; it feels like I can really push and thatthe power coming out would get me up anymountain. For me it feels right, and morenatural than pedalling in perfect circles withevery revolution of the pedals. Other peoplesay there is no difference: no logic to thatfeeling, and no science – that it’s a mechan-ical placebo. Well, it works for me.

I think there is particularly more to gainon the osymetric chainring when the road isgoing uphill. The angles seem better and youcan feel more of a difference as you pedal.You give a little extra force on the uphill, andthen on the downhills you ease up more thanyou normally would. That’s the way I’ve al-ways liked to ride, anyway.

So the course felt right in that sense. AndBobby was always good on time trials. Hewould speak in terms of letting a carpet un-roll. You are unrolling it. It starts off big andas it unrolls it gets faster and faster, right to

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the end. That’s how I needed to think of myeffort and my energy – the carpet. I neededto get it going, get it going, to build up themomentum. As it is getting smaller andsmaller, it is getting faster and faster. Whenit’s completed unrolled, that’s when my raceis done.

I do the same with my gearing. I start offpossibly pushing with a heavier gear butkeeping the power up there and as I tire to-wards the end I make it easier for myself us-ing the lighter gears. I always imagine thisconcept of the carpet rolling out.

Years ago in my South African days, Rob-bie had come up with some time-triallingrules. Typically I would go out too hard andthen die. So we decided that for the first tenper cent of any time trial (say it was 40 kilo-metres, well then, for the first 4 kilometres) Iwould go at below my threshold. I would ba-sically make an effort to go easier than I

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should be going so as not to put myself in thered too early.

Today, for the first 3 or 4 kilometres of thetime trial, I was looking at my power meterand making sure that I was saving some en-ergy, which is hard to do with all the adren-aline and excitement. On days like this, whenI am full of confidence and desire, I run thedanger of going flat out too early. I won’trealize the mistake until ten minutes in whenI feel barbecued.

I felt I was holding a little back but theSRM was confusing. It had to be wrong. Mybody thought I was not going hard enoughand my head thought I was maybe losingtime. After about 2 or 3 minutes of this in-ternal debate I put an end to it.

‘Okay, I’m not going to look at the meterany more. It’s not reading correctly today. Ihaven’t calibrated it right.’

I continued riding and hit a heavier gear.The carpet started unrolling. It was at a good

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lick and I was riding on feeling and instinctnow in my new lower flat-back position. Go.

Brad came off the ramp 4 minutes after Idid. By all accounts he looked as if he hadbeen shot out of a rocket launcher. At thefirst intermediate checkpoint after 13.3 kilo-metres of road he was 1 second ahead ofTony Martin, who had set the landmark timefor the day, 55 minutes and 54 seconds. Myown time was 25 seconds off Martin’s pace atthat point.

By the 30-kilometre time check though,Brad was feeling the pain. He was now 19seconds behind Tony Martin; meanwhile, Iwas 1 second behind Brad and gettingstronger.

Not long after the second time check,however, I could feel the tiredness invadingme. Suddenly I wanted the comfort of mypower meter again. I looked down and couldsee I was hurting. Aha, maybe it was rightnow – it had fixed itself!

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My brain will tell me anything in times likethis.

I was going to try to hold but I was feelingrough. Everything was screaming at me nowto slow down. Just a little bit. Slow down. Iwould try to hold these numbers though tokeep the average.

Marcus Ljungqvist, our director sportif,was now in my ear on the radio. There wereno details, just encouragement: ‘Great ride,Froomey. Keep it going, Froomey. That’s it,you’re smoking this TT. Brilliant. Very good.’

I had a couple of energy gels tucked up myshorts and took them. The sweetness gaveme a quick shot of revival but after a whilemy legs were talking treason again. I couldhear them. You can start to ease off now,boss. You have done the work. You reallyhave. You are almost there. Just ease a little.It won’t hurt you. Go on. You have done it.You are spent. You need to take it easy.Everybody is impressed by what you have

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done. Listen to Marcus. ‘Great ride,’ he says.You can relax a little bit now. No need tobeat yourself up any more.

Then the counter-argument came blaringfrom my brain. Shut up! Rubbish! Time tri-als are won or lost by seconds. A game ofinches. Legs, you should know that by now.Every second we can get, we keep clawingat it. There’s not a chance I’m going to letyou slow down. We need to get a contract.

I got back up to speed again. Then I sawthe numbers dipping. No. No. Fight. Fight.Back up again.

Coming in through the cobbled streetsback into Salamanca, I could see the town inthe distance full of big buildings whichlooked welcoming as I got closer. There is acharm about the town and I love the place, Ireally do. All the more so because comingthrough now I knew that this was the end. Igot out of the saddle and pushed a bitharder. Down in the saddle again and now

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the finish line was in sight through an oldarchway. Yes. Over the finish line into acourtyard.

I was hollow; as empty as I could be. All ofme was out there on the road but I knew thatit was a really good time. I was right: it cameup as 2nd behind Tony Martin, who hadbeen around a minute faster than me. Now Ihad to sit and wait for a lot of other guys tocome through.

Tony Martin. I didn’t count Tony Martin.This was his playground as well as Bradley’s,but Tony wouldn’t challenge on the GC.Looking at the GC, I thought, ‘Okay, I am thesecond-best time trialist at the moment. I amvery happy with that. We will see who doeswhat from here on.’

I sat with Szrekkie for a few seconds at thefinish. He put a towel around me and handedme a bottle as I sat there on the top tube ofthe bike, just waiting. Every couple ofminutes he laughed with approval and

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patted me on the back. ‘Well done, boy, grotverdomme.’ I started to feel nervous. Aroundme people were talking about Brad’s timeand there were flashes of his progress afterthe second check. I heard the figures. Holdon, that time was down on mine.

Okay. I struggled to get to the end. MaybeBrad would make the time up there? As hewas coming closer I was making the calcula-tions in my head. I saw it suddenly – Bradwasn’t going to do a better time than me. Ialmost felt scared. This was going to upsetpeople; this wasn’t the plan. And as I knewall too well, in this team we lived and died bythe plan. Now I had gone and beaten Brad. Itwas as if I had coldly dropped him on amountain pass, and this could be seen as asin, instead of a good thing.

I was quite worried and turned toSzrekkie. The look on his face said it all:‘Ooh, you’re in trouble now!’

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He gave a half-sheepish sort of laugh,which was not reassuring.

As Brad came over the line, Szrekkie dis-appeared to go and catch him and sort himout. I looked around.

This might not be so good. It could causeproblems. This was not the position I wantedto be in.

One of the chaperones from the race or-ganizers ambled over to me and said that Ihad to go on the podium.

I looked at him blankly. Why would I haveto go to the podium? I hadn’t won the stage.Maybe I was the most aggressive rider or hadI won some gimmicky award?

‘No,’ he replied. ‘You are the leader of therace. Leader of GC. You’ve got the red jersey.’

Wow.This was a lot to take in. It was like I had

been zoomed out from where I was to thisnew place. I was scared, happy and trying tomake sense of it. It was dawning on me now

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that I would be the leader if Brad didn’t do it.He was in front of me at the start of the day,but not any more. I had seen the other GCcontenders’ times.

I was ten days into a Grand Tour, it was arest day tomorrow and I was leading therace. This could not be happening: I was theleader of a Grand Tour! I would have the jer-sey for one day at least, which was more thanI could have ever hoped for from this race.

Did this mean I might be able to get acontract?

That was all I had been thinking about inthe last 7 or 8 kilometres on the long stretchof road where I could see the tar and Sala-manca in the distance. All the time when Iwas really hurting, really struggling to find itin me to keep maintaining that kind ofspeed, I was thinking of the telephone callswith Alex and Bobby. I thought of Bobbyasking about my contract and Alex telling me

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again and again that Sky just didn’t want tosay anything.

After this, would they want to keep me? Iremember looking at Salamanca and think-ing that today I could make sure they gaveme a contract. I was not slowing down; Iwanted an answer. I wanted to make up theirminds for them with the time trial. Thatreally drove me over the last few kilometres.

I had to stay around afterwards for the po-dium stuff, and tried to remind myself thatthis might never happen again. I should justbe happy and enjoy it.

For some reason they pulled Bradley intothe changing-room van too, where the podi-um riders get dressed into a set of clean kit.‘Why am I here?’ he asked. He was gettingquite grumpy about it and I didn’t blamehim. Why had he been pulled in here? Hecontinued to ask but no answers came andthe chaperone looked confused as I gazedacross from where I was sitting in the van. I

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was embarrassed really. What could I say? Iftruth be told, I was still a bit scared. I justwanted a contract.

They eventually said to Brad, ‘Okay, youdon’t need to be here. Just Chris.’

Sensitive. Thanks.I held my breath, wondering what would

happen now. Brad turned to me and saidsomething friendly and approving: ‘Goodride. Well done.’

And he walked out.I breathed a sigh of relief.Next in my mind was what the bosses

would say. Brad had given me a couple ofnice words but what would Dave make of it?What would Shane Sutton, Brad’s coach,have to add? This was a migraine for them.

I did the podium ceremony, feeling that Ijust had to smile and make the most of it. Iwas in the leader’s jersey, after all! But at thesame time I felt very awkward and out of

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place. I was apprehensive about what was tocome.

When I talked to Alex later I wouldn’t beCuba Gooding Jr and he wouldn’t be TomCruise. Show me the money? No, I wasn’tthat sure of myself. More like, this should getme a contract? Shouldn’t it?

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18

2011: Vuelta a España, Continued

Day of Rest

I awoke in the morning from uneasy dreamsand found myself transformed in my bed.Yesterday I was a bargain-basement domest-ique having a good week; today I was acommodity. Forty-seven kilometres changedmy life.

We were having a rest day and our teamwas scattered like furloughed soldiers aboutthe amazing hotel which was actually acastle, a real castle. It was very old and wewere the only team staying in the lovely set-ting. We were impressed.

Alex Carera, my agent, was arriving tomeet me. It certainly was an old-world place

to be speaking of new-world things like con-tracts and cash but it had to be done. We satin the courtyard and talked, where I knew wewould be seen.

I could sense that yesterday had causedsome unease in the team. ‘It’s still all aboutBrad,’ Shane Sutton had said to the media. Ihadn’t said anything different and told themicrophones I was really happy to be in thisposition, and that I had never expected it,but that we were all here to work for Brad. Iwent straight for the party line – the safeoption.

I hadn’t spoken to Dave Brailsford or theguys at that level. I hadn’t even spoken toBrad.

We went out for a recovery ride in the af-ternoon and my teammates chatted quietlyto me. Dario was very enthusiastic. He saidhow proud he was to be with me, to be on ateam where now we were leading a GrandTour and defending the jersey. He had taken

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a lot of happiness from it. He had been thereand had seen me struggling in Castilla yLeón and Catalunya. On a bad day at theTour de Suisse, he took care of me. He wasone guy who saw I had talent but it wasn’tquite showing. I trusted his views.

I asked Dario what he thought. Did hereckon I could keep this up for three weeksnow that I had done it for ten days? Or had Ihit my limit and was a bad day looming justaround the corner? In an ideal world, could Igo all the way?

He just looked at me. ‘Why not? Threeweeks. You just have to do ten days againand then you are finished. You do a criteriumon the last day and that’s it. You have done itnow once already. Do it again. Don’t see it astwenty-one days. Look at it as ten days. Startagain tomorrow.’

That’s so Dario. Pragmatic, simple, solid.I was wary of being the man who goes into

hospital with a terminal disease and comes

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out cured but moaning about the bland hos-pital food and the thin mattresses. I knewthat when I came to Spain I would have beenhappy just to leave with a contract, any con-tract. After the last ten days, though, I wasstarting to think I was worth more. All thatpotential wasn’t counterfeit. My belief that Iwas suited in temperament and genetics tobeing a Grand Tour rider seemed to be spoton.

In the short term we had eleven stages left.Brad had struggled yesterday and I had beenwith him in the mountains doing most of thepulling. I led the race on GC. I didn’t expect,and couldn’t expect, the team to cancel theirbets on Brad but I thought it would be smartif they hedged their risk by having two pro-tected riders for the rest of the Vuelta, and tolet the best man win. That seemed like goodtactics – good for me but also good for theteam. That couldn’t come from me, though;it would have to come from the management.

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It didn’t happen. In Team Sky we get manythings right but the plan is still the plan isstill the plan. Especially if it involves Brad,who has so much more history and friend-ship with the top table. I understood that.

I was still there as a teammate, to do thedomestique role that the team had asked meto do. I was still relying on the team for acontract and I didn’t want to upset people inthe moment when I had at last delivered anotable performance. I wanted to show themI was a team player but I also wanted that re-cognized; I wanted for the team to simply sayto me that although this was a positionnobody had expected, on the long flat hauls Ishouldn’t be doing the heavy lifting any moreas Brad and I should be recharging and wait-ing for the mountains. Ultimately, I wantedthem to tell me that if it got to the endgameand I had a better chance of winning theVuelta than Brad had, then I should go for it.

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I knew they were holding their breath,though. They were thinking, ‘This is justChris Froome’s career in microcosm. We’vehad the brilliant, but something will happento dull the light. Stand by for his Tour deSuisse day, his Tour of California day, or his“landing in a front garden” day. It hashappened before and it will happen again.It’s just a matter of time.’

I understood that too.But I was different now. One of the secrets

of the last ten days had been that I didn’tturn myself inside out looking for a resultone day and then die a death the next. I wasin the Vuelta and riding with the sole object-ive of being the best teammate possible forBrad; any urge to attack had been out of mymind. I had endured long, hard days but Ihadn’t had the chance to empty myself tothat level; there had been none of my crazy,hell-for-leather attacks. I was always ridingat Brad’s pace in the climbs and I had

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learned from that. And what I didn’t tellDave, or anyone, was that riding at the front,just pacing Brad, was easier than the way Iused to ride.

Something else that had been troubling mecame to a head on that rest day. The last dayor two I had been suffering from a bad rashand the previous night had been the worst.Brad and I had exchanged our usual ‘good-night’ as the lights were flicked off and he fellasleep. I couldn’t sleep at all, after all the ex-citement, and then I started to feel the red,welted bands around my legs. These werewhere my skin had been in contact with therubberized cuff grips that stopped my shortsriding up.

I already had the red jersey but now, in amatching colour, were large continents ofthis itchy, angry rash around my body. If Iscratched at them they would get worse andspread; if I didn’t scratch, I would lose mymind. I had been wearing physio tape during

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the time trial to support my back and nowthere was a rash anywhere the tape hadbeen. I had worn bandages on my knees, andthere was a rash there too. It must have beenthe mixture of heat and moisture, Ireckoned, as I recalled that for the last tendays we had been pouring water overourselves as much as possible.

I finally dozed off but at about 3.00 a.m. Iwoke up scratching myself on my legs, mytorso, my back and my waist – basically any-where that had experienced continuous fric-tion. It was crazy and I was bleeding fromthe demented scratching. Creeping out ofbed, I found my phone and looked up thedoctor’s room.

The doctor was Geert Leinders.*I knocked on his door and woke him up.‘Look at this.’‘Ooooh!’ His eyes opened very wide.He was very sympathetic for a man woken

at 3.00 a.m.

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‘That is a problem.’He got me some cream and I lathered it on

to myself, hoping to calm the rash. I wentback to bed and fell asleep straight away,thankful that the morning would bring noth-ing more pressing than a rest day.

In the morning, though, I started snifflinga bit. The health forecast was for a cold, oranother chest infection, either of whichwould be devastating coming so soon after Ihad taken another dose of Biltricide follow-ing the Tour de Suisse. I told the doc how Iwas feeling; that I was a bit run down, andthat I had a nasal snuffle and a snotty nose.‘Okay,’ he said, ‘as a precaution we had bet-ter put you in a room on your own. We don’twant you passing anything around the team.’

So I was packed into a room on my ownwith my nasal sprays and my creams.

I felt sort of bad. Myself and Brad neverreally bridged that gulf of mannerly silenceand now I was bailing out. On the other

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hand, at least I was not holding my breathany more waiting for Brad to say somethingor bracing myself to say something thatwould engage him. I felt much more relaxed.I could answer phone calls, which there wereplenty of, without feeling that every wordwas being digested right next to me. Thingswere a lot easier. I could speak freely aboutmy contracts and about how plans and mat-ters were within the team.

I’m sure Brad felt the same.

Looking back, I would love to have hadBrad’s impression of all this because as ateam we were in a weird situation. But henever really speaks much within the team.It’s as if he has his circle of people aroundhim all the time who muffle our idea of him.By the time he comes back from races andgets through speaking to the directeur spor-tif, to Dave, to Shane Sutton and to hissoigneur, I reckon he is all talked out. He

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doesn’t contribute that much at the table orwhen we’re all on the bus together.

He can make everybody laugh, though,which goes some way towards making up forthis lack of connection. He has a particulartalent for doing impersonations. In the teamthe guys reckon it is a defence mechanism,shielding him from his own reserve. Eitherway, he is very funny.

He does an impression of me with a reallyhivvy Sith Ifricin iccint. It’s almost too muchbut that’s what good impersonators do. Itdoes make it very funny and I enjoy his hu-mour a lot. He could be mean and bullyingwith the impressions but he isn’t. They arejust entertaining.

We get a couple of pairs of Oakleysunglasses given to us about twice a year. Ihave a child’s delight in being handed classysunglasses for free and it is still a novelty.One day I asked innocently if the bus had analarm on it, because I usually leave my

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Oakleys on the bus overnight. Brad twiggedthat, and he killed me on it:

‘We cin survive without the 800k bus,think you, ifficer, but whit about myOakleys? Are your min looking for them? Doyou nid a discription? An artist’s skitch? Icin’t bileev this is hippinining …’

He does a pretty good Dave Brailsford too.He picks up on all of Dave’s little motivation-al speaker phrases and runs them togetherlike a slightly demented version of Dave:

‘The three Ps of our culture and of ourteam: Professionalism. Performance. And,ehm … Whatever. The two Ps of our cultureand the W.’

Our favourite is his take-off of our pressofficer, Brian Nygaard. Poor Brian reallylikes his wine; it is a passion for him. Wineand fireworks – Brian’s face would light upwhen talking about fireworks. Brad took thefireworks theme, while playing the press of-ficer, and all with a Danish accent:

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‘A press conference is like a firework dis-play: first you have the silence, anticipation.The small flares go up, you answer them,but then it kicks off and explosions are goingoff all over, it’s chaos in there! Left, right,the one you never expected, then before youknow what just happened, it’s over. Time fora glass of Brunello to take the edge off …’

We love the impressions but I think some-times we all wish that Brad would give usmore of an impression of himself. There issomething else behind the impressions andthe gruff geezer cloak but we never get to seeit.

Alex and I sat in the courtyard and tried tospeculate about what the team werethinking.

Shane Sutton had pulled me aside on theway to my room earlier in the day. He said tome, ‘Listen, about your contract. Don’t worryabout it – we’ve got your best interests atheart. We didn’t want you to stress about it

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in this period, and that’s why we haven’t re-sponded. We want you to focus on the race.Of course your value will go up, but don’tworry about that; we will sort you out. Justget this race done, and don’t have all thesepeople in your ear. You will get lots of offersnow but don’t pay any attention to it. We’lllook after you.’

I wasn’t sure why Brad’s coach was tellingme this. I told Alex I had been told not toworry, and that the team would look afterme.

Alex took out his phone and scrolled downto show me his texts from Dave again.

‘What has Chris done?’ read the message.‘Nothing.’ Etc., etc.

‘Does this sound like somebody who be-lieves in you and wants to keep you as one ofthe top riders?’ Alex said.

Nothing? Nothing! I was insulted. I hadworked my arse off all year and Dave had thedaily uploads of my stats to prove it. I had

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worked so hard just to be there in all of thoseother races for other riders. True, I hadn’tbacked these results up on overall GC, but Itook it easy in time trials so I could work forthe other riders the following day and I hadshown good results on stages. Apart fromone night in Kraków, I had lived like a purit-an and trained like a martyr. Nothing?

Alex said that the best thing we could donow that I had UCI points for having been aleader was to carry on with the GC challenge:‘Just stay up there. When you have UCIpoints, teams will pay for you – points trans-late into contracts. I need those points to getyou the best deal.’

Alex said that if it was okay with me, hewould be putting out a press story the nextday saying that I was speaking to otherteams but that I had not made a decision yetfor next year. He would tell people Team Skyhadn’t given me an answer.

This was fine by me – it was the truth.

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I had been on the phone a lot to Noz andmy brothers, explaining the situation tothem, and they had each said the same thing– their belief in me was total, and no matterwhich way it went from here on in the race, Iwould do well regardless.

I didn’t have to sign anything immediately.If I slipped off the GC I would still have beenin the leader’s jersey for a stage, and myvalue would have increased. I had been inthe top five a couple of times in other racesand I would be okay. If I could see it through,then I would be worth a lot more.

I would have to gamble on myself againbut it was fair enough and I wanted to get tothe end of the race. If I blew up, my valuewould plummet from where it was now as Isat in the courtyard. If I did well, it wouldcost Team Sky a lot more than I would acceptat this point.

Seriously, though, did our bus have analarm? That day Oakley gave me a pair of red

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sunglasses to mark the occasion of me beingin the red jersey. What happened if the busgot raided in the middle of the night andthose Oakleys were on board?

Stage Eleven: Back in the Chain Gang

The words Alex planted with the media cameup as a harvest – he had twelve expressionsof interest from other teams. However, therewas no word from Team Sky apart from Davetelling me hurriedly that this wasn’t an issue,and that they would keep me. I was grateful,of course, but I didn’t want to sit down todiscuss with them how much they would payto keep me after those other twelve teamshad gone away.

I had been wearing the same pair of raceshoes for the past ten days of racing. Theyhad a flamboyant splash of red on them, andnobody had noticed till that morning. BobbyJ sent me a message: ‘Red Shoes? You hadthis planned from Day One, didn’t you!!’

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That morning we all went to Steven deJongh’s room for a team meeting. It was ourfirst debrief since the time trial and I leftfeeling disheartened. The meeting startedwith a general congratulations.

‘Fantastic, you have first and third on GCat the moment. Chris? Amazing! Stormingride. Don’t know where that came from butyou are now in the leader’s jersey. Welldone.’

Everyone had a little laugh. Me too. Good.‘Now to today’s stage. We have these

climbs on this route. We want the team toride on the front as expected. At the climb,Xabie, do your pull, and then Thomas, Dario,Morris and then Froomey and finally Brad.’

I didn’t speak up. I remember just pausingfor a second and thinking, wait, would it bethe other way round – Brad then Froomey?

No?Okay. I was here for Brad. This was Team

Sky. This was how things were done and this

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was the deal. Although I was in the leader’sjersey, nothing had changed. We had theplan. Sancho Panza should have been carefulabout what he wished for.

I was a bit disappointed though. Some-body could have come up to me before themeeting and said that this was their position:they were thrilled with my performance, theywould be putting this much on the table tokeep me because they saw my future going inthis way, but for now, though, they had morefaith and more of an investment in Bradley. Iwouldn’t have minded if they had asked meto continue doing the same job as I had beendoing. But if there was a chance I might winthe race, I wanted them to be happy aboutthat. If anything happened to Brad …

This was surely where the team wanted tobe? We were leading the Grand Tour and ithadn’t been a fluke. I was in the red jerseybecause I had climbed well and done a goodtime trial.

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The possibilities weren’t explored or talkedabout. Or, at least, not with me. It was a re-minder that I was just there to work for Bradfor as long as possible, even though I thoughtthat we could have had a little bit of flexibil-ity. I was leading the race, after all, and thechance to continue leading it would havebeen good. So why not play with both cards,keep them both alive and then go with theone most likely to deliver victory?

The meeting just stressed the team’s posi-tion: it was still about Brad.

There was nothing I could do, so I got intorace mode again and my mood picked up.Going to sign on for the race in the morning Ifelt a new sort of energy – I was the raceleader and people were looking at me differ-ently now that I had the red jersey. It was areally good feeling and lifted me a bit; it re-minded me that the jersey meant more thancontracts and money.

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Noz had flown over to Spain. He hadplanned the trip a while beforehand but itmade me smile inside knowing he would seeme in the red jersey that morning. He gaveme a big hug when I stepped off the team busand we had a quick chat before I went to signon for the start.

As I was rolling through the first miles ofthe day’s stage while fangless breakawayshissed and faded, other riders stopped byand said nice things:

‘Wow!’‘Well done.’‘Congratulations.’‘Impressive.’That was a great lift. A lot of the guys who

weren’t English speakers gave me kind com-pliments too:

‘Muy bien, Chris!’‘Impressionante!’‘A topé!’

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A couple of riders even said that for a do-mestique to be wearing the leader’s jerseyspread some hope and pride around the rankand file. They talked about how it hadhappened: working in the mountains forBrad, followed by a good time trial – the do-mestique’s dream script.

I felt boosted by all these words from otherteams and riders. The peloton can be a hardplace and these guys didn’t need to say any-thing to me, but they had made a point of it.That had never happened to me before.

Meanwhile, the plan that we had for therace was to pace things in a certain way com-ing up to the last climb. Xabie was to start offthe climb, next Thomas and then Dariowould go as long as possible until I was tolead Brad into the final effort.

We came up to the foot of the last climb,known as Estación de Montaña Manzaneda.Xabie got us on to the climb but then Tho-mas, for some unknown reason – because

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there was no breakaway that was really dan-gerous, and nobody in front who was a threatto us – did an enormous pull at the bottomof the climb. We went very deep into our re-serves for a good 3or 4 kilometres and the ef-fect was that Dario was dropped and Tho-mas, who had done his pull, swung off. Xabiehung in there but the distorted look on hisface said that he was not going to be able todo much of the pacemaking. He took a shortspin on the front before fading.

Our teammates were supposed to be themountain guys but we had burned them offbefore we were even halfway up. It was justBrad and me left in a group of thirty or fortynow, with more than 10 kilometres to go tothe finish. What happened to the teamtactics?

I was in the leader’s jersey, but as I wasriding for Brad it was still my responsibilityto control the bunch and ride on the front. Iwas looking about me. Shit. What now?

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Other riders were starting to jump around,making attacks. Something needed to hap-pen. Somebody needed to get to the front inorder to start controlling this.

Steven wasn’t giving the orders on the ra-dio so I turned to Brad and asked him.

‘Okay, what do we do now that we have noteammates left?’

He just looked at me and sort of motionedme forward. You go ahead.

He was basically saying, ‘Ride tempo, asteady tempo. Don’t do too much, don’t hurtyourself, but you need to control the race.’

So I got on to the front and rode up theclimb at an even pace for about 3 or 4 kilo-metres until we reached a section whichflattened out again. There, for 10 minutes orso, we had level riding, a little downhill even.There were forty guys who were all sitting onmy wheel now, Brad included. We turned leftand started the last part of the climb, whichwas maybe another 3 kilometres, and then

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the attacks started happening – real attacks.I had nothing in the tank; I could keep thesame steady pace but I couldn’t follow thesurges and the other guys were really goingfor it now. I was hollow and Brad was gonetoo.

I felt so deflated watching the riders accel-erating around me, knowing that I couldn’trespond. I had spent my energy getting themhere while some of them had been freewheel-ing or at least conserving their energy.Twenty-four hours. Everything had changed,and nothing had changed.

One guy left behind with me was CarlosSastre, a Saxo Bank teammate of JuanjoCobo. I was a little way back from him whenhe looked over his shoulder. Seeing that itwas me, in the leader’s jersey, he subtlyeased up enough for me to get on to hiswheel. Then he continued pulling. He couldsee I was in trouble and it was a generous,simple thing for him to do. Carlos is a Tour

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de France winner, who had no need to helpme, so it was pure class. He had better legsthan me at that stage and although he couldjust have pulled away and left me there to getto the finish line alone, he was saying, ‘Look,kiddo, sit on my wheel and we will get to thefinish together.’

He rode at a speed I could just abouthandle and I didn’t need to say a word tohim. The pace was comfortable enough forme to hang on and to limit my losses; Carlossaved me as much as 30 seconds. I got to theline 27 seconds behind Brad and JuanjoCobo. David Moncoutié, the old fox, pickedoff the stage.

I went to Brad to congratulate him – hewas taking my red jersey to bed with him forthe night. Then I went to Carlos to thankhim. ‘De nada,’ he said. It’s nothing, noproblem.

I filled in my race diary that evening: ‘Inthe leader’s jersey, hard day but we had the

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privilege of riding on the front. I felt supertoday. Really well recovered after the restday, also no bloating or holding of fluids.’ Ihadn’t encountered that sluggish feeling Ihad experienced previously quite often. Itwas overall a positive day in my eyes: ‘Istayed on the front and controlled the raceuntil a little over 2 kilometres from the topwhere it all kicked off. I tried to limit mylosses as much as possible. Brad the newrace leader.’

Steven de Jongh had told the media: ‘Hatsoff to Chris. He was in the lead but nothingchanged with the position of Brad, of course.He is our leader and he still was after thetime trial. Chris was a hundred per centhappy with that and he did an amazing ride.Bradley will thank him for that, I’m sure.’

And, in fairness, he did thank me.All was back to normal. Now I could go

back to being the domestique in the moun-tains, which was the plan from the

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beginning. Well, my plan from thebeginning.

And the plan is the plan is the plan, afterall.

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19

2011: Vuelta a España, Closing Stages

Stage Fourteen: Rocky Mountain High

We wore black armbands today. A year be-fore on the Vuelta we lost our soigneur Tx-ema González. He was a beloved figure andis still missed, and he would have loved thisday because we did our best climbing per-formance so far.

Nothing much had happened on stagestwelve and thirteen. During the latter, Tho-mas, Xabie and I had fended off a series ofattacks on the Puerto de Ancares ascent. Vin-cenzo Nibali took a 6-second time bonus inan intermediate sprint, jumping above meinto 2nd place, just 1 second ahead. Brad andI finished the stages together.

Today, on stage fourteen, we were relat-ively fresh, and the last climb of the day wasan epic: La Farrapona. It started with morecrosswinds and Brad and I pulled the samestunt as earlier in the week. He was on mywheel coming up the last mountain and wewaited till about 6 kilometres to go. I got onthe front with Brad still on my wheel and wepushed on for a couple of kilometres to getrid of a few guys. It worked well. We lostNibali and Fredrik Kessiakoff and then gotdown to just a few diehards: Brad, myself,Mollema, Menchov and Cobo.

There had been a break up the road all daybut there were no key players in it. ReinTaaramäe, the Estonian, was in there, whowould scoop the prize, as was David de laFuente, who was Cobo’s teammate, althoughhe had to drop back to work for Cobo.

While we were shedding Nibali and com-pany, Brad was saying, ‘Easy, easy, slowdown.’ I knew he was on his limit so I sat up

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higher to make a better slipstream to pullhim along a bit more easily, thinking maybethis would help him. I was a little ignorant asto the urgency of what he was saying. Wewere going the same pace but it would havebeen better for him if he had been shelteredeven more.

I felt good and told him, ‘Just a little bitlonger.’ I was not going to go at this speed tillthe end but we just needed to get rid of a fewmore guys and then I would ease up. I wenthard for a couple more minutes and thenbacked off, telling Brad that now I wouldtake him to the finish. Nice and steady.

He wasn’t comfortable with that last accel-eration. I knew I needed to slow because hewanted me to but at the same time I felt wehad to push on for a bit longer to do the realdamage. Over these yards our relationshipwas evolving wordlessly.

When I did slow down, riding at a steadypace with just a few left in the group, Brad

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asked me to get him to the ‘1 kilometre to go’mark.

‘What the hell are you talking about? Onekilometre to go? I’m going to take you all theway, sucker!’

Well, no. What I actually said was: ‘Noworries. I feel fine. I’m slowing for you. Don’tworry about me. I’ll take you all the way.’

Cobo had gone early to catch the frontgroup and we had let him go, while De laFuente dropped off the back of our group.Cobo wasn’t really on the radar as a big con-tender so we let him chase the stage.

There were four of us in the group now.With that previous acceleration on the frontwe had gotten rid of pretty much everyonethat mattered.

As we rode I was thinking about Brad. Hedidn’t quite get where I was today. Hethought I had done my effort and now I wasblowing, but the only reason I had stopped

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was because he was asking me to go easy. Iknew that I could take him all the way.

There were a couple of points where I wasgoing steadily for the last couple of kilo-metres where he pulled around me and puthimself on the front. This was unnecessary.He didn’t need to, but maybe he wanted todo some dog work and contribute to hisjersey.

The four of us – Brad and I, Mollema andMenchov – finished together.

I was hit by a revelation as we crossed theline. I had pulled really hard in the cross-wind earlier and I knew now that if I hadsaved that effort for climbing on the steeppart of the mountain I could have droppedpeople. I could even have dropped Brad but Iworked to leave him enough space to besheltered from the wind. That was the job,but the transfusion of self-confidence I gotfrom this realization was massive.

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I knew now I was controlling the guysaround me on these climbs. The penny haddropped. I watched the stage online thatevening and studied how people struggled toget on to the acceleration that I did, whichthinned out the group into one line. Some-body would sit up, which caused a gap, andthat was it – they were out the back,destroyed.

Brad was in red, 7 seconds in front of meand 36 seconds in front of Bauke Mollema.But I had felt quite good all day; I had riddenwithin myself. This self-confidence was anew thing.

Stage Fifteen: Changing of the Guard

Alto de L’Angliru is a 12.3-kilometre climb.That statistic is the most straightforwardthing about it. Otherwise it is a mountainthat just beats you up all day long. I thinkDavid Millar once made a statement abouthow ridiculous it is; that it shouldn’t even be

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in a bicycle race. He was right. It is just toosteep, with lots of insane gradients and onesheer climb that is so extreme you can neverget a rhythm. But Angliru is known for this;Angliru is very, very hard.

At the team meeting we decided oneverything as normal, all the way. We werestill leading and I was riding shotgun withBrad. I was a high-mountains domestique atlast and the team would get me and Brad tothe last climb. I wasn’t going back to the carfor bottles any more now, which was one ofthe perks of my promotion.

About a kilometre up Angliru, once againit was only Brad and me left from the team.

The other riders around us were triggerhappy and it was Carlos Sastre who attackedfirst. He was joined by Igor Antón, who over-took him, and then Cobo launched himselfinto an attack on Antón. He accelerated andwas gone. This Cobo was becoming aproblem.

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I thought to myself, ‘I am here with Brad.Stay calm.’ It didn’t even cross my mind tochase after Cobo; I knew I would have toclaw him back at a tempo that suited Brad. Ifelt good – I would pull us up this climb andwe would catch Cobo. I was ready for this.The mountain didn’t necessarily play to mystrengths; I had never ridden anything thissteep, with these staccato efforts. I wouldhave preferred longer and less sharp verticalclimbs. But I’m sure we all would have done.

It took us 44 minutes to get up themountain.

I didn’t have a power meter on because itdoesn’t work with the smaller compactchainring. This meant no power stats, butfrom the beginning I started a tempo and Iwanted to keep it very uniform. I paced my-self. This mountain gives you no recovery.Angliru just goes and goes all the way. A littlebit of flat here and there, but then it getssteeper and steeper, harder and harder.

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Cobo had disappeared and I was on thefront of our remaining group riding hard.Kilometre after kilometre, it got pared tofewer and fewer riders on my wheel. Finallyit was just Brad, Menchov (again) andWouter Poels, a guy from the Vacansoleil-DCM team.

We couldn’t hear much on the radio be-cause of all the spectators shouting and a badsignal. We couldn’t see Cobo either – he hadgone and he had kept going.

‘On and on,’ I thought. ‘Pace it steady. Noaccelerations. Keep a rhythm and get up thehill. Get Brad up.’

We must have been 3 kilometres from thetop now and every pedal stroke hurt. The ca-dence was down in the forties per minute,and even the high thirties. ‘One stroke at atime,’ I kept thinking. ‘Grind it out.’ Therewere birth pains in my legs now as they is-sued every stroke; each one a torture. I wasfeeling terrible and maybe doing seven

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kilometres an hour at the most. It was likeriding through a sea of treacle and evenpeople on the hill seemed to be walkingfaster than we were riding. The TV motor-bike in front was wobbling because it was go-ing so slowly. Eventually it toppled over andwe had to ride round it. We were hurting somuch we didn’t even see the funny side.

I had been on the front for 8 or 9 kilo-metres now, for half an hour. Maybe I wasjust slowing Brad down, I thought. Maybe Ishould move over and let Brad go ahead nowif he had something.

There had been little communicationbetween us on the way up. A few times hehad said, ‘Steady,’ or had asked to go easierand I had eased off slightly. But now I was ata point where the climbing was really steepand cruel and I was struggling. It was likeriding up a big wall and it was beating me.We were not going very fast and I was spentfrom pulling.

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It was no longer best for Brad to have meon the front and I moved over to the left,even though there was very little room due tothe lunatic crowds. Brad grinded past. I triedto come back in on his wheel. There hadbeen some mistake, surely? It felt like we haddropped from maybe eight kilometres anhour to six kilometres an hour. I could seenow that he was labouring and puffing worsethan I was. He was going slower in front thanhe was behind.

Was he going to stop?Both of us were battling with our gears –

the wrong gears – and the seconds passedslowly. It was still really hard and felt like theenergy was being pulled out of us and downsome great sucking drain in the mountain. Itwas like we were doing heavy gym torture inthe middle of a long race, on a hot day. Still,we shouldn’t be pedalling this slowly. Wecouldn’t be. It was too much pain for toolittle gain. We rode at Brad’s pace and I

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realized that we had definitely been going alittle quicker when I was on the front. Withthis new, deflated tempo, I had reclaimedsome energy. For maybe 30 seconds we hadridden at an agonizingly slow pace but Ineeded to get back on the front. I had moreto give. I could take us back to a dizzy eightkilometres an hour!

Now, though, I couldn’t get past Brad; thecrowd wouldn’t leave enough space for twobike riders. Then Brad wobbled heavily tothe left and I saw a tiny gap open up on hisright. I got out of my saddle and pushed my-self through the little crack, and back on tothe front. I was picking up the pace againand looked across and back towards Brad.His top lip was curled up in a wince of painthat I hadn’t seen before. Ever.

Shit. Brad was done; he was spent. And Iknew Cobo was in front, going for it.

What were the choices?

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I didn’t wait. Brad hadn’t got it in him anymore and the race was up the road already. Ineeded to go now. No words passed betweenus. I just looked at Brad again and we knewwhat I had to do. Staying with him wouldn’tmake him go any faster. It was every man forhimself now, even if it would be seen as in-subordination later.

I went. Wouter and Menchov taggedalong.

I was pulling these guys now and theysmelled opportunity. They hung back andwaited as I pulled for the last 2 or 3 kilo-metres, before it flattened out on top all theway to the line.

I watched the TV footage later. With akilometre to go, Cobo was 1 minute 10seconds in front. That fallen motorbikemeant there was just one surviving TV cam-era, focused on Cobo. There were no sight-ings of the red jersey group.

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Then suddenly on screen I saw myself,Menchov and Wouter come out of the mist,riding like three bats out of hell. Menchovand Wouter came round me on the sprintand I finished 4th on the stage. Brad was 33seconds behind us.

Crucially, coming 4th meant missing outon a time bonus. Cobo had taken 40 secondsin finish-line time bonuses that day: he’d hada 1st, a 2nd and a 3rd. Team Sky, meanwhile,had no bonuses. Menchov pipping me to 3rdplace on the summit robbed me of an8-second bonus.

That 40 seconds gave Cobo the red jersey.I was 20 seconds behind him at number twoon GC. Brad was 3rd, 46 seconds behindCobo.

At the finish I wasn’t apprehensive like Iwas when I beat Brad in the time trial. I hadworked the whole climb with Brad on mywheel and I hadn’t gone out and attackedhim. He couldn’t hold the wheel; he had

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cracked. A few weeks ago he had a brokencollarbone and he was human. I didn’t feel Ihad stepped out of line.

At the finish Brad came and put his armround me and said, ‘Well done, you go for itnow.’ He acknowledged the reality: I haddone the work and he hadn’t managed tostay on my wheel. He was saying that basic-ally now it was my opportunity.

Wow. How did we get to this?That evening my world had shifted. From

tomorrow the word was that the team wouldbe riding for me. It was an amazing feeling tohave got to this point. I spent half the nightlooking at every stage profile trying to figureout where I could steal back 20 seconds fromCobo.

I felt released, in a luminous dream whichno accountants or corporate suits would everknow.

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Tomorrow was another rest day. For a soulwho likes suffering I was getting to relishthese dawdling days.

Stage Sixteen: Badlands

The day was flat and long and I came 3rd onan intermediate sprint, gaining just 2seconds. However, I was told later that I hadactually come 4th and had to give the 2seconds back. I had now finished 2 secondsbehind Cobo, which meant I was 22 secondsbehind him in the GC.

‘Still, tomorrow, amigos,’ I thought, ‘weride Peña Cabarga. On Peña Cabarga wewould live or die. Olé.’

Stage Seventeen: The Legend of PeñaCabarga

The mountain where the day’s stage wouldfinish is close to La Pesa, the home town ofJuanjo Cobo. He is known for some reasonas the Bison of La Pesa, and so it was that

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busloads of his neighbours, many of themdressed as bison, had been transported upthe mountain to support him. I have seen alot of wildlife, kept some pythons and haveeven been chased by a hippo, but I haven’tseen anything like the mountain bison ofPeña Cabarga.

I had cased the joint. Today seemed to methe best chance of a heist that would net me22 seconds. There were more mountainsafter this stage but no mountaintop finishesand I liked the look of this route fromFaustino V to the mountaintop. It was 211kilometres long with a short but very sharpjaunt up the peak at the end. Towards thetop the gradient reached nineteen per cent,which after a long day with multiple climbswould grind and pestle us. There would bewheat near that summit and somewhere be-low on the mountain the chaff would beblowing.

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On days like these other riders are able todo a lot more than me at the beginning buttheir output is a line that slopes downsharply on the graph. I don’t start high but Idecline very gently. The longer the stage andthe more it eats into people, the better itsuits me.

The peloton was particularly jumpy thatday with lots of one-off attacks; this was thesting in the tail of the race.

Cobo had some good guys working forhim: Carlos Sastre and Denis Menchov werehis main henchmen all day but David de laFuente and David Blanco rode strongly too.They got Cobo through the climbs with noproblems.

It had been a blistering pace on to thelower slopes of Peña Cabarga and Cobo’smen had done an impressive job making therace uncomfortably hard. I liked that. Theexplosiveness would be long gone from themore punchy riders, and I stayed as close to

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the front as possible without taking too muchwind. It was perfect.

With about 5 kilometres to go, the phoneywars became real. Dan Martin of Garmin,who had ridden a good Vuelta, attacked onthe lower slopes of the final climb and imme-diately I thought to myself that this was waytoo early. Yes, there had been a bit of a lull,but there was a long way to go and too manyriders left in the group. Now was not thetime to attack and I knew we would be seeingDan later. Still, three riders chased off afterhim.

They were still out ahead when the BelgianJurgen Van den Broek threw himself afterthem at a crazy pace. He caught them andovertook them. We were getting to the en-dgame now though. Van den Broek had mis-timed everything and the pace had decim-ated the peloton. Now I was in a group offour with Brad, Cobo and Mikel Nieve,

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another Spaniard. Nieve took on the dogwork as we approached 2 kilometres to go.

As we passed the 2-kilometre marker wewere steaming past Van den Broek.

Then the crazy Belgian attacked again,even when he should have been dead. Thepace was up once more and I felt myself gowith him; the pain was pure, exquisite andsublime. My lungs were burning and everymuscle in my body howled for oxygen.

I got past and soon Van den Broek washistory. We pushed on. I knew there wereriders on my wheel or just off it, but thegrind took all my concentration. Cobo wasclosest now and I pulled onwards for a fewhundred metres. I wasn’t thinking about theriders we had dropped. My focus was onCobo entirely.

Then Cobo took over. We were on a steeppart of the course and he actually started set-ting the pace himself. I had been expectinghim to wait for other people to attack and

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this was a surprise. I followed him through afew switchbacks and under the flammerouge. One kilometre to go. Everything hadgone quiet behind me. I turned round andrealized it was only the two of us left there toduel under the high and pitiless sun.

Just Cobo and me on the mountain. Andthe entire village of La Pesa, I would think.They had painted his name again and againon the road with a pair of horns protrudingupwards from the first o in Cobo.

Just Cobo and me now, which suited him.If I got 1st place I would get a time bonus butif he got 2nd place he still got only a slightlydiminished time bonus. I could do with hav-ing a teammate here to get in between thetwo of us.

Cobo had chipped this hefty shard of effortinto the pot and now he too looked around tosee where everyone was. He must havethought that he would either be alone or thatthe group behind would still be chasing.

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Instead, all he saw was me, which shook him.He didn’t want to be pulling me up themountain and I felt him ease off the pace asmall amount. He hadn’t got rid of me and Iwas feeling really good.

The road tilted up again ahead of us. I wasjust to his right now and he almost boxed mein. So I cut across to the side of the road alittle but he was there too. He knew the gamenow and so did I. I was boxed in for a good10 seconds and there were lots of spectators.He had me up against them, and they werehysterically excited. At one point a big ox of aman was running up in the road right infront of us. It was a wild scene. I reallywanted to get out in front before Cobo hadtime to recover from his pull. I wanted to at-tack and make this my one move; give iteverything I had to put him in difficulty. Butthe big ox in front of me was in the way andthe Bison of La Pesa knew this was useful.

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Every second he blocked us was a secondmore for Cobo to recover.

In the end I got a little impatient. I dashedpast Cobo on the inside and pushed up be-side the ox. Placing a hand on his beefyshoulder, I shoved him out of the way.

I had a text message on my mind, which Ihad received from my old friend Matt Beck-ett that morning. He said, ‘Just go. Don’t goa little bit and then look around and then goagain. Go once and make it count. Just putyour head down. Don’t hesitate. Don’t waitfor Brad. Don’t do anything other than ped-al your arse off. Make your move and makeit count.’

He was right. I was only going to attackonce and I was going to make it count. All in.Everything on the line. Do or die. This waswhere I could win the Vuelta or lose it.

I was out of the saddle sprinting. I countedthe seconds in my mind. One, two, three …until I had been sprinting for just over a

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minute on one of the steepest parts of theclimb. Cobo immediately got on to my wheelagain – he had the tenacity of a honeybadger. He stayed there for maybe 30seconds and then drifted off a bit. Even in allthe hysteria I could feel that his presencenow was gone. I looked down underneath myarms and saw that he was no longer there.

‘Right,’ I thought, ‘I’m clear. I’m absolutelyclear. This could be it. I could be on my wayto winning the whole Vuelta here. Now.’

Stop thinking that, STOP, my brain wastelling my body. Keep your head down. Keepgoing. Block out the pain.

But I can’t block it: I’ve done a huge effortand sprinted for a minute – pain is all thereis, replied my body.

Love the pain then, live the pain, arguedmy brain. There was probably just over 500metres left to go now. I would have to digreally deep; I had to keep this advantage.Had to drive on. Had to. Had to.

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Meanwhile my body was saying, Go ahead,sunshine. There’s nothing left. Less thannothing. Dig away.

My brother Jonathan had also come toSpain to support me. He had told me thatmorning he was going to be standing justafter the ‘1 kilometre to go’ sign and that Iwas to look out for him. We didn’t know thecircumstances I’d be in when we arrangedthat, Jono! He sent me a text to say he wouldbe wearing Team Sky kit. And lo and behold,there he was, waving a Kenyan flag so Iwouldn’t miss him. A policeman was holdinghim back as he was just as excited as thebison – a herd of them. He was screaming:‘Go on, Chris!’

‘Well, indeed,’ I thought. ‘Can’t stop now,bro.’

I went on. Passing Jono, I realized what afantastic position I was in: I had dropped theleader. I got back into my saddle again andtried to keep my legs turning.

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There was a guy running alongside menow. He said in very bad English, right intomy ear, ‘If you win, we kill you! If you win,we kill you!’

What an arse. I wanted to tell him that Iwas undeterred; I wanted to give him somestiff upper lip. But I didn’t; I rode on. Ineeded to keep every little bit of energy nowto get me to the end. I needed to sustain thispace and not to die on the bike. Not here. Icould feel the lactate brewing up like a stormin my legs. Had I gone too deep?

I had attacked way too hard just there be-cause I wanted to get rid of Cobo. But what ifI had only put him on the ropes and windedhim? Maybe I hadn’t got the big punch in.He could have dropped off, letting me blowmyself out while he sucked in the oxygen.What if he had paced it perfectly? What if hehad sensed I was going too fast for him? Formyself! He could have eased off my wheeland gathered himself while I was biting at

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the air and turning my pedals throughtreacle.

What if … ?I could keep going, though; I could keep

doing this. The road was starting to flattenout. It was not exactly flat, but not as steepas it had been with perhaps a reduced threeto four per cent gradient, although it waspicking up again ahead.

I could see the 400- and 300-metre mark-ers in front, but they might as well have beena mile apart from each other.

‘Where are you, where are you?’ I thought.I still couldn’t see the finish line. And thenthere it was: a long last straight followed by aleft at the top – the finish line was just roundthe corner. Ride. Shit. Shit. Shit. He was backon. I sensed him from the noise of the crowdand didn’t need to see him; I knew he wasthere. He caught me and he surged past me.

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Unbelievable, incroyable, increíble – ababble of shouted commentaries sounded inmy head.

He was a hard bastard. I was dropped andthere was a gap already. For maybe 20metres I wasn’t even on his wheel. Hard.Hard. Hard.

I had to get up and sprint to control thedamage – I couldn’t let him take any moretime on me. So I sprinted on legs of jelly,turning myself inside out until I got back tohis wheel. I could sense that he thought hehad already dropped me for the last time.

As we approached the final left-handcorner he was leading me. He had maybe 15metres to the line, but I was on his wheelagain. Surveying the corner, he must haveheard the thunder of victory and seen theheadlines already: the Bison was to win onhis own mountain. But I would bet the farmthat he hadn’t realized I was here now.

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The quickest path to take to the finish wasthe inside line, hugging the barrier. Cobomade a mistake: he drifted out on the corner.His mistake was only a yard wide, maybeless, but my handlebars would definitelymake it through the gap.

My body and my brain skipped all formal-ities. The last kick I was capable of deliveredno questions and expected no answers. Idon’t know where it came from but I rippedthrough the slender gap dizzy with adren-aline and aggression.

This wasn’t the Vuelta any more. It wasn’tthe contract or the General Classificationseither. It wasn’t about the team and it defin-itely wasn’t about the prize money. It wasjust about two boys on a sunlit mountainsaying, ‘See that summit, I’ll race you to it.’ Itwas ‘I win you lose’ racing. It was a high thatnothing else can give you. Nothing.

There was no gap. And then, a secondlater, there was a gap. I was standing on the

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pedals ripping in as he tried to close his mis-take. Too late, my friend. I was through. Ourhandlebars brushed together ever so slightly,and so fast that there was almost a crackle ofelectricity as I passed.

The line was 10 metres away and I was stillout of my saddle. Cobo’s head dropped. Hisshirt was wide open. Seconds later my armswere out. I was over the line.

I hadn’t won the Vuelta, but I had won astage in a Grand Tour – my first win as aprofessional. Everything would be all rightfrom now on but that didn’t matter to methen. I had just been in the greatest moun-taintop finish I am ever likely to experience.Just to have been part of it – blow by blow –had been to know the best of our beautifulsport. I had won and he had won.

A few yards away Cobo bent his head overhis handlebars as he stopped. People aroundhim held him up but his head wouldn’t be lif-ted. I, meanwhile, sat with my back against a

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barrier – dirt on my face, water in my hand.People were leaning down to me. We hadturned each other inside out, Cobo and me,pushing each other to the limits and thenpushing some more. Right now we were twovoids on the top of a mountain.

This was special. People will tell me it wasthe single most exciting mountain race theyhad seen in years – belittled only by the real-ity that Cobo and I were not lead actors inthe movie that was pro cycling.

I will tell grandchildren about this daysometime. Many times.

Still sitting by the barrier, the voicesaround me said I had won the stage by 1second. Taking into account my time bonus,and Cobo’s bonus, he was now 13 secondsahead on GC.

This tough, squat mountain was topped bya huge camera obscurely placed in a tallwhite tower. An image was made with thelight that was taken in through the lenses at

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the top of the tower. In a large circular roomdown below they projected the images on tothe walls to make a 360-degree panoramapicture of the world outside: mountains,plains, sea, everything.

It was beautiful, but it was an image on awall. Just an image. Down below, Cobo and Iwere spent. We were two scraped-out shellssucking at air and water. We were unable tostand without agony.

We were real.

It ended there really. The stage after PeñaCabarga had mountains but a finish on theplains, although Cobo still eyed me all day.The next day was a sprint stage into Bilbao. Ihad stayed right at the front looking for anygaps to open up in the final kilometre of thesprint. I had taken a few risks to be furtherforward than the normal GC rider, mixing itwith sprinters where I shouldn’t have been.But Cobo was just as eager. He followed mearound the peloton so that everywhere I

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went, he would go too. If I moved, he wouldbe on my wheel. He wouldn’t even let myteammates stay on my wheel. It was verystrange having a second shadow.

He was odd. I tried to have a few wordswith him, as I thought we were tied togetherin some way after what we had been through.He had no interest in speaking, but he con-tinued to fascinate me. He never woreglasses when he rode and never even woregloves – he seemed a little set in his ways.Most of all, I knew he was nervous about meduring those last few days. Whenever Ipulled off to stop for a wee, he would do thesame.

There were no obvious places to take backthe 13 seconds, but I thought of the interme-diate sprints as Cobo’s lead was built onthose bonuses. I would have no guilt aboutwinning the Vuelta with bonuses of my own.

We set the whole team up like a train com-ing up to the sprints, but every time we did,

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Cobo was also there, magnetically drawn tomy wheel. I tried on the flat but the teamwent too hard and too early when we wereleading out and we fluffed it up. Did I men-tion that I’m not a sprinter?

Later in the stage we were to go over aclimb and on the plateau at the top there wasto be another sprint. As we went along a lakeshore on the approach, the team said to meover the radio, ‘Look out, Chris, the sprintintermediate is coming up soon.’ I caught aglimpse as we went round the corner. Theroad went round the lake but 300 or 400metres ahead I saw a banner. I thought thatit was a sneaky place to put an intermediatesprint, just as we turned and lost sight of thebanner again. But I also thought, ‘Wow,maybe I can catch Cobo off guard.’ We wentround a couple of corners and, yes, I wasright, I had glimpsed the banner a momentago.

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Right. This was my chance. He was un-aware and not expecting me to dash off. Iwent as hard as I could. Even if he was com-ing after me, he wouldn’t get me for these 10seconds. I went through the banner, and al-though he came after me pretty quickly, Imanaged to get through first. I sat up with ahuge grin.

But there was no excitement from the ra-dio. No, ‘Go on, Froomey, this is it.’ Therewas nothing.

Gotcha! Cobo shook his head. No! No! No!He pointed ahead. There was another ban-

ner. What? The radio crackled.‘Froomey? You know that was a banner

saying “Intermediate Sprint 1 kilometreahead”?’

The final day would be a criterium in Madridand nothing would change there. So I gave itone last go on the day before. The team tookover the pacemaking to try to make it hard inthe climbs and we ended up with Brad and I

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having changed roles. He was going to do forme what I had been doing for him.

On the bus in the pre-race meeting I hadsaid to the guys that the only card we had leftwas to make the stage as hard as possible foreveryone and to hope that Cobo had a badday. If that happened, I would attack in thelast kilometre or two of the climb.

Thomas did a great job that day, a reallybig pull that exploded the peloton quite a bit.He handed over to Brad but it felt like Braddidn’t continue that hard pace. It was morelike Brad was trying to survive and get overthe line in the group, instead of trying tofragment it even more. I tried to encouragehim along, saying, ‘Great, great, let’s go.’ ButI didn’t feel I could ask him to empty him-self, even though we needed to make thisharder.

I wanted him to bury himself, to die forme. But he was more conservative. I think hewanted to preserve his podium finish; he

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wasn’t going to surrender that now. Maybehe thought it was all hopeless.

About a kilometre and a half from the top Iwent past Brad. I would try to do PeñaCabarga again: sprint and see if I could loseCobo. But he was straight on to me. I wentup with about a kilometre to go, dippeddown for a few hundred metres, then down,around and back up again on a fast,sweeping right-hand bend. I was pedalling soquickly on the downhill, trying to keep thepressure on, that I almost didn’t make itround the corner. I just managed to angle mybike to stay on course, pedalling at the sametime to keep the pace up and to make it diffi-cult to follow. I think he struggled followingthat – I was taking risks to squeeze on, tocreate a gap.

I eked out a small gap but riders who hadattacked earlier in the day were now on theroad in front of me. The crowds were goingmad and had almost formed a barrier. I was

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coming really fast up a climb, when a Frenchrider from Team AG2R and the fans blockedthe road in front of me. I didn’t really brakebut I slowed down and had to force my wayround them, half pushing the crowd and halfpushing the rider to let me squeeze throughand get past. That allowed Cobo to get backto me.

I carried on pushing all the way up butCobo was comfortable. It was just the two ofus over the top. We had started the descentwhen I spoke on the radio: ‘I’ve gone as hardas I can but I haven’t got anywhere. He’s onmy wheel. No point driving it down the otherside.’

Stalemate. Over.Cobo’s Vuelta. Myself and Brad, 2nd and

3rd.Still, the future was so bright I needed my

Oakley shades.

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20

One day I was a character actor getting bitparts; three weeks later I was getting mychoice of the scripts. Well, almost.

First they wouldn’t take my calls; now theywere calling to ask what they could do for me– anything, just say, anything. Well, almost.

Life changed after the 2011 Vuelta aEspaña. With the soft click of a switch my bigfuture was ahead of me again and not behindme. I could have been a contender and then Iwas a contender.

Second place in a Grand Tour brings acloudburst of UCI World Tour points and inmy case a major re-evaluation. The perform-ance was worth even more because inside thesport the result wasn’t deemed suspicious.Credibility is currency in modern cycling.

Despite all the toxic currents flowing throughsocial media, the managers of rival teams be-lieve Sky are clean. Riders and staff talk torival teams and soon enough the informationfilters through. When I rode well in theVuelta, I became someone they wanted. Justlike that.

Of course, people had been expecting thatI might wilt in the final week of the race but Iactually got stronger. Suddenly there was a‘Wanted’ poster with my name on it.

In terms of salary, I knew I’d jump a fewlevels, which was good news for me; butwhen wages increase, negotiations takelonger. Re-signing for Sky was notstraightforward.

After we crossed the finish line on Mad-rid’s Plaza de Cibeles on the final day therewere interviews and then the podium. I don’tknow how this happened but when Cobo,Brad and I got on the podium, I was on the

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wrong step. I finished 2nd but ended up onthe lowest step.

It was my first time on a podium in aGrand Tour, and my first time finishingahead of Brad in such a big race, but on thepodium I was still below him. ‘Well done,Chris,’ I said to myself. I’m not sure if it wasBrad or me who messed it up but right thereand then I thought, ‘This is not a photo I willbe keeping.’

Before the Vuelta I would have settled forany extension of my existing contract but asthe race progressed and I stayed in conten-tion, my value was going up. Dave Brailsfordstill wanted the Vuelta to play out beforetalking turkey. Or talking to the turkey. Idoubt that Dave expected me to hold it to-gether for the three weeks. Wait for Froomeyto have his bad day, then re-sign him for less.Maybe I would have done the same in his po-sition. Business is business.

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But the bad day never came, and when wegot to the poker game I had some prettygood cards in my hands.

A few days before the race reached Mad-rid, Dave brought up the subject. ‘Now thatit’s basically over, Froomey, we’ll be givingAlex a formal offer.’ That weekend the teamoffered us a deal.

There was a fanfare of trumpets. Upliftingchoral music. Hallelujah!

But Alex was not impressed. He impressedupon me that I wasn’t to be impressed either.

‘Chris, this is not an option. This is wellbelow your value. From the UCI World Tourpoints you’ve now got, you are worth consid-erably more.’

It was as if hemp had become suddenlyfashionable; as if cycling-obsessed bald guyswere what women suddenly wanted. Therehad been some tectonic shift in the market.

Team Saxo boss, Bjarne Riis, had been atthe Vuelta and messaged me after he got my

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number from Alex: ‘Chris, I would really liketo make you an offer. You would be a greatrider with our team.’ He suggested a meetingin Madrid the night the race ended.

Noz had been at the Vuelta and we metmost mornings. Normally the team got to thestart of a race a good hour before start time.There was then a meeting on the bus andafter that the riders changed and went tosign on. To make time for Noz I changed intomy race kit as we drove from the hotel sothat when the meeting ended, I was off to seehim. I got him a pass for the corporate vil-lage and inevitably we would find somecovered spot there for a chat.

Towards the end of the race, Noz and Italked more and more about my future.What should I do? Which teams had been intouch with Alex? How much was beingoffered? Was I prepared to leave Sky? Whatteam was right for me?

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Unless I was genuinely prepared to leaveSky, my bargaining position was seriouslyweakened. Sky were gambling on me not be-ing prepared to do that.

One morning Riis saw us as we were head-ing to the village. He stopped us, and saidagain how impressed he’d been with how Iwas riding. At that point I was Sky’s leader inthe race.

He then had a sly stab at Brad, hinting thathe’d been slowing me down.

‘You enjoying the freedom now?’He also mentioned how impressed Alberto

Contador, Saxo’s leader, had been with myperformance.

That last Sunday evening, Dave and mostof the Sky riders and staff left Madrid. Keento spend a couple of days in a great city withNoz, I stayed on. We hooked up with the Skyguys who were still in the hotel and we allhad a great dinner together at a restaurantspecializing in serving massive steaks.

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The Movistar team were dining in thesame restaurant that night. At one point dur-ing the evening their boss, Eusebio Unzué,came to our table, offered his congratula-tions and discreetly said that he would bespeaking with Alex about the future.

All this was good – more suitors equalledmore options. Although I wanted to stay withSky (they had guessed my preference cor-rectly), they had to deliver on two points: Iwanted a salary that reflected my value and Iwanted the opportunity to ride for the yellowjersey in the following year’s Tour de France.

There would be no more bit parts.After leaving the restaurant, Noz and I

went back to the hotel. It had been a goodevening but we were ready to turn in. Thetaxi ride took half an hour and we’d only justgot back when Bjarne Riis sent a text. He wasat a nightclub close to the restaurant wherewe’d just eaten and he wanted me to comeand join him. I was curious, and so was Noz,

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so we jumped into another taxi and gave thedriver the name of the nightclub.

Now, I am not a nightclub kind of guy. Nozis probably a few hundred years’ worth ofevolution away from being a nightclub kindof guy. He and I were riding in a taxi to aMadrid nightclub to meet a man who wasonce known within the peloton as Mr SixtyPer Cent due to an alleged hematocrit levelenhanced by taking EPO. He confessed laterto using EPO, recounting the scene in hishotel room when the Festina police raidswere going on: ‘I didn’t have a choice. My vi-als of doping products had to disappearquickly. In just a few minutes I gathered allmy doses of EPO and threw them down thetoilet.’

The club was underground, which mightnot have been a bad place to meet a manwith Bjarne’s shady past. There were flashinglights everywhere and loud music thumpingaway steadily; it was hardly the perfect venue

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to conduct contract negotiations and Nozand I felt anything but at home.

To catch what Bjarne was saying, I had tostand really close to him while poor Nozdidn’t know what to do with himself. I feltfoolish. Surely if Bjarne was really interestedhe would have come to us? But there wewere, the business equivalent of love in analleyway.

He used his lead rider, Contador, as thelove arrow in the charm offensive.

‘Alberto would love to have you on theteam. If you came to us you could be Al-berto’s last man in the mountains for theTour de France. Then you can choose theGiro or the Vuelta for yourself.’

He believed that this was what I wished tohear but he didn’t really have any idea what Iwanted. I was thinking, ‘Hang on, Bjarne, it’sthe Tour I really want to go for.’ He wasn’toffering me what I wanted but he presumedI’d want to be in his team.

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‘Chris, this is how it will work when youjoin.’

One of the reasons I was keen to speakwith other teams was that Team Sky hadbeen delaying for so long over the contractthat it would be a good thing if they got a bitnervous about my leaving. Another big reas-on for considering alternatives was my fearthat if I stayed I would always be Brad’s lieu-tenant. This was one of the things Bjarnedidn’t get; that penny never dropped. Whywould I leave Sky because of the Brad situ-ation to go and ride for Contador in theTour? Bjarne didn’t ask these questions andcouldn’t get his head close to the idea that Ididn’t want to be anyone’s lieutenant in theTour de France.

But then again, we were having this dis-cussion in a nightclub.

With the length of the stages, the climbs,the heat and the longer time trials, the Touris the race that plays to my strengths. I didn’t

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want a future that involved sacrificing mychance to help someone else win. There areenough teams out there with so few riderswho can realistically compete for the Tour deFrance podium that I shouldn’t be held back.Bjarne Riis and I were not singing from thesame hymn sheet.

And I wasn’t as in love with his team as heimagined I would be. He didn’t mentionContador’s positive test for clenbuterol at theprevious year’s Tour de France and for surethis wasn’t the place to have the discussion.But it was on my mind, as was Bjarne’s ownreputation and the fact of that admission hehad made about his own use of EPO.

As he was selling the team to me, I waslooking around at where we were, and who Iwas with. I was thinking that to join himwould be going a little to the dark side.

Very early in the conversation I shouldhave just said, ‘Thank you, Bjarne, I will con-sider it.’ But that isn’t me.

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A few weeks later I would have dinner withRichie Porte in Monaco. We had gotten toknow each other as he was coming to the endof his time with Bjarne’s team and was aboutto join Sky. Based on his experience, Richieadvised me against going to Saxo. He felthe’d been completely over-raced and that, asa young rider, he hadn’t been that welllooked after. He also felt the team was builtaround Contador and the few Spanish guyshe surrounded himself with. This all seemedto confirm my misgivings. Still, I knew thatplenty of other teams were keen to talk tome.

Noz and I met up with GiuseppeMartinelli, boss of the Astana team, the nightafter the Vuelta. Alex had warned me he wascoming with a proper offer and that I shouldat least sit down and speak with him.Astana’s headquarters are in Nice, close towhere I am based in Monaco, so that was aplus. Alex thought Astana might work for me

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as, with Alexandre Vinokourov on the wayout, they were looking for a new leader.

Alex came with us to Martinelli’s hotelroom in Madrid, where we discussed the of-fer. He spoke in Italian and the time I’dspent learning the language never seemedmore valuable. I translated parts of the con-versation for Noz. Martinelli said Astanawould pay me more than double the annualsalary Sky had offered.

From a business perspective, Alex hadn’tbeen wrong: Sky had no idea what my mar-ket value had become.

What I liked about Astana was that theywanted me as leader – no ifs or buts. Theywould pay me a leader’s salary and I wouldhave to justify it, but I was cool with that.

There were minuses too. Astana were aKazakh-backed team and though I’d over-heard some dinner conversations, I couldn’ttell whether they spoke Kazakh or Russian.Either way, I didn’t fancy my chances if I had

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to spend a year or two with words in Cyrillicscript stuck to my handlebars. A switch toAstana was obviously going to be a challengefor me. Vinokourov was central to the teamand, like Riis, he too had a past. Also, LanceArmstrong had ridden for them in 2010 and,though we were still a year away from the2012 USADA revelations, I didn’t see theLance association as a plus.

Still, I appreciated their offer and itshowed me that Alex’s reservations aboutSky’s offer were justified.

Alex then spoke with Garmin-Cervélo.They were interested but they had alreadyspent most of their budget for 2012 and theyoffered a deal whereby I would get one figurefor the first year and a significantly improvedsum for years two and three. JonathanVaughters called me a few times and said allthe right things. He wanted a new leader andwould build the team around me. This wasthe single thing I most wanted to hear: a

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chance to be leader with a team built to sup-port me. But their first offer was so far belowAstana’s that it was hard to seriously con-sider it. Alex went back to them and theysaid, ‘Okay, what we’re offering Chris in yearone, we will triple for years two and three.’

From Madrid, I sent Dave a text: ‘I love theteam because it has the right approach andI want to stay. But you have to meet theseother offers.’

Money wasn’t the only issue.I also wanted Dave to agree that I would

have the chance to win the Tour de France,or at least not to be stuck in a system where Icouldn’t. Finishing 2nd in Spain after doingso much work for Brad had given me confid-ence. Then when other teams proposed con-tracts that showed they wanted me as theirleader, that made me think: why shouldn’t Igo for the Tour de France?

Dave listened and said that this workedperfectly for Sky because the team wanted to

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go to the race with two riders going for GC. Itwas too much of a risk with just one, he said.Look what had happened with Brad at thisyear’s Tour, and then at the Vuelta. He saidhow good it was for the team that when Bradcracked, I was there to pick it up. Dave wasenthusiastic and convincing and, though Iwanted reassurance, I also wanted to staywith the team.

What I remember him saying was this: ‘Ifyou stay with us, we will basically guaranteeto you that you go to the Tour and ride forGC.’

In hindsight I can see that Dave was beingclever. I thought what he told me meant thatI could go to the Tour de France and have mychance to win it. But he didn’t actually saythis. Instead he spoke of two guys riding forGC, with one being the designated leader andthe other riding as his back-up. If anythinghappened to the leader, the second guywould take over.

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Dave’s approach was rather like a charac-ter’s in Through the Looking Glass: ‘When Iuse a word, it means just what I choose it tomean – neither more nor less.’

My understanding was that I would go tothe Tour as a protected rider but the detailswere never teased out. Dave’s words wouldactually mean just what he chose them tomean.

We talked about the salary and by now hewas aware that other teams had offered farmore. He wanted to know if I would accept afive-year contract. From his point of view,Sky were increasing my salary and giving methe security of a five-year deal. From mypoint of view, they were offering much lessthan other teams and I wanted a contractthat reflected being a leader, rather than adomestique. It was getting stressful and Isent Dave a long and quite strong messagesaying there would be no more going back

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and forth. I also said that if that was the finaloffer, I was going elsewhere.

He called me soon after that, wanting toknow which teams had made offers and forhow much.

‘Dave, it doesn’t work like that. I’m not go-ing to tell you which teams so you can justundercut them, knowing I want to stay withyou. You need to tell me what you are pre-pared to give me to stay. If that isn’t goodenough, I will leave. The ball is in yourcourt.’

To help him understand the seriousness ofthe situation I sent him a message sayingthere had been an offer of more than doublefor three years. We both knew I wanted tostay with the team and, to do that, I was pre-pared to accept less than was available else-where. So in that message I told him I wouldmeet him halfway.

‘This doesn’t need to be difficult. You needto just tell me, “yes” or “no”. I’m not looking

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for a five-year contract. I’m looking for threeyears with these numbers. You accept or youdon’t.’

Seconds later the phone rang. It was Dave.There was emotion in his voice, a tone thatsuggested he’d been upset by my message. Inhis eyes I’d given him what amounted to anultimatum.

‘Are you telling me that if we don’t pay youthat, you are going to leave?’

He sounded stern. I’d had enough though.‘Yes. Quite simply, yes. It doesn’t have to

be personal, Dave. You know what I’m look-ing for. Take it or leave it.’

‘Okay. Okay then.’And he hung up.That could be the end of it, I thought. I’d

pushed him too far. Maybe I’d overestimatedmy value. Still, other teams thought I wasworth it. In my message to Dave I’d said hehad forty-eight hours to decide because atthat point I was signing a piece of paper –

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either their piece of paper or somebodyelse’s.

Throughout those days in Madrid Noz wasgreat and a calming influence. I didn’t knowwhy Dave had stopped negotiating throughAlex, but by dealing directly with me, hemade it my issue. I’d never been in this situ-ation and had no experience of negotiating acontract. I was playing for very high stakes.What was clear, however, was that teamswere prepared to pay a lot of money for Gen-eral Classification riders that did not havedodgy pasts. Luckily for me, there weren’ttoo many riders out there.

So that was it. Forty-eight hours to decide.I quietly hoped Dave would come back and

say my terms were okay. But while wewaited, Noz and I went through the alternat-ives. Sitting in a Japanese restaurant with awriting pad, we made two columns – prosand cons. With the Astana money, I couldcreate my own little world inside the team. I

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could probably get Bobby Julich on board,ask them to hire a couple of riders I knew,maybe even guys I’d already worked with, tocreate a group around me. It was definitelythe harder option but it could be an interest-ing project.

It was easier to get my head round joiningGarmin. There I would have the team’s fullbacking, with English speakers all aroundme, and guys who seemed to get along well.Saxo wasn’t as attractive. Part of me thoughtthat Contador had become the Lance Arm-strong of the new era – the main man butalso under a cloud as the UCI and WADA(World Anti-Doping Agency) were appealingthe decision of the Spanish authorities to ex-onerate him following the clenbuterolpositive.

As it happened, Bobby was in England andfrom what I could tell Sky had convened asummit involving the team’s top people todecide whether or not to keep me. Dave

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would be presiding, that was for sure, withTim Kerrison, probably Rod Ellingworth,Carsten Jeppesen and Fran Millar. Bobbycalled me and I sensed that he had beenasked by Dave to find out what I was think-ing and whether or not I might actually leaveto join another team.

I was non-committal.‘There isn’t much to say, Bobby. I have giv-

en them my demands – they either want meor they don’t want me.’

He pushed me a bit on which other team Imight think of going to but I didn’t want toget into that. Bobby was in a tough place be-cause we had worked together and got onwell, and when Dave told him he was in-creasing my salary, Bobby had thought thatwas a good deal for me. It was good but notthe best.

Dave had asked him if he thought I wasworth more and Bobby told him honestlythat he didn’t think I was. Bobby knew the

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team needed to invest more in coaching anddevelopment and believed the differencebetween what I had been offered and what Iwas demanding could be put to better use.

Bobby had no idea about the alternativesand I couldn’t tell him at that point becausehe also had a duty to the team, so I wound upthe conversation.

‘Listen, Bobby, we’ll catch up and have acoffee when you are back from the UK. Theway I left it was that Dave knows what I wantand I’m waiting to hear back.’

‘Okay, Froomey. I hope you know whatyou’re doing.’

After those couple of days in Madrid withNoz, I travelled back to Monaco and was outtraining when Dave called.

‘We are going to accept your offer, so let’sget this contract done.’

I was pleased and relieved. I immediatelycalled up Robbie Nilsen in South Africa andtold him Sky had agreed to give me what I’d

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asked for and that I would like him to helpme draw up the contract.

Robbie knew what I wanted: I had to beguaranteed freedom to ride for General Clas-sification in the Tour. They were the words Iused. This would become quite a discussionpoint. We took the team’s first draft of thecontract and as it was just a standard con-tract we amended it to include a clause thatwould formally recognize my right to fightfor the yellow jersey in the Tour.

To an outsider, unfamiliar with how teamswork in cycling, it probably seems bizarrethat a rider would have to persuade his teamto allow him to try to win the biggest race inthe sport. Isn’t that supposed to be the wholeidea of competition? That you try to win?

If only it were so simple. From Dave’spoint of view, the team’s chances of winningany stage race, and especially one as tough asthe Tour de France, are better if there is one

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designated leader that everyone elsesupports.

And he had Brad to consider.Endless toing and froing between Robbie

and Sky’s people concluded with a clausethat stated the team would support me in myambitions in the Tour de France. In my eyes,that was strong enough: my ambition was towin the Tour and the team had officiallyagreed I would be supported in that aim.

I couldn’t be too insistent with Dave be-cause I knew I had to prove I could back upthe Vuelta performance with a similar effortin the Tour. They still saw inconsistency rid-ing in my slipstream. Never at any point inthe negotiations did I say to the team that Icould win the 2012 Tour, which would havebeen presumptuous. But I was saying Ineeded the freedom to try.

When Noz and I spoke about it I told him Ithought I could make it to the top five in theTour. The opposition was going to be much

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stronger than the Vuelta, but with the back-ing of the team, a top-five placing was attain-able. Uppermost in my mind was the factthat I’d lost the Vuelta by seconds to Coboafter losing minutes working for Brad. Thatwas one Grand Tour I had lost because I’dhad to ride for someone else and I didn’twant a second.

When I compared myself to Brad I knewthat even though I’d beaten him in theVuelta time trial I couldn’t be guaranteed todo the same in the Tour; I couldn’t count onit. In the mountains I would have the upperhand, but would I gain more in the moun-tains than I would lose in the time trials?Who knew? It was simply a question of hav-ing the right to find out.

After the Vuelta, we went to Copenhagen forthe World Championships. On a circuit madefor sprinters the GB team performed reallywell to control the race. Our aim was to giveMark Cavendish the chance to win the

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rainbow jersey. He didn’t let us down. Iwould spend a year with Cav on Team Skyand never really get to know him, but Iwould come to understand that when theteam worked for him that was when he wasmost likely to win.

A couple of days after the Worlds hadended Brad decided to speak publicly abouthis determination to win the following year’sTour de France. I was out training when Iheard, and shortly afterwards I got a phonecall from my brother Jono.

‘What’s Bradley Wiggins going on about? Ithought Brailsford agreed you would go tothe Tour and have your chance? Brad’s talk-ing like he’s the only Sky rider for the Tour.’

Jono was pissed, and so was I. Brad hadspoken as if he were the Team Sky leader forthe Tour. I called up Dave.

‘This isn’t what we talked about. We said Iwould be allowed to go for the Tour.’

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‘Yeah, yeah, this won’t stop you at all. LikeI explained, we need two riders going for theGC. We will go there with Plan A and Plan B.’

At that point we didn’t even know theroute for the race, so we didn’t know howmany mountaintop finishes or how manytime trials there would be. For all we knew, itmight be a route that suited me far morethan it suited Brad, but Brad wasn’t waitingto find out. He was already proclaiming thathe was going to win next year’s Tour.

He had probably heard about my contractnegotiations and my insistence upon a clauseabout next year’s Tour. I saw this as Bradputting a stake in the ground to mark histerritory.

What he had avoided saying was that theteam now had two guys who could go for GCin the Tour.

I’d had so many conversations about thiswith my friend and lawyer, Robbie Nilsen.We had wanted the word ‘guaranteed’ in the

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contract but they had wanted something lessbinding, and in the end it was agreed that theteam would ‘support me in my ambitions inthe Tour de France’.

By going public at the time he did, Bradcreated the impression that the team hadonly one guy with the ambition to win. I feltlike I was being told to lie down, chill out,enjoy your new contract and forget aboutriding GC in the Tour.

I hadn’t really analysed what Dave meantby Plan A and Plan B. Instead, I had a vaguesense that Brad would have his chance totake time on everyone in the time trials whileI would be allowed to go for it in the moun-tains. And the stronger guy would end up asteam leader.

Before any discussion of how the teamwould use us, I felt we first needed to knowhow many mountaintop finishes there wouldbe. If there were several, the Tour would be adifficult one for Brad. If there were not so

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many, but there were two long individualtime trials, that would tilt the balance in hisfavour. With two or three mountaintop fin-ishes, and the team’s support, I believed Icould aim for the podium in Paris.

With the team’s support? That was a bigquestion. Even then, at a time when I wasgetting a very big salary increase, I wasn’tsure the team saw me as someone to lead theTour de France charge. They knew that witha little more support I probably could havewon the Vuelta but I would still have toprove to them that it was more than a one-off.

In the back of my mind there lurked a hazyfear which I didn’t properly recognize at thetime: might the team have been thinking thatthey needed to keep me because if they letme go to another team I could be the guythat would beat Brad?

After the season ended we had a team get-to-gether in Milan. Mark Cavendish and Bernie

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Eisel, who had both recently come on board,were there. We had a few meetings over thetwo days and on the last evening we all wentout for a night on the town. Brad was in Mil-an too and though we hadn’t been close be-fore, there was a new tension there whichhadn’t previously existed.

Now we had a reason to feel we wereagainst each other.

The ink on the new contract was hardlydry and already I was unsure of my position.Salary-wise, I had been given a great deal,but I had the sense the team thought thisshould keep me happy. You can go for any-thing you want, Froomey, so long as Braddoesn’t want it.

The tough conversations that needed totake place never happened. This wasn’t theteam’s fault but mine. On the bike I canfight. Off the bike I am paralysed by passivityand politeness. I’m not confident enough,not assertive enough.

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Blessed are the meek for they shall contin-ue to ride for Brad.

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Part Three

THE TOUR DE FRANCE

21

I am in my room at the Hotel Van Der Valkin Verviers, a Belgian city halfway betweenLiège and the German border. It’s the lastday of June 2012 and, man, I feel ready. To-morrow is Le Grand Départ of my secondTour de France and though I don’t oftenswear, let me just say that I feel very fuckingready.

This journey back to the Tour, four yearsafter the first, well, there are tortoises in theMasai Mara that could have got here quicker.That’s okay because I know how much pro-gress there’s been. That first Tour came a fewweeks after my mother died. I prepared on amountain bike while home for Mum’s funer-al in Nairobi. Back then, I knew so littleabout what was involved.

Now I’m part of Team Sky, the world’s bestteam, and I’m coming back to the Tour un-derstanding the race in a new way. Once Iwasn’t certain I could do anything in a raceas competitive as the Tour. Now I know I cancompete – I’m just not sure if the team willallow me to. It’s not that they don’t like mebut Brad Wiggins is the Big Kahuna here.The team directory has no listing for KahunaNumber Two or Deputy Big Kahuna.

If I don’t keep that thought on a tightleash, it will drive me crazy.

I want Dave Brailsford and the team toknow that after a difficult first half to theseason, I feel in the best form of my career.More than that, I want them to know thatnot only can I be the last man in the moun-tains with Brad but that I can stay with himevery day. When there’s an opportunity, I’dlike to have the freedom to see what I can do.

Does that make me a bad person? This ismeant to be a sport, correct? If you’re good

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enough, you get the chance to win. However,I’m not sure the team wants to have this de-bate. Definitely not on the eve of the Tour deFrance.

Brad has ridden very well through the firsthalf of the season and shown that he’s cap-able of winning the Tour. He is Team Sky’sleader and what the team likes more thananything is clarity: one leader supported byevery other rider. They know I can be one ofBrad’s lieutenants, but I know I can be morethan that.

Better to not think about it too much andenjoy the Hotel Van Der Valk, which isn’treally your typical Tour de France hotel. It’stoo nice. It has four stars, big bedrooms, amodern lobby and a feel that borders on lux-urious. It’s a good place to spend our lastnight of freedom; from tomorrow we becomeprisoners of the road.

Right now I’m in the bedroom and my legsare inside the lower part of the skinsuit I will

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use in tomorrow’s 6.4-kilometre prologuetime trial around Liège. I’ve deliberatelyturned the skinsuit back to front and, usingmy legs to keep the upper section taut, I tryto pin number 105 on to the lower back.

Richie Porte, my teammate, room-mateand all-round mate, is close by doing thesame. Over the last six months we have be-come good friends. At first I wasn’t sureabout Richie but I’m like that with everyone;I give myself time to work them out. It didn’ttake long with Richie. He’s chippy and whatyou see is what you get: there aren’t manythoughts that start in Richie’s mind anddon’t end up coming out of his mouth. I likethat.

Pinning the number on to the skinsuit isn’tas straightforward as you’d imagine. It takestime. As well as stretching it upwards, you’vealso got to get it hip-width. I like the pin-heads on the inside so they don’t catch thewind. Sure, they’ll scrape my skin but that’s

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better than seconds lost because of a frac-tionally higher drag coefficient. Richie hasthat smirk on his face.

‘Nice performance plan?’ he says, and thensmiles. I know what he means.

Sean Yates, Sky’s directeur sportif for theTour, has come up with our battle plan. Itdetails how Brad can win. It’s a good plan,and tactically it’s well thought out; Seanknows the ropes. Dave and Tim like it, butwhen I read it my heart sank. Brad is Plan A.There is no Plan B. Sean sees my role solelyas one of Brad’s lieutenants in themountains.

Richie instinctively knows how I’m feeling.He smiles to let me know he’s on my sideand that, come what may, he understandsmy predicament.

I can’t let Sean lower my enthusiasm forthe race. I’m in really good form and thoughI’ll support Brad and ride for the team, therewill be opportunities. I keep telling myself

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Brad deserves to be team leader while anoth-er voice says, ‘Yeah, but the team promisedyou’d be able to ride for GC.’

First things first. I need a good ride in to-morrow’s prologue. To show them I amready.

Next morning I speak with Gary Blem, whohas prepared my time-trial bike. Gary talksme through the changes and they all seemgood. At the bus I’ve got an hour and a halftill my start time. I’ve planned this to the lastdetail so I don’t end up waiting at the startline, which is almost as bad as running late.

I put on my skinsuit bottoms for thewarm-up but don’t pull the upper sectionover my torso. That would make me too hoton the turbo trainer. I wear an undervest forcollecting sweat, then a light mountain jerseywith a pocket for my iPhone. During thewarm-up I will turn on my music and shutout everything else.

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I check my time-trial helmet, fastening thestrap to the right length so I won’t have toadjust it later. I lay it on my seat. Holding thevisor up to the light, I look for any marksthat need to be cleaned. Then I fiddle withthe magnets to make sure they are wherethey should be to hold the visor in place.Gloves are placed on my seat. Shoe coversready.

I then soak two small pieces of cotton woolin Olbas Oil, stuff them up my nostrils, drawair through my nose and wait for the oil tostart clearing my airways. A quick espressoand I’m ready for the turbo trainer. The teamhas set up the trainer on a specially builtplatform beside the bus; uneven ground canruin a warm-up.

This warm-up; I could do it in my sleep.To do it right demands concentration. Think,get it right. I start with 3 minutes of easypedalling. Then an 8-minute progression tothreshold. At threshold I’m producing a

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power I can sustain for up to an hour – over400 watts. I dance to the numbers comingup on the display fixed to the handlebars.

Two minutes of recovery are followed by aquicker 4-minute progression. As I start at200 watts and need to get above 400, I in-crease my power output by 60 watts aminute until I hit 440.

I begin another 3 minutes’ recovery, then Ido three accelerations, which are almostsprints: two in the saddle, one out. Each lasts10 seconds and is followed by 50 seconds ofrecovery. I then keep my legs turning for an-other 3 or 4 minutes. At 25 minutes I stop;warm-up complete. It is 10 minutes until Iroll down the start ramp.

Back on the bus I take off the top and theundershirt; I have a small towel ready tomop up the sweat. A soigneur will help getmy torso into the skinsuit, making sure notto rip my race number. If it is pulled toohigh, the pins will snap; this is an art.

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I gulp down a hydromax gel, the one thattastes of pineapple juice, then I pick up mygloves and helmet. I’m ready.

The starter counts me down: trois, deux,un, allez. Just 6.4 kilometres – too short fortactics but I still don’t want to set off too fast.Robbie Nilsen, from back in the day, has in-doctrinated me: first ten per cent of a TT atninety per cent capacity. I take one quicklook at the SRM: 520 watts. That’s good butnot crazy. I’m going fast and breathing reallyhard. Another glance at the SRM: my heartrate is up to 170, which is as high as minegoes. I can hear myself breathing.

I don’t know why it’s so loud because I feelI’m going okay. Short, flat time trials don’tsuit me but this is not too bad. I keeppushing.

Right line into corners; nothing stupid.Fast and smooth; a kilometre to go. Empty itall now.

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I zip through the finish where Szrekkie iswaiting for me. I’m gasping for breath, strug-gling, but I can’t think why. As I try tobreathe deeply I feel like I’ve gone anaerobic;my body has seized up. I’ve never been sowasted. So helpless.

‘Hey, boy,’ Szrekkie says, ‘take the cottonwool from your nose.’

Oh shit!I’d forgotten to take out the nose plugs be-

fore the start. I’d raced the whole prologuewith them in, blocking my breathing. Thirtyper cent of your breathing is done throughyour nose. I feel embarrassed. Really embar-rassed. I’ve actually raced an okay prologue:11th at 16 seconds down on Fabian Cancel-lara, a specialist in the short time trial. Bradis 2nd to Cancellara, 7 seconds down, and 9seconds quicker than me.

But what has the blocked nose cost me? Afew seconds, perhaps a little more. It defin-itely hasn’t helped. Brad’s 2nd place means

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the team is happy. No one makes much of afuss about my mistake. Except the boys atthe dinner table.

I’m one of the later ones to arrive for themeal. Bernie Eisel is sitting there with twopaper napkins plugged into his nostrils.Funny. Genuinely funny. He looks at me.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asks, all innocent, as ifhe’s unaware he’s got two tissues up hisnose.

Brilliant, I think, just brilliant. ‘Okay, guys,laugh it off …’ My Tour de France has got offto the start I didn’t want.

I was treated differently after finishing 2ndin the Vuelta. My opinion was sought.‘Froomey, what do you think about this?’ Thekijana was moving up in the world. The teamhad a system of rider representatives and Iwas asked to liaise with and speak on behalfof the British guys in the team.

This never really worked but at the time Iwas quite pleased with the new status.

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Perceptions changed on the outside too.People noticed the performance in Spain andtowards the end of October 2011 I had runinto Adam Blythe again. Adam is a Britishrider and someone whose company I en-joyed. He was about to the join the BMCteam.

There was a junket to Langkawi in Malay-sia and Adam was due to go with his team-mate Philippe Gilbert, the Belgian star who’dwon more big races than any rider in 2011.Late in the day Philippe wasn’t able to makeit and Adam asked if I wanted to go in hisplace. He saw the look of surprise on myface.

‘Froomey, you were second in the Vuelta.They’d be delighted if you went. It’s basicallyan all-expenses-paid holiday. You do onelittle appearance for them and they’ll giveyou an attendance fee, as well as paying foreverything.’

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This wasn’t a difficult decision. Betweenthe beaches of Langkawi and time in KualaLumpur, we were away for ten days. It was agood trip and after returning to Monaco,where winter was kicking in, I was lookingforward to a couple of months of the Johan-nesburg summer where I could begin mytraining for 2012.

However, in Langkawi, the rash that hadstarted in the Vuelta had progressively got-ten worse. My face was bloated, especiallyunder the eyes, and it was very uncomfort-able. In the middle of the night I would wakeup and realize I had been itching the soresand making them worse. Then I wouldn’t beable to get back to sleep.

Worried about using a medication thatcould produce a positive test, I was scared todo anything about it in Langkawi. I appliedNivea cream to the affected areas. If any-thing, it made things worse: the rash sappedmy energy and disturbed my sleep.

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Back in South Africa, I saw a dermatolo-gist. Eczema, he said. Hydrocortisonecreams were prescribed. They calmed the in-flammation but after the next training ride,the symptoms returned. Bigger tubs ofstronger cortisone-based cream broughtmore temporary relief but the underlyingproblem remained.

I’m not one for agonizing over how I lookbut at this time I could have done withoutthe disfigured face. This was my time to im-press Michelle Cound, a Welsh-born, SouthAfrican-raised girl who I’d known for a fewyears and with whom I’d been friends in along-distance sort of way.

She took photographs at races I’d riddenin South Africa and it was Daryl Impey whoinitially introduced us. We hit it off and oncein a while I’d send her a text, she’d reply andwe’d be mildly flirtatious. With 8,000 kilo-metres separating Europe and

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Johannesburg, nothing much happened oth-er than the infrequent texts.

Towards the end of my second year withBarloworld, when the team had neither themoney nor the enthusiasm to send us to a lotof races, I went down to Johannesburg on ashort visit and asked Michelle out. We bothlived in Midrand: me still with Noz and Jen,while Michelle had her own house. Thoughwe were coming from the same suburb, wetravelled in separate cars to Sandton, nearthe centre of Johannesburg.

We’d planned to see a film but insteadwent to Baglios Italian restaurant in NelsonMandela Square at Sandton City. Knowing Iwould be riding with Sky the following sea-son meant I was full of enthusiasm and con-fident about the future. Michelle was a bitfurther on in her career as an IT systems de-veloper and was working for an insurancecompany called Momentum.

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She drove an Audi S3, a car I really likedbut only now, after joining Sky and movingon to a better salary, could I consider buying.Well, maybe I slightly exaggerated my in-terest in the car because I was hoping to kissMichelle goodnight.

‘Could I walk you to your car? I’d like tosee the S3.’

‘Why not?’ Michelle said.I checked over the car and thought about

kissing Michelle goodnight. I thought aboutit and let the moment pass. ‘My car is in theother car park. Would you mind droppingme round to it?’ Inside her car, I’d be braver.As we said goodnight, Michelle gave me ahug. Like I was her brother.

Two years passed. I’d been involved in arelationship that didn’t work out and a fewmonths before I was due back in SouthAfrica, Michelle and I set up a date for whenI returned. It was not the time to get a hor-rible rash. But that didn’t stop me and soon

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after I’d landed in Johannesburg we met forlunch at News Cafe, which was just down theroad. For dessert, I invited her to comehouse-hunting that afternoon.

My new contract with Team Sky had alsomade buying a house possible, and as I’dbeen using Johannesburg as my out-of-sea-son training base, it made sense to lookthere. Noz’s conference business was grow-ing and there were always people floatingaround at his place; I needed somewherequieter. The roads around Midrand were be-coming busier and busier too and more dan-gerous to train on.

I rented a cottage that my friend MattBeckett’s parents owned, and though thatwas better than my dad’s in terms of accessto training routes I still wanted my ownspace. Jono agreed to loan me what I neededuntil my new salary kicked in and I could payhim back.

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Michelle didn’t realize what she was get-ting into. That afternoon we looked at ahouse in Parkhurst, a northern suburb thathas retained a village-like feel. Its 4th Aven-ue has cafes and restaurants that people walkto, and because I went to school not far fromParkhurst I knew I could head west or southand, after about half an hour of busy roads,I’d be on routes that were good for training.

Parkhurst is an affluent area. Althoughthat first place wasn’t right I soon found onethat was. It was a lovely house, with a separ-ate flat that was ideal for renting or having afriend stay to keep an eye on the main housewhen I was in Europe. It was the kind ofhome I never imagined myself owning or liv-ing in.

That first day with Michelle started withlunch, spilt over into house-hunting andended at Luca’s Italian restaurant in Sun-ninghill that evening. We got on really well.Michelle didn’t seem to mind the miniature

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volcanoes on my face and arms. And therewasn’t anything about her that I didn’t like.We had plenty to talk about.

Michelle now had her own IT consultancybut had just been recruited by the bankingand wealth management company Investecto be a systems architect for their operationin Mauritius. She could do this out of theirSouth African headquarters in Sandton andwas hugely excited by the chance to work fora big and progressive company. I told herabout my hopes for the coming season andhow I believed I could do well in the Tour deFrance.

After that first day we wanted to see eachother again, and pretty soon. For the follow-ing two months, we were close to insepar-able. I’d stay at her house, and she’d stay atthe new house in Parkhurst. It helped thatMichelle knew cycling. She had cycled withan amateur club in Johannesburg and evendid a few stints as a team manager for some

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of the small local teams (she could havecome in handy in Salzburg in 2007).Michelle ended up travelling to a lot of racesand taking a camera with her. Her photossoon caught the eye of the local cycling pub-lications and in the end she enjoyed takingphotographs more than riding races.Understandable.

The new house was unfurnished but, for-tunately for me, Michelle had decided to takeDecember off before starting with Investec inJanuary. The cutlery, crockery, cooker,washing machine, curtains, furniture andlight fittings all became her responsibility. Ithought electric shutters on the windowswould be nice but hadn’t worked out howwe’d hook up the shutters to our power.Michelle sorted that out, too.

All the time my skin problem ebbed andflowed. Hydrocortisone helped with the in-flammation but the underlying problem per-sisted. We talked about it a lot and Michelle

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wondered if maybe it wasn’t actually eczema.The rubber in my shorts, for instance, irrit-ated my skin. We were using Adidas gear andtheir famous three-stripe logo produced athree-stripe rash on my legs. Wanting toknow more about skin conditions, Michelletrawled the internet in search of informationthat might provide a clue to the precisenature of my problem.

I went to another dermatologist in Johan-nesburg and spoke on the telephone with theSky doctor Richard Freeman but nothingchanged until Michelle stumbled across aphotograph on the internet of someone withwelts on their arms that looked the same as Ihad. She discovered it wasn’t eczema buthives and treatable with antihistamine med-ication. I began taking one tablet a day andsuddenly the problem was more or less un-der control.

Bobby called me a lot, asking how I wasand how training was going. It felt like he

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was checking up on me. I don’t believe thiswas coming from Bobby but from concernbeing expressed within the team. They wereprobably wondering if being put on a bigsalary would change me. Then they hear I’vegot a new house, and a new girlfriend …

And they worried that I might not have thesame hunger. So without anyone ever accus-ing me of slacking, Bobby was making morecalls than normal. That was fine. I likedBobby and knew that he realized what kindof person I was too. I was two years into theteam at this point and it was interesting thatpeople still didn’t know me. That was prob-ably as much down to me as them. Eitherway, I wasn’t going to become less dedicated.

One of the reasons Michelle and I hit it offwas the fact that she had so much going onin her life. She had a great career, was closeto her family, had a lot of friends and, basic-ally, she had her own independent existence.She wasn’t at all needy and, given my love for

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being on the bike, that was important. Thelast thing Michelle wanted was for me to losefocus.

Returning to Europe in mid January for thebeginning of our 2012 campaign, I knewwhat I had to do: start well in training, usethe early-season races to sharpen up andthen produce the form that would showeveryone I was ready to ride GC in the Tourde France. Our first race was the Tour of theAlgarve, where Richie, who was in reallygood shape, was allowed to lead the team.

There was a mountaintop finish that wasgoing to be decisive. We made sure it was.Though we didn’t have the leader’s jersey, werode like we did, which was the typical TeamSky approach: try to control the race fromthe start, make it hard for everyone and trustthat, at the end, your leader will be strongerthan everyone else’s.

I rode well on that stage as did almosteveryone on the team. Richie finished it off

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easily, and went on to win the race. It was agood start for the team, but in the end, notthat brilliant for me. Next day was a harder,lumpy day and I woke feeling terrible.Without an appetite or any energy, the mo-ment I got out of bed I knew it was going tobe a struggle. So I did what I always did atthese times, I kidded myself: ‘Let me just getinto the stage and I’ll ride through it.’

I put on full leg warmers and the thickestjacket I could find. On the bus I shivered allthe way to the start, and something definitelyfelt not quite right. I spoke with NicolasPortal, assistant director sportif, telling him Iwasn’t good.

‘Chris, just try to stay in the wheels. It’ll befast until the break goes, then you’ll be okay.’

Twenty kilometres in, I felt even worse.The break hadn’t gone, the speed stayed highand once we hit a climb, I was off the back.Soon I was being overtaken by the race carsand when our second team car drew

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alongside, I spoke with Nico. ‘I’m sorry but Ihave to get in the car. I’m feeling terrible andI’m not going to be able to get to the finish.I’m really sorry I can’t stay and help Richiebut, feeling as I am, there’s nothing I can do.’

Next morning I was worse again so I waspacked on to a flight back to Nice. For thefollowing five days, I felt more sick than I’dever done in my life. On my own in a tinystudio apartment, this wasn’t an especiallyjoyous time. The team had me on antibioticsbut through those first few days they madeno difference. There were times when I wasafraid I was going to die.

Bobby later told me that when I aban-doned the race on that Saturday morning,Sean had ribbed him about it. ‘Ah ha, what’swrong with your boy? I told you he’d take themoney and that would be it.’ Well, there Iwas back in Monaco, enjoying the good life.

Having to pull out of Algarve was just anoccupational hazard. It shouldn’t have been

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a big deal. But often that initial setback is thefirst domino to fall. I’d asked the team a fewmonths before if I could skip Paris–Nice asJeremy was getting married in Kenya on theweekend the race finished. They said no. ‘Ifyou’re going to fit into the Tour team, youneed to be there.’ I felt they were telling me,politely, that I had to do whatever I wasasked. I understood that.

But I’d already told Jeremy that I’d be ableto get that weekend off. Jono and I were the‘best men’ so I had to be there. I askedJeremy if he could put the wedding back fora week and told him that if anyone had to in-cur any extra costs to change their flight ortheir hotel booking, I’d take care of it.Jeremy put the wedding back and thankfullythere were no extra costs.

A week before Paris–Nice I went for atraining ride with Richie, and Bobby camealong too on a scooter. We were on a climbwhen Richie pushed on a bit, and I struggled

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to stay with him. I was coughing every 10seconds, as if my lungs were being squeezed,and I couldn’t stop. Bobby moved up along-side me and shook his head.

‘Listen, I’ve got to make a call here, there’sno chance of you riding Paris–Nice. You willonly destroy yourself if you try.’

I couldn’t argue. That bug had been a badone; the dominoes were continuing totumble. Bobby told me to take it easy for fouror five days and by the time Paris–Nicebegan, I was only just getting back into train-ing again. On the day Paris–Nice ended, Iwent for a long spin with Adam Blythe. Ourplan was to do a long, steady ride but insteadof coming back directly to Monaco, we wouldride on to Nice and I would watch the finalCol d’Eze time trial on the Team Sky buswhile he met up with his BMC teammates.

Our ride took us over the border into Italyand after going through Ventimiglia on the

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Italian side, I suffered a Crash Froome re-lapse. A serious one.

We were coming towards a border cross-ing at Latte and an inviting stretch of clearroad that led through a couple of tunnels. ‘Ineed to do a bit of an effort here,’ I toldAdam. As I occasionally do, I had used mytime-trial bike that day. I needed practice inthe time-trial position.

Adam tucked in behind me and I increasedthe effort. We were coming towards the bor-der and just as I began to ease up, the roadgot a little busier. There was a cafe/liquorstore on the right, cars parked along theroad, but nothing dangerous until an olderman suddenly stepped out from behind oneof 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 goingto walk away from this unhurt. But he kept

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going, quickening his step if anything. Heshifted straight into my line and I smashedinto him, my helmet crashing into his head.Down he went.

I carried on flying, but without the bikeunder me. I landed half on the island run-ning down the middle of the road and half onthe road itself. I rolled over. I had to get onto the island, out of the road. I needed tocatch my breath. People gathered. Somecame to where I was, others were around theman, who might have been in his late sixties,early seventies.

I had to know how the man was, but hewasn’t moving; no movement at all. I sat upto take a look but that was met with instantdisapproval from those around me. ‘Youmustn’t move. Lie down. Keep your headstill. You have a bad cut on your chin.’ Myhelmet had been shattered. They were think-ing head injury.

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Adam had reacted to my scream by lockingon his brakes and then veering round us. Hewas okay. All I could think about was theman lying there motionless. I felt sick, naus-eous and dizzy. I kept trying to look over towhere he was. I saw the brown paper baghe’d been carrying. It was on the road, brownturning to claret. His bottle of red had beenanother casualty. People were talking to me.‘You’re going to need some stitches. Don’tmove until your head’s been examined.’

‘Please,’ I said, ‘can you check on thatman. 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 lookslike he’s dead. Someone felt for a pulse butthere wasn’t one. Just all this blood.’

I sat up again to look. Their voices werestill telling me to lie down, but I had to see. Ablanket or sheet had been put over the man.From where I was looking, it seemed it was

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over his entire body. ‘I have killed this guy,’ Ithought. ‘With my helmet, I have killed him.’It was the most horrible feeling I’ve ever hadin my life.

I lay back down and thought, ‘Christ. Howcan I ever come back from this? This is morethan an accident. This is a situation where aman has died.’

I didn’t feel at any point that it had beenmy fault. He had stepped on to the road infront of me, leaving me with no time to avoidhim. I hadn’t been reckless. No, this was anaccident. But I didn’t know what to do. I hadmy phone, and Adam was standing besideme. People asked if they could help but thedamage was done.

Some amateur cyclists stopped and tookphotographs. I thought that these could beon Twitter and Facebook in the next fewminutes. I thought of Noz, Jono, Jeremy,Michelle – I didn’t want them to see them,not knowing if I was okay. I called Michelle,

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still lying there flat on my back. Someonewhispered that I should ask to be taken to aFrench hospital as I’d be seen to quickerthere than in Italy.

We were still in Italy though, so it was anItalian ambulance that arrived. Paramedicscame towards me, then went straight to theold man. I strained to see. They took offwhatever had been covering him, loaded himon 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 ambu-lance would come for me.

I’d lost quite a bit of skin from my legs andarms, but nothing major. I had a gash on mychin, but that wasn’t too bad either. Thenthey discussed what to do with my bike. Aman who’d been in the cafe offered to mindit until I was ready to collect it. Adam said he

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was riding back to Monaco to get his car andhe could take it then. The police shook theirheads and said it was part of the evidence.They were going to impound it.

We’d been given some new handlebars forour time-trial bikes and not everyone on theteam had them. I’d got one of the last pairsand I was thinking, ‘If they take the bike Ilose the handlebars and I really don’t want todo that.’ I asked to keep the bike, but the po-lice said no, the bike would be taken to thepolice compound in Ventimiglia. Then I re-membered the old man on his way to hospit-al and the handlebars seemed lessimportant.

While I waited for the ambulance I photo-graphed the line of cars parked on the roadbeside the cafe/liquor store. All of those carswere on a no-parking line and if anyone wasgoing to say this was my fault, I wanted evid-ence, just in case, to show that those carsshouldn’t have been there.

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At the hospital I had to sign forms I couldbarely read, before they took me for an MRIscan and then stitched up my chin. Butmostly they left me on a surgical bed in acorridor staring at the ceiling.

From there I called Bobby. ‘Listen, I’m notcoming to the finish of Paris–Nice this after-noon. I’ve had an accident and hit an oldman. I’m here at the hospital with him, wait-ing to see how he is and when I’m going to bedischarged.’

The police said they needed a urine sampleto check my alcohol level. Standard proced-ure. When the nurses came I asked about theman and was eventually told he’d fracturedhis skull. It was serious but he would beokay. More relief.

Adam returned in the car and had to hangaround for a few hours before they allowedme home. It was a long, long day. But theman recovered.

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In the aftermath of the accident I went toVentimiglia police station close to ten times,and actually got to know the guys workingthere – two in particular were keen cyclists.They told me I had to pay a small fine for hit-ting a pedestrian, explaining that Italian lawconsiders seniors in the same way it regardschildren and I would be held responsible.

Getting the bike back took for ever, buteventually I did.

The day after the accident I flew home toKenya for Jeremy’s wedding. Shaken up bythe experience more than the fall, I was gladto have those days with the family. The ser-vice was held on the veranda of theTamarind Hotel restaurant overlooking Tu-dor Creek on the coast just north ofMombasa.

It was a light-hearted service with a beau-tiful backdrop. During the ceremony theyplayed a song that I hadn’t heard for yearsbut it was something my mother had always

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listened too, often when just she and I weretogether in the house. It made me feel veryteary and, after that, I was choking back theemotion. It was just so sad that she couldn’tbe with us on this day. She would have beenin her element.

The reception was on two traditional sail-boats about a kilometre out on the IndianOcean. The boats were roped together andlinked by a bridge. We ate barbecued lobster,prawns, crab and lots of fresh fish.

Jeremy brought a mountain bike I’d left athis place in Kenya to Mombasa and the nextday I got up early so I could do three or fourhours of training before the sun got too hot.On the way home I stopped off at Dr CharlesChunge’s practice in Nairobi. Charles haddiscovered my bilharzia and I was keen forhim to check if it was still in my system andwhat level it was at. I’d also been havingstomach problems and wanted him to exam-ine that as well.

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‘The level’s gone down since we first foundit but you’ve still got it,’ he said. The num-bers were now in the three hundreds as op-posed to the five hundreds they had been atthe beginning. Still, it was time for anotherround of Biltricide. Dr Chunge gave me sixbig tablets, advised me to take them all atonce and warned me it would be a few daysbefore 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 canseldom resist a man with parasites, a skinrash and typhoid. Michelle was no exception.She came to Europe to see me race at thetwo-day Critérium International. Girlfriendsaren’t typically welcomed at races, but BobbyJulich had convinced the team that I was indesperate need of some motivation. After be-ing sick at Algarve, followed by slow

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recovery, followed by a bad crash, then aweek in Kenya, I suddenly had a bit of catch-ing up to do.

The Critérium International confirmedthat. I wasn’t good.

Michelle came back with me to Monaco,saw my little apartment and silently des-paired. She thought about the days I’d spenthere alone feeling sick as a dog after Algarve.It wasn’t an easy decision for her to give upher job with Investec. I’d loved her for herindependence, yet it was the one thing I wasasking her to give up. She went home and,after a few weeks of deliberation, resigned.

The Critérium International had shownme that I was off the pace. At the Tour deRomandie I made a start at reparation. Bythen the Tour team was taking shape. Bradhad won Paris–Nice and the question waswho would be supporting him in the moun-tains. Mick Rogers and Richie were ahead ofme. On the hard stages in Romandie, I was

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pulling fourth last. I was doing the work onthe middle climbs too, but always trying topull for longer than my body wanted.

I remember doing one long pull, thinking,‘I’m only going to be able to do another fivehundred metres,’ and somehow managing toget over the top of that specific climb beforeagain counting in five hundreds up the nextclimb. Just a little further.

Mick was very experienced and I think hesaw himself as the natural road captain andBrad’s main man. He was riding well at thetime.

Romandie brought me on a lot and at theDauphiné a month later I felt like I was closeto being back to my highest level. On thepenultimate stage Richie and I were pullingat the front on the Col de Joux Plane, withBrad and Mick in behind us. The Joux Planeis hard but Richie and I felt good and pushedit. Or at least we did until Mick started

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telling us to ease up: ‘Easy boys, easy.’ Hear-ing that was good for our morale.

That Dauphiné ended in Châtel and westayed on in the Alps for a fortnight to do arecce on some of the climbs we would ride inthe Tour and a final block of training. Feelinggood after the Dauphiné, I felt I moved on toanother level during this last training camp.I’d been riding with Richie all year and hehad generally been stronger than me in themountains. Over these few days thatchanged. In the best form of my life, I wouldgo 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 out-lined how things would work.

Brad and Cav were the protected riders. Ifone punctured, teammates would wait and

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pull them back up to the peloton. I wonderedwhat about me? Apart from Richie, no onewould have guessed I might have been think-ing along these lines. After all, what had Idone this year? Fourth in the Dauphiné wasmy best result. Set against Brad’s victories inParis–Nice, Tour de Romandie and theDauphiné, that 4th place was nothing. I kepttelling myself that in the mountains therewould be opportunities. There had to be.

The first stage was through the rollingcountryside of the Ardennes but the climbswere too short to get rid of all the sprinters.Ten kilometres from the finish is generallywhere the jostling for places towards thefront of the peloton begins. It’s a fight youcan’t avoid and I had got into a good posi-tion; I was in the front third of the pack.Then I punctured.

Richie saw it. I didn’t ask him to wait, andthe team definitely didn’t ask him to wait.But he did. Richie had every chance of

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finishing high up on GC in this Tour but onthe first stage, he sacrificed that for me. Thatwas an incredible thing to do.

We were on a long straight road that ranby the river, and a crosswind was hitting usfrom the right. If there was one place on theentire stage you didn’t want to puncture, thiswas it. Richie did a really long pull for meuntil we could see the peloton ahead of us,but with the crosswinds, it was so hard tomake contact again.

Soon the crosswinds split the peloton andthat meant we were never going to get backto the front group. The groups we caughtwere also struggling. Then the front groupdisappeared from view. It was out of sight.Gone.

We picked up our teammate ChristianKnees, who’d done a lot of work for Brad butwas spent and unable to do any more pullingat that pace. If it hadn’t been for Richie, Iwould have been on my own.

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I lost 1 minute 25 seconds because of thepuncture, which was hard to stomach. All thetalk I’d had with Dave about my riding forGC at the Tour now seemed like it was justthat. Talk.

The race had hardly begun and already Iwas behind. It was a big blow. It also didn’thelp that, apart from Richie, hardly anyonenoticed.

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22

2012: The Tour de France, continued

Stage Seven: Saturday 7 July, Tomblaine toLa Planche des Belles Filles, 199 kilometres

The Algarve sickness, missing Paris–Nice,that collision with the old guy in Latte, theTour plan that saw me as nothing more thanone of Brad’s lieutenants and then the punc-ture on the first stage; most of what couldhave gone wrong, did go wrong. But I wasriding well, and had what was probably thebest form of my career. The first mountainstage of the race was to the summit of LaPlanche des Belles Filles in the Vosges.

I knew this would be interesting. We hadbeen to recce the stage, and the climb at theend was going to be hard: it is steep at the

bottom and never eases. It isn’t extremelylong – just 5.9 kilometres – but it is enough.

To get there we would have to go over acategory-three climb and a lumpy approachthrough a bit of a forest. None of it was easy.

Ten kilometres before the start of the finalclimb, everyone was fighting for position. Iwas last in the Sky train, with Mick Rogers infront of me, and Brad in front of him. Wewere on the right-hand side of the road andwere at the front of the peloton.

If you watch a bunch sweeping up a third-category climb on television it all lookspretty ordered: people swap positions, a lineof four or five riders moves up through thepack, a guy peels off the front and someonetakes his place. It seems like everyone knowswhat they’re doing. But this isn’t how it is.

Right now, to make a stressful situationworse, Greg Henderson had re-entered mylife. For some reason he thought it was hisright to be on Mick Rogers’s wheel; Greg was

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now riding for Lotto, a Belgian team, and hewas a lead-out man for the sprinter AndréGreipel. But it was a hilltop finish – whatwas Greg doing at the front on a day likethis?

I tried shoving him aside.‘Sorry, Greg, can you just let me in here?

Climbers’ day?’Greg turned towards me and got aggress-

ive. ‘Why should I? You’re always in themiddle of my train when it comes to thesprints.’

I’d apparently caught Greg on a bad day; Inever mix it with pure sprinters. Next thing Iknew it felt like he was pulling right into me.I slammed on the brakes, just in time, butthe deceleration cost me about fifteen places.It was the last thing I needed.

It took a huge effort to move back up to myteammates. I could only pass one rider at atime, leapfrogging from one to another, thenwaiting for an opening and accelerating

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through it. We got over the top of the cat-egory three and I was still chasing, brakinglate on the corners on the descent, takingrisks.

If I didn’t get to them before the start ofthe climb, it would be a disaster. I took somemore risks and finally I reached them. Phew.

When Greg was in our team, I had listenedto his harmonica-playing without complaint.I had defended him; told the lads he wasn’t abad guy. For him to do this now?

As soon as I got into our room later thatevening, I would say to Richie, ‘FuckingGreg, now I see why you guys didn’t thinkthat much of him.’

Back in the race, there was the team plan forLa Planche des Belles Filles. Then there wasmy plan, which took the team plan and ad-ded a little bit extra.

The first part of the team plan was to makesure that Brad was well positioned when wehit the final climb. We did that. Then we

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controlled things all the way to the top. Ed-die, Mick and Richie did the work in theearly stages. I had never seen Eddie so leanand strong. Mick and then Richie did goodturns at the front. I sit behind Richie, en-couraging him to pull that extra few hundredmetres further. The hurt is on; riders aredropping fast.

My job was to stay with Brad, and to takehim to the last kilometre. If I could take himinside that last kilometre, there was a 200--metre stretch that was really steep at theend. I couldn’t help Brad go any faster upthat little ramp. It will be every man for him-self and that can be my launchpad to go forthe stage. So I try to keep the pace as high aspossible until I get there. If I’m working, Iwant the guys behind me to feel the sameload on their legs. This is the bit that’s not inthe plan.

Richie did a good pull but we were stillslightly too far out. Then, at probably 4

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kilometres from the finish, I thought, ‘Okay,I’ll take it on.’ It had been hard up until thenand other guys had to be feeling it; Mick andRichie had burned off quite a few. This washow I liked it: not too many riders sitting oneach other’s wheels, waiting for somebody todo something. We’ve done a good job of thisso far.

It was too fast for anyone to attack andwhen Richie handed over to me, my legs feltgreat. Riding on the front, I had one aim: norecovery for anyone behind me. So I kept thepace pretty uncomfortable. I still feel like I’mriding within myself.

Just before the top, the climb flattened outthrough a car park before kicking up to the200 metres of twenty per cent gradient. Ididn’t want anyone to recover on the flat, so Ishifted down a few gears and sped throughthe car park. Then we had a right-hand bendon to the really steep section. As we hit thecorner, Cadel Evans surged past me.

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He knew I’d been on the front for morethan 10 minutes and must have presumedthat I would be too tired to react. I’d donemy job for Brad. He also knew that Bradwasn’t going to like the steep ramp ahead.Once Cadel went by, I got a few seconds ofrecovery time, as if I were being pulled byhim through the corner.

Fantastic, I thought, he’s going for it. Hewas pushing on. Brad was behind me, thenNibali and then the Estonian Rein Taaramäe.Just five of us. Cadal’s attack was perfect; hewas giving me a lead out. Brad came up myright to keep tabs on Cadel, and got on hiswheel, but he was blocking me in for asecond. He didn’t understand how I was feel-ing, and that I might still have somethingleft.

I slowed a little, to allow Brad to go pastme, and then I swung round him so that nowI had some space on the right. Head down.Go! From the right side of the road I looked

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across at Cadel, wanting to see what he wasgoing to do next. Would he try to get on mywheel? Was he going to come after me again?Then I caught it: he looked across at me andhis head dropped ever so slightly.

This was exactly what I wanted to see. Hecame after me but he didn’t have the legs toget back to my rear wheel. I won, 2 secondsahead of Cadel and Brad. It was a specialmoment because I knew I had also done myjob for Brad. I saw him at the finish and hecame and put his arm round me – he sur-prised me a bit with that.

Brad got the yellow jersey and had to dolots of interviews. I heard him say somethinglike, ‘A fantastic day for the team. Chris win-ning the stage; I’m in the yellow jersey.Great.’ Then he added, ‘Now he’s got hisstage win, he’s going to be an integral part ofhelping me to try to win the Tour.’ I thoughtit was such an arrogant thing to say: Chris

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has had his little moment, now he can con-centrate on his real job.

WINNER: CHRIS FROOME

OVERALL GC 1: BRADLEY WIGGINS

9: CHRIS FROOME +1 MIN 32 SEC

We rolled on. The waters would get muddierand the hills would become steeper. At thesame time the cycling media began question-ing the team’s employment of GeertLeinders, the doctor who had been employedon a contract basis the previous year. Allega-tions about his past were hissing out like airfrom a punctured inner tube. Within theteam, the mood wasn’t as good as it shouldhave been: Brad wasn’t always happy, Iwasn’t happy and Cav wasn’t happy. Itshould have been better than this.

One day on the bus Cav slipped me a note.He just leaned back and gave it to me, likewe were in school.

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Be not afraid of greatness. Some are borngreat, some achieve greatness, and othershave greatness thrust upon them.

Shakespeare, Cav? Underneath, there wasanother quote, this time from Ralph WaldoEmerson.

No great man ever complains of want ofopportunity.

I’m not sure what Cav reads betweenstages, or if the note had been given to himand then he had passed it on to me. It madea deep impression though and I still have thepiece of paper.

There was something interesting to be saidabout people having greatness thrust uponthem within the context of the team. Cav wasunhappy about the peripheral considerationgiven to sprinting. He definitely gave me theimpression he thought Brad was being giveneverything as the golden boy of the team. Infairness to Cav, and to Brad, I think wewould all have felt that this was a role that

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Brad was being shoehorned into. The team’sobsession with The Big Plan was makingcharacter actors out of all of us.

The quote from Emerson was more stir-ring. At that point I hadn’t complained toanybody or expressed what was goingthrough my head, but Cav was perceptive inseeing that down the road complainingwould be a poor substitute for seizing theday.

I felt Cav was saying, ‘Don’t get to the endand say you didn’t have the opportunity.’This was powerful; tough but powerful. Iwasn’t going to dandle grandchildren on myknee in years to come and explain that,‘Yeah, I had the chance to win a Tour deFrance but I passed it up for a quiet life onthe team bus.’

Stage Nine: Monday 9 July, Arc-et-Senansto Besançon, 41.5 kilometres

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Brad and I finished 1st and 2nd on the indi-vidual time trial to Besançon; the work withBobby J and with Tim on the art of time tri-alling was starting to pay off. When thestarter said ‘Allez’ I also went, as I alwaysdid, with a bit of Robbie Nilson inside myhead. The time trial left me in 3rd place onGC, 16 seconds behind Cadel Evans.

It continued to bug me that the 1 minute25 seconds I had loss right at the beginningof the Tour had been so unnecessary. It justshouldn’t have been there. As much as any-thing else, I was driven by the need to takethat time back. Whatever I would achieve onthis Tour I wanted it to be an honest and ac-curate reflection of where I was at.

I felt by now that the team didn’t under-stand or weren’t prepared to recognize that Iwas a potential winner of this Tour and if Iwasn’t allowed to try, accepting that wouldinvolve a very significant sacrifice on my

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part; they hadn’t treated me in the way thathad been promised.

I was in 3rd place now and I had my reser-vations as to how Brad was going to copewhen we got to the real mountains, the realcrucible of the race. If he popped in themountains and I got to the stage where I hadpulled and pulled and he was just dropping,maybe I would have to push on. Maybe thenthe team would have to go with me in the fi-nal week, as they did in the previous year’sVuelta.

That was hard but this was also pro sport.It is a hard world. I was not going to ruleanything out at that moment.

I needed to be as close to Brad as possiblein case I had to take over as our main GCcompetitor. That didn’t mean that I had arifle pointed at Brad’s head. It meant that interms of my own ambitions, and in terms ofwhat had been promised, I was taking a bul-let for the team but still doing my job.

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Stage Eleven: Thursday 12 July, Albertvilleto La Toussuire-Les Sybelles, 148 kilometres

This was short, sharp and shocking: 148 kilo-metres of drama. We would race up La Tous-suire to the line; the stage was made for me.In a different way, it was also made for Brad.One arrow he doesn’t have in his quiver isthe ability to accelerate away at the top of aclimb and take a stage like that. He has theability though to beat out a steady time-trialtempo and he had a team around him whowould pull him up the mountain to a pointwhere he would be safe on GC.

The plan was to scorch the earth again,just as we had done a few days ago on LaPlanche des Belles Filles to put Bradley inyellow. Still thinking of the 1 minute 25seconds I wanted to get back, I suggestedthat maybe it might be possible for me to at-tack towards the end of the stage, after I hadshepherded Brad almost to the top.

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The response was a frown and a slight un-ease that the question had been asked. I wasused to this hypersensitivity towards Brad’sfeelings but Brad was basically 2 minutesahead on GC. Today was a day when wecould kill off Evans and Nibali for him andtake another stage for the team.

I wasn’t putting my hand up and asking if Icould help myself to Brad’s Tour or have aweekend away with his wife. I was askingcould I go for a stage win, and get myself in aslightly better position? I had ridden inBrad’s service, as I was employed to do in theVuelta the year before, and had sacrificed anoutstanding chance to win a Grand Tour my-self for the good of the team. I accepted that.

But my status in the team changed afterthat. I saw myself as a GC rider now and theteam had agreed that this was how I wouldbe seen by them too. Here I was still riding inBrad’s service and I accepted my unchangedrole, but I thought allowances would be

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made, and there would be some recognitionof my personal ambitions.

The day unspooled oddly. Cadel Evanssurprised everybody by launching an attackon the Col du Glandon with nearly 60 kilo-metres still to race. It was both an attack anda suicide mission. Cadel didn’t believe hecould win, otherwise he wouldn’t have gonefrom so far out. Upon seeing Cadel take offup the road, I turned to Richie, no longerable to contain my excitement. ‘Today, I’mgoing to rip his legs off in the final!’ Weworked well and we controlled well. Therewas no panic. We pulled him back on Croixde Fer and from there onwards his chance ofwinning the Tour was more or less over.

Richie led us into the climb of La Tous-suire. Our group had thirteen riders in it, fullof colourful fish, but the only fin sticking outof the water was Nibali. Twelve kilometresfrom the top, Nibali made his move.

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As if shot from a gun he was up the roadbefore we even heard the gunfire.

I looked at Brad. Richie looked at Brad.Richie looked at me.

‘Froomey, you need to go. I’m done.’This was a game for GC riders now. I was

feeling good; better than good. Again therewas no panic and I brought Nibali back withabout 10 kilometres to go. Brad clamped onto my wheel. All was well; all was calm.

Nibali is pesky though. Always. He wentagain. Tsk tsk, Vincenzo. Now I could eitherput the foot down to go after him again. Or Icould play smart.

I knew the climb was going to get evenharder quite soon and I wanted Cadel Evansto expose himself. Maybe even attack again.He was hanging on the back. Was he recov-ering, saving up for another attack, or was heon life support after his effort earlier?

So I began displaying a few signs ofweakness.

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Look, Cadel, here, I’m struggling a little.My head is rolling, I’m flapping a bit, lurch-ing off a straight line. This is hurting.

I wanted Cadel and Frank Schleck, whohad also been having a free ride up themountain, to think they had me on the ropes.Let them think they could get rid of me.

In my mind, the second they had madetheir move I was going to drive back on tothe front. It was a case of control, control,control. Let them waste their energy andthen burn the picture of me going past themon to their brains.

If I just kept riding at the front, they wouldhave another free ride back to Nibali.

Now we started going downhill for a bit.Okay, Cadel, how dead do I need to look?

I really needed him to take the bait.Please, Cadel. Come on. Attack. Take me.

Let me see your jersey streaking past me.Look at my shoulders. I’m dying here. I’mswaying. Show me no mercy.

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He didn’t bite. Mainly because he had noteeth left, but I didn’t know that yet.

Aw, look Cadel. I’m almost done. Stick afork in me, man.

Hmmm. Nothing.This was getting silly. I dropped back to

get a good look at Cadel. I wanted to look asif I was struggling and at the same to timesee if he was struggling too. I put on my bestgrimace.

Brad was at the front now and he wasn’tpanicking. He wasn’t going super deep butsetting a steady tempo. When I dropped tothe back I got the car on the radio just to re-assure them.

‘I’m okay, I’m okay, I’m good.’They would pass that on to Brad. When

the climb ramped up again in about half akilometre he could expect me to be thereagain. For now we were on a fairly gentlestretch and I was still taking Cadel’s pulse.

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But there was no pulse. He wasn’t ped-alling well and unless he was a better actorthan I was, his body language was screamingout that his day was done. It was time to goand bring Brad back up to Nibali. I was en-joying this now.

Nibali was now the last threat, about 15seconds up the road. There was plenty ofroad left to catch him and break him; itwould be job done.

I rejoined Brad and went past, assuminghe had latched on. I could hear him though.He was saying to me, ‘Easy, easy, go easy.’

And I was saying, ‘C’mon, Brad, we’re al-most up to Nibali.’

I could see Nibali just 20 or 30 metresahead; he couldn’t have much left.

‘We’re almost there. Then you can relax.Stay on my wheel.’

When I looked back at Brad though I couldsee he was suffering. Shit. If he could justhold on till we caught Nibali it would get

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easier from there. Once Nibali surrendered,the train would slow down.

Evans was already gone and now FrankSchleck fell back down the mountain. Oneminute he was clinging on, the next minutehe was a tiny figure receding into the roadbehind.

This road was steep now. It was hard workbut we almost had Nibali.

‘Hang on, Brad. We have him.’Nibali had latched on to a couple of guys

ahead of him, Thibaut Pinot and Jurgen Vanden Broek. This was good as they weren’t go-ing anywhere and there were five of us now.

Me – feeling good.Nibali – spent.Pinot – spent.Van den Broek – spent.Brad – spent but with a teammate to pull

him along.

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We were coming to a tiny village, Le Corbi-er. I said to Brad, ‘Okay, get on to thosewheels and just stay on them.’

Nibali was pulling the group at this mo-ment. I would let him. He had made two at-tacks already and we had dealt with both. Hewas in trouble.

Brad wasn’t saying anything at this point.I decided to go, right then and there. I

swung left and pushed past Nibali. Okay,Vincenzo. What have you got now?

The road was getting steeper. We rodefrom out of a shadow, round a bend back in-to sunshine. The crowds on the climb werespilling on to the road. It felt electric; pureracing.

Brad could sit on their wheels while theychased me. I’ll be damned if they’re going tocatch me, though! Brad and I were going tobe 1 and 2 on GC tonight. Behind me,though, Brad had been dropped by Nibali

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straight away. Either Nibali had more leftthan I had thought or Brad had less.

Sean Yates was in my ear on the radio.‘Froomey, Froomey, Froomey. I’m hoping

you’ve got the okay from Bradley for that?’He was telling me that unless Brad expli-

citly said I could go, I would be having a spellin the naughty corner. I kept pushing. Then Iheard Brad’s voice on the radio.

‘NOOOO, NOOOO, NOOOO.’He sounded like a man who had just

dropped his oxygen tank near the top ofEverest.

I could hear that he was in trouble; myplan hadn’t worked. I slowed immediately.Brad was panicking; I could hear hisdesperation.

This was all wrong. He was folding physic-ally and mentally, and quicker than I hadthought possible. I got the feeling that hewould literally just get off his bike were I tocarry on pushing. What was a simple and

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perfect plan to me seemed to translate forBrad into a public humiliation.

This was an extraordinary moment for theteam. We were the people of marginal gains.We controlled the controllables. But wherewas the margin now? Where was the gain?Where was the control?

This was sport. This was life. It was ashard as it gets, and if it breaks you, there wasno shame. You get knocked down, you getback up again.

These were the questions these mountainsand this race were supposed to ask. This wasthe moment when the team decided. Stickwith the plan? Seize the day? Big moment,Chris.

I slowed and waited for Brad, who had al-most sat up by now. Two minutes ago wewere riding at a faster pace and Brad wasfine. He hadn’t just cracked; I think he feltbetrayed. By the time he was back in touchwith me, Pinot had gone again and Nibali

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and Van den Broek were dawdling, waitingfor the free ride they’d get when Brad dockedonce more with the mother ship.

Brad perked up a little when he was backon the wheel. I was pulling again and theclimb had eased off so it was quite a lot easi-er to stay on the wheel. I pulled faster. Wecould at least get Pinot back at this rate.

We hauled Pinot back in, along with acouple of other stragglers too. I had time tothink as we rode. All around us the crowdswere jostling and cheering, but not much ofthe internal drama was known to them atthis point.

How would this play out? I had made anattack that the team didn’t think was a goodidea. I then called it off. All the same, I knewthat by nightfall I would be in the stockades.

The history of cycling is littered with in-stances like this. In some cases, the guy whowas stronger than his team leader said, ‘Fuckit, this may never come around for me again.’

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Stephen Roche attacking Roberto Visentiniin the 1987 Giro d’Italia is probably the greatmodern-day example. Over time manypeople have forgotten Roche went againstteam orders, remembering only that he wonthe race.

I’m the guy who turned back with the bluelight flashing.

I pulled them to the end and when werounded the last bend, with 50 metres ofroad left, I put my head down. Pinot and my-self sprinted for the line but he edged meout. Surviving from an earlier breakaway, Pi-erre Rolland won the stage with Pinot 2ndand me 3rd. As a reflex, I looked behind tocheck on Brad as I crossed the line. He hadlost a couple of seconds but Nibali was withhim. Job done. Now for the bloodypostmortem.

WINNER: PIERRE ROLLAND

OVERALL GC 1: BRADLEY WIGGINS

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2: CHRIS FROOME + 2 MIN 05 SEC

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23

Case for the Defence: By nature, m’Lord, MrFroome is incredibly stubborn. He had aplan in his head; he felt it was a good plan.He was going to see it through. When theplan succeeded, all would see the beauty ofhis thinking.

Case for the Prosecution: Mr Wiggins orthe agents thereof had retained the servicesof Mr Froome to do a specific job of adven-turing. At a time when he could not be sureof Mr Wiggins’s good health or spirits, MrFroome chose to continue the adventure onhis own thus causing physical and psycholo-gical damage to Mr Wiggins and spoilingeverything.

Moreover Mr Froome had with some im-pertinence told Mr Wiggins what to do. Mr

Wiggins had subsequently been brought‘close to the edge’.

I could see the point. Brad was a cyclingtrack star who had been absorbed into roadracing at a high level. He had never reallybeen given orders in the way a domestiquegets given orders. He was officer class, notenlisted.

His experience was that he just said ‘faster’or ‘slower’ and the world around him wentfaster or slower.

Even in team meetings he would neverpipe up and say, ‘Okay, guys, this is what weare going to do today.’ That job would bedone for him. On the road he would super-vise the implementation. Faster. Slower.

I knew there would be a reaction. Every-body had seen me go and what I had hopedwould happen behind me hadn’t happened.

After crossing the line, the inquisitionbegan. I was mobbed by a swarm ofjournalists.

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‘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 agood place. He obviously wasn’t. As soon as Iheard that, I waited for him and brought himall 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’sthe leader and I’m here to do a job, end ofstory.’

I never tried to say that wanting to winshould not be such a bad thing.

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Brad, though, was clearly rattled. He toldjournalists it was just a mix-up: Sean hadsaid, ‘Slow, slow, slow,’ but because of crowdnoise Chris thought he said, ‘Go, go, go.’ Oneof those things.

Sean Yates wasn’t in the loop. He said Ihad pissed him off.

Going back to the hotel I knew there wouldbe more to come.

The hotel was right by the finish; I couldhave done with a bus journey. When I gotback some of the guys were finishing theirwarm-downs in an abandoned room on theground floor.

Mario Pafundi came across and spoke afew words to me. Typical Mario. ‘No prob-lems, no problems. All good.’

No one came over and said, ‘Christ, whatthe hell were you doing out there, Froomey?’

I warmed down as normal, went upstairsand showered. I then waited for Richie to

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finish on the massage table and made a fewcalls. I wondered if clouds were gathering.

My mind rewound the tape to the pointwhere I had suggested before the stage that Imight be allowed to attack. Sean Yates hadmade a point of saying, ‘Uh, listen, Froomey,we know you want to attack but …’

We had agreed that Brad would be takento the last kilometre or so. I had asked whatwas the difference if Brad was safe with 5kilometres to go: ‘If the opportunity presentsitself, can I not go with 5 or 6 kilometres togo when the road is still hard, before it flat-tens out?’

In my mind was the fact that if I could onlygo with 500 metres left I could only reclaim afraction of my lost minute and 25 seconds.Attacking that late was basically not attack-ing at all.

Sean had come back at me saying, ‘Well,no, we’re here to do this job. No, you’re notgoing to attack far out.’

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I went to Sean again about it and made thepoint again. ‘I really want to attack today.I’m feeling fresh and I can definitely get backsome of the time that I’ve lost. I need to get agood buffer over Cadel and Nibali so that ifsomething does happen to Brad, I can takeover with no problems.’

A little while later, Dave had called me tothe 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 getbigger than normal. They were like two plan-ets now.

‘Froomey, all this talk of attacking is be-ginning to unsettle people now and we’re go-ing to fall off track if we’re not careful …’ Hemade a gesture with his hands to suggest thissort of togetherness of the team. He was likean upset vicar. He was almost shaking at thispoint.

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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 wetalked about. I was told I was going to havefreedom in this Tour to go for it on theclimbs. These are not the conditions underwhich I stayed at Sky.’

I’d called Michelle earlier that morningand said, ‘Please go through my contract andjust check exactly what the wording says. I’mgoing to need to remind Dave of that today.I’m going to tell him that I have every rightto attack on this climb at the end of thestage. I feel fresh. I can do this.’

Dave just said, ‘Look, this is causing a lotof agitation. A lot. Brad is up there stressing.Sean is just, well, he doesn’t know whatyou’re going to do. We need you to say you’regoing to go along with this.’

I said, ‘Listen, I’m not going to do anythingstupid, but I want to go for it today withoutjeopardizing this Tour. I’m not going to

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throw it away but if there’s an opportunityand Brad is on the wheels and he’s safe, thenthere’s no reason why I shouldn’t go for it.’

Dave immediately said, ‘Well, what if hepunctures when you’ve already gone?’

‘Seriously, what are the chances? In anycase, he has almost two minutes’ advantage.’

‘No, no, no, Froomey. That’s too muchchance, that’s too much risk.’

We had a silly, worst-case-scenario discus-sion but it was settled in my head that theyfelt my desire to get that minute and 25seconds back might put me in a positionwhere it threatened Brad. Then I might turnrogue. They would have to control the un-controllable. This scenario had never been inany of the PowerPoint planningpresentations.

I had got my stuff for the stage and left forthe start line. We were into the stage and Iremember all day just feeling so at ease on

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the wheels, thinking that I was really fresh,and felt really good. Why not?

Anyway, that was in the morning. This wasnow. Aftermath time.

When I got to massage, David Rozman,our soigneur, looked at me and smiled – hewas half pleased and half disapproving. Iknew what he was thinking: you did the firstpart, but not the second part. By the time Igot to dinner the guys had finished eating. Isat 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 wasasked.’

‘Well, no you didn’t. You attacked, didn’tyou?’

‘I did, but look at how the race unfolded. Itwas playing into our hands perfectly: Nibalihad attacked twice, he was tired and I gotBrad back to Nibali. I brought Nibali back

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twice, and I’d dropped Cadel. We were in aperfect position. I really thought Brad wouldhave been able to stay with his group withoutany 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 asif I were asking the question from a positionof ignorance and innocence.

Sean conceded that he could see where Iwas coming from but insisted that I had stilldisobeyed the orders that I’d been given onthe bus. But I’d never fully bought into whatwe said on the bus and he knew that becauseI had challenged it. There was nothing reallyleft to say.

Then Sean added, ‘I think Dave wants tohave a chat with you.’

I also explained to Sean that there wereprobably things he didn’t know about, in thesense that Dave had promised me certainthings; that I could go for this Tour and ridefor myself. Or at least try to ride GC without

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being held back. I told him that those werethe conditions under which I stayed at thisteam, things which had been written into mycontract. I was just filling him in. We weren’tbeing aggressive. He had been testing thewaters; I was explaining the tides.

The tides were choppy on Twitter aroundthen too. Cath Wiggins had tweeted a note ofwarm praise to Mick Rogers and Richie fortheir ‘selfless effort’ and ‘true professional-ism’. It wasn’t the character limit on Twitterthat prevented her adding the words ‘ChrisFroome’.

Michelle had fired back more economicallywith one word: ‘Typical.’ Then she had comeback with an expansion about being ‘beyonddisappointed’. ‘If you want loyalty, get aFroome dog – a quality I value although be-ing taken advantage of by others.’

Later, Dave dropped me a message: ‘Comeup to my room.’

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When I got there, Dave and Tim Kerrisonwere 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 tosay, but I went straight into my side ofthings.

‘Listen, Dave, this is not what we hadagreed at the end of last year …’

I went over all that I thought had beenagreed and asked what had changed andwhy.

Dave said exactly what Sean had been say-ing. Brad was now in yellow. We only hadone mountaintop finish to go and one timetrial from today onwards. At the moment,standing right where we were in GC, Bradhad the better chance of winning. So now wewere all going to go one hundred per cent be-hind that.

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My argument was just as blunt. What hap-pens if – as we all remember seeing on thelast two Grand Tours that Brad has done –he fades in the last week, or he crashes orsomething goes wrong? What if one of thosethings happens and I’m still too far off Nibalito be able to catch up again?

Dave, the man with a plan for all occa-sions, said that it was wrong to speak now in‘what ifs’. These were the facts. We had towork with the facts.

So we talked facts. Day one, I punctured.No contingency plan. Fact.

Dave immediately apologized for thatoversight. It was a mistake. He was sincerebut the point was made. There had beenpromises made and yet from the puncture tothe special lightweight wheels and skewers,which Brad was using exclusively, all hadbeen geared towards Brad. I had thought thiswas the team that didn’t do oversights.

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Dave said to me, ‘Brad wants to go home,he’s ready to pack his bags and leave the racealtogether.’

I remember thinking, so it’s okay for himto leave and not give anybody else a hand? Ifhe leaves, will I have to carry his bags? Mypoint was that we were at the Tour. Howmany chances was I going to get in my ca-reer? I just wanted what was agreed upon. Iwasn’t staging a coup; I was riding a race.

We talked for probably half an hour aboutwhere the team was and how it basicallycame down to the point that right here, rightnow, I was nowhere near being in as strong aposition 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 wouldbe in the yellow jersey. But if, in that posi-tion, I then punctured with 2 kilometres togo, or if something else were to happen to me

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in the last couple of kilometres, I’d lose timeto Nibali, then Brad and I would both havelost the yellow jersey.

That was a whole pile of ‘what ifs’ fromDave, but I could see it from his point ofview. I saw the big picture but I still felt letdown about the promises I had been made.

The next morning, we got on to the bus andwe all went to the back section and closedthe frosted-glass doors. There was Brad,Sean Yates, Dave and myself. Tim too, Ithink.

I felt quite betrayed by Sean Yates. Hetook the much harder line and basicallybegan reprimanding me for what hadhappened the day before.

‘You went against the plan; you’ve rockedthe boat, and you can’t do that again. This iswhere we are in the race; you’re not to jeop-ardize that.’

When we had spoken the night before hewasn’t at all like this. I felt like he’d almost

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been given orders to perform a punishmentshooting 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 otherpeople and make the problem worse. Comespeak to me and we can sort it out. But itdoesn’t help if you go telling Sean, tellingDave, telling everyone else what problemyou’ve got or why you’re unhappy. Speak tome about it.’

He sort of nodded and muttered a fewwords. I suspected that this may have beenSean and Dave’s way of placating Brad. Bradwould never do it himself. It was not in hisnature. You didn’t really expect to have aconversation with him, especially at the Tourwhere he was under all the pressure and thestress. We rode around him and his moodslike he was a traffic island.

I went back to the team area on the busfeeling that whatever there had been

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between myself and Sean was gone and that Iwasn’t going to be able to go for a mountain-top finish, even though Brad was always go-ing to secure his victory in the time trial onthe second-to-last day. But I liked Sean, re-gardless of that. I’ve got a lot of respect forhim as a bike rider, and as a director I thinkhe did a really good job. It was just on a per-sonal level that I felt a bit disappointed. Ithought he was bigger than acting out thatlittle performance.

That day, as the media inflated the wholeLa Toussuire episode into ‘Shoot-out at theOK Corral’ we rode a long, dullish stage. Werode that day still thinking about the day be-fore. I hardly remember a thing about thestage.

The people closest to me were all sayingthe same thing: don’t let this pull you down.Well done, keep plugging away at it. Theywould have been disappointed in the waythat I had been held back but they knew that

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I wasn’t the type of person to throw in thetowel.

We had four stages to ride between La Tous-suire and the second rest day of the Tour atPau. I slept very little, on those days or onthe rest day. I would lie awake for hours. I’dhear Richie nod off and I’d just be lying therethinking about all the different things goingon in my mind. How could I ride differently?How could I stand up for myself withoutjeopardizing the position that Brad was in? Ibegan wondering if I’d been bought off, if Ihad just been signed by the team in order toneutralize me. If I was riding for Garmin inthis Tour and threatening Brad, questionswould have been asked.

I wondered what options I had. Everysingle ‘what if’ ran through my mind.

If we got to Paris and Brad won, did thatlay an even stronger claim for him to comeback and defend the title next year? Was I

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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 seri-ously. Not only might I not get the chance towin the Tour in 2013, I might not get the op-portunity to even try.

I wanted to know what my potential was. Iwanted to go as hard as I could in the moun-tains until I blew! I wanted to expend all myenergy and have to crawl to the finish lineone day. I wanted days when, instead ofstanding, I would have to sit down in theshower. I wanted to know how far I could go.That is a fundamental of sport, mining thetalent, loving the raw ability to go mano-a-mano against somebody doing the same.

I worried about how the team were react-ing. The guys picked up on everything. Didthey think I was the baddie here? I got a lotof reassurance from Richie. He was the samewith me all the way through, saying, ‘Just do

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what you need to do.’ He didn’t need to sayany more.

Those nights I would be awake until 4.00a.m., usually texting Michelle. Texting. Tex-ting. Texting.

At midnight she’d say, ‘Okay, go to sleepnow, you’ve got a race tomorrow.’

An hour or so later I’d send a message: ‘Ireally can’t sleep, I’m just lying here, are youstill up?’ And she’d get up and keep me com-pany. We’d try to talk about other things butalways we came back to the race and whatwas going on behind the scenes.

I’d go down to breakfast with a yearningfor coffee, but I didn’t allow myself coffee onthe mornings of stage races. I don’t think it’sreally healthy to have a stimulant in themorning. It dehydrates you and it’s acidic soit starts your stomach on an acidic kick fromthe morning on. And it definitely brings youdown again at a later point if you don’t top itup.

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The mornings were hard. I’d hear thealarm go off and know that I’d been lyingthere until the early hours texting or brood-ing. Once I was up and going though I wasokay.

Those were flat days. Not just for me butfor the team. We were winning the Tour butjoylessly.

On the second rest day of the Tour my broth-er Jono and Noz came over to the team hotel.It was good to have them around.

The team had held a press conference outon the hotel lawn, and afterwards I probablyhad the best part of twenty minutes with Nozand Jono in the lounge area. We were sittingthere talking when a few people came over,journalists wanting one-on-ones. I remem-ber Jono trying to be polite, saying, ‘Listen,guys, not now. We’re just catching up andwe’re only here for a few minutes, we haven’tseen him, now’s not the time.’

Some hope!

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During the day, Alex Carera, who was stillmy agent, had spoken to Dave. As a result ofcoming 2nd, my bonus was bumped up.

It was only money but at least there wasthe acknowledgement that I was givingsomething up. The team had recognizedwhat I was talking about. I would happilyhave forgone the bonus for the chance torace for the win; money wasn’t the issue. Butit was a gesture.

We went for the usual rest-day ride as ateam. It was an odd atmosphere. There wasno giddiness, no sense of what we wereachieving.

But at one point Brad and I were ridingnext to each other. He turned to me and said,‘Listen, Froomey, don’t worry about this,your time will definitely come, and we’ll beright back here next year, and we’ll be ridingfor you.’

I glanced at him. He seemed to be sayingthat he didn’t want to go through all of this

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again. If he won, that would be it for him.He’d focus on something else, but he’d comeback here to help me. I appreciated thosewords greatly; they weren’t typical of Brad.

I felt okay; this was Brad’s time. Good luckto him. I knew I had to suck this up for now,but there was recognition here, even fromBrad, that I would be a leader in the futureand he would be there to help me next timearound.

We were in a better place now.

Next day it was business as usual. Cavcrashed in the feed zone, then Richie got afeed bag caught in his handlebars andcrashed too. Nibali made a break downPeyresourde in the Pyrenees. We chased himdown. I pulled. Brad pulled. We worked to-gether and gave the media nothing to speakabout.

The last three big contenders on GC (if Icould include myself with Brad and Nibali)

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all came in together. Nothing more to besaid.

On to the last mountaintop finish:Peyragudes.

Stage Seventeen: Thursday 19 July,Bagnères-de-Luchon to Peyragudes, 143.5

kilometres

I woke up on the morning of Peyragudesfeeling fantastic, like I’d had a rest day theday before. Just walking to breakfast, I wasbouncing along. I felt fresh; I felt really good.My legs were like the devil on my shoulder:Hey, Chris! Pssst! Mountaintop finish? Feel-ing good, eh?

I’d spoken to Sean the evening before.‘Listen, if we get to the point where it’s just

the three of us coming to the last kilometre,can I then go for the stage win? If Bradley issafe or if we can even get rid of Nibali, can Itry and go for the stage?’

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His response was ‘yes’, on the conditionthat Bradley was safe. And that Bradley gavehis consent.

I didn’t check if the consent had to be inwriting. I floated away. I might have thechance to go for a stage. Just might. If abreakaway went that didn’t threaten us, wewould let it go. If Brad needed company, Iwould stay with Brad. There were a lot ofDave’s ‘what ifs’ back in the equation.

We rode over Col de Menté, Col des Aresand so on until there were eight of us in theyellow jersey group. Brad and I, Nibali, ofcourse, Van den Broek, Pinot, Van Garderen,Rolland and Chris Horner. Somewhere upthe road, Valverde was making a solo run forglory. Good luck, Alejandro.

It was a grippy day. Even on the second tolast climb, the Peyresourde, I rememberthinking that there were going to be somestruggles after this one; it had been a hardday of racing in the heat.

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It was a stage of attrition. Everybody washurting. Going up over the top I drifted backjust a little bit so that I could have a look ateveryone; see who was there, who was ped-alling seriously, who looked like they were upfor the last battle.

The radio said Valverde wasn’t too farahead; we could soon be at the front of therace. Guys in the breakaway were dropping;they’d been out there all day. I had hope.

Before descending Peyresourde, and head-ing on to the last climb, Peyragudes, I leanedacross to Brad and asked for his consent. Isaid to him that Nibali was on his knees,looking terrible. When I had drifted back fora look, he was really struggling. You couldsee he was taking the strain; there was nofluency.

I said to Brad, ‘Listen, Nibali’s absolutelyfinished. Can I go on the last climb? You’vegot no more contenders left. Can I go for thestage? Valverde is within reach.’

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He muttered something along the lines of,‘He’s too far away, the breakaway is too faraway.’

Just after he’d said that Sean’s voice cameon the radio and said that we were just with-in a minute from them. I turned back to Bradto see if he’d say anything else but he justlooked down at the road.

I was floating. Feeling good. The words onCav’s note were buzzing in my head; thosetwo quotes. It felt like everything was goingmy way today, if only Bradley would just giveme the nod.

He hadn’t, so instead I would try to get uson to the last climb. I would set a good paceon the front, make sure Bradley was on mywheel and then I would try to pull him up tothe breakaway with me. We would see if wecould lose the others. I would be ready to doall of the work on the front here, but seeingas I couldn’t attack, this was my next best

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option now. I felt really good; it would be awaste not to spend it.

Tomorrow was a flat day anyway.From our group of eight, gaps opened and

a couple of guys dropped off. It looked as ifeverybody was in trouble, except for Bradand myself. Brad looked good – I thought hewas still pretty solid.

We got to the front of our little group andwhen I started pulling, he was on my wheel.It wasn’t long at all until it was just the twoof us left. I kept on looking under my arm oraround my shoulder, just to double-check hewas there. I think he had realized, also, thateveryone else had dropped off. He was safe.He wasn’t worried about the stage.

I started saying to him, and gesturing tohim, ‘Come on, let’s go! Let’s go! We can getthe breakaway.’

They were just a couple of corners aheadof us at this point. After the first 2 kilometresof the climb they were under 40 seconds

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ahead. I felt so up for it, I was like a kid tug-ging on his dad’s sleeve saying, ‘C’mon,c’mon.’

Only Dad wasn’t bothered. On the radioSean was saying, ‘Just stay together, guys,stay together. Keep together all the way tothe top.’

I wasn’t thinking about attacking at thisstage but I was trying to motivate Brad, toget some life into him. He was winning theTour de France at this very moment. Thiswas where the whole race was being won.Time for a little panache.

I’d get him on to the wheel and startpulling, gradually trying to increase it tospeed up, and then he’d be off and I’d have toease up again. He wasn’t telling me when hewas dropping off so I needed to keep check-ing the whole time. I was looking round, justchecking, checking, checking, trying to pullat the right kind of pace for him. But weseemed to be yo-yoing the whole time.

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With about a kilometre and a half to go itflattened out. I thought, ‘Yes, right here I canabsolutely empty it, I can go as hard as I canbecause it’s flatter so there’ll be a bigger slip-stream effect. He can sit on my wheel quite abit more comfortably.’

At one stage I let my hand dangle down tomy side like Sugar Ray Leonard goading anopponent into a punch. Nothing. I flicked thehand: come on, come through, pick it up.Nothing. Now I was the dad. I felt like the ladwanted to be carried.

For Brad the race was won and the longstruggle was over. I was a poor companionfor him to have at this particular moment inhis life.

Now I was just looking forward to gettinghome, getting out of this uncomfortable situ-ation between us. We crossed the finish lineup at the top and were swamped by two dif-ferent groups of journalists.

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I don’t know what Brad was being asked.My questions were variations on ‘What areyou doing? You could be winning the raceyourself.’

On the climb Michelle had tweeted, ‘Damnit, gooooo.’

The guys had got hold of that one prettyquickly.

‘Why didn’t you just “gooooo”? Don’t youwant to attack?’

I gave the party line. ‘Brad’s in optimumposition to win the race, and at the momenthe’s poised to win so … we’re on track. Andno, I’m not going to be attacking or anythinglike that.’

I realized, at last, that everything had beengeared towards this. It was never going to beany different. The story was completed longbefore we got to France. Bradley wins. Thebook is written. The documentary is made.The promise is fulfilled.

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We had just been acting it out. There wasplenty worthwhile in that, and a lot to belearned.

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24

We keep on keeping on.As soon as the Tour was finished we

already seemed to be ten steps ahead. Bradhad won the race and Cav had won the finalstage but our heads were already on the nextthing. What do I need for the podium? Whatdo I need for the flight? The Olympics aredays away. What do I need for them? Wedidn’t really have time to soak up the factthat we’d won a stage, let alone the wholeTour.

Three weeks of riding in the Tour and atthe end we had a very brief sort of cocktailevent in a fancy hotel. It felt formal andforced. I had one glass of champagne and afew snacks before a bunch of us left straightaway for a plane flying straight to the UK.

It was a relief to get out of there and to seeMichelle again and to spend time with her. Iwas excited about the Olympics. I’d neverbeen to one, and this being a home Gameshad a special feel to it.

I remember getting to the room. All ourbags were there. All of the kit for theOlympics. Everything all laid out and ready.

I did feel a little bit deflated that we wer-en’t staying in the athletes’ village. Instead,we were staying away from the other athletesat a plush hotel called Foxhills that had twogolf courses. It was a breath of fresh air butnot the Olympic experience I had expected.It almost felt like it could have been anotherrace. Hotel. Sleep. Eat. Train. Repeat for fivedays. Then race. What was nice was that wehad our partners with us for that week beforethe Olympics. That definitely made it a lotmore comfortable.

We warmed up for the event mentally aswell as physically. We got some amazing

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bikes to ride. They had come from the track.With the help of a wind tunnel and someclever minds they had been converted to ourneeds. I was very impressed; I was stunnedat how the mechanics had set this thing upwithout me trying it or without me beingthere and yet it was a perfect fit.

I could imagine Rod behind the scenespulling all the strings to make that happen.

My last ride for Kenya was at the All AfricaGames in Algeria in 2007.

It was quite an experience. Maybe it isn’tfair to compare it to London 2012 but thatshould be done by anybody who wants to un-derstand the differences between the worldof African sport and the privileges we enjoyhere in Europe.

I don’t want to sound like the spoilt mzun-gu recoiling in horror at what he found.That’s not me. I just want to explain that thisis world sport; this is just how it is overthere.

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The athletes’ village in Algeria was verymuch like a big compound; it was almost likea staff quarters. All the toilets were simplyholes in the floor and there weren’t enoughbeds and mattresses. There were no pillows,no covers and no plug sockets. There wasjust one light bulb hanging from the ceilingin each room, and the corridors were dark.There was also a bit of a pungent smell.

We were told we couldn’t travel outsidethe village because of bomb threats and ter-rorists. Not long before the Games, a hugebomb had gone off in Algiers, killing a lot ofpeople. For a while things were in the bal-ance, and the All Africa Games were almostcalled off. But of course they eventually wentahead. Life goes on. This was Africa.

The journey from the airport to the villagewas colourful. It lasted about an hour on abig motorway where everybody seemed tohave competing interpretations of the rulesof the road. I remember wondering if there

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were any rules for driving here. There wereno lines painted on the roads, although thewidth of them allowed for three or four lanesacross. The fast lane could have been on theright or on the left – it was anybody’s guess.There were cars weaving everywhere but theminibus driver seemed to be quite relaxed.He was smoking and humming along to mu-sic, and driving very fast in between differentlanes, not to mention getting very close toother vehicles. He didn’t seem at all fazed byit.

I’ll never forget our first meal in the vil-lage. Try this, Gordon Ramsay. There wasrice and there was meat stew but there wasvery little in the way of plates and cutlery,and not nearly enough for everyone. At firstpeople would wait for others to finish eatingso that they could grab their plates and cut-lery to give them a quick rinse and then re-use them, which was fine. But the queue gotbigger and bigger and eventually the system

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imploded. Soon everybody was using onehand to dip into the large metal pots to grabfistfuls of rice. With the other paw, we wouldscoop up a handful of lukewarm stew andcarry it to our table. There we would puteverything into a little mound on our table-cloth and commence eating with our fingers.If we didn’t do this we weren’t going to beeating that night.

Of course, there was a vegetarian option:two handfuls of rice, no stew.

At breakfast the next morning I went alongearly. I helped myself to a few bananas andbrought them back to my room to keep megoing. This hardly mattered though becausewe couldn’t train anyway: there were noturbo trainers and we still couldn’t leave thevillage. There was a path around the peri-meter but it was thick with runners. So wewere all kitted up with no place to go.

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I got a silver medal for the time trial. Imade a mess of the final climb in the roadrace.

Afterwards, there would be a reward formy silver. It was substantial for me at thetime, huge for a lot of other riders. As muchas a couple of thousand euros. But I neversaw the money. Despite travelling to theGames at my own expense, when I got backto Kenya it had disappeared. Some peoplehad passed it on; other people never saw it.Nobody knew where it had vanished to.

The Olympic Road Race

After the Tour we had five days to get readyfor the 2012 Olympic road race. We taperedour training off for this, doing two or threehours a day to keep things ticking over. Oneday was longer, when we went to see the cir-cuit, but the rest was mostly just fresheningup.

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The road race route involved climbing BoxHill nine times. It wasn’t exactly Ventoux,but stack it up nine times and it becomesvery wearing both mentally and physically.We were there to support Cav, who was thefavourite to take the gold.

Looking back, I do think it was realisticthat Cav could win. What wasn’t realistic wasto expect that we could do it all on our ownas Team GB. I think we’d banked on at leastone or two other nations with the same kindof plan who would see the benefit of havingthe race end in a bunch sprint: Germanywith Greipel, or Australia with Matt Goss.We expected someone else to come along atsome point, late in the race, and say, ‘Wealso want that breakaway to come back be-cause our sprinter is here and feeling good.’

On the day, it felt very much like everyonereally was racing just to beat us, as opposedto actually winning the race themselves. Itwas a tough day for us. We were a team of

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five, which was a lot of work for the four rid-ing for Cav. When we started weakening, therace really started kicking off. Instead of oth-er teams helping us, they sent riders into thebreakaway. That’s racing.

The last time up Box Hill, guys were at-tacking and going across to the breakaway.Cav said he had the legs to go. I think it wasDavid Millar who turned round to him andsaid, ‘No, no, don’t worry, we’ll bring it back.’

We went down the other side though andwe didn’t get it back at all. I hadn’t gone thatfar into the red through the whole Tour deFrance. I had never got to the point where Iwas actually blowing up like I was now. I wasabsolutely flat, flat, flat. After going down theother side of Box Hill for the final time wewere on a flat road. I thought, ‘Okay, I canjust sit on for a few seconds to recover andthen I’ll be able to get back on the front againto keep pulling.’

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But I couldn’t get back to the front. I wentback to the car and got bottles instead, think-ing, ‘Right, I’ll do one more effort, get bottlesto all the guys, and then I’ll pull off.’

I got up to our train again, I reached for-ward and gave Cav a bottle, and that was it. Iwas so far in the red that I couldn’t actuallygo any further to give the rest of the teamtheir bottles. We’d been on the front fromkilometre 20 to kilometre 200. And now weweren’t going to be able to deliver Cav a goldon The Mall. We had let him down.

Brad was strong. While I was struggling toget the bottles to the guys, he was stillpulling at the front.

I rolled through the last 20 or 30 kilo-metres, to get to the finish, being slowly lif-ted by the crowds. For the first time therewas an Olympic feeling, riding along the bigopen roads where thousands of spectatorslined the sides, cheering.

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As I rode towards the finish I wondered ifCav was up ahead about to win gold. We’dget to the finish and there’d be a hugecelebration …

It was quite a disappointment when I gotback to the small tent at the finish to seeeveryone crestfallen. We had been talked upso much. The Kazakh, Alexandre Vinokour-ov, had the gold we had hoped to help Cavwin.

The day hurt. Afterwards I saw a lot ofnegative comments on social media. Peoplethought I was just saving my legs for the timetrial and was not really interested in the roadrace. I thought, ‘Ah, if only you guys knewthat I actually hadn’t gone this hard in all ofthe Tour. Today I went much deeper thanthat!’

Hard times. And four days till the timetrial.

When I left the Kenyan cycling world therewas both the sadness of farewell and the

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lightness of feeling I was doing the rightthing.

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

For Mum, the decision was tied to emotion– she felt truly Kenyan. I think she had eventraded in her British passport for a Kenyanone so that she could work properly withouthaving to apply for visas. She definitely had aKenyan ID in her purse and Kenyan identityin her heart.

Mum always said to me, ‘No, don’t changefrom being Kenyan, you’re Kenyan, you wereborn here.’ She was very proud of me repres-enting Kenya and she wanted me to keep rid-ing 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 pass-

port I was causing more harm than good forKinjah and the rest of the guys who were

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trying to make it from a more difficult start-ing point in life than I had; I was being usedas a political weapon against them. TheKenyan Cycling Federation stopped givingKinjah and the rest of the riders around hima licence to race in 2006.

As long as I was performing under aKenyan licence it was making the KenyanFederation and Julius Mwangi look like theywere active. They could pretend they weredoing something to develop riders in thesport. They weren’t. For me to be their posterboy was basically hurting the riders, the guyslike Kinjah who weren’t getting any kind ofsupport.

I knew too that compared to every otherKenyan that I’d raced with I’d had a very dif-ferent journey. I’d had a much more priv-ileged upbringing than they’d had. I grew upin a home that had running water and elec-tricity. I loved every minute I spent with Kin-jah and the guys. We ate the same food, slept

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in the same room, did the same things androde the same bikes. I was one of them and itwas a great, great thing in my life, but thedifference which I was always conscious ofwas that I was staying with them; they wereactually living there. In that sense, I didn’tfeel that I was really a Kenyan cyclist.

The road out for me was just a cycle hometo Karen. The road out for Kinjah and myfriends was a long, hard climb. When thetime came I went to a good school in SouthAfrica and I could afford better bikes. I couldaccess different information and I could getmyself to Salzburg. Kinjah and my old ridingpartners had none of those things.

They deserved opportunities and I didn’tthink it was fair that I was taking up one ofthe spots on Kenyan teams. I might as wellhave sat in Kinjah’s hut every day and eatenall the food.

I talked to Kinjah about the switch and hewas actually quite happy. In terms of career

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progression, he felt that it was going to bethe best thing I could do. And in terms ofhelping his cause it was the best thing alsobecause the Federation had started pointingto me saying, ‘Chris is doing this. Chris is do-ing that. Chris is one of the guys we’vedeveloped.’

I had always been self-conscious andquietly guilty about that bit of comparativeprivilege in my upbringing; I had it easierthan my fellow Simbaz did. It was unspokenamong us but we all knew it. Deep down itsat poorly with me to take the easy road outand to represent Kenya. In doing so, as wellas eating up resources I was going along withthe pretence that cycling was being carefullycultivated.

I love Kenya but sometimes the best youcan do for somebody you love is to leavethem be and let them grow. Nobody will beprouder than me when a true Kenyan riderwins a stage on the Tour or stands on a

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World Championship podium with the an-them playing. Then Kenyan cycling will havetravelled the road that Kinjah and the guyscarved and paved. Whatever I can do forthem to make that day come quicker, I willdo, in gratitude for all I was given.

I think once Mum understood those ele-ments of my choice she was better with it butI know she did feel sad that I wasn’t repres-enting Kenya any more. She’d been reallyproud of that and she didn’t think that Iwould ever really feature within the Britishsystem.

She never got to see me ride the Tour deFrance. And here I was, four years later, atthe Olympic Games in London, riding forTeam GB. Bad days and good.

Olympic Time Trial

I’d had two decent time trials in the pastmonth on the Tour, coming second to Bradon both of them. I thought I was obviously in

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good shape, but I couldn’t expect to be any-where near the likes of Fabian Cancellara orTony Martin; I would be riding for 4th place.

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

We had the same sort of build-up to thetime trial that we’d had for the road race:everything was done properly and we fell in-to our old pattern. Only one difference: I wasusing my standard team-issue TT bike. Bradwas on a custom bike commissioned by UKSport. When our paths crossed we swappedcordial hellos. We ate in near silence. We didour own thing.

After the Tour, I realized that Brad hadnever really said thank you. He’d never actu-ally shaken my hand and said, ‘Listen, Chris,thanks for all you did in the Tour, the sacri-fices you made and everything.’ I almostthought that in those few days in Foxhills itwas coming. I kept on expecting it, thinking,

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‘Okay, maybe tomorrow morning he’ll say it,’or, ‘He’ll have reflected a little bit on theTour by now.’ I found it really strange that itjust never came.

I started the time trial thinking, ‘Right, I’mfeeling good here. I’m pushing on, pushingon.’ It was a flat course and I began at quite agood pace. I held on to it. I can remembergetting closer and closer to the end, and justwhen I was feeling as if I were running out ofsteam, I heard Rod on the radio saying how Iwas up on Cancellara, and I was sitting in3rd place … I wasn’t far off Tony Martin.

That news blew me away. It had gonepretty well and if I could keep pushing onthere was even a chance that I could beatTony. My legs were feeling completely full oflactate, and were so spent, but I thought tomyself, ‘The only thing I can do now is juststare at the SRM box; stare at the box anduse that to motivate me. Get the numbers upto where I want to be. Ignore those legs.’

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I got to the low to mid 400s; got thatwattage out. I kept staring at the box andcounting down the kilometres towards thefinish. Whenever there was a corner, andevery time there was a bit of a bend in theroad, I’d steal as much recovery as possible.Two seconds of not pedalling, through thecorner – bliss!

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

I hovered between 400 and 440. Thosefigures indexed my mood: the higher thenumber, 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; atleast I can hold it here. This is sustainable.’

In one breath I was thinking, ‘Fantastic,I’m looking like I’m gonna get a podiumhere.’ In the next breath I was thinking, ‘I

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could make a silver if I catch Tony Martin.’So I tried to focus on Tony; I pictured myselfclosing in on him. Maybe he’d started fastand as I got closer to the end I’d hear thetime gaps coming down; maybe he wasstruggling a bit.

It never happened.Bronze.For a short while I’d dreamed of silver, but

before the race I’d almost written off beingon the podium at all. It took a while now toabsorb the achievement: this was different to3rd in any other race. This was the Olympics.It was an amazing feeling.

In a funny way it felt much better than theTour podium. The Tour podium felt stagedand very false to me for some reason. At theOlympics, on the other hand, it really felt likea privilege just to be standing up there. Eventhough Brad and I had our differences, orwhatever, I did feel an unusual amount ofpride that we were there, the two of us, 1st

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and 3rd, both on the podium, in front of ahome crowd.

It was a big deal; a good and happyending.

The Tour gave way to the Olympics whichquickly gave way to the Vuelta, which meantthree weeks in the Spanish heat. We hadn’tdone any proper recces of the key stages butit was a course that looked inviting, witheight mountain stages and a lot of mountain-top finishes. I didn’t know what was left inmy tank but I was getting my chance to bethe team leader at a Grand Tour.

The race was likely to be dominated byhome headliners: Juanjo Cobo was going forback-to-back home wins, Alberto Contadorwas back in the peloton of a Grand Tour afterhis ban, and Alejandro Valverde and Joa-quim Rodríguez were also in the mix.

Significant chunks of those days werespent in their company. On stage three, forinstance, Valverde, Rodríguez and I chased

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Contador down half a dozen times on asingle mountain.

It was an interesting race but I could feelmy energy slipping away early on. There wasa mountaintop finish in Andorra where wehad taken the race on and put all the ridersin the team on the front. Richie, SergioHenao and Rigoberto Uràn had made astrong pace on the final climb as this was theday I planned to ride away from the threemain Spanish riders.

With 4 or 5 kilometres left, I hit the frontand tried to go. I went but Contador stayedon my wheel. After pulling for a few minutesI signalled for him to come through and giveme a hand. He wasn’t interested; he justlooked down and shook his head.

We almost came to a standstill, andRodríguez and Valverde came back to us. Ithought to myself that these guys were a lotmore punchy than me on the climbs. Itwould be in my interest now to try to keep

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the pace relatively constant, and not to letthem have too much recovery.

So, stupidly, I got on the front and carriedon pulling at a good pace. In the last kilo-metre they all left me for dead and took 20 to30 seconds out of me.

There was a time trial that I had ringed inred as important. I came 3rd, some 39seconds back. Then, on another day in themountains, Rodríguez took 2 minutes 40seconds out of me. I was getting used to see-ing the backs of the three Spaniards rollingaway from me.

But I kept going. I know now that to do theTour and the Vuelta you need a break inbetween and then maybe three weeks ofclear, dedicated training for the Vuelta. Backthen I just kept on going to the well everyday.

I had come 2nd in the Tour, I had won abronze medal at the Olympics and now I’dcome 4th in the Vuelta. If I had been offered

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that at the beginning of the year I wouldhave taken it, for sure.

Bobby said to me that what I had enduredat the Vuelta impressed him more than any-thing I’d done at the Tour.

I was persuaded that it had been ideal pre-paration for the World Championships, andwith my head still echoing with the excite-ment of the Olympics, I went. However, Irode about 120 kilometres and it wasn’t tobe. My legs retired of their own accord.

I longed for a few weeks off; days when Imight take the bike out to ride for an hourand then meet somebody for coffee. Butthere were not many of those days and 2013was already beckoning. I needed to rechargefirst though.

On the last weekend in October the teamwere to gather in London. Brad was stagingsomething called a ‘Yellow Ball’ to mark hiswin in the Tour. Then the team were to meetfor a debriefing session about the season.

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I didn’t get an invitation to the Yellow Ball.I would also be left out of a bonus paymentfrom Brad to all the riders that had riddenfor him as a token of his appreciation. Thesewere small things but it seemed that Bradwas brooding ever more darkly on the Tourand how he saw my role in it.

As for the debriefing, the whole atmo-sphere of celebration which it had seemed topromise was sucked away by a new under-current. The team was going to purge somestaff members as part of their ongoing zero-tolerance policy towards doping.

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

I can remember Bobby coming into myroom and talking to me. He had obviouslymade the decision to tell the truth about hisown past. He said, ‘I’m going to go in there

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and I’m going to tell them that what I didwas take EPO …’

He said he felt it was his responsibility totell the team, and that he didn’t want anynegative association to rebound on myself orRichie. We knew what he was saying: he wasour coach and, because he had taken EPO,people would think that he might be advisingus to do the same. He said this wasn’t fair onus. He was going to tell the truth because hefeared it would come out sooner or later andthe damage would be bigger. He preferredfor it to come from him.

It was very clear to Bobby that if he didown up it would be pretty much the end ofhim. He went into the room knowing that. Ofcourse, knowing something will happen inadvance doesn’t stop you from being disap-pointed when it does.

To add insult to injury for Bobby, when wewent out for a last evening, he lost his jacket

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and his wallet. He had no cash, no creditcards, no job.

When we worked together, Bobby had agreat deal of passion for what he did and fordealing with people. This came through inthe way that he’d volunteer to come and fol-low us training to watch the efforts that wewere doing. Or the fact that I’d upload atraining file and he’d be on the phone fiveminutes later talking about it, and we mighttalk for an hour, or even two.

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

I went back to Africa to get rested up for2013.

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25

On one of those faraway, forever-ago Christ-mases with Mum and my brothers, this par-ticular one at Kilifi, a coastal town 55 kilo-metres miles north of Mombasa, I was aseventeen-year-old cycling dreamer withouthis bike. So on Christmas morning, thinkingabout the food that would come my way laterin the day, I decided on some pre-emptiveexercise: a run on the beach, the sun on myface and the Indian Ocean for company.

I’d gone about 3 kilometres, boundingalong and happy, when it seemed like I’dstubbed my foot. But it was not your normalstub moment; it was more like the groundhad grabbed me and wasn’t letting go. Ilooked down and saw that a pencil-sized har-poon arrow had gone into my foot.

The difficulty was that while the arrow-head of the harpoon had torpedoed into myflesh, the other end was buried deep in thehard sand. I was stuck. ‘On the first day ofChristmas my true love said to me … what inthe name of the Lord are you going to do?’What was strange was the absence of anypain. I didn’t feel the harpoon go in and nowthat it was there, it didn’t hurt. So I sat downand tried to prise it free.

Moving it at the point where it hadentered, I could see the tip of the harpoonshifting under my skin much further up, to-wards the ankle. It had gone four or fiveinches into my foot. This was quite serious.

A guy with dreadlocks came walking to-wards me.

‘Merry Christmas,’ were not my firstwords.

My eyes directed him to the situation.He looked at the harpoon, at my foot, and

then at me.

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‘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 sharppoint that had wedged into my flesh; theweapon had been designed to enter but notexit. He then tried to get the other end of theharpoon out of the sand. By bending it thisway and that he eventually snapped it off.

It was rusty and old. Part of the brokenharpoon was still poking out of the sand, butfour or five inches of it were still in my foot,with another three inches sticking out frombetween my toes. Putting my arm round theshoulder of my new dreadlocked friend, Ihobbled up the beach to a nearby hotel.

From there I called the rented house myfamily were staying in. My mother and mycousin, Sarah, came for me in the car. Thehotel receptionist said the options were the

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public hospital in Mombasa – more than anhour away – or a local clinic. Not fancyingthe one-hour drive, we turned up at the localclinic, a smallish tin establishment not dis-similar to Kinjah’s place at Kikuyu, where wefound a cheerful guy in his mid sixties, in awhite doctor’s coat.

He sat me on a wooden bench and hemoved the embedded harpoon, gently atfirst. He then tried to yank it out, but itwasn’t budging. My mother and he agreedthat forcing it out could do a lot of damage,probably leaving rusty chips inside, and po-tentially leading to infection and furthercomplications.

‘We’re going to have to open it up,’ said theman who I was guessing was a doctor. ‘I willtake out the harpoon and clean upeverything that’s inside.’

He injected me with what I imagined was alocal anaesthetic. The razor blade wasn’tquite what I had expected but it sure sliced

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open the sole of my foot. I don’t know thatthe anaesthetic had much effect becauseafter he’d opened up my foot it became reallypainful.

The amount of blood shocked me. Itgathered in a small puddle on the bench andthen flowed like a red waterfall on to thefloor. That was about the time my cousinSarah retreated from the room. I noticed thedoctor was shaking a little and sweating pro-fusely. He seemed worried.

‘I hope we haven’t cut too many nerveshere,’ he said, which wasn’t reassuring. Mymum looked over his shoulder. With the footnow opened up, he was able to free theharpoon.

Taking it out was the easy bit. Sealing thewound was much harder. He didn’t have anysurgical suture and the needle kept bendingas he pushed it through my skin. I think itwas a standard sewing needle rather than a

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surgical one, and instead of suture he had touse fishing line.

This was far from suitable as every knotseemed to come undone and after takingonly five or ten minutes to make the incisionand take out the harpoon, he spent twohours putting in about twelve stitches. Thespacing between the stitches was unevenand, all these years later, the scar is stillimpressive.

Before we left the tin hut, my mother hadto pay. We’d taken up more than two hoursof this man’s time and on Christmas Day. Ithought this was going to cost my mother.

‘How much will that be?’ she asked.‘Eight hundred shillings,’ he said.Wow. That was about six euros.We returned home and had a good Christ-

mas lunch that day. Sometimes pain is justwhat you choose it to be. When you climb amountain till your legs are jelly, or when youtime trial till your lower back aches with

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pain, you know that it will end. The harpoonbarb won’t hold you for ever. No climb, noeffort, no diet, no pain is for ever.

Still, I thought, in future I should stick tocycling.

Training days often go like this.I ride out of Monaco, deserting the odd

huddled world of bespoke clothes, expensiveapartments and fine cars where I live, and onup to La Turbie, where the Trophée desAlpes was built by the Romans when theyconquered the mountains. It still loomsmassive above the humble steeple of an oldchurch. The outcrop above me is called Têtede Chien (Dog’s Head), a great name. On upto the narrow, lovely streets of La Peille andjust time to steal some quick snapshotglances down the mountain at the rockygorges and the river below.

The signs warn you of the lacets or boot-laces, which is what the locals call the tighthairpin bends which seem to just lie here as

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if dropped carelessly from the sky on to thesides of the mountains. This is the old Routedu Sel where the mules used to carry salt in-land from the Camargue. When I feel bad myheart goes out to those poor mules. Nothingis straight-lined here. No such concept ashow the crow flies. Even the long railwaytunnel through the mountain from here toSospel loops around and around in thedarkness.

L’Escarène straddles the river itself andhas a beautiful row of viaduct arches sup-porting the railway bridge. Ride on. Pushharder. Off now towards the Col de SaintRoch with its 25 kilometres of mostly gentleclimb. Two dips in the middle and then a de-cent haul to the top. I’m feeling ready nowfor what is next.

And what is next? You swing towards theCol de Turini with its crazy hairpin bends allthe way up. If you have seen the Monte Carlorally then you have seen those bends – the

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petrolheads love driving them. You look outfor oncoming thrill-seekers. Keep pushing upwith all the staccato rhythms taking it out ofyour legs.

We are about three or four hours into theride now. We have done a few climbs on theway but Turini is a good 20-kilometre dragup to 2,000 feet. This is the meat of the day,the point where the trip is starting to gethard. We go round a hairpin and the roadgets even steeper for the last 5 kilometres. IfRichie is here we might start half-wheelingeach other at this spot. If not, I push myhardest anyway.

One day Joe Dombrowski, a young Amer-ican teammate, put Richie and me underpressure at this point. We knew then the kidcould climb. A lot to learn still, but the talentwas there.

We reach the heart of things now, loopinground towards the Col de Braus. There sitsthe small tombstone of the beloved French

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rider René Vietto who, on stage sixteen withthe race lead almost in his poche, sacrificedhis chance to win the 1934 Tour and filteredback through the descending peloton trafficto give his bike to his team leader, AntoninMagne, who had mechanical problems.Magne won the Tour. Vietto became a herobut he did grumble: ‘I’m not going to playthe slave for ever.’ Right on, René.

(The story goes that in later life when Vi-etto lost a toe to sepsis before the 1947 Tour– what was the weight advantage there? – heasked that his friend and super domestiqueApo Lazaridès have one of his own toes re-moved to match. Lazaridès, unable to refusea man who defined the nobility of the do-mestique, walked with a limp for the rest ofhis days. Are you getting all this down,Richie?)

We are in Italy now, riding towards the oldport town of Ventimiglia, the first train stopon the other side of the border. The blue

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waters lap against the brown and grey build-ings which have been here for ever. Then it istime to turn for home. Home, back along thecoast road through Menton, or a switch upthe right towards Col de la Madone.

Ah, the Madone and her ghosts. Anotherstory.

I’m waiting for dinner to come at a Team Skytraining camp in Tenerife.

It’s been twenty minutes and my stomachwon’t shut up about it. Kosta doesn’t help.

Kanstantsin Siutsou aka Kosta. He doesn’tknow it but I am watching him, studying himlike he is in a nature documentary. This isbecause Kosta doesn’t have a digestive sys-tem: he has a full-blown industrial plant,which extracts what it wants from a river offood and incinerates the rest. I know this andI hate him for it.

He eats more than the rest of us combinedbut still has the lowest body fat and skinfoldsof the whole team. He simply doesn’t do fat –

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he has never heard of it – and he thinks thatwe are crazy with our suffering and ourabstinence.

I am watching Kosta digging into thebread basket now. His fingers are lingeringon the warm, soft, fragrant bread which thewaiter has just placed on our table – a wholebasketful of it just to torment us.

Hardly looking at his work, Kosta finds themost delicious-looking roll in the basket andrips it apart absent-mindedly. A wedge goesinto his mouth with one hand while the otherhand and his eyes start a casual search forthe butter. I watch that first mouthful in slowmotion, even though Kosta takes no care – itis just a thick chunk of bread after all; warm-up bread. Now Kosta is chasing down anoth-er. This second wedge of loaf is more sinful –he has loaded it with a hefty serving of al-mond butter and some honey. Mmm. Hisface greets the taste like an old friend and hechews lovingly as I watch.

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I am a sad and hungry food voyeur. I hatemyself for it. Even more than I hate Kosta atthis moment.

Kosta’s eyes are darting about the tablenow. He has seen the pot of strawberry jam.Why is there even strawberry jam at ourtable? He reaches out for the jam but I can’twatch any more. My stomach begs me tochange channels – anything but watchingKosta eat. Anything.

I turn to talk to Richie. But he too iswatching Kosta now, tracking the movementof the strawberry jam like a wolf watching aspring lamb.

In the old days on Grand Tours they usedto say that it took the Italians the first threeor four hours of riding each day just to digestthe mountain of pasta they would eat forbreakfast. Only then would they be ready torace, which would of course be followed byanother mountain of pasta for dinner thatevening.

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When I smell bread or I see pasta I amconditioned to the sound of alarm bells inmy head. Gluten is taboo. We don’t eat glu-ten, my brain says. We could try, my stom-ach says, a little wouldn’t hurt.

As far as I see it, gluten just complicateseverything: it blocks the muscles, retains wa-ter and bloats you. Bread and pasta are Tro-jan horses filled with gluten. We try to stayaway from glutens. We just watch Kosta eatthem, and we hate him for his industrialplant.

I try to go very light in terms of diet. In themornings I limit myself to just the one bowlof porridge, and normally a two-egg om-elette, with no hint of extras on the side. Nosecond helpings, no picking, nothing. If thereis a big stage ahead that day I’ll try a three-egg omelette, but warily, and I’ll mix a smallamount of white rice into the porridge.

Sometimes on the giant epic rides I thinkthat I am under-fuelled but I can still

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summon up the Barloworld days and thefeeling of heavy bloat I used to get after someof the good old pasta meals. I know it has tobe this way.

On to the desserts, which no longer con-tain ‘love’ as I like to put it. Instead, I’ll chewa few pieces of fruit or have a pot of yoghurt.I don’t count calories or know the values ofmost things; I just let my instinct guide meas to what is the right amount to eat. My in-stinct always says that the right amount isless than I feel like eating. In a previous life Ithink my instinct lived in a remotemonastery.

I can think of food, see things in terms offood and watch Kosta love his food. But I justcan’t eat food. Not like before. It’s a fidelitything.

End of argument.

The sweat du jour, or training efforts.Today’s house special is served in three

portions, up there on the blackboard.

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The starter is a 20-second sprint served atthe bottom of a climb. All in. Balls out. Bang!

This is followed straight away by a portionof zone-three riding, which is 20 minutes attempo pace. It is not at threshold but luke-warm; not on the edge but close. So wesprint, then ride at tempo.

It’s about racing.Why sprint at the bottom of a mountain?

Usually just to get into position for the up-coming mountain.

Why so much pain? To teach the body torecover from a blow-out sprint by usingtempo pace instead of freewheeling.

We take the pain now, hoping that otherswill suffer later.

The final course varies in texture. It in-volves a sprint of 30 seconds followed by thesame 20 minutes of recovery at tempo. Thenthere is a 40-second sprint, followed by an-other 20 minutes at tempo. All this is accom-panied with a side serving of mountain.

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I decide to make alterations; I don’t thinkTim Kerrison minds, as long as I’m makingthe effort more challenging. He sends us all amenu of efforts for our session. Everybodyuploads the data from their effort and sendsit back to him. I sometimes send my databack to him with slightly different or extrainformation, along with an explanatory notesaying that I felt I had to do more.

Once I feel my form progressing, Timknows I will add a few touches to make it alittle more painful, a little sauce to flavourthe suffering. He’ll tell me to stick to theplan, but I’ll do it and explain later. As a rule,the plan changes from day to day anyway. Imight stick to the day’s plan when I see itagain. Maybe not. But tomorrow’s plan is al-ways fair game for alteration.

So today instead of just one sprint per 20minutes of tempo recovery I throw in an ex-tra sprint of the same duration at the halfway

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point of 10 minutes for each of the three sep-arate efforts.

So now the pattern is 20 seconds of sprintriding followed by 10 minutes of tempo rid-ing. Then another 20 of sprinting followedby 10 minutes of tempo. I turn round, des-cend back down to the bottom of the climband repeat with a 30-second sprint this time.It’s the same method for the final effort butthis time a 40-second sprint.

I’ve sliced the ‘recovery’ period in half inorder to add a lactic-generating sprint in themiddle. It doesn’t make me feel good butthinking that I could have done more wouldmake me feel worse.

I have to really struggle to recover fromthis, which is good. My body definitely re-members when I go really deep and it all getscoded in so that the muscles remember thefeeling and become more attuned to it. Theyadapt.

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Today I think there is benefit for me be-cause the rhythm has been coarsely chopped.My body had 20 minutes to recover, thensuddenly just 10 minutes. After more workthere was another 10-minute break. And soon. These intervals are designed to teach thebody how to dissipate the lactic acid in orderto recover from the sprint at the beginning.In a race, the recovery periods won’t come atsuch nice, regular intervals.

I pile on these extras like a glutton at thepunishment buffet. I rack my brain for ideason the days when we are instructed just to dosome ‘general cycling’. Nine times out of tenI will add my own intervals on top of theserides to reassure myself that I’m in control,and that I’m making the most of my training.

When it’s time to train, I don’t like beingon the bike for no reason and general ridingdays aren’t really a reason. I want to takesomething away from each and every ride, soevery day I ask the same questions. What do

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I want to get out of this ride? How am I test-ing myself? How am I getting stronger?

I don’t necessarily like pushing my body tothe limits the way I do in training. I can feeltoday that all this isn’t necessarily thathealthy for me. I don’t think it’s good for mybody to push it this hard, and this often. Itcan’t be good in terms of health and longev-ity; I’m sure that the aggregate of all thesemarginal debts will have to be paid by thebody sometime down the road.

I know for now though that this is what isgoing to make me stronger, fitter and tough-er. It’s what I need to do to be a racer, andwhat I need to do to be at the front of thenext race.

On days like today I don’t care about any-thing else.

Back in Monaco, the Col de la Madone deGorbio is a fallen woman. Her name is tain-ted by the sins of her former lover. I livenearby and have to admit there is some dark

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attraction in her notoriety. Richie and I havespoken about it. The Col de la Madone hadpoor luck. That’s the only way you can ex-plain it when a mountain falls in with a badcrowd.

The Col de la Madone was Lance Arm-strong’s test mountain. He loved her somuch he named a bike after her. He talkedabout her so much that riders still want totest themselves up her slopes. We know theCol is blameless and beautiful, and today weare at the bottom, Richie and I, ready to takeher up on her challenge.

It wouldn’t be true to say that we havenever been here before. We have used theCol de la Madone a lot for doing the20-minute efforts or 24-minute efforts whichTim Kerrison plans for us. We have riddenup and down it many a time on trainingrides. We have never respected the mountainproperly though. We’ve never gone from bot-tom to top as fast as we could go. We are

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here to time trial Col de la Madone. I am rid-ing my mountain time-trial bike.

Armstrong used to come here to see if hewas ‘ready’ for the Tour.Yes, we know nowthat it was just one of the more naturalmeasures of ‘readiness’ that he was obligedto take but we have to admit, this is a goodone, a useful barometer. It’s a nice climb,about 12 kilometres (11.89 kilometres mydownloaded file says) from start to finish,with a good consistent gradient of aroundseven per cent, climbing 808 metres of ver-tical ascent. There are a few flat stretches forrecovery.

We can’t know where others started ex-actly, as obviously there is no official startingline for an effort up the Col de la Madone,but traditionally people flick the stopwatchat the bus stop on the left side of the roadjust past the first switchback in Les Castagn-ins, right at the bottom of the climb. Nothinggrand, just a pole on the side of the road with

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a few bus numbers and routes on it. That’sour starting point anyway, exactly where theroad begins to go uphill.

Richie sets off before me.Richie is an unusual man. He is someone

whom I can train very well with. I look at theroad and I see little stretches where I can testmyself, really push it on, and Richie looksand he sees the same. Finish lines, visibleonly to us of course, pop up all over ourtraining routes. He’s a competitor. We have alittle training rivalry and constant chal-lenges. Race you over the next rise ahead ofus?

When we are on the boring valley roads,we don’t just ride side by side chatting. Westart swapping off, 2 minutes each, with eachof us trying to do a harder turn at the frontthan the other one did. Harder, longer,tougher.

It’s human nature that riders often like tomake things easier for each other. Richie and

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I go the opposite way. We make each other’slives as hard as possible but as an expressionof friendship. This is good for us.

Occasionally the young Americans in theteam moan that they think the training’s toolong, and too hard. We’re not good shouldersfor them to cry on. When Richie and I ridewith them we push on, to see if we can getthem out of their comfort zone. We includethe steepest climb we can find. We’re justmaking a point; it’s fun in a perverse sort ofway.

Today, we want to see where we’re atform-wise. So the Madone becomes ourmountain time trial. I set off 1 minute afterRichie and Tim Kerrison follows me, alone inhis car. Richie has flown off quick as a fish atthe start. I know what he is thinking: No waydoes Froomey give me a head start and thencatch me.

It is a strange ride. We will end up in abadlands of stringy roads and mountain

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goats but we begin where the surface is fineand for the bottom 5 kilometres we are push-ing through residential areas, with housesand driveways branching off from the Col.There aren’t any big hairpin bends but theroad is always turning left and right as wesweep our way up the climb. The houses lookso quiet and serene but we careen past themlike we are handling a getaway car.

After about 6 kilometres we start hitting acouple of hairpins but if you look over theedge of the climb here you have got the cityof Menton below and, beyond that, theocean. Amazingly beautiful. Our heart ratesare okay. The scenery is breath-taking buttoday we pay it no attention.

About 18 minutes in, and just overhalfway, we get to a junction where you canturn off to the town of Sainte-Agnès. To carryon up the Route du Col de la Madone youlook to the small maroon sign for instructionand then coast round a very sharp left that

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doubles back on itself. Next you sprint to getback up to speed again and carry on up.From this point it is about 5 kilometres tothe summit. You go through a couple of tun-nels before the road flattens out for maybe500 metres, and then you pass an avenue oftrees. Now it kicks up into the last third ofthe climb, where the road surface is veryrough. It’s quite normal to meet goats, whichroam up here. Goats and goatherds. That isthe most traffic you will find: tourists onbikes and goats.

The road is narrow. For two cars to passone needs to stop or pull a little off the roadfor the other to get through. It becomes lessscenic as you come closer to the top and youhit the back of the mountain where you can’tsee the ocean any more. Nature just narrowsyour focus anyway.

This effort is taking its toll on me. Thatfresh, zippy feeling I had at the bottom haslong since left my legs. I squeeze on. I have

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to squeeze on. This is where it counts – thatstopwatch can easily gather more secondshere if I lose concentration.

There is a left-hand bend with a desertedhut on it. This marks the spot from whereyou have 1 kilometre to go. When you get tothe hut you know you can start emptying it.You dig it out now, out of the saddle, drive ithome. Squeeze hard. Because you know it’snot for ever.

Once you get to the top there is an aban-doned settlement. At some stage peoplethought better about riding up the Madonejust to get home every evening. No windowsor doors survive and some roofs and wallsare all that is left. More ghosts. To the left,some massive antennas.

There is an old monument at the top of theclimb. It is made from stone and old artilleryshells and it looks like the Madonna in theform of a bomb cradling a baby. The inscrip-tion says ‘Combats de l’homme, éclats

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d’obus, désormais ne soyez plus que laMadone de la paix’, which reads along thelines of: ‘Battles of men, shards of shells,from now on you are no more than theMadonna of peace.’

Once you hit the top of the Madone youknow it. It descends immediately. You justcrest the hill and you drop; there is no flatarea.

We lean forward, sucking in the air, bothof us fiddling with our bikes, both of us hav-ing the same idea. I scroll through the SRMdata from the ascent: Power, Time, HeartRate, Speed.

I think a lot about my competitors when I’mtraining. I think about how they might beriding, and wonder if they are out with theirteammates chatting for five hours. Especiallyif I’m out on my own that day, doing morefocused efforts. I’m not just dawdling along.I like to think I’m doing more than the other

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guys, even when I don’t know if this is thecase or not.

Alberto Contador told me once that he hadmoved up to Switzerland, somewhere aroundLugano. He needed to be close to Bjarne Riis,and the bonus was that another couple ofSpanish riders on the team had moved therewith him. They were going to be trainingpartners.

I like to think of those three amigos outtraining, just having a gentle ride and a chat.Maybe a coffee stop. The more my legs achewhen I train the more I hope they are enjoy-ing themselves. If one of them is a bit belowpar today, maybe all three will pack it in. Ihope so.

In my head I am sure Contador and Nibaliand my other rivals are out there trainingjust as hard as I am. So some days I add inintervals or do more specific training ormore intensity and tell myself they’d never

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think to ride like this – this is where I’ll getmy advantage.

Richie and I both struggle when we aretold to take it easy; we want to be out theretraining. Work gives us the reassurance weneed. We don’t want Contador thinking of ussipping cappuccinos and talking bull. We areno-pain-no-gain fundamentalists. A lot ofthe time Team Sky want us to be recovering.If we’ve done a big training block in Tenerifethey might say, ‘Okay, guys, take four dayseasy back at home now before you go to thenext race.’

Richie and I become edgy at the prospect,Richie especially. You have to take his bikeaway if you want him not to be doing five-hour rides.

‘God, four days? We’re gonna get fat infour days! We’re gonna put on a kilo. It’s bet-ter if we train.’

We can’t train though. Otherwise they’llsee that we have been training. So, we have

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found a way to get past our power meters. Ifwe are supposed to do an hour, we’ll prob-ably do an hour and a half on the powermeter, then disable it so it switches off andonly shows that we’ve done an hour and ahalf.

Meanwhile, the two of us will go on and domore training. We might carry on and do an-other four hours. Afterwards, we’ll make surethat we have our stories straight when talk-ing to Tim: ‘Oh, today we only did a recoverycoffee ride.’

For us it is important just to keep the bodygoing. Sometimes we imagine that no onereally understands this except for us. Weworry about putting on weight, about accu-mulating fluid. We worry that our legs willjust stop turning. Training longer gives usreassurance.

I know that sometimes we do run the riskof over-training, that we need to be backingoff. And it’s something I’m learning to deal

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with. Having Michelle in my life has made ita lot easier. I’m starting to say, ‘Okay, well,Tim has said take a day off. I’ll do somethingwith Michelle.’

Does that sound bad? Sometimes a daywith Michelle is better for me than a day ofpain. But pain is still the friend that alwaystells me the truth. Training is still an addic-tion. For sure there are days when the pain isoverwhelming, where I push into the red sofar that I wonder if I will come back. And onthose days I speak to my rivals in my head. Ican do this. What can you do? I can do thishere on my own in training. And when I doit in a race it will be much easier. It will beenjoyable then. Can you do this?

Training in Tenerife. I got to the 40-secondsprint a while ago. Halfway through, at 20seconds, I was feeling nailed and in deeptrouble. When you are sprinting up the sideof a mountain, and when the pain owns you

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instead of the other way round, 20 seconds isa life sentence.

But then again, it’s not. I thought, ‘It’s 20seconds. Only 20 seconds. You can actuallycount that. Why don’t you do that? Come on.’And I started counting:

Eighteen, seventeen, sixteen … It gave mesomething to do, and something to focus on.A voice in my head to talk over the com-plaints coming from my legs.

Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen … After about 15seconds my power started dipping a little,wanting to head towards 600 watts. ‘Stop. Ihave done this before. Keep pushing a littlebit more. Get it back up to 700. Yes.’

Twelve, eleven, ten … ‘Spit the words out.When I get to the bottom of this countdownit will be finished. Done.’

Six, five, four … Then I can recover attempo for 10 minutes, maybe 9.

Two, one, zero. The big zero. That’s it.That’s it. I imagine a fragmented peloton

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behind me on the mountain. How’s that cof-fee, Alberto?

Maybe I have another sprint in me in a fewminutes’ time.

Today I am working on the interval ses-sion on Col d’Eze. It’s perfect, consisting ofabout 10 kilometres of climb with a verysteep section at the bottom to give me atough start.

When I get to the top after the intervals Ido a small loop and ride straight back down.And then back up again. And then down.And then back up again. I ride for close tothree hours doing this with the same loop atthe top each time.

Like at other points in my career, I oftentrain like this on my own. Not many guyswould be interested in riding up and downthe same road for three hours.

I’ll upload this session later and wait to seeTim’s response. What will he read into it? Hehad advised me to do these efforts but I’ve

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tweaked them as usual, and turned pain intotorture. I’m hoping he might say, ‘That’squite a good idea, you’re getting double com-pensation there on the climb, you’re reallytrying to work those recovery systems inyour legs.’

But he may come back and say, ‘That’s notnecessary. It’s too early in the year. You don’tneed to be doing that much. Just do the one.’

In which case I’ll stash this morning’swork in the bank of things that I can do, andwhen I get closer to the Tour I’ll draw on itthen, and ramp up the training.

I’ll say to him, ‘Remember I was doingthese things a while back and you said “waita bit”? Now can I do them?’

Tim is not one to shy away from pushingon, but there is still a time and a place for it.

I felt good all the way up the Col de laMadone today. The numbers can tell me justhow good. I’m not sure even now if I want towrite them down here. The power I managed

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to hold for that half an hour up the Col de laMadone was the highest I have ever done –459 watts in a pretty flat line all the way up.The highest in my life.

There’s definitely something a bit strangewith my heart rate. Not only today, but al-ways. It just doesn’t go very high, even whenI’m going as hard as I can.

The heart rate is normally one of the mostvisible readings on the head display. Some-times we can be riding a decent tempo up aclimb and I will look across and see anotherrider’s figures hovering around the 180 beatsper minute mark. They glance back at mineand see my rate is under 150.

In the morning when I’ve checked it, orwhen I’m resting, I’ve seen my heart ratedown as low as 29. It is a little odd and I’msure it could be reason for gossip. I mean, I’lloften do my threshold efforts for examplebetween 145 and 150. That’s quite a hardworkout, but it’s funny sometimes because

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there have been a few occasions in a race, ona climb, when someone has looked across atmy power meter and almost looked twice atme just to check that I was still breathing.

My time from the bus stop down below tothe summit was 30 minutes 9 seconds.That’s some 36 seconds into Armstrong’ssupposed fastest time up here. It’s fasterthan Tom Danielson’s 30 minutes 24seconds. If it’s a record though, it is one thata rider would be reluctant to claim. It bringsto mind too many thoughts of Michele Fer-rari and his clients examining their own statsafter a day on the Madone.

Richie has posted a much faster split timeup to the turn for Sainte-Agnès. He startedrunning out of fuel a little towards the end.He did a great time though, about 15 secondsbehind me.

It is a strange feeling we both have afterdoing it. We feel slightly guilty and a bitsheepish. We don’t want to tell anybody that

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we have gone and beaten those times be-cause we don’t want to invoke the ghosts ofthe past.

I turn to Richie.‘We can’t tell people about this.’We don’t want to go there. It’s happened

so many times that it stops hurting you andbegins to bore you – ‘Hey, you climbed thathill faster than Pantani. Therefore you mustbe guilty.’

No more idols.We are in good shape but it suits us not to

make too much of this, not to be blowing ourtrumpet before the race and not to be draw-ing snipers. We are happy. We know what wehave done. No need to tell everybody aboutit. It is great for our morale, our confidenceand our faith in clean riding.

Richie turns to me and says, ‘We’re readyfor this, mate. We’re ready.’

This was 23 June 2013. A Sunday. Wewould start the Tour six days later.

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26

Since the 2011 Vuelta I had been talking thetalk. Now 2013 was upon us and I wouldhave to walk the walk.

Nobody else was quite as excited as I was.For the team, this year would be tricky.Everything had been built on Brad in 2012 –he had delivered a Tour de France and anOlympic gold medal and was now literally aknight of the road. This year Team Skywould have to be explaining why last year’sdomestique would be the leader in the Tourde France. And Brad would still need to feelfulfilled and challenged.

All I could do was take care of my ownpart. Any time the team wanted to checkwhat condition I was in, they should bepleased and no alarm bells should sound.

Six months’ hard labour lay ahead but thatwas okay; pain has always been both an en-emy and an ally. I had found a soigneur inSouth Africa, a guy called Stefan Legavre,who had worked with the local pro teams. Hewas based in Cape Town so I flew him to Jo-hannesburg and put him up in the apartmentof the place I had bought in Parkhurst.Jaguar South Africa gave us a branded teamcar with all the Sky logos so Stefan could fol-low me on every ride, providing bottles andfood and acting as a buffer between me andmotorists. This was some change from thedays of sneaking out of St John’s at dawn.

I did huge blocks of training into theSuikerbosrand nature reserve. The longestclimb in the reserve is only probably a littleunder 4 kilometres but very undulating. Ittops out at about 1,900 metres. On one partyou ride up on to a big plateau and stay upon the top and then drop down on the otherside of the reserve. It was somewhere I really

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enjoyed training and I was always able tolook out for animals as I rode along: eland,waterbuck, wildebeest, zebra. Occasionally afat puffadder stretched across the warm tar.Mischievous baboons and jackals darting outon to the road.

Team training for the year began in Mal-lorca and I wanted to make a statement. Iwanted to show the team that I was takingthe challenge seriously; I wasn’t going topitch up overweight and unfit. So I workedharder than ever in South Africa.

Most days I rode on my own. When Ididn’t I would ride with some of the localcyclists. If I was doing specific efforts I wouldgo out on my own with Stefan behind. If itwas a general training day I’d seek out somecompany.

It sounds excessive, having a man in aJaguar follow you as you train, but it helped.For instance, I could ride the time-trial bikeas far as the nature reserve, switch to the

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road bike for a few hours and then ride thetime-trial bike back home again. And therewas the safety factor. On South African roadsthere is little respect for cyclists. In midJanuary Burry Stander, the mountain bikerwho had helped Kinjah and myself duringthe Commonwealth Games in Melbourne,was killed on the roads in South Africa.

One minute Burry was planning his sea-son. The next minute he was gone.

A few hundred of us took part in the me-morial ride for him in Johannesburg. Theroads were closed and we did a 10- to15-kilometre procession on bikes. EvenMichelle and Stefan joined in. During theprocession, we mounted and chained a ghostbike, a white-painted bike, in memory ofBurry, to the top of the iconic Nelson Man-dela Bridge.

I had one night in Monaco to stop and pickup my racing kit. The next morning I was offto Mallorca.

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Things had changed with the team andthere were fresh faces as there are every year.Mark Cavendish had moved on, looking foran environment more sympathetic to asprinter’s needs, and a couple of guys had re-tired. The cut, that invisible scalpel, haddone its work over the winter and now wehad new blood. David López and Vasil Kiryi-enka had joined us from Movistar, alongwith the two talented but inexperiencedAmericans Joe Dombrowski and IanBoswell, and Josh Edmondson, the Englishneo-pro.

The younger guys had to deal with the cul-ture shock. Joining Team Sky is like goingfrom a desk job to working in a coal mine.When I arrived they were telling horror stor-ies about some of the training days they haddone in my absence – apparently some ofthem in December had been like full-on racedays. I smiled thinly and nodded, doing theold-soldier routine. It was quite funny.

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Bobby J. was gone. The scalpel hadn’tbeen quite so invisible when the team cutseveral key staff members as part of the zero-tolerance policy to doping. Those who lovetrolling about Dave Brailsford and all his Pi-ety in the Sky-ety statements could managenothing more than a pretty juvenile ‘I toldyou so’ when staff members came forwardand confessed to having been involved indoping in the past.

Not many people understood that severingthose connections on the day of the longknives hurt everybody. Guys like Bobby hadmade mistakes and now they were paying forthem. But so was the team. It was a sacrificeto lose their cycling knowledge as well astheir presence about the place. Their pastdidn’t mean they didn’t understand the mis-takes or the wrong they had done to thesport and themselves. It didn’t mean theyhad nothing to contribute to a cleaned-upcycling world. They were casualties not of

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hypocrisy but of the fact that cycling needs torebuild itself and different people have dif-ferent ideas on how best to do that.

That was the end with Bobby. I missedhim and still do; we had worked well togeth-er. I was slightly disappointed in him andvery disappointed for him, I suppose.Whatever he had achieved while dopingcould never mean the same to him as whathe had achieved while clean, and that’s quitea punishment for a man who loves the sportso much.

I would stay in touch on the phone occa-sionally to see how he was doing and what hewas up to, but we had no more contact abouttraining. It wasn’t like it was before.

I was in more contact with Tim Kerrisonnow, who was Head of performance at Sky.Tim hadn’t been a rider himself so hebrought a more analytical and cerebral ap-proach to the whole thing. I enjoyed that toothough, and we would test and challenge

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each other. I would push on with my instinctthat more work is always better, whereasTim would quietly insist that more work atcertain times might be more effective thanall the time.

Cycling has its own conventional wisdomsand Tim has been a beacon in the way he haschallenged them. In South Africa I wouldsometimes meet up with a big group of ridersand tag along with them for a while.However, I would still need to do my 15- or20-minute intervals so I would ride off thefront at pace, complete my intervals andthen pull a U-turn, come back and continueriding with them. Nothing was ever said butwhile I was coming and going I noticedsmirks on faces and heard comments backthrough friends. They were all amused by myantics. ‘Doing intervals in January? What anidiot! This is the time for long steady miles.Always has been and always will be.’

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The point is that the Sky team prepares forthe season in its own way. I know that to acertain constituency, those hurt most by theLance Armstrong business, there is no pointexplaining what makes Sky different. Theysay they have heard it all before and theywon’t get fooled again. That’s fine. Certainriders and their teams treated the sport andits followers with such cynicism that thosefollowers are entitled to their cynicism now.

I am not a student of Lance Armstrong orthat period in cycling. He doesn’t interest meand that era doesn’t interest me. As such Iam no expert on what was done and whatwasn’t done. I do know though that a rangeof cycling people, from South Africa to theseasoned pros in Europe, expressed surpriseat how hard Sky went so early in the season.Also, at the time that we spent at trainingcamps at altitude as a team. We came toevents like the Tour of Oman prepared torace, and not to prepare for future races.

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At first the peloton disapproved but then itadapted. Last time I was on a training campin Tenerife the guy in the next room at theHotel Parador on Mount Teide was a rivalpro cyclist – Vincenzo Nibali.

Tim’s approach has influenced things. Ihave had lots of lucky breaks along my jour-ney through the people I have met, from Kin-jah to Robbie to Bobby. Meeting Tim, whothrough science reached many of the sameconclusions as I had through instinct, wasanother of those breaks.

In Mallorca I definitely felt that some of myteammates were trying to use me as thegauge for their own efforts. They would beoutriding each other one day and then fallingoff the back of the group the next day withsore legs or wounded knees.

Tim took me aside to say, ‘Listen, don’tworry about the other guys, some of themare way out of their zones trying to match theefforts you are doing at the moment. Because

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you are the main guy in the team, people willcompare themselves to you all the time. Justcarry on doing what you are doing.’

That was good to hear. It was what I hadhoped to achieve when I had been puttingthe work in down in South Africa.

Of course, some guys coped because theyknew how to. You knew that old warriors likeDanny Pate or Xabier Zandio had been doingthe work. There was no trying to turn headsor show off their form, they just did theirwork. They were good, consistent guys.

We developed a rhythm to the days. Richieand I would go to the gym before breakfast,where we would often find Kosta and Kiri.Their cores are so good we wondered whythey felt the need, and then, of course, werealized that it was exactly these early-morn-ing gym sessions that helped to build andmaintain their core strength. Within theteam everybody had their own habits andtheir own ways.

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Brad was in and out. He was at the campduring the week and he would fly home atweekends to be with his family. Once he andI sat down for a round-table discussion withjournalists who wanted to talk about the sea-son. Brad controlled the conversation anddid most of the talking. He was very enga-ging and switched on, a side of him the teamdidn’t always get to see. I felt like I was justadding in a few words here and there butthat didn’t bother me. Brad was more accus-tomed to that scene than I was. We spokeabout the Tour in 2012, and what we hadlearned. Brad then talked about the Giro andhow he intended to come and support me af-terwards in the Tour de France. We toed theparty line.

The journalists wrote afterwards that theredidn’t seem to be a lot of warmth betweenthe two of us. Well, we were saying what weneeded to say but neither of us felt comfort-able sitting next to each other. I was nervous

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about what Brad might come out with,whether or not he would follow the pointersset out for us by the team in the one-page‘media messages’ print-out.

Brad was to focus his comments on theGiro; I would focus mine on the Tour. As theseason progressed we would see how thingspanned out. The idea was for Brad to comeand help me at the 2013 Tour, and if anyquestions about 2012 were framed in a Brad-against-Chris way, we would play themdown.

We were trying to portray an image of usworking together and that was fine. Bradsounded very confident and genuine; itdidn’t have to be all warm and brotherlybetween us as long as we were singing fromthe same sheet. That day I didn’t think therewould be much of a problem. We just got onwith it and I felt reassured about what was tocome.

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If there was pressure early in the season, itwas subtle. The team wanted me to win oneor two races in springtime in the hope thatwinning would build the confidence of theteam around me; it was felt I needed to es-tablish that I was the leader. This was ex-pressed equally subtly. Tim might say to meafter one of the harder training rides, ‘Listen,Chris, your numbers are right up there –there is no reason why you shouldn’t, oh,let’s see, win Oman for example.’

Okay, Tim. I never saw a race I didn’t wantto win, so the guys were pushing at an opendoor.

Oman was the first race of the season. Wewon but it would be a more interesting weekthan the bald result suggested.

In the first couple of stages I had the feel-ing the race wasn’t doing what it said on thetin. It was too easy to sit in the bunchbetween the critical parts of the race, whichwas going very slowly. I had expected a more

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action-packed race in the desert; I had ima-gined there would be more hills and lumps.

In terms of the big picture, this didn’tseem like a very useful way to be spending aweek. I had been training a lot harder andfaster than this race was willing to be.

The event picked up gradually though andI went with it, stayed out of trouble and keptmy head down till we got to the showpieceday on Green Mountain.

Again, even that stage wasn’t quite whathad been promised. The pace was painfullyslow which meant that everybody would befizzing on the climb. I prefer for it to be hardall day, a race of attrition. This day insteadseemed set up for a guy like Contador, who ismaybe more explosive than me.

It may have been called Green Mountainbut it was not really a mountain. It was moreof a sudden and eye-catching change in ter-rain, as if an interior designer had decided tomake the desert interesting. At first glance I

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thought that if this was the Green Mountainthen I was the Incredible Hulk, but as weclimbed the air became cooler and thinner,losing the furnace fierceness of the desert.The views stole our breath away.

Long before we got up to those heights Ihad a look at the power meter. I needed touse it to stop myself going too far into thered early on the climb. With everybody sofresh it would be easy enough to get carriedaway.

As it happened, Contador and his SaxoBank team set an unbelievable pace at thebottom. They lined it up and made it reallyhard for everyone else for the first kilometre.I found I was dropped from the front groupof fifteen to twenty guys.

After about a kilometre of climb on GreenMountain the road dips for a few hundredmetres before going up again. The frontgroup had dropped me by about 50 metres atthat point. I turned round and saw that the

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next group of guys were 20 to 30 metres be-hind me. I was in no-man’s-land and on myown.

Richie was in the front group with Conta-dor and Nibali and a couple of the other bigplayers. He looked back and saw me on myown on that flattish, downhill section. Imme-diately he filtered back, hooked up with meand led me all the way back to the front ofthe race for the next section of climbing.

It was a very tactical climb, so there wereattacks all around. There was Nibali, Conta-dor attacking and Rodríguez following. I dida small attack of my own just to make it seemas if I were pushing as hard as I could but Ididn’t put too much effort into it. I didn’twant to go that far out, as there were still 3or 4 kilometres to go.

It was very cat and mouse, with lots ofbluffing and lots of pawing. Nobody reallywanted to bite. It got down to myself, Nibali,Contador and Rodríguez. The four of us were

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all looking at each other and trying to workout who was bluffing and who wasn’t. Therewas one other guy with us, a small Frenchrider, Kenny Elissonde. At some point in allthis, Cadel Evans latched on to our group asa temporary distraction. Then he was goneagain.

I was still bluffing most of the way, bymaking it look as if I were really struggling. Ididn’t want them to keep using me, workingme only to attack me in the final stretch. Sowith about a kilometre to go Rodríguez accel-erated. I looked at the other two and basic-ally gave an expression which said, ‘I can’tfollow that. Poor me.’

Inside I felt really good but I just spun off,dropping off their wheels and giving them 10metres of space in front of me. They glancedback at me, amazed. He has nothing left?Wow!

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Now it was Rodríguez, Contador andNibali. And then me, toiling manfully a fewmetres back.

I can remember seeing the 500-metressign and being absolutely shocked that wewere at that point because I could see theroad kept going right up into the hills.

I had miscalculated. Surely it went on fur-ther? I could see a road snaking up slopeshigher than we were. The race must go onfurther, I thought.

But on the other hand, I didn’t want to getit wrong, just in case this was the finish. Ifthis was about establishing myself as theleader of the team, it wasn’t going to work if Istarted by having to explain how I misjudgedthe finish.

Then again, wait. Could that sign havemeant that there were 500 metres to go tothe King of the Mountains hotspot? Icouldn’t risk it. There was nothing for it. I

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put my head down and went with everythingI had left.

There was no doubt in my mind thatContador and Nibali wouldn’t be able to fol-low me. I knew I was going a lot faster thanthem and I didn’t expect them to be able torespond. Rodríguez was just out of my reachbut I wasn’t bothered by that as I knew hewasn’t on GC.

In the end, he won the stage and I finished5 or 10 seconds after him. However, in that500 metres I had put a good 30 seconds intothe others.

It was a good result but frustrating too; Ithought I could have done more damage if Ihad only realized exactly where I was on theroad. Still, I was in the leader’s jersey and wehad just two stages to go.

After giving some post-race interviews onGreen Mountain I went to the bottom for thepodium ceremony. After the presentation ofthe jerseys I thought I heard somebody

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behind the podium say something in Swahili.That was strange; really strange. Must havebeen my imagination.

A few minutes later somebody turnedround to me.

‘Habari gani, Chris?’ (Hi, how is it going,Chris?)

I was shocked but I replied in the samemanner.

‘Kila kito ni poa sana.’ (Things are reallygood.)

I then asked my new friend what he wasdoing here, such a long way from home. Hesaid that, no, this was home, that he livedhere. He went on to call some others overand they were all speaking fluent Swahili,just as you would hear it in East Africa.

I thought, ‘What is this? Are they on holi-day? On the run?’ They didn’t look liketourists.

It turns out that there are a lot of EastAfricans in the country, and many people in

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Oman speak Swahili because of the big influxof East Africans into the country.

That made my day. It was a really nice sur-prise, getting the leader’s jersey and then be-ing able to make some small talk in Swahili.

After we’d finished shooting the breeze,the team car was waiting to take me back tothe hotel. This was the first thing I learnedabout life in a leader’s jersey: you no longertook the bus and you were filed off from theteam. Your colleagues had eaten andshowered on the bus back to the hotel whileyou would be detained for other duties.While your teammates were being massaged,you would still be winding your way back.

I had been finding it harder than usual toread Brad all week. On Green Mountain, forinstance, he hadn’t done much to help theteam. The last 10 kilometres into the bottomof the climb involved the usual jostling,pushing and shoving and it was quite hectic.

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But I didn’t see Brad there; he just stayed outof it, above it.

The plan had been for him to lead us intothe bottom of that climb and to take us up onthe first kilometre or so, but instead we wereall over the place. I don’t think there wasanybody around me and this was disappoint-ing after such a long, slow wind up.

Unfortunately the team meetings weren’tgoing great either.

Nico Portal was moderating the discus-sions in the mornings and the tension waswritten all over the poor guy’s face. Thesewere no longer the usual open forums. Itwasn’t, ‘Okay, guys, well, what are we goingto do today?’ Instead, the atmosphere wasvery tense and forced. We all enjoy workingwith Nico but you could see he was underpressure.

I felt that everybody was on eggshellsaround Brad and how he was feeling aboutnot being top banana. I had hoped that all

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this would have been dealt with in Brad’shead, and by Dave, who has some access toBrad’s head, before we got there.

In the meetings Nico’s voice would occa-sionally tremble as he spoke about the stageahead. Every day was judgement day forNico: Dave looking at him, Brad looking athim, all of us just looking at him. How wouldhe describe Brad’s role? And my role?

At the end of each meeting Dave would tryto get round and speak to everybody to geeus up: ‘Just enjoy it. Go out and have a goodride.’

Okay, Dave!But the mood was way too tense. Nobody

ever added anything to what Nico was say-ing, we were in too much of a hurry to getaway.

One evening Brad was having physio orrunning late and didn’t show for dinner. Theatmosphere was completely different; it

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became light-hearted with the usual banterand nobody tiptoeing around the situation.

I said to Pete Kennaugh, ‘Does this feeldifferent to you?’ He nearly exploded withrelief.

‘Fooking hell, I thought it was just me. It’snot! I’m glad you said something. I’m afraidto open my mouth.’

It felt very unhealthy with everybody onedge; like a week working at a job poisonedby office politics. We were there because wewere paid to be there, but the dynamics wereoff.

I had gone to Oman thinking that I had torace with these guys as often as possible, theones I would be at the Tour with, and help toset the mood within the team for the seasonto come. Everybody should feel free to saywhat they’d like to say over dinner, and thereshould be no tensions. There was work to bedone to get us on the right path.

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The stage after Green Mountain caught us alloff guard and was much harder than any ofus had imagined. It went over the sameclimb, came back and went over again: threetimes in all and then to the finish.

We had gone over the climb once andChristian Knees and Joe Dombrowski hadboth done really decent pulls. Joe, in particu-lar, had set a very good pace. When we gotdown to the U-turn and came up the climbfor the second time I can remember beingastounded that Brad was in the line. Thiswas where we really needed him to take histurn and pull on the front and race hard.‘He’s going to do it,’ I thought. Then, sud-denly, he seemed to remember a prior en-gagement. It literally looked as if he pulledthe brakes. He swung out of the line anddropped off just as the second climb began.He hadn’t done a pull or a turn on the front.Maybe he’d left the gas on at home?

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It really felt to me that he wasn’t inter-ested, that he just didn’t feel like sufferingthat day.

I don’t know if it was that or if he didn’twant to ride for me. I was coming to the con-clusion that if you were riding out to battlethrough early-morning mists with yourstandards flying high, Sir Bradley Wigginswas a man you would want at your side. Be-cause after lunch he just might not bebothered.

I tried to keep the rest of the guys togetherin our formation. Halfway up the climb SaxoBank took it up again with Contador and acouple of his henchmen pushing everybodyhard. Very quickly I was left with Richie andit was just the two of us.

Richie did an incredible job. He pulled tothe last kilometre of that second climb, get-ting back to Contador who had attacked offthe front. Then Contador sat on the front andcontrolled the race all the way round and

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down the mountain, before doing the U-turnand leading us back up for the last time.

Saxo Bank came swarming around usquite early on the final climb. After a fewhundred metres they were pulling reallyhard, trying to launch Contador off the front.Richie had already done quite a bit of toughwork containing things and when Contadorwent, I could see Richie was close to beingdone.

I said to Richie, ‘Relax, it’s great, you aredoing just fine, he’s not getting away fromus. Just keep working. You are doing a greatjob.’

Richie carried on pulling for a little bitlonger and then turned to me. I could see hewas spent.

Contador was about 15 seconds up theroad so I accelerated from the group I was intowards him. Rodríguez hung on to mywheel and now we were both in pursuit.When we got to the top of the last climb

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Contador was probably only about 7 to 10seconds in front of us.

There were a few more lumps and bumpsand then the proper descent. On the little dipwhere it started going down I could see thatContador got up out of his saddle, sprintingto get on to the back of the camera motor-bike. I was working hard behind in the head-wind and was worried. If he managed to getthe protection offered by the motorbike hewould gain a few extra kilometres an hourright there. I was on the limit already so Ireally wanted him not to make the motor-bike. I turned to Rodríguez and told him heneeded to help me now. If he didn’t, wewould both lose.

He made his calculation. He did his shareof the work. He came through. I was happyto have his help. Rodríguez is a rider I re-spect – somehow his love for the bike andthe sport has always seemed really pure tome. Once at the hotel in Tenerife when I was

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there with Team Sky, he was there on hisown. No team, no minders, just a guy and hisbike doing a lot of good work, and loving it.His nickname is Purito, which is actuallySpanish for little cigar, but to me it seemedto reflect the purity of his character. ‘Purito,’I thought, ‘you’re well named.’

We got Contador back on a little dip nearthe start of the descent, and we rode downthe mountain eyeing each other. On one ofthe corners I felt like I had taken the wrongline and I was forced to pull my brakes alittle harder than I should have done. A verysmall gap opened up to Contador, just a fewmetres more than he would have been ex-pecting. He was as quick as a cobra to spotthis and was up and ready to strike on thenext corner.

I could see he was pushing harder than hewould do normally because I had lost hiswheel for that one second. It was a good les-son for me. If I gave this guy 10 centimetres

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he would take 10 metres. He looks for everychance to get one over.

The three of us more or less rolled on intothe stretch. When we got to about a kilo-metre to go I knew that nobody wanted to doa turn. The two of them had pulled but thatwas over. I could see them looking at eachother; alliances were shifting.

That was my cue to say, Sorry, guys, I’mgoing to go for it. Now. I don’t think I stoodup or sprinted. I just sat in my saddle and ac-celerated, trying to get a gap on them. Theywere on to it pretty quickly and within a fewhundred metres they had me reeled me back.

With 500 metres to go now, the three of uswere still looking at each other, and I wasstill on the front. A stand-off prevailed.There would be no more mutual interest;just three selfish cats.

Nobody wanted to lead it out and ourbrains had to be whirring as quickly as ourwheels because we had to make the right call

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and go with it. I decided to take things intomy own hands with about 300 metres to goand then lay down a sprint. They weren’t go-ing to take GC time on me today. That wasthe main thing; I had nothing to lose.

As so often happens, the wind determinedthe tactics. When I started the sprint I couldfeel that the breeze was coming from thefront left. I was the furthest over on theright-hand side of the road against the barri-er, and the road also curved round to theright.

Everything favoured the guy who startedthe sprint because anybody coming past himhad to go the long way round to take the out-side lane, thus doing more distance. Theywould be coming out to the left and into thewind as opposed to just coming round me onthe right and getting the slipstream whilecoming past me.

I realized as I wound it up that I could winthis stage.

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And so it was. Contador made an effort tocome round the long way on my left but Ihad enough in the tank to hold him off.

Defending the lead with a stage win was agood feeling.

The last day in Oman was more or less acriterium-type race. Again, Brad surprisedme. We got out on to the circuit and it was agunfight with lots of pushing and shoving,and sprint teams coming to the front. Therewas a small climb on the circuit and a sectionwhere you almost had to jump over the pave-ment to get on to a roundabout and doubleback. It was quite a tricky circuit in parts andwide open in other sections, which meantthat riders could come round you easily.Brad did some massive pulls on the widestretches. He’d get on the front and it wouldalmost feel like he was riding a time trial andwe were all sitting on his wheel.

I was impressed and bewildered. It crossedmy mind that this incredibly strong ride on

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the front was part of his own training, ratherthan rolling up his sleeves and doing a jobfor either me or the team. I hope I’m not be-ing unfair to him, but I just didn’t know.

‘This is Brad,’ I thought. ‘This is just howhe is. One day he is fantastic but other daysyou can’t rely on him. That’s his personality.He was up for it today, but yesterday, itseemed, he wasn’t. I am glad to have himwhen he is doing a good job. When he is upfor it, he can be excellent. When he wants toengage with people, he can be charming.’

Listen, Brad looks like Paul Weller; I looklike Tintin.

Maybe we’re not created to appear in thesame story.

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27

The old story about burning the boats is amotivational cliché now. Alexander the Greathad landed on the shores of Persia where hisarmy was going to be vastly outnumbered.Some of his generals argued that the wisestcourse was to regroup and to come back an-other day with more men. One asked, fairlyreasonably in the circumstances, about howeverybody would get home after work. ButAlexander, on hearing this, gave the orderfor his men to burn the boats. He turned tohis soldiers and roared, ‘We go home in Per-sian ships, or we die.’ In other words, if yourcommitment is complete, defeat isn’t an op-tion at all.

In March we went to Italy for the Race ofthe Two Seas, or the Tirreno–Adriatico. Not

a lot sticks in the memory except the moun-taintop finish on stage four. I took it ahead ofContador, Nibali and Rodríguez. For me,that win after a 15-kilometre climb up thePrati di Tivo was confirmation that thingswere still on the right track. I was developingsome consistency and the team were workingwell. On the climb that day my teammatescontrolled everything and left me to launchoff to the summit with a kilometre to go. Thestage win put me within 4 seconds of thelead with three stages left.

I was starting to settle into a leadershiprole that didn’t come naturally to me. I hadnever seen myself standing on a beach order-ing men to burn their boats. My inclinationwould be to suggest other travel options orget Michelle to go online and check out thework visa requirements in Persia. The idea ofhaving a train of professional cyclists work-ing for me was odd but we were establishinga pattern. In Italy I had the two Colombians

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Rigoberto Urán and Sergio Henao with meand they did a huge job on the mountain theday we won. Dario Cataldo did too.

I felt that following on from Oman wewere settling into a method of winningmountaintop finishes. Rigoberto’s story isone about the realities of professional life.The team seemed to realize early on that ofthe two Colombians we could afford to keeponly one long term. It was rumoured theywere both going to Quick-Step and ratherthan lose them both we had to choose theone we thought had the greater potential.Sergio fitted better into the Sky model, al-though Rigoberto was stronger. Sergio wasyoung and willing to learn; he was theMoneyball choice. Rigoberto was more set inhis ways.

On the climb up Prati di Tivo, Nibali andContador had been attacking enthusiasticallyand flying up the road. I found I was preach-ing calm, a chip off the Kerrison block. ‘No

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stress, guys. No problems. We’ll carry on rid-ing this high tempo and we’ll get them in aminute. Trust me.’ That was quitesomething. When we then won the stage itvindicated how we were going about things; Ihad fresher legs than Contador and Nibali inthe last kilometre.

It was a style that had been developed byTim for Brad: ride the stage in the manner ofa time trial and see what happens. Now Ibrought to the table an ability to accelerateoff a high tempo. This was the most efficientway to win a stage; let other teams waste en-ergy making attacks. But I also had the senseafter that mountain that we were beingpicked apart by other teams as they tried tofind ways to beat us. On stage five I took theleader’s jersey and there was somegrumbling from Nibali about the style of ourriding.

The penultimate day, stage six, was a veryhilly ride around Porto Sant’Elpidio. The

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weather was miserable and we raced badly,tactically speaking, letting a very big break-away go early. That put us under pressure toride hard all day trying to get them back.Thirty riders had gone up the road and wehad been slow to respond, debating amongourselves as to whether we were chasing orwaiting. Back in the car our directeur sportif,Marcus, didn’t really know what was goingon. He asked us to chase and told us not toworry; we were in chaos and it was lousyweather. But by the time we settled on a planwe had to chase pretty hard.

The stage incorporated Muro di Sant’Elpi-dio, a short but brutal climb that we had totake three times. I would have said thatmorning that I had never met a climb Ididn’t fancy the look of but the weather herechanged my mind.

I had lots of race food in my pockets, in-cluding gels and rice cakes, but the race itselfwas too full on and I had lost all feeling in

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my fingers from the cold, which meant that Icouldn’t even manage to lift my rain jacketover my pockets to get at the food. With thedriving rain and strong crosswinds, therewas never a chance to refuel properly. Also, Ihadn’t dressed for the weather. I had worn ashort-sleeved rain jacket for most of the dayand it was only when I was too cold to feelmy extremities that I thought to ask for along-sleeved one.

On the last ride up the climb Nibali wentaway with Peter Sagan and all I could do wasturn my gears and get up the climb as best Icould. It was that sort of day. Over fiftyriders quit altogether and a large number,myself included, got their gearing wrong. Mycadence dropped to fifty revolutions aminute, which felt like strength work, grind-ing just one stroke at a time. It was so wetthat when you stood up to put pressure onthe pedals your back wheel would simplyslide as if the bike were on rollers; there was

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no traction. This meant we had to sit in oursaddles, making it even harder. Normallywhen it gets that steep – up to gradients oftwenty-seven per cent – all you want to do isstand up and use your weight on the pedals.It wasn’t to be.

So I hung with the group I found myselfwith. I limited the losses but lost the jersey.The worst aspect was the feeling that I hadlet my teammates down. They had put me inthe leader’s jersey. When it came to thecrunch in the bad weather they had buriedthemselves again. After the race I got on thebus cold and shivering and full of apologies:Sorry. I couldn’t follow Nibali. Thanks forall that you did. The response from guy toguy was the same: Don’t worry, bro. Thatwas a day from hell. Now let me jump intothe shower.

The week finished with a time trial in SanBenedicto del Tronto. I was 34 seconds be-hind Nibali as I rolled down the ramp. The

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course was just 9.2 kilometres and notenough to take that 34 seconds back. End ofstory.

It was a disappointing defeat but it wasn’ta lack of form that had caused the loss. I hadbeen caught off guard and learned a lessonabout the cold: overdress don’t underdress.This was not so much a rookie error as anAfrican error. As a team we had learned a bitabout controlling the race more efficientlyfrom the start. We would make sure in futurethat the only breakaways that got away in themorning were the ones that we were pre-pared to allow to let go.

Nibali threw a pinch of salt into thewounds with some comments about how weat Team Sky race by numbers and spend ourdays huddled over our SRM meters trying towork out our next move. Little did he know.

For a while Michelle had been eyeing upthe trophy for winning the race, which was alovely trident. I think she had a spot picked

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out for it! Now Nibali had the trident andthought I cared about being called an SRMslave.

I was enjoying the challenge of leading theteam. That day on Prati di Tivo in Italy whenwe had watched the big guys riding off up theroad and had the guts to say, ‘It’s fine, letthem go,’ only to reel them in later, gave usthe rush you might get from playing high-stakes poker. We had to trust in the strengthof our own hand.

After Tirreno, the two-day Critérium In-ternational had additional importance as ittook place in Corsica where the Tour itselfwould be starting and staying for threestages. We went over early so that we coulddo a recce of the Tour stages before the startof the Critérium. I remember noting that thethird stage was going to be quite tough.Winding and undulating, a crosswind couldblow the field apart that early.

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The Critérium itself started with a short89-kilometre stage on Saturday morningwhere practically the entire field came homein a bunch sprint. The real racing com-menced after lunch with a short time trialwhere Richie took the jersey a couple ofseconds ahead of me. Richie was the leaderovernight, continuing the amazing form hehad shown in winning Paris–Nice a couple ofweeks before.

The third and last stage took place onSunday with a mountaintop finish on Col del’Ospedale. Richie had the jersey so our planschanged. We had worked out our tactics be-fore the race began. If I had a lead after thetime trial Richie would attack towards theend of the next day’s stage. If our rivalscouldn’t bring him back then he would winthe stage and most likely the race. If they gotup to him, that would set it up for me tocounter-attack them in the last kilometre.

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With Richie beating me in the time trial,the roles switched. Now I would attack 2kilometres out and Richie would counter ifthey hauled me back. It worked pretty muchperfectly.

Kosta and Josh Edmondson rode well tocontrol the race for us, but with more than30 kilometres left to go, Richie and I wereleft with only Kiryienka. Kiri took thechallenge head-on. He sat on the floor for thenext 20 kilometres, reeling back attacks andkeeping the pace high a good way up to theclimb. It was impressive to say the least. Itwas then my turn to pull and I pulled hard.Richie thought this was the point to let me goon.

I had gone on the front to pull but Richiesat off the wheel and let the gap open. Heturned to the other riders and looked for areaction. He got on to Tejay van Garderen’swheel as Tejay started chasing me.

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It wasn’t long before I got across to a fewothers who had broken away earlier. I couldsee straight off that they would be of no helpso I attacked them and rode on my own tothe finish.

Back down the road Richie saw that Tejaywas labouring as the climb went on, so Rich-ie attacked him. We ended up coming in 1stand 2nd.

I took the jersey off Richie. I felt a little ap-prehensive; it didn’t give me any pleasure totake the jersey off my friend and teammate.But, typical of the man, there wasn’t anounce of resentment in his face.

‘Hey’ he said, ‘we smashed them! Theydidn’t know what to do!’

It was this moment, I think, which trulycemented our friendship. For the two of us ithad been a day in the saddle when we didn’tneed words. I just looked round at him oncethat little gap had formed and he had sat offmy wheel. He was in the leader’s jersey but

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he was saying, ‘Go, and keep going.’ I alsoknow I would have done the same for him. Ina heartbeat.

I remember the two of us coming backhome after that, knowing we were both on areally good path. We just needed to keep thatcompetition between us in training and thatbond between us in races.

In Tenerife I had amused myself by getting asmall wearable action camera with specialbike mounts. You can stick it on the front ofthe bike, or on the back; anywhere, really. Ispent my time thinking of cool ways of film-ing the training we were doing. I hoped toput something together at the end of it toshow people what we do, including all the ex-ercises, the team time trials and the dayswhere we go right to our limits, pushingourselves even harder than in a race.

I particularly enjoyed the team time trialsup the mountain, so I put the camera behindmy saddle so that the lens was looking back

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at the guy behind me. I was able to film hisfacial expressions over a half-hour climb thatgot faster and faster as we approached theend of our team effort.

We would break the squad down into twoor three teams and have a full-speed race try-ing to catch each other. On this particularday I was in a team with Pete Kennaugh,David López, Dario Cataldo and a couple ofothers. Pete was having it tough; he was be-hind me and not really ready for his close-up.

We premiered the video afterwards – youmight call it a tragi-comedy. It was hilariousto see Pete’s face as he tried to get back onthe wheel at the end of his turn: wincing withpain trying to hang in there. We watched himget to the last kilometre and eventually justblow up. It was funny because we all knewthe pain. Pete’s face was all of our faces.

When we come home from Tenerife, andfrom the daily inflictions of Tim’s

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imagination, we are generally all a kilo ortwo lighter and generating more power.

After Tenerife, time was shortening and thedates in the calendar were crowding togeth-er. The Tour de Romandie was at the end ofApril. Then back to Tenerife and then on tothe Critérium du Dauphiné.

Romandie is a race which throws up aworthwhile story. We needed the story tohave a happy and meaningful ending thistime because we had just done Liège–Bas-togne–Liège, complete with all the usual luckthat I enjoy in that part of the world. I punc-tured early and was on the back foot all day.Sergio was our other leader in the race buthe didn’t have a good day either. In terms ofLa Doyenne, my coming home in 36th placewas actually a personal triumph.

In Romandie there was a predominantlyuphill prologue which I won, with AndrewTalansky, another young American on thescene, coming in 2nd. I kept the lead till the

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end of the race but, more importantly, we allrode well: no dramas, no crises.

The penultimate stage of the five days wasa sentimental journey around some of theroads and slopes where I had trained when Iwent to the UCI school in Aigle as a naiveyoung kid out of Africa. I had to remind my-self that this was now; all that stuff was along, long time ago.

I wrapped the race up on that fourth stage.The weather was so bad that the final ascentup the snow-capped Col de la Croix had to beabandoned in favour of something morerider-friendly. I had learned to cope with badweather while the conditions had broken thepeloton into pieces. The team rode heroic-ally. Towards the end of the last climb the at-tacks came right, left and centre. Youcouldn’t begin to cover every one of them;the only option was to counter.

Myself and Simon Špilak of Katusha endedup away from the field. When we crossed the

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line at Les Diablerets he had the stage and Ihad sown the guts of a minute into my GCrivals. The final day was a time trial. Jobdone.

We had worked hard for the week in Roman-die, grinding out the result. Once I got backhome my mind dawdled over the possibilit-ies for the Tour.

The cast was shaping up. Pete Kennaugh,the star of the time-trial snuff movie, hadlooked a few kilos lighter the previous week;he is a guy who can keep his hands by hissides when the bread arrives. At Romandiehe auditioned strongly for a role on the Tour.Geraint Thomas and Ian Stannard had beenin my mind from the beginning of the seasonbecause of their tactical ability, as well astheir riding; they are very good with posi-tioning. If they’ve got the legs, you find themin the right place at the right time.

David López had been solid. Edvald Boas-son Hagen was certain to be in the team, a

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good all-rounder who had been one of thestrong men in the previous year’s Tour.Kosta? It was too early to say as he was com-ing back gingerly from a broken leg and hehad to ride the Giro; it would be a tall ask.

Ditto with Christian Knees; he was goingto the Giro with Brad. Pulling that off andthen riding the Tour would have been hard.In terms of the big guys, it was betweenChristian and Stannard. I had ridden morewith Ian, and Christian was doing the Giro. Ilike a guy who understands crosswinds; aguy who has the physical arrogance tomuscle his way into a place near the frontand who then fights for it no matter what.Ian, I thought, was that guy. I thought Kiryi-enka would make it too although he hadalready had a long and tough season.

Brad going for the Giro meant diluting theteam’s strength and both of us would pay aprice for this. He would have the Colombians

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pulling for him in the mountains but I wouldhave Richie at my side in the Tour.

There was speculation that Brad was goingto do the Giro and then the Tour. I wasn’tsure. He could be the man to take us into thelast climb and maybe halfway up it becausehe does have a big, big engine. He would alsobe a major asset for the team time trial. But,before that, we had to be sure that he and Icould work together.

It was a recovery day. I had been out earlieron an easy ride after Romandie and was nowback at my apartment going through emailswhen I started getting all kinds of alertscoming through on my email. Then text mes-sages on my phone.

Uh oh. Something was happening in theworld. People were asking what the story waswith Brad. What’s going on with Brad?Have you seen this?

Brad had done a press conference. The gistof his message was that he was thinking now

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about trying to do the double. If the Girowent well, then why not the Tour? He said hewould come in as a joint leader, and after thefirst week we would see who was in the bet-ter position. As defending champion, manyprobably thought that what he said wasreasonable.

Within the team, it was seen differently.He had just gone back on everything thathad been agreed beforehand; things that hadbeen said and understood for a long time. Onthe second rest day of the 2012 Tour he hadtaken me aside when we were out on a recov-ery ride near Pau. His words were: ‘Listen,Froomey, don’t worry, I’ll be back here nextyear to help you.’

He had told me that my chance wouldcome, and that he would be pulling as hardas he could for me. He’d confirmed that asrecently as in Mallorca in January when hetold the media he was focusing on the Girobut going to the Tour ‘to help Chris’.

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Now it all seemed pretty hollow. Brad hadissued a gilt-edged invitation to the media.Sir Bradley Wiggins cordially invites you toWiggins vs Froome, a duel to the death to bestaged under a July sun …

There was a populist appeal to his argu-ment. He was the Tour de France champion,the Olympic gold medallist, the mod god. Alot of people generally didn’t understandwhy he couldn’t just win another Tour deFrance as a matter of course.

I was confused; I didn’t know where allthis had come from. It hadn’t been discussedwith me and it hadn’t been talked aboutwithin the team.

This stuff at the press conference wasn’tglib. It wasn’t a voluble man letting hismouth run away from his brain. Brad isbright, he’s articulate. He doesn’t often openhis mouth just to make small talk.

In Pau that day in 2012 he asked me justto get him through that last week and he’d be

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here in 2013 to help me. It was very powerfulto hear him say that; I knew it wasn’t easy forhim. For the rest of that last week I didn’tleave his side. I believed him.

I tried to get hold of Dave. No luck. I gotChris Haynes, our head of media, on the line.

‘Listen, Chris, what is going on there? Wasthis in the messaging plan that was giventhrough the team?’ Whenever we do a mediaday we get briefed beforehand on key mes-sages, things that the team would like us toput forward.

Chris didn’t see that anything was out ofplace.

‘No, things went smoothly and it all wentaccording to plan …’

He wasn’t the man I needed to speak to.Either that or I was completely out of theloop and had been deluding myself all year.To fend off the media I issued a statementvia email saying that as far as I was aware

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nothing had changed from the team’s side; Iwas going to the Tour de France as leader.

I sent a copy to Dave’s office adding a notethat this message would be much stronger ifit came from the team. The subtext was: or isBrad now bigger than the team?

I spoke to Dave the next day. He said hehadn’t seen Brad’s statement. He claimedthat none of it had been discussed with himbut he knew that Brad was under a lot ofscrutiny. People couldn’t understand why hewasn’t defending his Tour title. He was justsaving face.

I was confident in what Dave said. I be-lieved that it wasn’t a conspiracy within theteam. I got ready for another two-week stintin Tenerife. It was 30 April. The bomb wasdefused but the clock kept ticking. Shortly af-terwards, Dave issued a statement:

‘Given Chris’s step up in performances thisyear, our plan, as it has been since January,is to have him lead the Tour de France team.’

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Hallelujah.

In Tenerife on top of our old volcano the in-ternet seldom works. The rooms have smallprison-cell TV sets that only trade in Span-ish. There is nothing interesting to do and nodistraction. We rely on each other for enter-tainment and, knowing just how entertainingwe all are, we take the precaution of bringingbox sets of television series.

For those two weeks we were all watchingDexter, a very dark comedy series about aserial killer. We thought it was a comedyanyway. The main character is basically aforensic analyst. He’s the good guy in theprogramme, but there’s a slight catch in thathe moonlights as a serial killer. To his credithe only kills murderers and people who haveslipped through the cracks in the pavementof the legal system …

We all enjoy Dexter. The thing was, Dexterhimself looked very like … well, very muchlike Tim Kerrison. It just seemed too perfect

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that this guy was the sort of very dry laborat-ory analyst who lived his life through num-bers and was really methodical abouteverything.

Poor Tim. By day he was coming up withtortures which he might inflict on us out onthe mountain. Killing us softly with his stats.Then in the evening he was helping us bondby appearing to us in the guise of a fictionalserial killer.

Apart from that we had little or no distrac-tion. If it was somebody’s birthday we had asmall celebration. My own birthday is 20May. Normally we would take the chance togo to a restaurant in Villaflor, a good half-hour drive down the mountain. We mightrun wild and sinful by allowing ourselves toeat something different. We might even havea few sips of wine. Decadence. But on 20May we were flying home so there was nochance of an evening celebration. Thatmorning, instead, we had a surprise.

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Knowing my weakness for pancakes,Michelle had contacted the soigneurs to seeif they could get the kitchen staff to makesome pancakes for breakfast. The waitersbrought out a big platter of pancakes for usall. It was really nice and somethingdifferent.

The last step before the Tour was the Critéri-um du Dauphiné starting on 2 June.

When we planned the season I knew thatBrad would be at the Giro. But he had wonthe Dauphiné for the last two years and hewould haunt us, although I didn’t know how.

Brad had pulled out of the heavily toutedGiro campaign after twelve days, laid lowwith a chest infection. He was also having alittle trouble with his knee. A few days laterhe announced that he was in no condition toride the Tour.

I knew the team hadn’t just dodged a bul-let; we had ducked a cannonball. No matterwhat was said or how much we had deferred

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to each other in public, the first weeks of theTour would have been played as Froomeagainst Wiggins. The gangly Kenyan-bornBrit against loveably gruff mod geezer.

The media would have had fun and theTour would have had its storyline, but thepressure could have cracked the team. De-ciding where to sit at breakfast might havebecome a political decision.

Instead we went into the Dauphiné with asense of relief. On a personal level it was atough break for Brad and after the year hehad enjoyed in 2012 the disintegration of2013 seemed cruel. On a professional level itmeant getting on with what had to be done.Life: it goes on.

The Dauphiné didn’t have a mountaintopfinish till stage five, which ended on themassive Valmorel. Everything came togetherfor us that day. Contador attacked late butnot convincingly after we had worked well allday pushing a high pace. He was reeled in

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and I accelerated away to take the stage winand the yellow jersey.

The next day we even got up early and dida recce of stage seventeen of the Tour, thetime trial to Chorges. We had left anothermarker down on top of another mountain.There were three stages left, but the race wasbasically over. In the mist and rain to Risoulon the Sunday we applied the lessons we hadlearned in the spring and didn’t respond in-stantly when Contador made his big attack.We upped our pace and waited for the raceto come to us.

The Dauphiné finished with Richie and Ion the top two steps of the podium. We hadeight of the nine guys who would ride theTour with us at the Dauphiné. Kosta was theexception.

We went to the French Alps for our finalpreparations. Our team. My team.

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28

2013: The Tour de France

Stage One: Saturday 29 June, Porto-Vec-chio to Bastia, 213 kilometres

Here we were.I had caught a plane to Corsica on Wed-

nesday. The ferry ride would have been morespectacular but it takes around three hoursto get here from Nice. No romance – I wasgoing to work.

The usual pre-tour hoopla began: a medic-al, followed by a press conference, followedby a presentation. The team rode to the latterin a motorboat, with all of us trying to givedeep, meaningful looks like Vikings arrivingto pillage a new land.

As usual the media attention felt odd.Every person in the press conference roomseemed to have at least four cameras and welooked out into a wall of lenses, microphonesand lights. If you scratched your nose,crinkled your face or looked up at the ceiling,the shutters whirred. So you looked blankand vacant. No Viking stuff here.

Nine of us would live and breathe togetherfor the next three weeks: myself, Richie, Ed-vald Boasson Hagen (Eddie), Vasil Kiryienka(Kiri), Kanstantsin Siutsou (Kosta), DavidLópez, Ian Stannard (Yogi), Geraint ‘G’ Tho-mas and Pete Kennaugh.

From the Isle of Man to Belorussia, theNgong Hills to Norway, Spain to Tasmania –some anthology of life stories for one team.

Over the next twenty-three days we wouldrace twenty-one stages: two individual timetrials, one team time trial, seven flat stages,five stages which were a bit hilly and sixmountain stages. Four of the mountain

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stages would have summit finishes. For us,the Tour would probably be won or lost onthose stages.

To paraphrase the golfers, ‘we sprint forshow, we climb for dough’. And stage onewas mostly for show.

We were rolling out of Porto-Vecchio for LeGrand Départ; our heads full of dreams andplans.

The day began with a gentle ride throughthe neutral zone. I always give myself a littletask each morning when we’re rollingthrough the zone. Today I tried to get to thefront of the race by the time we reached theofficial starting point, where race directorChristian Prudhomme would wave the whiteflag.

I do this because I like to start at the front;I don’t like the idea that I have to catch upbefore we’ve even started. I began roughlyhalfway back in the bunch, slowly moving upthe sides. I could feel everyone was slightly

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more nervous than usual, but then again,this was the start of the Tour. I felt confidentthough; I had my teammates around me aswe went up towards the front.

Richie was just in front of me with Yogi.The three of us were moving up togetherwhen we got to a left-hand turn, which sortof doubled back on itself and then droppeddownhill. Now the speed started picking up.

It was a slightly tricky turn, but nothingcrazy. And we were only going about twentykilometres an hour. But as the turn loopedback on itself, the width on the outer side ofthe road narrowed.

The barriers that had been placed in theroad squeezed the space on the corner, mak-ing it tighter than expected. Well, muchtighter than I expected.

Richie made it round the barriers but onlyjust. I didn’t. I couldn’t brake in time.

Going towards them, I was thinking,‘Please let the barriers be plastic … if I hit

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them they’re going to just move a few metresand I’ll be able to unclip fast and carry on.’

Turns out they were concrete. I hit one andit didn’t budge a millimetre. The bikestopped dead and I went from being on thesaddle to being half over the wall. I didn’t ac-tually hit the ground, but draped myselfthere like a coat dropped on the back of asofa.

For maximum indignity, one of my legs re-mained clipped into the bike. As it wentdown on to the ground, I dropped on to thewall and my other leg remained still attachedto the left pedal.

I – a team leader in the Tour de France, onstage one, in the neutral zone, doing twentykilometres an hour – had crashed into a con-crete barrier.

I was dazed and grazed, and landed quitehard on the side of my leg and arm. Therewas a bit of blood, I’d got a dead leg and mypride was broken in about nine places. But if

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I had been shot full of bullet holes at thatmoment, I was still getting back on that bike.

This race wasn’t going to ride away fromme before it had even started.

I’d fallen on the right side of the bike,which had the derailleur, the gears and allthe mechanisms. Froome’s law. That wouldbe the side I fell on. The derailleur had bentand I could see the damage straight away. SoI called for a new bike on the radio and saidI’d had a small crash.

There was silence on the line; then again,people make no noise when they roll theireyeballs.

Eventually Nico said, ‘Okay, we’re coming,Chris.’

Nico is pretty calm but I could pick up theconcern in his voice. From an outside per-spective I’m sure it would have looked like:FROOME CRASHES IN NEUTRALIZEDZONE! HOLD THE BACK PAGE …

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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 theback waiting. Except Richie, who had beentold to stay with the bunch.

Seeing the team hanging back, waiting fortheir leader, did nothing to diminish theembarrassment.

I’m sure a lot of people, including some ofmy rivals, would have enjoyed this, thinkingthat I was a nervous wreck. Sky had gonefrom having all their eggs in Brad’s basket tobeing led by a basket case: ‘If he can’t evenmake it through the neutral zone, he’s notgoing to make it off this island without hav-ing lost ten minutes … He might drown whenwe hit the coast!’ I felt there might be aCrash Froome Anecdote competition inaug-urated in my memory: ‘He hit a

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commissaire. He rode over an old man. Heended up in a garden.’

More than anything it was my pride whichwas damaged. I responded with frantic non-chalance. Ultimately, I still felt relaxed inmyself, and I began to laugh at it. This wastypical 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?’ withbig grins on their faces. I tried to joke it off:‘Yeah, yeah, yeah … just taken my stabilizersoff … bit wobbly … still learning.’

However, when I thought about it later Igot a sick feeling in my stomach. If I hadbeen going a little bit faster, the spill couldhave been nasty; it really could have been theend of my Tour before it had begun. Whowould trust me to lead again?

I was mightily thankful to have a bruiseand a dead leg and nothing more.

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Luckily the race laid on more embarrass-ment and controversy and by dinner time Iwas just a footnote. The Orica-GreenEdgeteam bus had got jammed under a gantryover the finish line. The organizers movedthe finish forward by 3 kilometres and some-body eventually had to let the air out of thebus’s tyres for it to be freed. The finish wasmoved back again and then there was a masscrash. Contador took a tumble, as did G Tho-mas, who was shot like a human cannonballover his handlebars. He came back to earthwith a bang; he thought his pelvis wasbroken.

Marcel Kittel won the sprint; Cav lost hisshot at yellow when he had a crash near thefinish.

Making a show of myself on the openingstage soon became old news.

Welcome to the Tour.

WINNER: MARCEL KITTEL

2: ALEXANDER KRISTOFF

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41: CHRIS FROOME

(ALL RIDERS AWARDED THE SAME TIME.)

Stage Two: Sunday 30 June, Bastia to Ajac-cio, 156 kilometres

Corsica is drenched in history. A lot had beensaid about this, the one-hundredth staging ofthe Tour de France taking place entirelywithin the nation’s borders. Even as we rode,people were worrying themselves about Cor-sican separatism, but I had no side to take inthe discussion. I just knew it wouldn’t reallyfeel like the Tour until we got back to themainland, and what felt like France. But withthe rocky landscape of Corsica set dramatic-ally against the perfect blue sea, I was hardlyitching to get out of there.

That day was all set up for the sprinters.We rode down to Ajaccio, the birthplace ofNapoleon Bonaparte. Everybody started butwe were worried about the health of GThomas.

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There was a modest climb thrown into thestage just to keep us interested. I needed totake my body for a test drive so I took off andwent over the top ahead of the bunch. Thebonus was being able to come down the oth-er side without worrying about more chaosin Corsica. One spill on the tricky downhillcould have scattered a lot of us all over thehillside. For a man yet to master ridingslowly around concrete barriers it was best toplay safe.

Having tweeted birthday wishes toMichelle in the morning my attack promptedspeculation that I was attempting to win thestage as a romantic gesture. Alas, it wasn’t tobe.

RadioShack-Leopard’s Jan Bakelants wonthe stage ahead of Peter Sagan. I trundledhome safe and happy in the peloton.

WINNER: JAN BAKELANTS

OVERALL GC 1: JAN BAKELANTS

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2: PETER SAGAN +1SEC

18: CHRIS FROOME +1SEC

Stage Three: Monday 1 July, Ajaccio toCalvi, 145.5 kilometres

Up the west coast to Calvi. A mildly lumpyride.

We didn’t have a good day and G was inagony. If he were a racehorse we would havehim put down. He was Welsh though. Hewas surviving that too.

Two-thirds of the way along the road heappeared out of the blue beside myself andRichie 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 finelead out to set the stage up for Simon Ger-rans. A South African, setting up an Aussie,in Corsica. Who would have thought?

After the day’s stage, a lot of the guys inour team felt frustrated. We went over the

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last climb with only two or three in a frontgroup of about ninety. They felt they neededto step it up; they hadn’t been in the rightplaces when they needed to be. There was nosense of despair though; no self-doubt. Justan itch to get started properly – we hadsomething to prove.

At the end of the day I was still on course.And so was Richie. We hadn’t been great, butwe had been strong enough to keep every-one’s hope alive. If anything, Corsica – espe-cially that day – was just a bit of a wake-upcall. We were not sailing through this race;sacrifice and suffering were all that layahead.

WINNER: SIMON GERRANS

OVERALL GC 1: JAN BAKELANTS

2: JULIEN SIMON +1SEC

15: CHRIS FROOME +1SEC

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Stage Four: Tuesday 2 July, Nice TeamTime Trial, 25 kilometres

Team. Time. Trial. These days are a longshredding of the nerves. One screw-up andthe whole peloton is laughing at you. Go well,and you make a statement.

Richie and I got changed into our time-tri-al skins and put our helmets on in the hotelroom. We took a few goofy selfies to takesome of the pressure off, then we got towork.

Team. Time. Trial.Everyone was in one long line pumping as

hard as they could. We were individual partsof the same machine; just one of us feelingbad could have a chain reaction. Whenyou’re racing in one frantic line, it’s quitehard to make calls to the guy on the front.Should he be going faster? Or slower? On theother side of the coin, when things go well,it’s smooth and it’s beautiful and no oneneeds to say a thing.

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But you never really know what’s going tohappen.

Geraint was the limping question marktoday. There was a crack in his pelvis; on theX-ray, it looked like a river. For normalpeople, this would mean ceasing all activity.For G it meant somebody had to give him ahand getting his leg over the saddle.

We couldn’t put him anywhere else otherthan on the back. If he was going to lose thewheel in front of him, he couldn’t take theguys with him. If we lost him, we couldn’twait. We all knew his difficulty would behanging on through the first few kilometres,when his body would be trying to bully himinto submission.

The plan had been to keep it smooth butfast through the initial few corners until wegot out on to the big promenade, where itwas open and wide. We would leave G on theback, and if he felt good enough to contrib-ute at any point it would be a bonus.

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We settled: we each did a turn, filteredback, and then got in line just in front of G.Nico was on the radio calling the shots.

‘Okay, Kosta, you’re coming back now, youneed to slip in behind G or … oh no, behindYogi. Or Eddie.’

He did that for almost every rider comingthrough. We also had hand signals. If youhad spent a little too much energy and weregoing to slow it down for everybody, youdropped off and when you got to the back, orjust in front of G, you gave a thumbs-downsign. This told Nico that you needed someextra recovery time and you would skip aturn. So then the next one coming backwould pull in, just in front of you.

‘Okay, guys, López is now skipping a turnon the back. Yogi, you need to come in be-hind Kiri.’

When you were ready to go again you gavethe thumbs-up sign and Nico did the rest.

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‘Okay, fall in behind López now, he’s com-ing back into the line.’

After about 5 or 6 kilometres riding on thebig open promenade, Geraint started movingup through the line. He came and did a turn;he sustained our high speed.

What a lift.He filtered back through the line, roaring

in his Welsh accent. ‘Let’s have it! Gooo on!We’re gooonna do this.’

Eight of us were now grinning and grim-acing at the same moment. There was a buzz.

‘G’s really committed today. He just had tohang on but … he’s actually managed tosqueeze a few more seconds out of his per-formance to get everyone a little bit faster.He’s left us with no excuses. We’re gonnareally pull today.’

I tried to do more time on the front thanmost of the other guys as time trialling is oneof my strengths; I hoped I could contributehere.

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We have a rule. We look at the speed thatwe’ve been given by the man in front of usand try to hold it there for maybe a 30- or40-second turn, but only on the conditionthat the speed doesn’t drop. If we see thenumber dip we pull off straight away. On theother hand, if we feel really good there is nopoint in pushing the number from say 56kilometres per hour up to 60 kilometres perhour, as it will hurt down the line.

We didn’t fall apart; our complex little ma-chine worked.

The Orica-GreenEdge team were fastestand Simon Gerrans was in yellow. OmegaPharma Quick-Step finished 0.75 secondsbehind. At Sky we were 3rd, just 3 secondsoff the lead. Not bad for a team carrying abroken pelvis. We were happy and there wasa good energy between us all again.

Team. Time. Trial.I loved it.Today.

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WINNER: ORICa-GREENEDGE

OVERALL GC 1: SIMON GERRANS

2: DARYL IMPEY (SAME TIME )

7: CHRIS FROOME +3SEC

Stage Five: Wednesday 3 July, Cagnes-sur-Mer to Marseille, 228.5 kilometres

These dull flat stages were a torturementally.

I was just following my front wheel, whichwas following the wheel in front of it.

I was also getting into a pattern in the even-ings now. I liked to be in bed before 11.00p.m., if possible, and most evenings I wouldput something on to watch to switch off fromthe day. I was still on Dexter and I wouldwatch ten minutes or so, just enough to getme into the story and stop me replaying the

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events of the day as I went to sleep, or think-ing about the next day.

As for Richie, usually he conked out firstand I could hear his breathing change. Hisbreaths get very deep and it isn’t long beforehe’s snoring. He can really snore; he’s not abig guy but he snores like an ogre.

Sometimes I listened for a few minutes,then fell into the same kind of breathingrhythm and drifted off. Even for getting tosleep, he’s my pilot fish.

If our hotel room overlooked the car park,close to where our team’s trucks were, weknew the mechanics would be washing thebikes early in the morning and loading uptheir equipment and suitcases, so I wouldprobably put earplugs in to block it out.

Mario Pafundi, our head soigneur, saysthat one of his jobs is to try to make sure theriders are kept away from the noise when as-signing rooms. We tease him. ‘Really,Mario? We didn’t know that was even on

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your radar. We thought the biggest part ofyour work was making sure the soigneurshad the best rooms.’

On dull days like today we would often onlyfind out about the closing sprint when wewere on the bus or back at the hotel. Todaywas slightly different.

Cav, who had bronchitis all week, took thewin. Our man Eddie Boasson Hagen was inthe shake-up, and got 2nd, beating Greipel,Sagan and Kristoff.

Eddie would probably do better with moresupport but our policy is that the strongriders in the team don’t spend energy leadingout sprints. That leaves Eddie free to sprintbut without back-up. I understand the think-ing, and I benefit from the strategy but, still,it’s tough for Eddie.

As the stage finished, Simon Gerransended up with the yellow jersey after moreselfless riding from Daryl. I was happy forthem.

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WINNER: MARK CAVENDISH

OVERALL GC 1: SIMON GERRANS

2: DARYL IMPEY (SAME TIME )

7: CHRIS FROOME +3SEC

Stage Six: Thursday 4 July, Aix-en-Provence to Montpellier, 176.5 kilometres

Today wasn’t thrilling but it finished on ahigh.

Simon Gerrans led out Daryl in the lastkilometre and Daryl finished 13th, which wasenough to put him in the yellow jersey. Forme, this was the noblest moment of the raceso far. Daryl had done so much himself to getSimon into the jersey, and had then doneeven more to keep him there. You can say itwas his job, but wearing the maillot jauneisn’t like putting on overalls or a pinstripesuit.

Simon owed Daryl.

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Today he repaid him.It was very good to see. Daryl was an ex-

teammate, and an ex … I’d like to say sort ofSouth African brother, who had been therewith me from the early days and who had in-troduced me to Michelle. Seeing him nowwearing the yellow jersey was a thrill; thefirst African to get that jersey.

Daryl is from a South African cycling fam-ily. His dad had been a pro and later owned abike shop. Daryl was always in the thick of it,and although I came in as more of an out-sider, he made me feel like I belonged. Wehad ridden together and against each otherback in Johannesburg; he had shared hisroom with me in Salzburg; we had sat side byside in the broom wagon at Paris–Roubaix.Now, I went to find him to congratulate him.

He’s not unlike Richie. He grinned andsaid, ‘Hahaha, I’ve got it before you.’

He laughed. We hugged. Same old Daryl.

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‘Ah, no, thanks a lot,’ he said. ‘This isreally special.’

It was. Back in the hotel, I tweeted: ‘An in-credible day for African cycling, a Saffa inyellow!’

I hoped the whole country, the whole con-tinent, appreciated what he had done todayand would get behind him.

WINNER: ANDRÉ GREIPEL

OVERALL GC 1: DARYL IMPEY

2: EDVALD BOASSON HAGEN +3SEC

7: CHRIS FROOME +8SEC

Stage Seven: Friday 5 July, Montpellier toAlbi, 205.5 kilometres

Team Cannondale decided to make it veryhard about two-thirds into the race today.We still had about 50 or 60 kilometres to gowhen they got on the front.

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They took a lot of people by surprise as thestage was expected to finish in a bunchsprint. There was a small climb thatshouldn’t have been a factor, but they madeit extremely fast for the duration of theclimb. Peter Sagan had yet to win a stage.Their plan was to get rid of the pure sprint-ers, such as Cav and Greipel, who rolled intoAlbi nearly a quarter of an hour after thestage had been decided.

Cannondale shook us all out of the patternof the previous few days, and for that I thinkthey deserved to win the stage. They set upSagan perfectly and he did the rest. It wasvery impressive.

Daryl stayed in yellow; he is quick but hecan get over the climbs too. Eddie was 2ndon GC for the second day. He survived theclimb but didn’t get it together in the sprint.He finished 5th on the stage which was frus-trating for him as we headed into the

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mountains; his own chance of wearing yel-low was gone for another year.

WINNER: PETER SAGAN

OVERALL GC 1: DARYL IMPEY

2: EDVALD BOASSON HAGEN +3SEC

7: CHRIS FROOME +8SEC

Stage Eight: Saturday 6 July, Castres toAx-3 Domaines, 195 kilometres

So far, a lot could have gone wrong. Today,we planned for a lot to go right.

We would know after today. This was thefirst true day of business in terms of GC; itwas the first day when we would see ifContador had stepped up from the Dauph-iné; if Rodríguez, if Valverde, if any or all ofthem had more than we anticipated. Andthere was Quintana, who had come backfrom a long training stint in Colombia. Howgood was he going to be?

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In the races leading up to the Tour therehad been a vibe coming from the Contadorcamp: He isn’t at his best, but you ain’t seennothing yet. In the Tour, he would be the oldContador; irresistible in the mountains.

For a long time I had been determined toattack on this stage; I wanted to reach that fi-nal climb and cause a real GC shake-up. Theteam kept saying softly that I needed to becareful, and not to go too early. As if.

Our plan was to ride hard to make the raceas tough as possible, then to let it fall to theGC guys to scrap it out over the last few Ks.

On the valley road building up to the lasttwo climbs you could feel the volts of tensionshooting through the pack. Twenty kilo-metres to go before the climb and it wasalready kicking off: a war of pushing andshoving started as everybody was frantic fora position close to the front. There was bigpressure: this was the race for the Tour deFrance yellow jersey.

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All the domestiques were helping theirleaders to be at the front, the sprinters werepulling for the climbers and, as we were get-ting closer to the climb, it was just gettingfaster and faster.

Eddie gave a really big pull in that valley,as did Yogi and Kiri, who were all swappingoff. Geraint was just surviving at that point.We got a good position early on, and the restof the battle was holding on to it.

Climbs. There were two mountains closetogether at the end of today’s stage: Pail-hères, which is very difficult, and Ax-3 Do-maines, which is shorter and less difficult,but because the race was finishing at its sum-mit, it was where the battle would be.

On Pailhères, Nairo Quintana attacked. Sothis was it. This young and very talented Co-lombian climber had been sent on a mission:go early, make the others chase, make themspend a lot of energy and create the oppor-tunity for your leader, Alejandro Valverde.

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This felt like a tiny victory to me; Quintanawas the unknown, the one who could be thedangerous dark horse. Valverde, I knew. Ididn’t fear him.

A few years before, I would have pushedall of my chips to the centre of the table andgone with Quintana. All or nothing. Today,my face was as expressionless as a corpse.Kiryienka did a good pull at the bottom ofthe climb, followed by Pete Kennaugh, whotook over and did a huge pull. Over the topand down. He laid down such a ferociouspace that I began to wonder whether I wasactually in the shape I thought I was in. Hetook us to the bottom of Ax. This was hard.Really hard.

Pete took us a little bit further, thenhanded over to Richie.

At home, Quintana might ride up a lot ofmountains all day long, but he didn’t seem tohave done many hairpins: he was giving up

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seconds every time he took the wrong lineround a corner.

In his ear the Movistar directeur sportifmust have been telling him that Richie Portewas coming for him. Richie was leading adisparate gang which consisted of me,Contador, Valverde and Roman Kreuziger, ateammate of Contador.

The good news was that there was no signof some of the other big GC favourites. Therewas no Cadel Evans, no Joaquim Rodríguez,no Andy Schleck. And where was Tejay vanGarderen?

The pace that Richie was setting was caus-ing chaos behind us. By the time we caughtQuintana, we had dropped everyone. This lif-ted my spirits.

Then I couldn’t wait any longer. With justunder 5 kilometres to go, I made my move. Itwas slightly earlier than planned but …

I passed Quintana. I knew he had nothingand that he had gone too early; I had been

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that guy. As he saw me go by he must havebeen wondering about Valverde. Why wasn’the here?

I was alone in the lead. It was painful butjoyful. I told myself that every second Igained could be the second that won theTour.

I crossed the line. My mate from Tasmaniarolled over in 2nd spot, 51 seconds behindme, having attacked Quintana.

We had sown time into the field. I had theyellow jersey. Richie was with me. Perfect.

There is one other lovely memory. We werespeeding towards the start of the climb toAx-3-Domaines when Daryl pulled alongsideme in his yellow jersey.

‘Make sure you bloody well get this jersey,bru. You’d better be wearing it tonight.’

That hit home in the best sense. Darylknew he wasn’t going to keep it, and that itwas going to be with a climber this evening.But he had the generosity to say he wanted it

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to be on my shoulders. A lot of people die alittle when a friend succeeds. Not Daryl.That’s the measure of the man.

WINNER: CHRIS FROOME

OVERALL GC 1: CHRIS FROOME

2: RICHIE PORTE +51SEC

Stage Nine: Sunday 7 July, Saint-Girons toBagnères-de-Bigorre, 169.5 kilometres

House of cards.On the bus we made our plans. We had the

yellow jersey, yesterday we had bullied thepeloton, and this morning the papers weresaying that the Tour was already over: fin-ished after just one mountain stage.

That yellow jersey colours everythingaround it, so we planned to ride in as con-trolled a way as possible. We were only inter-ested now in the big dogs. If a breakaway hadno big GC names in it, we would let it go.

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Anything else we would chase down like col-lies bringing sheep back to the fold.

That was our first mistake of the day.On the bus, feeling all-powerful and with

the happy yellow bleeding into our thoughts,we didn’t specify what we meant by this. Wedidn’t pause to think that with Richie and mein the first two spots in the GC the rest of thepeloton would be feeling bruised andaggressive.

The attacks started straight away. The firstclimb, a category-two hors d’oeuvre, was still30 kilometres down the road, but the pelotonwas popping and fidgety. Attack. Attack. At-tack. With yellow now in our brains wechased down just about everything; if a pieceof paper had blown up the road, we wouldhave gone after it. And the peloton saw whatwe were doing and knew they had a chanceto break us. Like schoolkids sensing weak-ness in a student teacher, they went after us.

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Garmin-Sharp declared jihad from thestart. They launched an insane barrage of at-tacks on the way to that first climb, the Colde Portet d’Aspet.

Dan Martin of Garmin and Igor Antón ofEuskaltel were the two breakaways that hadus in a quandary. They were borderlinecases: a few minutes down on GC but if theygot away maybe they would be a problemlater. They could both climb.

Nico was on the radio urging us to go. Wewere trigger happy, so we went.

We should have said our goodbyes. ‘Seeyou later, guys.’ As the yellow jersey team,we should have worked slowly and method-ically through the day at our own pace. In-stead, we let everybody else set the agenda. Itwas my mistake. I should have called it. Ishould have let them go but I didn’t have theexperience to know.

I was coasting through the peloton, stayingclose to the front and keeping an eye on who

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was going away, but there were just so manyattacks. The team were taking it in shifts topatrol the front of the peloton. Even by thefirst climb, when Dan and Igor attacked, youcould see the toll it was taking on us. And socould the other teams.

Soon we were a man down. Pete Kennaughswung out of our line towards the left of theroad just as Ryder Hesjedal from Garmincame sprinting through from behind us to at-tack. Pete was knocked into the ditch like askittle and rolled down for 4 or 5 metres. Bythe time he climbed back up and remounted,the race had gone.

We kept thinning out. After more chasingit was Richie, Kiri, Kosta and me now con-trolling things at the front. Other teams wereusing us. After we had done a tough stint atthe front in pursuit of Dan and Igor, theywould counter-attack and, one by one, ourguys started popping and dropping.

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In the valley after the first climb we werealready beaten dockets. Now it was onlyRichie and me left.

It got worse on the second climb, the Colde Menté.

At this point, ironically, we found somesense. ‘Okay,’ we said, ‘let’s leave the break-away alone. Let’s just regroup, recover andreorganize. Let’s work as a team.’

But more attacks came. Nicolas Rochewent, who was Alberto Contador’s team-mate. Mick Rogers went too. Ditto. Theywere starting to gamble now on the basisthat we would let them go, so we chased.Richie worked like a dog on the flat beforethe Menté.

We hit the climb and another wave of at-tacks began. Richie turned to me and said hewas busted. I would have to go on my own.

I could see the big guys moving now. Ale-jandro Valverde had attacked, who wasn’t a

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discretionary case. He and his teammateQuintana had to be covered, as did Contador.

Suddenly I was very alone: the only Skyrider in a group of twenty-five or thirty,which was under the control of Movistar. Isensed everything could go very wrong veryquickly before this day was done.

When in doubt, act tough. I immediatelywent right to the front so everybody in thegroup could see that I was alive and well.

‘I’m the sheriff. I’m restoring law and or-der. Calm down. Nothing to see here.’

I sat up to make it look like I was quite re-laxed and strong and feeling no pressure.

They looked around. No Sky jerseys.‘Well, tough guy, if you’re the sheriff,

where’s your deputy? Where’s the posse?You just have a tin star pinned to you. That’sreally all, isn’t it?’

Movistar figured out that this could begood for them. Between the guys already upthe road and the group of twenty-five plus

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that I was part of, they had seven. It meantthat as the stage developed, they would havea lot of cards to play.

Saxo had maybe three or four riders butenough to give them options. Between Mov-istar and Saxo, if they handled things wellenough, they could use their numbersagainst me.

But if you’re me, you’re not panicked bybeing the outsider.

I went to Contador. I pointed out to himthat there were a lot of Movistar guys aroundus and up the road in front of us – Quintanaand Valverde plus five teammates – whichmade them dangerous. I told Contador whatmust have been obvious: he couldn’t expectSky to control these guys; Saxo would haveto do it. Contador and Valverde are Span-iards and there’s a natural rivalry betweenthem. Each wants to be King of Spain. I justwanted to make sure they didn’t form an alli-ance and use their big numbers against me.

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I told him it was his race to lose as muchas it was mine. This was not quite true.Today it was more mine to lose because ofthe colour of the jersey I was wearing – butContador had to think he could also miss outif he sat back and watched me get dropped. Ihad to make that clear to him. Movistarwould sting him like a scorpion. That wastheir nature. Contador would need to use histeammates to protect him (and me). Theconversation was in English. Contador justsaid, ‘Yeah, well, we’ll see how things gotoday.’

I was happy enough that he was thinkingabout it. He knew that for me to lose the racetoday wouldn’t be enough. He could lose ser-ious time as well if he didn’t play his owncards right. If he thought about this for longenough, I might just survive.

I started looking for small signs of encour-agement. I had been able to go with the mostdangerous attack of the day. I was here now.

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I had to think my way through the nextcouple of hours.

There was a largely harmless group up theroad, maybe 25 seconds ahead of us. TomDanielson, Ryder Hesjedal, Yuri Trofimov,Igor Antón and some others were first overthe second summit of the day while we eyedeach other in the group behind.

My eyes were glued to Contador, Valverdeand Quintana. This was where they wouldhave to stay. I was letting these thoughtssettle as I rode second or third from the frontdown through the valley.

Next thing, Valverde came from behind,attacking down the right-hand side of theroad. He had a Movistar colleague with him.If we were doing 40 kilometres an hour, theywere riding at 55 when they passed. They gota huge jump, just when I thought things hadsteadied.

This was very dangerous. It wasn’t on aclimb; it wasn’t where I felt comfortable. I

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couldn’t just accelerate knowing that every-body else would hurt worse. If I was leftchasing here on a flat road I could get intotrouble. I wouldn’t sit on the front and towContador and company back to Valverde. I’dbe spent. Contador, Valverde and Quintanawould leave me behind like roadkill on the fi-nal climb and maybe take as much as 10minutes on GC. So I shifted down two gearsbefore they were 20 yards past me. I sprintedafter Valverde, putting in a 40- or 50-secondacceleration to get across to them. I would letthe others in the group look around andmake their plans; surprise was my only assethere. I surprised myself mainly. I was theonly rider from the group who made it on tothe back of Valverde. His back wheel was mylifeline.

Now I had the two Movistar riders with mefor company. They were pulling and takingturns. Ahead were the few guys who hadalready attacked on the previous climb. They

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were being caught by Valverde and his matewith me hanging on. If they had made thatbridge on their own, it would have been verydangerous, because some of the riders up theroad were also from Movistar: they had twoor three in that front ten. They would havespent the rest of the day pulling.

Behind was the group with Contador andthe others. Their view on what was up theroad had just changed.

I was still in bad trouble but I wasn’t dead.A couple of times Valverde and his mate

looked over at me. They said, ‘Come on, youhave to help us.’ I just shook my head. Noway. Why would I pull on the flat for no reas-on? They recognized that and didn’t persist.They kept working and I stayed with them.

As soon as the Movistar boys and I lookedlike bridging the gap to the front group,Contador gathered his remaining teammatestogether, including Mick Rogers and NicolasRoche, and they gradually closed the space

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between us. They were 30 or 40 seconds be-hind us through the valley and it took themthe best part of 15 minutes to reel us in. Itwas quite a bit of chasing from their point ofview, but they did it.

I added that work into my calculations inthis new scenario. Whatever happened in therace from here on, at least everybody wouldget to the last climb pretty tired. The pacehadn’t eased up all day.

Once we all regrouped at the bottom ofPeyresourde, the whole race slowed down alittle bit. Movistar took control and Saxokept a watch. Again, I had survived the mostimminent danger. Time for … oh shit … forthe first time I figured out I would have to goback for bottles and gels. They wouldn’t becoming to me. No room service today.

I put my hand up and thought, this mustlook strange: the yellow jersey putting hishand up to go back and feed. I went back tothe car trusting that the unwritten rule as

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regards attacking when somebody is feedingor taking a leak would hold firm. It did.

It was good to chat with Nico when I gotback to the car. Despite the relatively trickysituation we were in, he smiled and was fullof encouragement, we would get through thistogether.

Back in the chain gang this was still a day ofpolitics; it was very nervy. I went and posi-tioned myself where, in my opinion, the bestchance was: on the back of the Movistartrain.

Movistar suddenly upped the tempo andwere working really hard now. What hadcaused this? Suddenly it dawned on me. Thenews had come to me over the radio; it musthave come to them too. They were workinghard because Richie was coming up from be-hind with Kiri helping him.

I had spoken to Nico on the radio. Maybethe guys would be better off conserving theirenergy for tomorrow rather than killing

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themselves on a wild goose chase? We couldregroup and learn from today.

Nico saw it differently. Richie and Kiriwere closing in. Soon they would be just aminute behind.

Of course, Movistar’s directeur sportif waslistening to the Radio Tour, hearing reportsof Richie’s comeback, and of course hepassed that on to Valverde and Quintana.Richie was 2nd on GC, and they wanted himout of the way. But that was the limit of theirambition now: to kill Richie.

They didn’t want the words ‘Team Sky, oneand two on GC’ being rubbed in their facesagain. And that’s why the tempo had so sud-denly increased. Richie didn’t get back, and Iwasn’t put through the torture of Quintanathen Valverde attacking me in turn on thePeyresourde.

Poor Richie. He didn’t know it but by try-ing so hard and so honestly to get back to thefront to help me, he had done a great job.

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It was quite a strange feeling sitting in aline of seven Movistar guys all riding as hardas they could. I wondered what I would haveasked my teammates to do here if they wereall riding at the front at this point. Eureka! Iwould have asked them to ride in much thesame way as Movistar were riding. That gaveme comfort.

Their guys were wearing different jerseysbut they may as well have been wearing Skyjerseys; I was sitting in their train.

Today Movistar were my team and theywere doing the job for me. It would be aboutlegs and not tactics in the last shake-up,which suited me.

Movistar were fully aware of what they weredoing. They knew they were riding Richie outof the race for GC and they probably tooksatisfaction from that, even though I was get-ting a free ride. I was for another day as faras they were concerned. Sometimes in life,

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there’s not going to be another day like theone you’ve just had.

On the final climb Quintana had obviouslybeen given the freedom to attack. Maybethey thought I’d stay with Valverde andContador and it would be Quintana’s oppor-tunity to steal some time. But first it was DanMartin and Jakob Fuglsang who attacked. Idecided that this wasn’t my battle. I stayed inthe group but it wasn’t long till Quintanastarted his own attack. Now it was different:each time he went, I reacted. I didn’t get upout of the saddle to sprint after him like acrazy man; I just sat on the front and did abit of a progression back to his wheel, thenwe would slow down for a few seconds andhe would go again. I think that happenedfour times.

I was within myself. They were hard at-tacks but I had them under control. Aftereach one I remember thinking, ‘Okay, I’ve

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closed another one.’ Each time I did, I lookedaround to my left and to my right.

Now it was surely going to be Valverde orContador to be the next one to go. To mysurprise, neither of them did anything, whichwas interesting. Quintana and Valverdedidn’t seem to be in tune with each other:they were two individuals. Either they hadn’tgot it in their legs or they didn’t fancy the fi-nal descent on their own. Anyway, they nevermoved.

We got to a point about a kilometre fromthe top of the last climb where it just felt likestalemate. I was riding at the front and anumber of guys from the group started rid-ing next to me as if to say to Quintana andValverde, ‘Look, you had your chance, it’snot going to happen. We are just riding now.No more attacks up here.’ They made an un-spoken truce.

I survived. Dan Martin had a famous stagewin. Overall, it was one of the most complex,

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tactical and interesting days the Tour hadseen.

I got over the finish line and almost immedi-ately the France 2 TV reporter, who was al-ways at the finish area doing the on-the-spotreports, had a microphone in my face. Hisfirst question had nothing to do with therace.

‘A lot of people are questioning your per-formances here. What can you say aboutthat?’

I felt so pissed off. Of all the questions hecould have asked after that day of racing, thiswas it? It hadn’t even occurred to me as Isaw him coming that he would ask me aboutdoping.

The dark side still blows clouds over, evenon the brightest days.

WINNER: DAN MARTIN

927/1106

OVERALL

GC1: CHRIS FROOME

2: ALEJANDRO VALVERDE +1 MIN 25

SEC

928/1106

29

Monday 8 July, Rest Day

We could have surrendered the Tour yester-day. Instead, today was a new day. We hadmoved northwards, jumping from the Pyren-ees to our hotel in Brittany.

When we went out for our rest day warm-down ride, Dave made a point of coming outwith us. As we rode he spoke to each rider inturn, flitting around like a bumblebee gath-ering pollen.

The guys weren’t happy. There had beenbad luck and misunderstandings, for sure. Ghad crashed, Eddie wasn’t sure of his role,Kosta had been over-raced and we’d lostKiri. David López had ridden really well tomake the Tour team but it seemed to us that

he’d then relaxed. When he pitched up inCorsica it appeared that he’d gained a bit ofweight and lost some form.

Dave took in all the stories and processedthem.

Stage Ten: Tuesday 9 July, Saint-Gildas-des-Bois to Saint-Malo, 197 kilometres

Dave sat us all down in the bus that morningand said, ‘Okay, guys, here we are.’ Daveloves to start his talks in that way. ‘We havegot what we have got.’ ‘It is what it is.’ ‘We dowhat we do.’ ‘We are at this fitness level andit won’t change.’ ‘We can’t bullshit each oth-er.’ ‘Some of us are not going as well as wewould have hoped.’

After identifying the issues – the guys whoweren’t performing and the guys who wer-en’t happy with their roles – he outlined thesolutions. Dave handled this mini-crisis well.I wasn’t the only person to have learned from2012.

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I had gone to have a chat with Kiri beforehe left the hotel. He had worked so hard inthe last race and had done such a big job try-ing to get Richie back, pulling along that longvalley road that I had chased Valverdeacross. However, he hit the next climb andgot dropped. Then he slipped back into thegruppetto, and then into the no-man’s-landbehind the gruppetto.

When the second team car was up aheadbehind Richie, Kiri slipped through the net.He only got eliminated by a minute and ahalf, which I felt was quite a big mistakefrom our point of view. We should have hadsomeone egging him on, telling him, ‘Listen,you have a minute to make up, you can do it.’

The team had a huge feeling of regretabout this.

Today’s stage was another one for the sprint-ers. Our concern is to stay out of trouble dur-ing the hectic final 30 kilometres of thesestages, so we will have a Sky train at or near

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the front and it can be pretty annoying whensomeone from another team tries to musclehis way into our train. If there is any onerider who sticks out for always wanting topush in, he’d go down as, well, we have thephrase Arsehole of the Day. There is alwaysone. There is a Movistar rider who scoopsthe title regularly. He cuts into our train andbrakes for whatever reason, which causes agap between our front guys and our backguys. It is part of racing but it is irritating.When the stakes are higher it is very annoy-ing. When you are ambling along with 150kilometres to go it isn’t a huge issue. Thestress comes at the more crucial moments,coming into a climb or during the wind-upfinish.

I didn’t think he was deliberately trying toget under our skins; I got the sense hefigured the best place to be was wherever wewere. But he wasn’t fully aware of what was

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happening around him or why we were all ina line.

Most of the time I bite my tongue in situ-ations like this. Richie isn’t so gentle.

‘Hey, you think it’s just a coincidence thatwe all showed up here wearing the same jer-seys, and now we’re all on each other’swheels?’

L’Arsehole du Jour was just on a differentwavelength to us. I hoped that his under-standing of English was just as poor, andthat he didn’t quite catch what Richie wassaying.

WINNER: MARCEL KITTEL

OVERALL

GC1: CHRIS FROOME

2: ALEJANDRO VALVERDE +1 MIN 25

SEC

933/1106

Stage Eleven: Wednesday 10 July, Av-ranches to Mont-Saint-Michel, 33

kilometres

I woke up in the morning leading AlejandroValverde by 1 minute 25 seconds and BaukeMollema by 1 minute 44 seconds. I had 2minutes on Alberto Contador. The stage wasjust 33 kilometres of time trial but this waswhere I hoped to buy myself some time and acushion in case I had a bad day in the Alpstowards the end of the Tour.

I had to empty myself to gain as muchtime as possible. Today was a day which hadto count.

I see my time trialling as a godsend. I amextremely lucky to be able to time trial andclimb. More often than not, people can doone or the other. Doing both very well isquite rare.

Today I had a very good ride. I finished 1minute 10 seconds faster than Richie. Peoplelike Valverde and Contador were 2 minutes

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or more back. Quintana was the same. Thesewere all excellent climbers but not as strongon the time trial.

The exciting thing for me was that I hadset out at a good pace and had taken a fewkilometres to ease into things. I felt I hadridden a good time without over-extendingin the first half of the race. When I got to thetime check I heard that I was around asecond up on Tony Martin. That really mo-tivated me and made me think – either Tonywas having a terrible day or I was going verywell. If that was the case it would be an ex-cellent result.

Nico was in the car talking to me all theway.

On the second time check I was 2 secondsahead of Tony. He went faster to the finish,gaining 14 seconds for the last stretch. But Icould definitely live with that.

My lead was up to 3 minutes 25 seconds –could this race now be mine to lose?

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The first race I did with Barloworld was in2008 in South Africa, just five years beforethis Tour. We had done the training pro-gramme over in Italy in January and hadcome back to South Africa for the IntakaTech World’s View Challenge in March.

I was a bit nervous at the start but on thethird day I got into the break on one of thehilly sections and then broke away on myown on a climb about 10 kilometres from thefinish in Pietermaritzburg. Coming into thefinishing straight I had everything going forme to win the stage. It was mine to lose.

All of a sudden, a guy on a motorbike atthe front of the race said to me, ‘You can re-lax, they are more than three minutes behindyou.’

I thought, ‘Super,’ and so I relaxed, be-cause there was no point in being stupid andwasting my energy.

I sat up, zipped up my jersey and set aboutlooking prim and proper for the finish.

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Luckily I hadn’t quite raised my hands inthe air for victory.

I heard the screeching of brakes and thecrashing of metal. Guys flew past me in abunch sprint, and some even crashed tryingto get round me; I was a slow-movingobstacle they hadn’t expected to see. Therewas a terrible pile-up and Daryl Impey camedown.

The field had come past me at 60 kilo-metres per hour while I was cruising homehappily at about 35 kilometres per hour.

I lunged back into race mode but it was toolate; I could only come 7th in the bunchsprint.

I remember the absolute shame. All thepress were there, including a TV camera, andeven the lens seemed to be grinning. I felt soembarrassed.

That was the Intaka Tech World’s ViewChallenge; it was mine to lose, and I lost.

I couldn’t think like that any more.

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I had a sense that maybe the riders in 2nd,3rd and 4th, and even down to 5th, 6th and7th, were looking at each other now, as op-posed to looking at me and how they wouldtake three and a half minutes out of my lead.I would let them race among themselves; letthem focus on their private battles for podi-um places.

WINNER: TONY MARTIN

OVERALL

GC1: CHRIS FROOME

2: ALEJANDRO VALVERDE +3 MIN 25

SEC

Stage Twelve: Thursday 11 July, Fougèresto Tours, 218 kilometres

A dull day; another one for the sprinters.In the mornings I would generally sit next

to G at the table. Most of the time wediscussed race-related stuff. Because today

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was going to be a sprint day, Cav’s OmegaPharma team needed to contribute to con-trolling the race. I said to G that maybe hecould have a word with Cav about this.

However, as it was, not a lot got said outon the road. There was a bit of swearingwhen the hammer went down in the finalsprint, but that was it.

Kittel went past Cav for his third stage winof the Tour, which killed Cav’s mood. Itwasn’t a great day for us either: we lost Eddiein a crash, which fractured his shoulder.That killed our mood.

I was also learning that for the race leader,the day didn’t end when you thought it had.In between the podium ceremony and thedoping control, I had the media. Usually Ihad Chris Haynes from Team Sky with me,as well as the former rider Dario Cioni.

Before the press conference I had to go tobetween ten and fifteen media outlets forone-on-one interviews. Dario said to each of

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them, ‘Two questions, just two questions.’The first question was always, ‘How was ittoday?’ The second question was usually avery long sentence with five questions in it.Something like: ‘Are the rest of the teamholding up – if so, what do you think abouttomorrow – and of course, what about yourown knee after that fall – are you now in theposition you expected to be – would it begood to have Bradley Wiggins with his exper-ience in the team at this point – you lookfresh but how is your physical state?’

Dario would catch my eye, and shake hishead gravely. I would say, ‘Yes,’ and walk onto the next microphone. Two questions arenot six questions.

The length of the journey in the team carback to the hotel could vary greatly depend-ing on traffic and distance. Nine times out often I would tuck into a bowl of rice and tunaand have a protein drink. We would chatabout which journalists had been especially

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irritating or pushy. Who had asked that samestupid question again? It was a very differentroutine from being with my teammates onthe bus.

WINNER: MARCEL KITTEL

OVERALL

GC1: CHRIS FROOME

2: ALEJANDRO VALVERDE +3 MIN 25

SEC

Stage Thirteen: Friday 12 July, Tours toSaint-Amand-Montrond, 173 kilometres

Buried within the stage today was an inter-esting story:

Valverde lost his Tour chance on the roadto Saint-Amand-Montrond.

Something had been on everyone’s mindsfrom the start of the race; I imagine on everyteam bus the riders would have been talkingabout it, and each directeur sportif would

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have been telling his riders the same: ‘You’vegot to stay at the front today, today’s the day.We’re expecting crosswinds. Big crosswinds.’

It was a nervous day, and once we set off,we hit the crosswinds relatively early on.

Valverde punctured at a bad moment. Atthe time the pace wasn’t full on but it was de-cent and the crosswinds were blowing. Weknew immediately that he would struggle toget back on; the race would almost have towait for him.

I was sitting close to the front with Yogi, Gand the rest of Sky. Then, just at the pointwhen Valverde hit trouble, the Belkin teamstarted swapping off on the front.

Belkin had something to gain. Valverdewas still 2nd on GC and Belkin’s riders,Mollema and Ten Dam, were 3rd and 4th.Without Valverde, they would move up to2nd and 3rd.

It was an interesting move in terms ofpeloton etiquette. Were Belkin entitled to

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take advantage of Valverde’s bad luck? Didthe unwritten law that protects the yellowjersey from this kind of attack apply to hisclosest challenger? A lot of people wouldhave thought it did.

Valverde’s Movistar teammates definitelythought it did. They were coming up and say-ing, ‘Listen, what are you doing? Valverdehas punctured. This isn’t sporting.’

One of the Belkin guys responded in anamazing way.

‘Oh, you’re asking us to be sporting? Thisis the guy who’s gone down for two years forhis involvement in Operation Puerto. Howsporting was that?’

Basically, they were saying, ‘We’re notwaiting for him. Why should we?’

Obviously Belkin’s motivation wasn’t en-tirely to do with doping and OperationPuerto but I still thought it was a powerfulthing to hear.

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The race got strung out. Everyone at thefront had reason to ride, and Valverde’s racehopes were being killed by the General Clas-sification teams and the sprinters’ teams,who were riding to keep Kittel behind. Noone actually took the race by the horns andripped it to pieces until we got to about 40kilometres to go. Then Contador gave the or-der and his Saxo Bank boys accelerated. Yogiturned back to me and just said, ‘Go,Froomey!’

He was looking at me, as if to say, ‘We’vebeen caught out but now you need to get onto the back of Saxo Bank before any damagecan happen.’

At that point we were probably sitting inabout 30th position in the bunch, not thatfar back. But it was too late. They had accel-erated and opened a gap of 20–30 metres. Igot out of the saddle and sprinted to try toget on to them. Cav was 10 metres in front ofme but his acceleration was a lot quicker

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than mine. He managed to make it on to theback of Saxo Bank. I didn’t.

As soon as I found myself in no-man’s-land I pulled over to the left-hand side of theroad and cruised, waiting for the peloton tocome back so I could find my teammates. Igot everyone working. It took no longer thana minute or so, and then the Katusha teamrealized it was in their interests to help usand we got a decent chase going.

We felt the loss of Eddie and Kiri throughthose final 40 kilometres.

I was able to sit on the wheels until the fi-nal 2 kilometres when our chase began toflag. Then I went to the front and rode stead-ily to the finish. We were about a minute be-hind Contador’s group and I didn’t want it toget to a minute and a half.

I realized that here, in the middle of thisstage, which to all intents and purposes wasa bad, bad day, I was dialling for help anddrawing on the lessons that Tim Kerrison,

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Rod Ellingworth, Bobby Julich and othershad been driving into me for years. Theirnotes of caution worked. I trundled in safely1 minute 9 seconds behind the Saxo group,but it could have been much worse; Valverdehad fallen out of the top ten.

Elsewhere, Bauke Mollema and Contadorclosed the gap at the top of the GC and Cavcame back into sprint glory. The day after to-morrow was the iconic Mont Ventoux, wherewe would settle some accounts. Roll on anddon’t look back.

WINNER: MARK CAVENDISH

OVERALL GC 1: CHRIS FROOME

2: BAUKE MOLLEMA +2 MIN 22 SEC

Stage Fourteen: Saturday 13 July, SaintPourçain-sur-Sioule to Lyon, 191 kilometres

Back at the Dauphiné, before the Tour, I hadraised the issue of the food we get on the bus

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after a stage. For as long as anybody couldremember, it had always been tuna and rice.I wasn’t attacking this choice, but it wouldhave been nice to have some variety everyonce and a while.

The team listened, and after the Dauphinéwe started getting different post-race dishes.Søren, our Danish chef, looked after us well.One day we had couscous with strips ofchicken and the next we had fish and potato.It was a small change but I think it worked,and it carried on into the Tour.

Usually I got to dinner later than the otherriders. There was an understanding that youwould eat when you could eat, you would geta massage only when your soigneur was freeand you would fit into the Tour, not the oth-er way round.

The norm in pro cycling is that riders sit atone table and the staff sit at another. Thiswas private time to spend by ourselves, but Ithink it would have been more relaxed if we

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were all together. I understand the counter-argument, especially if the soigneurs experi-ence long, stressful days on the Tour; theymay need the space to unwind away from theriders. But I would still prefer a systemwhere we all just go and sit down wherever isfree.

Another argument is that because theriders are fed with Soren’s healthier andmore nutritious food, it’s better to seat us ata separate table. The rest of the team eathotel food, and although our food was‘better’ for us, theirs were covered in tastysauces and gravies. A man could crack.

Today’s stage was settled by a break. It was abreak of guys enjoying their day in the sun,and not a GC day; the peloton and the overallchallengers rolled in 7 minutes later.

Mont Ventoux was on my mind.I told myself that it was better to coast to

the finish today. Yes, I had lost a minute yes-terday but I knew that the mountains were

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beckoning once more. This was where I wasgoing to need all my energy.

WINNER: MATTEO TRENTIN

OVERALL GC 1: CHRIS FROOME

2: BAUKE MOLLEMA +2 MIN 28 SEC

Stage Fifteen: Sunday 14 July, Givors toMont Ventoux, 242.5 kilometres

The ‘Giant of Provence’. The ‘Bald Moun-tain’. One of the Tour de France’s most fam-ous climbs.

Before the Tour, I spoke to Contador aboutVentoux. I’d watched a video of him racingup it, against Andy Schleck. I said to him:‘It’s going to be a big day for us in the Tour.’

He nodded, and had a little think.‘Yeah, yeah, it’s a tough climb, but in the

final [section] it’s always headwind and it’sdifficult to make a selection. [It’s] because

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you’re riding into a headwind. So you can’t…’

In a headwind it’s very hard to get awayfrom another rider. You’re pushing against ahuge amount of wind, and in turn you’remaking a fine slipstream for anybody behindyou. They just stick to your wheel as yousuffer.

That conversation lodged in my brain untilI was two-thirds of the way up Ventoux onstage fifteen.

Alberto, I don’t want you having thatpleasure if we get round Chalet Reynard,and there you are looking for myslipstream.

But here we were, nearing the end of thispunishing but iconic 242.5-kilometre stage.Richie had done the work and had laid it allout. I could launch myself now to the top ofVentoux.

It was the perfect ambush, as Contadorhadn’t expected anything here. The road

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flattened just before Chalet Reynard, whichwas 6 kilometres from the finish. This wasrecovery territory before the last skirmish. Ihad to be smart; I didn’t want to get up outof the saddle and sprint; I didn’t want to lookhell-for-leather desperate, splurging all myenergy with such a long way to go. If I got outof the saddle here, he would let me go andsurely later pass my empty husk on the roadup ahead.

I took over the pace, but stayed low in mysaddle, spinning my gears.

I sowed more confusion than I had hopedfor. I hadn’t actually been able to changegear fast enough because the road had beenflat and I was accelerating. I was spinningvery fast; far faster than it was efficient tospin. I was actually in the wrong gear. Butthis now was my attack.

Come after me, Alberto. If you want to bewith me to the top, you’re going to have toforget any recovery time. Accelerate now. If

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not, we might not see each other again tillthe podium. What’s it to be?

I couldn’t resist any more. About 30seconds into my acceleration I turned tocheck on him. He wasn’t there; he’s wasn’ton my wheel any more.

One down.My focus shifted to Quintana, who was 30

metres in front of me, but coming back. ‘Nottoo quick now, Nairo,’ I thought. I neededsome recovery time myself.

I wasn’t going to race up to him all puppy-dog keen, Hey, I’m back! When it came totaking him I wanted to go straight past him;I wanted to be a couple of bike lengths infront before his brain had registered me atall.

I got to him. I attacked immediately. Toosoon. He followed me very easily, or so itseemed.

Okay, this isn’t going to be easy. This can’tbecome a poker game where we ponder our

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hands till Alberto and the boys catch up onus.

I was looking for the headwinds but thereweren’t any. Not today; nothing. I rodesteadily for a bit, mulling this over. I askedQuintana to come through. He declined.

One more shot at dropping him.I got up and accelerated again; another

good hard acceleration. But I went nowhere.He closed me down, again.

Okay, that’s fine. I’m basically going tohave to put winning the stage out of mymind, and I’m going to have to ride to thetop with you, Nairo. You are going to let medo most of the pulling and you’ll have thelegs over me in the last few hundred metres.You’ll win the stage and take a few secondsfrom me. But I can live with that. I have to.

I settled in, ready to do the lion’s share ofthe work. Any time he came through, hepulled at a slower rate.

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Listen, don’t play games with me here.I’ve stopped attacking you. I’m not going tokeep attacking. Just pull! Pull with me. Be-cause you can move up on GC too, you’re5th, or whatever, right now. Just do somework.

I was telling him this in my broken Span-ish with a splash of Italian. It might as wellhave been Swahili. I assumed he was justthinking about the final showdown. How hewould weaken me. How he would ‘kill’ me.

A kilometre to go. I had worked out wherethe Tom Simpson memorial was, eventhough it wasn’t visible with so many peopleon the mountain. It was a stark reminder ofthe mountain’s mercilessness; the Britishrider had tragically died there on 13 July1967.

Quintana would be sucking in the air now,getting ready for the end.

I rode with my head down most of thetime. It meant that I could see down between

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my legs, and behind my seat post. I could seewhere Quintana’s front wheel should be, andif he was on my wheel.

I glimpsed down.He wasn’t there! Not where he should have

been.I didn’t have much left. I wasn’t going to

get up out of my saddle and attack right here,and take the chance that he would close medown again. So I pushed on a little bitharder. If he really was on the limit, thiswould be it. If he wasn’t, his wheel wouldreappear.

I upped the pace by 30 watts or so; Ilooked down. There was nothing but road …

It took me a few minutes to ride the lastkilometre. I was light now though. One mo-ment I had been surrendering the stage tac-tically; now I was winning it. With every ped-al stroke I was taking more and more timefrom my rivals. It wasn’t because I was going

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that fast but because Quintana had run outof fuel.

I was in yellow riding to a stage win on thehardest climb there would be in the Tour thisyear. It was an amazing feeling. Now I wasgoing up that last bend. Photographers wereswarming the outside of the corner, with thetowering meteorological station above themat the top of Ventoux.

I was riding to the finish line now.This was the day. The biggest win of my

life. Say it again. This was the biggest win ofmy life.

I was 29 seconds clear at the summit.In the yellow jersey.On Ventoux! It was dreamtime.Michelle was here. I went through the

crowd and around the barrier. We wrappedourselves around each other. I couldn’tspeak; I didn’t know if she could either. Allthe rides, all the years, all the pain, was forthis. Pain and joy, inextricably linked.

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I could hardly breathe. I began coughingand couldn’t stop. Somebody led me to acamper van and a race doctor planted anoxygen mask on my face. A few minutes laterthe euphoria returned.

At the team hotel in Orange that night weforgot about being Team Sky for a while, anddid something spontaneous. Dave orderedchampagne and made a short speech; themechanics Igor and Richard poured thebubbly.

We had a couple of toasts and a bash atour low guttural victory chant before thefood came.‘OoooooOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHH!’Everybody joined in. Michelle had made amassive milk tart, a South African pudding,for the team. Tomorrow was a rest day andwe were relaxed, happy and loose.

I was just putting a fork into my starterwhen there was a tap on my shoulder.

Sorry. Anti-dopage.

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I scoffed some food while the manwatched and then I headed off to give ablood and urine sample; the same thing Ihad done this morning before the race. I hadalso given another urine sample after thestage end.

Three tests in one day. If this is the pricewe pay to restore our damaged sport, it is asmall one.

My early cycling idols tended to test posit-ive and die in my affections. I never want anykid to look at Ventoux today and wonder if itwas all an illusion created by chemicals andcheating.

WINNER: CHRIS FROOME

OVERALL GC 1: CHRIS FROOME

2: BAUKE MOLLEMA +4 MIN 14 SEC

Monday 15 July, Rest Day

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Jeremy and three old friends, the Jethwabrothers – Kiran, Sam and Jaimin – were allhere. They turned up today at the team hotelin Orange and I had no idea they were com-ing. They had travelled from Kenya, on amarathon journey that began for Jeremywith a flight from the Nandi Hills to Nairobi,from there to Abu Dhabi, then Paris, a TGVto Marseilles and, now, a camper van toOrange.

Greater love hath no man than this …Jeremy was wearing a Kenyan rugby jer-

sey. My bike had a little Kenyan stickerplaced discreetly on its frame. I am ChrisFroome (GB), I have always felt British and Ilive in Monaco. But today, with Jeremy andthe guys here, home seemed both closer andfurther away.

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30

Before Robert de Niro and ChristopherWalken go to war in The Deer Hunter we seethe people they are and the bonds they have.There is a wedding; Walken flirts. There isthe scene high in the mountains. De Niroloves to hunt. With the clouds at shoulderheight and the guys done teasing each other,they are at one with the world around them.They don’t need words.

I have days like that on my bike. Richieand other friends might be there with me or Imight be on my own, high on some summit.I can’t describe the feeling of getting up thereunder my own steam. Knowing the path thatis behind me, feeling the ease in my legs asthe mountain plateaus. Getting ready to

hurtle down the far side like a carefree boy,the wind in my face.

Cycling is my job but it also feels spiritualand connected and it’s all I ever wanted todo. Somehow – through genetics, throughmeeting a line of people, starting with Kin-jah, who have helped me enormously – Ihave been given a great gift.

Millions of people end up spending lives asthe wrong person in the wrong job with thewrong boss. I know how fortunate I am, howblessed. My heart is in those high mountains.

Sometimes I wonder, why me?

There are two tales of Ventoux. We toastedone last night; this is the other one.

The morning had begun with an earlyknock on the door. It could only be onething: the testers were here. Richie and Ilooked at each other.

‘Well, here we go again, bro.’We had a long stage ahead of us before

climbing Ventoux. It was early and now the

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testers were here. They were going to takemy blood and my urine, which was fine. Theywere going to take an hour of our sleep too,that’s the price.

From the moment the tester knocks theyare obliged to chaperone you. So you go tothe door, open it, walk back in and the testerfollows so he can stand and watch.

You put on a pair of tracksuit bottoms,throw on a top and you go with them. Youdon’t shower or wash. You do not pass go.You do not pass water. You go straight tocontrol.

Usually they have set up in a conferenceroom or somewhere like that. They are de-cent people, doing a hard job that has to bedone. There is no point in resenting them. Isave that for the heroes who tested positive.

In the mornings they generally wantblood. Ironically, in the morning urine is sel-dom a problem – the testers just aren’t in themarket for it.

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Once you reach the testing room there is arule that you have to be seated for tenminutes before you can give a sample. Dur-ing that time you fill out the forms.

Have you been to altitude recently?In the last two weeks have you had a

blood transfusion?In the last two weeks have you lost a lot of

blood?Are you on any medications … ?And so on. Eight or nine questions give

you the chance to explain anything thatmight affect your blood values.

We are young and fit and lean so they finda vein easily.

One person handles the documentationwhile a second looks after the blood, needles,phials and other such paraphernalia. Youseal and number the bottles in front of them,then you sign. Our team doctor Alan Farrellis there from beginning to end.

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Some mornings they want the entire teamfor testing, sometimes just me, sometimesme and Richie. We decide the order of whogets the needle first by means of who is themost awake.

So we get it done, go to breakfast, go backup to our room, have a wash, pack our stuffand get on the bus. It’s just a part of life, partof our routine. We understand why it has tobe this way.

So far on this Tour I have been spat atmaybe a dozen times and I know there willbe more. A guy has squirted something overme. I took it to be beer or urine although Ididn’t have it tested.

Some days I don’t get spat at all while oth-er days it happens three or four times. Some-times out of pure consideration they aimtheir spit at my jersey though mostly itcomes at my face. If I’m lucky my shoulderor my helmet gets it. Most of the time I’mnot lucky. I am riding up a mountain a few

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feet away from spectators who are leaninginto my path, when I hear the sound of spitbeing launched. Even through the generalnoise I am attuned to that noise. Then I feela warm, globby clump hit my face. It’s hardto be lucky when they are spitting from twofeet away.

It is horrible.Usually I take my glasses off and wipe

them on my jersey, then use the back of myglove like a rag to wipe my face.

You know, I haven’t actually done any-thing wrong. I am left with no way to provethat except to be the person that I am and tolet time and the push of technology provethat I am clean.

This is a sport for people’s pleasure andentertainment. To dope is to abuse that, butto spit in a rider’s face does the same. Don’ttalk to me about the lost integrity of oursport and then spit at me.

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Picture this: I have a huge wad of spit onmy face. Nicolas Roche and Alberto Conta-dor are on my wheel. They have seen thelaunch and they have seen the landing. Nowthey can see me defaced with this beerysaliva. I am pawing blindly at myself with theback of my glove.

I handle the moment as well as I can,mainly by ignoring it. I might have turnedround and sworn at the guy or pegged abottle at him but that is not my battle on thisTour.

Nicolas comes up and puts his hand on myshoulder. He says, ‘Even Alberto is disgustedat what happened there. That shouldn’t behappening. You don’t deserve it.’

I know Nicolas and I know Contador wellenough to appreciate the sincerity of whatwas conveyed: here was my biggest rivalreaching out with a few words. I didn’t un-derstand it though. Nicolas wasn’t targeted.

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Alberto, with his achievements and his his-tory, wasn’t targeted.

When I crossed the finish line yesterday Iknow there was booing. I didn’t hear it then– maybe out of excitement, or exhaustion –but I did notice it on the way up Ventoux.There was one moment when I was pullingQuintana along and it started getting reallysteep towards the top. I wasn’t going veryfast and there were people standing almostin the middle of the road, just baying andbooing at me. They would stand there rightuntil the last second, daring me to ridestraight into them. You never know whichone could be the lunatic who doesn’t duckout of the way.

Yesterday was a great day on Ventoux. Ifyou had dreamed my dreams, if you had giv-en the thousands of hours I have given tothis sport, you would know that. Nothingcould really knock me off that high. I had astage win and the yellow jersey, and I was

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leading the race in the best position possibleafter one of the hardest days possible.

When I went into the rest day press con-ference this morning the questions aboutdoping came down like balls of spit from thehills. I felt the pressure of having to justifymyself, to prove that cycling is clean, to takeresponsibility for the past and to defend my-self for the present and the future.

I’m clean. To be honest, I struggle to seehow I could be any cleaner. I want a cleansport, I want us to be open and honest aboutwhat has happened in the past and I wantthe technology that proves I am clean.

I don’t know where we are going with allthe spitting and the finger-pointing and theinnuendo. Sometimes I’d just like to be ableto talk about the race, about spiked efforts,about training my body to conquer its ownweaknesses. Ask me. But the doping discus-sion is circular. You think I’m guilty. Can youprove it? No. I know I’m clean. Can I prove

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it? No. You heard it all before from LanceArmstrong. Well, I’m not Lance Armstrong.You won’t get fooled again. Not by me youwon’t, ever.

All I could tell the press conference in thePark Inn Hotel was that sin isn’t contagious.We have inherited the wreckage of cycling’spast but not the habits of cyclists past.

Lance cheated; I’m not cheating. Thatshould be the end of it, but of course it’s not.

Finally Dave offers to hand over perform-ance data to the World Anti-Doping Agencyfor an independent – and this is important –expert assessment.

When David Rozman, our soigneur, didme the great honour of naming his son afterme, I told him that I hoped it was because ofthe person I am, not the rider I can be. Herein France, my brothers and old friends arecoming together. Mum is on my shoulder. InNairobi, Kinjah and the boys are gathering in

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that little shack that once felt like home tome. Michelle is in the crowds.

I owe them all. And I owe my sport. I oweit to them to be the best person I can be.First, second or also-ran doesn’t matter if Ican give them that. I owe it to them to behonest to myself and to them and to thisdream they helped me achieve.

Spit in my face. Stand in my way. Boo me.Hiss at me. Troll your accusations. You don’tknow my blood. You don’t know my heart.

The people who matter to me do and fornow that is enough.

Stage Sixteen: Tuesday 16 July, Vaison-la-Romaine to Gap, 168 kilometres

All the action went down on a mountain be-hind Gap, the Col de Manse. Contador andhis teammate Roman Kreuziger tried toscorch the earth for Saxo. As we approachedthe summit, they went up like fireworks.

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Richie and I chased and caught them.Kreuziger burst free next. And Contadoragain. Bang. Bang. Left and right to the jaweach time. They took it in turns to attack usagain and again. Richie must have pulledthem back five times.

In the last kilometre Richie finally turnedto me and said, ‘Okay, I’m done now, youneed to follow them yourself.’

Contador noticed that Richie was gone andattacked again. I chased him down.

It wasn’t long until Contador, Kreuzigerand I were going down that final descent.

Contador tried to accelerate a couple oftimes, looking to distance me. They had aplan: Contador in front, then Kreuziger, thenme third in the line. As he was going into acorner, Contador accelerated, Kreuziger de-celerated and I had to brake. While I wasforced to slow, Contador was surging.

I didn’t mind chasing but when you’ve gotsomeone in front of you blocking when

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you’re trying to go round the corners it canbe difficult. It seemed like very negative ra-cing tactics to me.

And this was the famous descent whereJoseba Beloki had his crash in 2003 andwhere his career ended. Lance Armstrongdid a bit of off-road riding here and cameback on to the hairpin. Beloki’s career endedthere.

It was a place of nerves and we werejumpy, and Contador and Kreuziger chosethis downhill to play their games. I wasn’timpressed.

Richie rejoined us, tagging on the back.Rui Costa arrived with him.

In the circumstances it was probably notclever of me to react to every Contador accel-eration but I couldn’t allow him to gain fromthis bullshit. I could have just given him 30seconds and taken no chances but I didn’twant to encourage this behaviour.

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They wanted to know if I had the balls.Good for them.

They wanted to know what I would do forthe yellow jersey. I’d show them.

Finally I made a decision. It was game up.Kreuziger, I’m not letting you sit on Conta-dor any more. I’m going to do that instead. Idrove into a gap past Kreuziger and got on toContador’s wheel.

He knew now he was going to be followeddown every inch of road. If he was to gainanything he was going to have to take biggerrisks.

He went through one corner extremelyquickly and I let him get a little distance onme. I didn’t want to be on top of him if hecame off. Now it was me asking him if he hadthe rocks. Sure enough, at the next corner heovercooked it and ended up on the road.

The couple of bike lengths I’d been givinghim into the corners saved me. There he wasnow in my line but to avoid him I had go to

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the left and a little off-road. Luckily therewas no drop or ditch so I was fine.

I wasn’t hurt but I had to unclip the pedalsand lift the bike back on to the road. By thetime I had recovered, the chasing group ofsix or seven had gone past. Richie eased offthe back to help me yet again.

Contador caught up with me by the nextcorner.

His hand was hurt and his knee was bleed-ing; his tail was between his legs. He wentpast me and said he was sorry, what hadhappened back there was his fault. As a ges-ture he moved forward to help get us back tothe front of the race.

He caught me in a rare moment of anger.My feathers were ruffled. If I had ridden overhim I could have broken a collarbone orworse.

‘No. You are not leading us any furtherdown this hill, you’re staying on my wheelnow. Otherwise we’ll crash again.’

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He had pushed it too far. Richie pulled usboth back to the rest of them.

Rui Costa stole the stage by 42 seconds forMovistar.

WINNER: RUI COSTA

OVERALL GC 1: CHRIS FROOME

2: BAUKE MOLLEMA +4 MIN 14 SEC

Stage Seventeen: Wednesday 17 July, Em-brun to Chorges, 32 kilometres

Sometimes it’s not where you’re at, it’s whereyou’re going.

Today was a time trial that started on topof a mountain, took us down the mountainand then up the mountain next door, along aplateau and down the next descent. I wasdrooling.

There was a lot of discussion about whatbike to use. My time-trial bike? Or my roadbike for the mountains? And which wheels

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would go with what bike? Every rider had adifferent opinion. I had a plan: use bothbikes.

For the climb I needed the lightest bikepossible with the lightest wheels known tomankind. Aerodynamics don’t count for any-thing when you’re slogging uphill at 15 kilo-metres an hour. I also knew that the firstdescent was pretty technical in terms oftwists and turns. To me it made sense to usethe road bike until I got to the flat plateauand then switch to the time-trial bike and goall out across the plateau, down the seconddescent and across 3 flat kilometres to theline.

It would either work or I would look like afool.

We’ve never done a bike change in a timetrial before. We did a dummy run with Nicoin the car and we practised it again thismorning. The plan was that I would give ahand signal near the top of the final climb

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and indicate 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 to tell the car that Iwas ready. The car would come along besideme and I would leap high into the air andland on the time-trial bike, which was beingsteered along the road from within the car.Crash Froome is dead. Say hello to EvelKnievel Froome.

No, actually, I would lean my bike at thefront of the car while Gary Blem got thetime-trial bike off the roof. While I was clip-ping my feet into the time-trial bike, Garywould give me the biggest push he could givea friend and off I would go.

It made sense to me. The last bit of roadwas so fast that being in that aerodynamicposition would help me gain a lot of time.After this stage we would hit three hard daysin the Alps and I figured I needed to go intothe red – to hurt myself but do no damage.There were bigger sufferings ahead.

Coming into the final time check, havingdone the bike switch, I was 10 seconds down

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on Contador. Doh. I wasn’t sure I could takethat back.

It wasn’t too efficient to change bikes un-der pressure but I reckoned it was more effi-cient than having a bad body position on theroad bike down the hill and across the flat. Ifyou are out of the saddle and pushing on aroad bike, your upper body is stealingseconds from your legs. On the time-trialbike the handlebars are set in an aggressive,more aerodynamic position, low down.Contador had opted to ride his road bike forthe whole trial.

The gamble paid off. I won by 9 seconds.Now I was four and a half minutes ahead go-ing into the Alps.

I still couldn’t feel that I had the race inmy grasp though. One bad day during thenext three and I could lose all that time on asingle climb. So, yes, it might be fair to saythat the race is now mine to lose. It’s justsomething I didn’t want to say.

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WINNER: CHRIS FROOME

OVERALL

GC1: CHRIS FROOME

2: ALBERTO CONTADOR +4 MIN 34

SEC

Stage Eighteen, Thursday 18 July, Gap toAlpe d’Huez 172.5 kilometres

In the evenings I shower before I go down toget a massage. There is just enough time toget clean.

The shower measures the toil of the day. Iturn the shower on, grab the shampoo andshower gel and, if it has been a brutal day, Ijust sit down. I sit with my knees pulled upto my chin, the posture of the small boy inthe front row of a class photo back inprimary school.

That’s when I know it has been a reallytough day – I can’t stand up for an extra five

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minutes on my legs. I sit down so I can washmyself without feeling like I am about totopple over.

This evening I sat for a long time with thewater just powering down on me. I sat thereand thought, postponing the effort of stand-ing up again.

I get those days in training sometimes aswell. Today, this was how my legs told methis was hard, maybe too hard.

Today we rode up Alpe d’Huez twice. If yougrew up in France or Italy or Belgium, someplace that wasn’t Nairobi, twice up the Alpeis a lot of snow-capped myth. I just lookedon it as two category-one mountains in thefinal 50 kilometres of a stage. Two45-minute climbs at the end of a long day.

After climbing Alpe d’Huez once we wouldbe about 122 kilometres through the stage.Things would get a bit flatter, then we’d dipdown and then start a gentle climb up theCol de Sarenne. Over 13 kilometres the road

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rises about 954 metres. Then there is asharper hill to the summit, 3 kilometres long,before a hair-raising descent.

Then we are facing up Alpe d’Huez again.If I was looking to challenge someone for

GC this would be where I would launch theambush. You’ve got that whole 3 kilometresto the top of the Sarenne to get a gap andthen a dangerous descent. It’s as steep as anelevator shaft, with a bad surface and noguard rails. Tony Martin in particular hasbeen very critical of the state of the descent.One misjudgement and you could be fallingdown the side of the mountain.

There had even been some talk ofabandoning the second ascent of Alped’Huez in order to eliminate the descentfrom the Sarenne. But the Tour has a public,especially the public served by television,and a brutal descent can sometimes be greattelevision. So it was decided that unless the

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weather got really bad, the dangerous des-cent stayed.

I told any team that came up to us on theclimb today not to worry about the descent.We wouldn’t be racing it. ‘Nice and easy,guys,’ I said, ‘nothing crazy.’ I spoke to Val-verde and he said, ‘Don’t worry, Chris, we’renot going to be lunatics either.’ I got the feel-ing that not everyone saw it quite that waybut the people I spoke to agreed with me.

Contador was the worry. Losing the timetrial yesterday would have gotten under hisskin. I think they had a look at the possibilit-ies because they sent two riders up the roadin front of the peloton at one stage. I pre-sumed they were dispatched to be there forAlberto for after he’d made his move. Hewould attack on the Sarenne, hook up withhis teammates and then throw himself downthe descent, risking life and limb to get sometime back.

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I saw the two of them go and I sent in-struction to my guys to close them down. Wehad to make sure Contador had nobody toget across to.

He did try on the descent anyway; about athird of the way down he managed to slipthrough us and rode away. I said clearly tothe team that there was no need to stress. Ifhe wanted to take the risk, that was on him.He had about 15 kilometres to go down thehill and through the valley after the descent.Then back up the Alpe.

If this was his big move of the day hewould have to ride that 15 kilometres on hisown, taking all that wind. We knew from theradio there was a headwind in the valley. Iknew no credible GC rider would do thatknowing they had to climb Alpe d’Huez allover again. Even if he committed a hundredper cent and it worked, he wouldn’t takeback more than a minute.

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At the same time I knew the race was on.We needed to close this down. As ithappened we got down the mountain niceand safe and it wasn’t long before we foundContador off his bike. He’d pulled off theside of the road and was doing a bike change.It seemed a bit pointless to go on the offens-ive only to then sit up and change his bike.

I don’t know what the issue was, but wewere told soon after that the race had an-nounced they were going to control our bikesat the finish. Rumours went around, ofcourse. Had he switched from a bike that wasunder the allowed 6.8 kg weight? There wasgossip, too, about a special lube that workedwonders by reducing fiction. I’m sure he justhad bike problems.

Movistar started bearing the load. Theyrode a really good tempo leading up intoAlpe d’Huez. Our guys had done a good jobpulling back Contador’s two teammates.David López was proving his worth. He had

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done a really good job ascending l’Alped’Huez and taken us over the Col de Sarenne.

Pete Kennaugh was riding heroically too.At one point about 5 kilometres from thesecond climb up the Alpe I asked him to goback to the car for gels. All was good but wewere empty. Three of us were sitting behindMovistar and Pete peeled out into the windto go back.

As he went, I spoke into the radio mouth-piece: ‘Nico, Pete is coming back for the gels– please can we have some pineapple.’

Pineapple gels don’t contain caffeine. Ifind the ones that contain caffeine make mefeel flustered and generally not very good. AllI’m looking for is some readily available sug-ar, electrolytes and carbohydrates to gostraight into the system.

I didn’t hear anything back. A few minuteslater Pete returned and told us the car wasn’tthere. That was odd – one of the perks for

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the team in yellow is that the car gets to ridefirst in the convoy.

I got on the radio again.‘Nico, Nico. Can you hear me? We need

some gels. Can you come to the front please?’Pete was empty. I was empty. Richie had

one caffeine gel, which he offered to me. Caf-feine? At least it’s got some sugar in it.

I didn’t want to make a bigger deal of thisthan it needed to be. The climb was comingup and we had to focus.*

If I am close to a rider who I am on goodterms with, I can ask them for a gel and ninetimes out of ten that would be fine. But thiswas a relatively select group of contendersjust 5 kilometres off the last climb. I neededto hold my position. It wouldn’t do to lookdesperate and show weakness. If I asked thewrong person the word would be out: He’slow. Let’s make it hard for him. We had zerooptions.

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We said farewell to Pete at the bottom ofthe Alpe. He needed to save his legs for thenext day. I sat behind Richie and we let Mov-istar work; they had the numbers. They tookus about 3 or 4 kilometres up. The group wasstringing out. I remember turning to Richieand saying, ‘Okay, now.’

He looked back at me.I nodded, as in, ‘Let’s go.’People were on their limits. I didn’t feel

great myself. Richie picked up the pace andwe dropped a number of riders and then Irode over the top of him and kept on pushingfor a minute or so.

It was not a huge attack but it was an earlyattack. There were 10 kilometres of moun-tain stacked above us but with people ontheir limits it was time to push on. No freerides.

Myself, Rodríguez and Quintana were nowout in front. I was not prepared to pull all theway up, so we shared the workload but not

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wholeheartedly. No one really wanted tocommit to it. With so far still to go, I couldunderstand that.

I calculated it would take the best part of30 minutes to do this last 10 kilometres.Richie had dropped back, fallen in withContador and the others, seen they werewasted and ridden away from them. He re-joined us and it was pretty impressive to seehim again. This gave me a tremendous boost.

Not long after, I said to him, ‘You knowI’m not good, I’m fairly spent.’

The four of us rode on for another 2 or 3kilometres. I couldn’t contribute at all to thework at this stage, I felt hollowed out. I askedRichie to pull just enough to keep me in thegroup.

I was worried about a big loss. Thankfully,Contador was struggling, and Quintana andRodríguez, who stood to gain most from myweakness, were around 7 minutes down onGC.

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With about 4 kilometres to go, I heardNico back on the radio.

‘Okay, I’m back at the front now with youagain, guys.’

I shot my hand up to say I neededsomething from the car. Richie asked mewhat I wanted. The man was unbelievable.

‘Gels, please, I need sugar.’He said, ‘Okay, you stay here, I’ll go back

for them.’It didn’t even occur to me that there was a

rule against feeding in the last 5 kilometresof a stage. Nico was there, so surely therewas no reason why I couldn’t get a gel?

But I’d given the game away.When I put my hand up to signal I needed

something from the car, Quintana lookedaround and recognized that I needed help. Afew moments later he accelerated off thefront.

I thought to myself, ‘Chris, you know whathe’s just done. This goes into the memory

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bank.’ For all Quintana knew, I had a flattyre. Anyway, for now he was gone.

That attack was not something I was goingto forget. Two days ago Contador and I hadgot into trouble on the descent and Quintanahad been the one to push on. There was apattern here and I was going to have to keepan eye on it. It could be inexperience or naiv-ety, but I would keep it in mind all the same.

Richie came back with the gels and I tooktwo immediately. Rodríguez had latched onto Quintana, so they were 50 metres up theroad now. Richie just settled into work infront of me. He was going well.

There were times when I had to call to himto say I was losing contact. It was horrible,not having the energy. I had a damp blanketof weakness over me and the higher we wentthe heavier it got.

Whoa. Focus. My head was all over theplace. There was less and less power in mylegs, just jelly. I had nothing. It was quite

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humbling to have my friend’s back wheel asmy only goal. Richie was doing the job. I justreally needed to concentrate on that now. Ihad no idea how many guys were in front ofus at this point. I assumed Rodríguez andQuintana had caught the earlier breakawayby now and were fighting for the stage win.(As it turned out they hadn’t. ChristopheRiblon of France was away and would stayaway.)

As we approached the finish Richie pulledaside to let me go over first. I demurred.That wouldn’t be right. He deserved to go be-fore me and take a place on that stage. As hepulled off I pushed him to make sure hestayed in front.

He turned and thanked me!I didn’t have the energy to explain that all

the debt and gratitude were mine.We were blessed. I finished a bad day by

increasing my lead on Contador who had aworse day.

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I had mixed emotions at the finish. Thiswas the one day I had worried about having ablow-up in the mountains. Now it hadhappened but I’d come out of it okay. I’dsettle for that.

Nico was apologetic about the car. A coolbox had leaked and destroyed the electron-ics. The car had shut down. I knew the feel-ing. Stuff happened.

Nico started talking technicalities. He wasexpecting that I would get a time penalty fortaking the gels on board in the last 5 kilo-metres. There was a brief discussion aboutlegalities.

But it seemed like bad karma and sharppractice when I got to think about it. Weshouldn’t appeal. I’d had a bad day and I’dsurvived in front. I would take the 20-secondpenalty.

If the worst days were only this bad, wecould handle them.

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Later on I went for a massage with DavidRozman. Richie was still there being workedon when I got down so I used the 5 or 10minutes to myself to make a few phone callsand put out a tweet.

Most of the time a daily plan goes up tosay that dinner is at 8.00. Sometimes I onlyget on the massage table at 7.15 and I knowRozman will take an hour and a half to takethe mountains out of my muscles.

He starts on the back, which not manysoigneurs do. His thinking is that once theback is released then we can work on the legsand it makes a more logical progression. Ifyou have a tight back it limits your legs. Afterthat he starts on the back of my legs, gettinginto my hamstrings and glutes.

What I like about his massage is that hehasn’t got a by-the-numbers system of threerubs here and three rubs there, now presshere, now press there. Rozman can feel forhimself where something is tighter than it

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should be. He knows the spots where I havetrouble with different muscle groups and hetakes longer on those points, stretchingthem, coaxing them to relax.

Some days I am exhausted and we don’tsay much at all. A muttered greeting mightbe all we manage. Other days we talk aboutlife, the universe, everything: time away, hisfamily, his wife, Manja, and small child, Kris.

I remember when he told me what he hadnamed his son, my surprise almost spoiledthe moment. ‘No way! C’mon, really, what ishis name? You wouldn’t call him Chris. Seri-ously, what’s his name?’

‘No, no, Chris. After you. But with a K. Notwith a Ch because in Slovenia we don’t useCh.’

Whatever that meant to Rozman I believehe’ll never know what that meant to me. I re-member the feeling that this guy from Slove-nia, whose path had intersected with mypath coming from Kenya, this guy believed in

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me. He had connected with me as a person,not as a bike rider. It was a lovely thing to doand I was moved and humbled. I still am. Ijust hope he didn’t get into trouble for bring-ing home his work like that.

On brutal days, like the one on Alped’Huez, we don’t speak much. But Rozmanalways gives me a very clear view of things.

I lay on the table and said, ‘I can’t believethis has happened today. And … I’m not sureabout tomorrow.’

Rozman just said, ‘It’s simple. It’s a bicyclerace. It goes uphill, so you pedal uphill. Whythink so much? Just go.’

And that stays in my mind when I am ra-cing. Just go. What would Rozman do? Waittill 2 kilometres from the top, the hardestpoint. And just go, Chris! Just go!

Simple.He stopped me running through all five

hundred different scenarios that I had

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thought of for the next day. I switched off.His final formulation was straightforward.

‘You are strong enough to win this on yourown, but you aren’t on your own, so it will befine, Chris.’

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31

Stage Nineteen: Friday 19 July, Bourg-d’Oisans to Le Grand-Bornand, 204.5

kilometres

A big sprawl of a day: over 200 kilometres inlength with a large amount of climbing. Thestage didn’t finish on top of a mountain buton a descent, so at least it shouldn’t be thesame GC battle as yesterday was with Alped’Huez. Still, it had the Col du Glandon andthe Col de la Madeleine. We couldn’t be sure.

We rode out preparing ourselves for theworst. Helpfully, the Glandon and Madeleinecame early in the stage and everybody whowas left from the team (minus Eddie and Kirinow) all pushed over as a unit.

The team rode so well. As G and Yogi werepulling up the climbs I was thinking, ‘One ofthem has a fractured pelvis and the otherweighs over 80 kilos.’

Throughout the tour we had talked aboutthese final three big days as being decisive.Today, before the race began, I had evenwondered if we would have the manpower toride at the front for such a huge stage.

Pete, for instance, was really tired by now;he was the youngest on the team. So I was sorelieved when we got over these two bigclimbs and we still had everyone with us.

Then Saxo came to the front and almostrelieved us of our duties.

I couldn’t work that out. I asked Nico onthe radio what was going on. Had they de-cided to work with us to control the race? Hefigured out that they were riding for the teamcompetition. This was an unexpected bonusfor us.

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As we approached the last climb theweather turned for the worse: very heavyrain and a thunderstorm. López was stillwith me, along with Richie.

I said to López at this point that Saxo werecontrolling things now and he didn’t need toride up here at a ridiculous pace. He was do-ing good work at this stage but he could af-ford to save his legs.

On that final climb, going up in the storm,I knew there would be attacks towards thetop from Contador and Quintana and pos-sibly Rodríguez. They would figure that itwould be quicker to take the descent on theirown and steal a few seconds. So I followedthose attacks when they came and I was con-scious that Contador was likely to take crazyrisks in the wet. He started the descent veryfast but it wasn’t long before the rest of ushad pushed on and kept him to roughly with-in 20 metres.

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He saw that we weren’t going to surrenderand then he turned to us and gave us a lookthat said, ‘I’m not going to keep pushing youon the wet corners. I’ll back off.’

So no drama, really. In the end, Movistar’sRui Costa won the stage. All the GC ridersrolled across the line 9 minutes later.Everything stayed the same.

I got on the massage table and Rozmansaid to me: ‘Well, how are you? How wasyour day?’

Most days I would say, ‘Fine, how wasyour day?’ but today I felt different.

‘Rozman, I’m actually feeling quite tired.’I expected him to say, ‘Okay, my friend,

just relax. I’ll go a bit easy here.’Instead, he just buckled over and started

laughing at me heartily. I looked at him witha question mark instead of a face. What?

He turned to me.‘You’re amazing, you know that? You don’t

need to say anything else. Just shut up now.

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For the past eighteen days I asked how areyou and every day you’ve said, “I’m good,how about you?” Well, it’s about time you’retired. I’m glad to hear that you finally admityou’re tired. I am a hundred per cent surethat each one of your rivals has been sayingthey are tired every evening for the last twoweeks. So to hear you saying you’re tirednow? Well, lucky you! You’ve got nothing tocomplain about. Just relax and enjoy.’

I got it. I genuinely did feel the fatigueafter the stage today. The Tour is tough andit takes its toll every day being in yellow. Ijust needed to get to the end now.

Tomorrow would hopefully be a short giftof a stage. In my mind it was just a 3-hourride. I almost didn’t need to pack any ricecakes into my pockets because it was soshort. I would just bring along some gels.They are normally just a finishing productthat I use closer towards the end of a stage,but tomorrow’s race was only 125 kilometres.

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I would start eating at 50 kilometres so thatwould leave me with 75 remaining kilo-metres, which I could pretty much do on thegels alone. It was quite a nice feeling not tohave another 200-kilometre stage. What washappening to me? Was I becoming obsessedwith food and rest?

WINNER: RUI COSTA

OVERALL GC 1: CHRIS FROOME

2: ALBERTO CONTADOR +5 MIN 11 SEC

Stage Twenty: Saturday 20 July, Annecy toAnnecy-Semnoz, 125 kilometres

A short, hard day.No puncture and no crash, but it was a day

to survive. I felt I couldn’t relax until it wasover.

Once we had got on to the final climb I halfadmitted to myself that at this point it was

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going to be very difficult for me to lose theTour.

Rodríguez and Quintana were among thefirst to attack on the early slopes and I hadlet them go; I knew that this was now therace for the podium. I looked back at Conta-dor to see what his response was. He justlooked down at the ground as if to say, ‘Idon’t have anything today, I can’t go afterthem. It’s beyond me.’

At that point I felt well enough to make upmy own mind: I was going after them myself.I released a lot of tension out of that acceler-ation and then I was off to the front. I hopedthat this wouldn’t be the end for me.

I did get a little carried away and wentstraight past Quintana and Rodríguez. Ithought, ‘Right, I’m going to keep going!’

After a minute or two it began to hurt. Myenergy levels dropped and the pedals gotheavier. Quintana and Rodríguez came backand latched on to my wheel.

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I made the attack after about 3 or 4 kilo-metres of the 10-kilometre final climb. Afterthat, Rodríguez did the lion’s share of thepulling. He asked me to come through andhelp him and I did once or twice but I couldfeel I was only slowing him down. I alsothought to myself, ‘I have the yellow jersey.What am I doing? I don’t need to be pulling.’I started to feel rough at that moment but Iwanted to try to stay on the back of those twoguys. It was one of the hardest climbs I hadexperienced in the Tour, in the sense that Iwasn’t feeling great. I really regretted thatcocky acceleration.

With 1 kilometre to go, Rodríguez easedthe pace up on the front; the race for thestage had started. We looked at each other. Ireally didn’t have anything left in the tankbut I thought there might be a chance if I at-tacked. These two were so busy markingeach other there was a chance I might slipthrough and ride away.

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I made a very sluggish attack: I got out ofmy seat and the bike lurched forwardslightly, but it wasn’t long until Quintanahad gone straight past me. Oh well.

Towards the final 20 kilometres or so I goton the radio to everyone in the team. Mov-istar had been working hard and our re-sponsibilities once again had fortunatelybeen taken over by another team. This was abit of a relief but I said to the guys, ‘We have20 kilometres to go. We are going to finishthis off properly. When we start dragging uptowards the last climb we’re going to puteveryone on the front and let’s ride as hardas we can into the bottom of the climb.’

In my eyes this was partially a safety meas-ure, for the team to go as hard as they couldin one long line. But it was also for ourselves;we needed to do it.

Closer and closer we got to the finish. Itold the guys to get ready for it. ‘We’re goingto move to the front in 1 kilometre – start

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lining up now. The finish line is just at thebottom of this climb and then we’re donepulling in this Tour.’

They did a fantastic job. All of them. Theylined out the race and made it extremelyhard for everyone else building up into theclimb.

A great way to knock off duty.

There was a story I was thinking of. Aroundten years earlier I had gone down to a placecalled Howick in South Africa, which iswhere Nelson Mandela was arrested beforehe was tried.

All week I’d gone out training on my own,putting the big miles down.

There aren’t many roads to choose fromaround Howick – it has a strange geography– so I had been riding a circuit which wasabout 200 kilometres long. It was one bigloop of tarmac road around the whole area.

This day I had got through 150 kilometresof my loop. I was coming into the last hour

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or so, and was on the home run, when I hit along, straight piece of road where I could seefor a long way ahead of me and behind me.Up the road there was a group of young guyswalking in my direction. They were aroundmy own age, and there were six or seven ofthem on the left-hand side of the road.

As far as the eye could see there was justthem and there was just me. As I got closerthey fanned out and made a straight lineacross the road; a human barrier. I knew Iwas in trouble.

I was still 200 metres away and therewasn’t a car in sight. We were in the middleof nowhere, just a crop farm on the right sideof the road. I did the calculation: ‘Okay,they’ll take the bike. And I have a phone.They’ll take that too, along with my glasses.’I had nothing else but they were certainly go-ing to mug me.

I slowed down for a second, thinkingthrough my options, although I think I

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already knew which one I was going to take. Icould have rung for help. I could have gonebackwards and ridden the whole loop I hadjust done, but there were no shortcuts link-ing one side of the route to the other – justfarmland and a lake in the centre. It wouldtake another five hours to get home.

I could have ridden for a distance backdown the road and hung around there, comeback in an hour and hope they would begone. But this was Africa. People walk forever.

My other option was to go forward.I got my head low. I flicked down a couple

of gears and I got out of the saddle. I startedsprinting hard. My hands were gripping thedropped handlebars for dear life. Hard.Harder.

I picked out the two guys in the centre ofthe road. I aimed at the small gap betweenthem. I got to within 10 metres and I roaredlike a beast.

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‘Aaaaarrrrrrrrrrghhhhhhhh!’They did the calculations now. They would

have to stop me with their bodies; I clearlywasn’t going to slow down myself. On eitherside of them the guys on the flanks saw whatwas happening and started to close in. Theywere too late. In the last couple of metres Iaimed myself at one of the two guys. Then,just at the final second, and just before im-pact, I went to his side. He flinched enoughto open the gap a little more.

I made it straight through them. As I wentpast I felt their hands on me briefly but theycame off just as quickly as they made con-tact. They had needed to get a hold of myhandlebars, and although the guys coming infrom the side had tried clawing at the bike, Ihad the momentum.

I stopped pedalling when I was a couple ofhundred metres up the road. Coasting, Icould feel the adrenaline racing through me.My heart was pumping in my throat and my

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stomach felt like I was just falling throughspace. I looked back at them and they lookedat me. It was over. They weren’t going tocatch me.

I remember that day because in terms ofcommon sense, in terms of the way the worldruns, I had taken the least sensible course ofaction. However, I knew somehow even be-fore I started thinking of my options that thiswas the option I would take.

Sometimes you have to live that way. For-get common sense, grab the handlebars, dipthe head, push the legs and ride hard for thegap.

Tomorrow I would win the Tour deFrance. Most people, I hoped, would haveenjoyed the race and not wondered how Ihad got to be there at all. The people whoknew me would know that I had received alot of help along the way and that I would al-ways love those who were there for me. Andthey would also know that quiet grain of

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madness that runs through me. Some peoplewho have never known me may tell each oth-er that I cheated. Some of them may tell theirreaders the same.

I think back to that day in Howick. I knowI am here today because I have that madnessin me. I could have been the quiet guy whotold you at the office party that he liked cyc-ling on the weekends. I could have riddenthe big loop of life doing the safe thing.

But I gave up everything, put my headdown and rode hard for the gap. Tomorrow,credit me for that, at least.

WINNER: NAIRO QUINTANA

OVERALL GC 1: CHRIS FROOME

2: NAIRO QUINTANA +5 MIN 03 SEC

Stage Twenty-one: Sunday 21 July, Ver-sailles to Paris Champs-Élysées, 133.5

kilometres

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Last night the mechanics were still workingon the bikes when we all went outside to jointhem and Dave B. served them thechampagne.

It was a good touch, and really nice to beable to have a glass with everyone, just tosay, ‘We made it, guys.’ The mechanics werestill working as they did every night but weall knew Paris would just be a procession.

There was a small element I couldn’t quiteget my head around.

Hold off the champagne, Chris. At heartyou are still Crash Froome. You might havegot to this point but you haven’t won theTour yet. The cobbles on the Champs-Élysées are made for you to take a tumbleon. It’s very easy to have a mechanical thereand the race doesn’t exactly wait for you. Allthose traffic islands and photographers ask-ing you to stop for photos coming into Pariswith your arm around this person or thatperson? It’s made for you to screw up. You’ll

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run into someone holding a flag pointingyou where to go, or the flower bed from Ro-mandie will pop up on a road somewhere!They have old men on the streets of Paris,you know.

As an added bonus it was also the firsttime in Tour de France history that therewould be a night-time finish on the Champs-Élysées.

I wasn’t completely at ease that evening.

That morning at the hotel, before we flew upto Paris for the start in Versailles, Jeremyhad come through to say congratulations.We had about twenty minutes together be-fore the buses were to leave so we sat andtalked.

There was a bit of a crowd forming outsidein the hotel lobby, made up of people whowanted photos and autographs. For a bit offun, and because everyone had seen me walkdown from my room in my team tracksuit,

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cap and glasses, we decided to dress Jeremyup in my clothes and let him walk to the bus.

It was hilarious. He went out there andmade a few scribbles on a few pieces of paperand people went along with it. I stood by,taking photos of him signing ‘my’autographs.

Then he felt so guilty he had to come backin. Little kids were happily gazing up at him,tugging his sleeve to have a photo taken withhim. We both felt guilty now, so we wentback out there and brought each of themback in, where I give them all a proper auto-graph and picture.

Still, we had a few photos taken for poster-ity of me wearing Jeremy’s clothes andJeremy wearing my tracksuit. Afterwards, Ithought more about how Jeremy and I arequite similar in some ways but there was onequestion that stuck to me, even on the day Iwas winning the Tour de France. Jeremy is

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seven years older than me. Was I really age-ing that fast?

At the start of the stage, just after we left thePalace of Versailles, Joaquim ‘Purito’Rodríguez pulled out some Cuban cigars aswe were riding. He handed one to Quintana,one to myself and one to Peter Sagan – thewinners of the Polka Dot (King of the Moun-tains), White (Best Young Rider), Yellow(GC) and Green (Points Leader) jerseys re-spectively. We didn’t light them or anythingbut he just wanted a few photos of us withthem.

Meanwhile, I was wearing some new yel-low shoes that SIDI had provided for me forthe final stage. They hadn’t been worn in andthey pinched a little. There was alwayssomething!

Before the race began – it was a late start –there had been a lot of waiting around be-cause the organizers wanted us to arrive in

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the evening, when the sun had gone down. Inthe afternoon I sat on the bus, thinkingabout what I was going to say on the podiumthat evening. It was quite daunting thinkingthat somebody was going to hand me a mi-crophone without asking any questions. Theywere just going to let me speak.

I decided I would begin my short speech inFrench, knowing the majority of the peopleon the sides of the streets would be French. Iwanted to thank everyone who had suppor-ted the race, and I remember asking Nicoalong the way if what I hoped to say soundedright.

He said it was fine.‘I’m sure the people will be very happy that

you’re at least making an effort to saysomething in French. Quit worrying!’

I took his advice.

It is always a big deal who the first rider is onto the Champs-Élysées to begin the final cir-cuits and I wanted that to be Richie because

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he had been there for me in the race when Imost needed him. As we approached thefamous Parisian avenue, I rode alongsideRichie and said, ‘Come on, let’s go.’ I went tothe front with him glued to my wheel.

As we swung out of Place de la Concorde, Ilooked at Richie. ‘Now you go.’ He led us onto the Champs-Élysées. It was perfect and Icould feel myself welling up; I felt so pleasedfor the whole team. I pointed out the planestrailing the French Tricolour over the Arc deTriomphe to Richie, holding back the tears.It really was a strong moment. We’d put somuch into the last three weeks and this wasfinally it. Every guy had delivered some mo-ments of heroism. This was the end, and see-ing it nearly broke me.

Cycling around the Place Charles deGaulle, I tried to soak up the carnival atmo-sphere as British flags mingled with French,Spanish and Colombian colours. But the fin-ishing circuit was by no means easy. The

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section of the Champs-Élysées from the fin-ish line to the Arc de Triomphe was on agradual, painful incline, and each lap gotquicker as the lead-out trains for the sprint-ers jostled for position. A brave breakawayattempt led by David Millar and Juan Anto-nio Flecha was up to 35 seconds ahead at onepoint, but they were eventually reeled in.

Kittel beat Cav in the final sprint. A fewmoments later, comfortably in the bunch astwilight replaced the golden sunset, all sevenof us in Sky pulled alongside each other andlinked arms. Together we crossed the line.We had done it.

At the line I had four schoolfriends fromSouth Africa who had flown over especially:Matt Beckett, Simon Gaganakis, who waspart of the St John’s cycling club, RickyReynolds, also from St John’s, and AnthonyHoldcroft, or Anto as we called him, who Iused to sit beside in maths, memorizing the

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sayings written on our classroom walls, in-stead of listening to our teacher.

Anto chose the moment to make a com-plete monkey of himself, live on television.He had given an interview to Orla Chennaouifrom Sky Sports, who had asked them to in-troduce themselves and recall a few memor-ies of times spent with me. Anto immediatelywent into a recital of the old saying we hadlearned off the wall: ‘He who knows not, andknows not that he knows not is a fool, shunhim. He who knows not and knows that heknows not is a child, teach him. He whoknows and knows not he knows is asleep,wake him. He who knows and knows that heknows is wise, follow him.’*

Well, he attempted it, but made a mess ofit after about ten seconds and then heard avoice saying, ‘We’ll need to cut this!’

Poor man. But we were all in tears at theline. It was so special to have them there.

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I was standing on the podium. The Arc deTriomphe was illuminated behind me inglowing yellow with the historic numbers‘100’ projected majestically on to its surface.In between its arches the giant Tricoloreblew lightly in the wind.

On the podium I wanted to talk aboutMum, to express my sadness that shecouldn’t be with us. I knew she would havebeen so happy to see me standing there.

‘It’s a great shame she never got to comesee the Tour, but I’m sure she’d be extremelyproud if she were here tonight. Without herencouragement to follow my dreams, I’dprobably be at home watching this event onTV.’

I dedicated my victory to her.The next thing was to thank everyone.

There were so many people who had helpedme along the way and so many people whohad given me chances. The list went on andon, from Kinjah to Team Sky. I couldn’t

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stand there and rattle off a phone directoryof names. And what if I left somebody out?So I just summed it up by saying a massivethanks to everyone who had helped me alongthe road from Karen to Paris.

‘I would like to thank my teammates whoburied themselves day-in, day-out, to keepthis yellow jersey on my shoulders and theTeam Sky management for believing in meand building this team around me. Thankyou to all the people who have taken thetime to teach me over the years. Finally, I’dlike to thank my close friends and family forbeing there for me every step of the way …’

One thing I expressed – though maybe notenough – was my feeling for the team.

Michelle, of course, deserved special men-tion. A year ago when I came 2nd she wasback at the team bus, not allowed to comeclose to the podium. She had given up herjob and life, and dedicated herself to helpingme achieve my goals and dreams. She had

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supported me, protected me and defendedme as only she could and I wanted to thankher. When I saw her run on to the Champs-Élysées, straight after I crossed the line, itwas a moment that I will never forget; wehad both given so much to get to this point.

I wanted to finish with a reference to thepast and to the future. This was the one-hun-dredth staging of the Tour de France. It wasthe first staging after the final act of the darkLance Armstrong era. It was a surreal mo-ment, standing there in the spotlights, sur-rounded by close to complete darkness, theArc de Triomphe lit up behind me.

‘This is a beautiful country and it hosts thebiggest annual sporting event on the planet.To win the 100th edition is an honour … thisis one yellow jersey that will stand the testof time.’

Those twelve final words meant the most.After one hundred races, the Tour startsanew. We begin making fresh history. No

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footnotes. No asterisks. Days that will standthe test of time.

Asante sana.

WINNER: MARCEL KITTEL

FINAL GC 1: CHRIS FROOME

2: NAIRO QUINTA na +4 min 20 sec

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Illustrations

Kenya, where it all began. [Photo credit: Michelle Cound]

The Safari Simbaz – back with David Kinjah’s team in

the tin hut where I learned to ride as a boy. [Photo credit:

Michelle Cound]

Mum never tired of teaching me about the bush and the

animals that lived there. She told me about the different

sounds and all of the different trees.

Boy racer − on my bike on holiday in La Péniche, France.

The Masai Mara became a favourite place of mine.

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My grandfather taught my brothers and me to fish and

hunt.

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Without Mum’s encouragement to follow my dreams, I

would probably have never got to the Tour de France.

First take – the race where I met David Kinjah, aged

thirteen.

David Kinjah and I having lunch together during one of

our epic training rides.

The Black Lion: my first cycling mentor, David Kinjah.

Nobody I knew even had one pet python. I had two:

Rocky and Shandy.

Having a laugh with my mates in Africa.

Matt Beckett, a lifetime friend.

Hippie – when I had hair.

With my brothers Jeremy and Jono, our ayah, Anna, and

her daughter Grace.

Me with game rangers at the Masai Mara nature reserve,

2004.

Riding as an under-23 for the Hi-Q Supercycling

Academy, based in Johannesburg.

2006 was a year in three acts. Above, Act I: the Tour of

Egypt. With our trollies and bikes held proudly in front of

us, Kinjah and I gathered with the Simbaz at Cairo airport,

along with our manager, Julius Mwangi (second from

right), as the seven-man cycling team of Kenya.

Act II: the Commonwealth Games, Melbourne. Me racing

for Kenya in the mountain bike competition, which we had

never planned to ride. It began badly and got worse.

Warming up for the time trial at the Commonwealth

Games. I wound up 17th overall in a fi eld of seventy-two

riders, but spent over an hour sitting in the leader’s chair

after recording the fastest early time. Two managers from

the English team fi rst noticed me. Their names were Dave

Brailsford and Shane Sutton.

Act III: Under-23 World Championships in Salzburg.

After ‘borrowing’ the email address of the Kenyan Cycling

Federation to enter myself into the race, my time trial star-

ted disastrously when I crashed into a marshal just 200

metres into the course. [Photo credit: Roberto Bettini]

Riding for Team Konica Minolta in 2007. Despite the

hightech sponsor’s name, the South African team still ran

on a shoestring budget.

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In 2007 I rode for the UCI development team, a mixed

continental team made up of riders from developing coun-

tries based in Aigle, Switzerland.

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In 2008 I swapped my Kenyan licence for a British one. I

know people who feel they are from Yorkshire and Britain;

from Merseyside and Britain; from the Isle of Man and Bri-

tain; and so on. Well, I was raised in Kenya feeling that I

was of Britain.

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Me with my second cycling mentor, Robbie Nilsen. I first

met Robbie through the Hi-Q Supercycling Academy, but he

has continued to offer me advice and help me train

throughout my career. We didn’t know it at the time, but

much of our training back then was precisely the same work

that we would be doing at Team Sky later.

The red dirt jersey − training in Kenya in 2010 after join-

ing Team Sky.

Stage seventeen, Vuelta a España, 2011. I hadn’t won the

Vuelta, but I had won a stage in a Grand Tour – my first win

as a professional. I had just been in the greatest mountain-

top finish I am ever likely to experience. Just to have been

part of it – blow by blow – had been to know the best of our

beautiful sport. I had beaten Juanjo Cobo, the hometown

hero also known as the Bison, by one second. [Photo Credit:

PA Images]

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On the Champs-Élysées after the 2012 Tour de France. I

finished second on GC, 3 minutes and 21 seconds behind my

Sky teammate Bradley Wiggins. [Photo credit: Michelle

Cound]

The 2012 Olympics, London. I won bronze in the time

trial, which was an amazing feeling. Afterwards, in a funny

way, it felt much better than the Tour podium. It really felt

like a privilege just to be standing up there when I got my

medal. [Photo credit: Michelle Cound]

Time-trial training with my mate and Sky teammate

Richie Porte.

Mont Ventoux reconnaissance during 2013.

The Team Sky support car follows me during a huge

block of training in the Suikerbosrand nature reserve in

South Africa.

Resting during the final camp in 2013, pre-Tour de

France.

Putting in the final hours off-road.

[All photographs credit: Michelle Cound]

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‘The Giant of Provence’: Mont Ventoux, stage sixteen,

2013. [Photo credit: Sonoko Tanaka]

‘The biggest win of my career’ – a great feeling, but after-

wards I needed oxygen on Mont Ventoux. [Photo credit:

Getty Images]

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Earlier on stage eleven, winning the 33-kilometre time

trial from Avranches to Mont-Saint-Michel. From this point

on, I wondered if the race could be mine to lose. [Photo

credit: Sonoko Tanaka]

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A night to remember – on the podium in Paris, being

crowned the winner of the 100th Tour de France, 2013.

[Photo credit: Sonoko Tanaka]

‘This is one yellow jersey that will stand the test of time’

– I was so nervous before I gave my speech.

Made in Kenya – my brother Jeremy and I. [Photo cred-

it: Michelle Cound]

We did it. Me with my African mentors, Robbie Nilsen

and David Kinjah. [Photo credit: Michelle Cound]

‘Smile, Simbaz!’ – me with local kids at Kinjah’s place in

Mai-a-Ihii [Photo credit: Michelle Cound]

‘Attack’ – taking advice from a real expert. [Photo credit:

Michelle Cound]

I can jump higher than you … unless you’re a Masai.

[Photo credit: Michelle Cound]

My fiancée, Michelle Cound, and I, relaxing on safari in

Kenya after the Tour.

‘This is yours’– giving Kinjah a well-deserved thank you

present. [Photo credit: Michelle Cound]

Glossary

Swahili

asante sana – thank youaskari – night watchmanbakkie – pickup truckboda boda – bicycle taxibwana – Sirkijana – youngstermanyatta – villagematatu – colourfully painted taximurungaru – gangly kidmzungu – someone of European descentpanga – macheteposho – powdered maizeshamba – gardenshúkà – traditional red dress of the Masaisukuma wiki – leafy green vegetable stew

ugali – maize-flour porridge

Cycling Terms

aero bars – handlebars, often used in timetrial races, to reduce a cyclist’s wind res-istance. A cyclist places his or her fore-arms in a pair of bars in the centre of thehandlebars.

aero helmet – a streamlined helmet designedto reduce wind drag. Often used in timetrials.

broom wagon – the vehicle that follows atthe back of a road race behind the pelotonand the team cars. Picks up strugglingriders who are unable to make it to thefinish.

cadence – the rate at which a cyclist pedals,measured in revolutions per minute.

categorized climb – most climbs in cyclingare designated from category one(hardest) to category four (easiest), basedon both steepness and length.

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chainring – the large cog carrying the chainon a bike, which transfers energy to thewheel. A chainring consists of one ormore sprockets – profiled wheels withteeth or cogs that engage with the links ofthe bike’s chain. These are in turn drivenby the crank arms and pedals.

classics – one-day professional cycling roadraces. The Five Monuments of Cycling aregenerally considered to be the oldest andthe most prestigious classics: Milan–SanRemo, the Tour of Flanders, Par-is–Roubaix, Liège–Bastogne–Liège andthe Giro di Lombardia.

commissaire – a cycling race official.compact gearing – compact cranks and

chainrings are normally smaller in sizethan traditional gearing set-ups, offeringa lower low gear. This can help whenclimbing.

criterium – a multiple-lap race around ashort distance course.

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deep section wheel – a wheel with a deep rimwhich is more aerodynamic, and which issubject to less drag. Commonly used intime trials.

derailleur – a mechanism that changes gearsby lifting the chain from one sprocket tothe next.

directeur sportif – team manager, or theperson who directs a professional cyclingteam during a road-racing stage.

domestique – a rider who works for and sup-ports other riders in their team.

dossard – the number on the back of a cyc-list’s jersey.

EPO – a performance-enhancing drug.Erythropoietin (EPO) is a naturally occur-ring glycoprotein hormone which can alsobe manufactured. When injected underthe skin it can stimulate red blood cellproduction to increase athletic endurance.

equipiér – a team member.

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flamme rouge – a red banner that marks 1kilometre to the finish line.

General Classification (GC) – the overallclassification during a stage race. Thewinner of the race is the rider with thebest overall time after all stages.

gruppetto – the group of riders behind thepeloton.

Grand Tour – the three major Europeanstage races are referred to as GrandTours: the Tour de France, the Girod’Italia and the Vuelta a España.

hematocrit level – the percentage of redblood cells in blood.

maillot à pois rouges (polka dot jersey) –worn by the leader of the mountains qual-ification in a stage race. In the Tour deFrance, this is also known as the King ofthe Mountains classification.

maillot blanc (white jersey) – worn by thebest-placed rider under 26 years of age atthe Tour de France, and other stage races.

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maillot jaune (yellow jersey) – worn by theoverall leader on GC in the Tour deFrance, and other stage races.

maglia rosa (pink jersey) – worn by theoverall leader on GC in the Giro d’Italia.

maillot vert (green jersey) – worn by theleader in the points competition in theTour de France and other stage races.Normally contended by sprinters.

neo-pro – a cyclist in their first year as aprofessional.

out-of-category climb – any climb that isharder than category one is designated asout-of-category or hors catégorie (‘bey-ond categorization’).

OVL – overlapped.DNF – did not finish.palmarès – a pro cyclist’s list of achieve-

ments, showing their key race results.pavé – paved road surface, often known as

‘cobbles’.

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peloton – the main group of riders in a cyc-ling race. Also known as the pack orbunch.

skewer – the rod mechanism that attaches awheel to a bike.

soigneur – a person who assists the riders ina team. Jobs include massage, supportduring races and training, transportation,and the organization of accommodation,equipment, food and other supplies.

SRM power meter – a device fitted to a biketo measure the power output of a rider.

TUE – therapeutic use exemption.turbo trainer – equipment used to warm up

before a race or to train indoors on a sta-tionary bike. Some trainers consist of aclamp to secure the bike, a roller thatpresses up against the rear wheel and amechanism that offers resistance to pedalagainst.

UCI – the International Cycling Union.

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Acknowledgements

Thank you to David Walsh, for taking thetime to get to know me and for writing abook that truly reflects my character. I’ve en-joyed sharing my life with you and appreci-ate the friendship and guidance that you’vegiven me over the last few months. Thankyou for believing in me.

Thank you to my wife to be, Michelle, foryour dedication in seeing this projectthrough. Without your commitment thisbook would not have happened, at least notin the next ten years. You have been instru-mental in the development of my career overthe last few years, and I would not be where Iam today without you.

Thank you to everyone who wants to readmy story and to get to know me beyond what

they see at the Tour de France in July. Thisbook is for you. I hope you enjoy it!

1092/1106

THE BEGINNING

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VIKING

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published 2014

Copyright © Chris Froome, 2014

Cover photograph © Garreth Barclay

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Typeset by Jouve (UK), Milton Keynes

ISBN: 978-0-241-96943-4

1096/1106

* I had only just managed to finish the Trust race, walking

over the line. My mum, in her enthusiasm to support me,

had driven into me with her car. I convinced her that, des-

pite my injuries, I did not need to go to the hospital, as I was

concerned that she might not be able to afford it.

* Tragically, six months after the 2012 Olympics, in January

2013, Burry was hit by a minibus in KwaZulu-Natal. He was

dead at twenty-five which was a huge loss, particularly in

South Africa where he was an idol to many and one of the

best mountain bikers to come out of the country.

* As a good friend of Kinjah’s, I should point out just how

impressive a top-fifteen placing really was. The field wasn’t

quite the size of the Tour de France peloton. In fact, there

were only twenty-nine riders. And I was one of those behind

Kinjah! I didn’t really count. Neither did our teammate

Davidson Kamau, who finished 25th. Three of the others fell

off their bikes and quit.

* Mr Mwangi, I am sorry I impersonated you. To be fair, I

did mention it all vaguely before I left, that time when I said

that I had ‘sorted something out’.

* You can watch the crash on YouTube in a clip called ‘Three

worst time trials’.

* In some parts of America they actually call these big pieces

of rock Belgian Blocks. They ended up in America having

been used as ballast in ocean-going ships. When the ballast

was swapped for cargo the Belgian Blocks were put to the

same use as in the lands of northern Europe. They made

hard-wearing, bumpy roads with them.

* As I would later discover, my rash wasn’t contagious, and

neither was Dr Leinders’s controversial past with the Dutch

Rabobank team, about which I knew nothing.

* There has been much speculation over the use of the

painkiller Tramadol in Team Sky. I do not take any paink-

illers or stimulants while training or racing. People have de-

scribed ‘finish bottles’ containing crushed-up painkillers

and stimulants. I do have a finish bottle on occasion, but it

contains nothing more than a double espresso. I fully sup-

port the introduction of TUEs for Tramadol and any other

medication which may be viewed as performance enhancing

that is being used without a valid medical reason. I believe

the peloton would be a safer place without the use of Tra-

madol. I did not need or use Tramadol to win the Tour de

France and I hope that this serves as an example to others

that it is not something that is necessary to compete at the

top end of our sport.

* Anto, if you ever read this, I wrote this quote without look-

ing it up!

@Created by PDF to ePub