Team Sky's leader has come a long way from his Kenyan boyhood to favourite for the 2013 yellow jersey
Even as winter rolled across Europe in December and January the Tour de France burned inside Chris Froome. He was far from the cold and the snow but, back in Africa where he was born and raised, Froome followed a brutal training regime as thoughts of the Tour consumed him. His daily block of six hours on the bike during South Africa's blazing midsummer has been the bedrock on which he has established himself as the favourite for this year's race, beginning in Corsica next Saturday.
Froome drew on the resolve that underpins an evocative story: a once shy kid from Kenya strives to win the world's greatest bike race. A lone soigneur, Stefan Legavre, went on the road with him every day as Froome stuck to his punishing schedule at altitude. The crucial stretches of climbing, however, were done on the beautiful mountain passes of the Lowveld, where he could imagine beating the two-time Tour winner Alberto Contador on this year's imposing course that twice forces the riders up Alpe d'Huez.
During a rare break he and Michelle Cound, his fiancée, went to Gary Blem's home in Johannesburg for a braai [barbecue]. Blem was brought to Team Sky last year as its lead mechanic by Mark Cavendish from their previous team, HTC-Highroad. Responsible for the bikes of Bradley Wiggins and Froome, Blem was a close witness to the way, amid occasional acrimony, they nailed down the top two places on the 2012 podium.
As he watched Froome interact with typical humility around Blem's family, the mechanic felt certain he was working with the next winner of the Tour de France. Blem believed that, as he says now, "Chris wants to win the Tour seven times. He is intensely focused. Honestly, man, this guy's unbelievable."
Similar incredulity rose up in his other friends as they adjusted to the new reality that, rather than being the local domestique of his past, Froome looks primed to follow a string of substantial victories this year by winning the Tour. Instead of regarding him as the reserved figure he cuts in Britain, where he is reduced to the polar opposite of the charismatic Wiggins, the tight-knit South African cycling community echoes with colourful insights into Froome. He is cherished here with the kind of fevour that enveloped Wiggins throughout 2012. Froome will never be an eccentric mod beloved in Britain like "Wiggo", but his links with Kenya, South Africa and the United Kingdom uncover his layered character and a compulsion to succeed against mighty odds.
I met Froome in January, soon after he had arrived for Team Sky's winter camp in Mallorca. He emerged as a warm and generous man – whose humility could not mask his fierce determination. His African past lit him up from the inside and, to me, made him more interesting than most in the Tour peloton.
Froome explained that he had learned to ride a mountain bike in the highlands above Nairobi alongside a dreadlocked rider called David Kinjah. In and around Kikuyu township, where Kinjah still lives among the tin huts, the black Kenyan passed on his enduring passion to an impressionable white boy. "Kinjah helped me see you didn't need the best bike or perfect conditions," Froome said. "You can just get on a bike and go – no matter where you are."
That simple truth, however, did not explain Froome's transformation. Some of his cycling allies in Johannesburg, where Froome had moved as a teenager when his parents sent him to boarding school, could not square his rise to the peak of European cycling with the endearing image they carried in their heads. Gareth Edwards, who now works as a television anchor, managed Froome's first real team, Super C, which they remember as a bunch of amateur riders in ill-fitting gear.
Froome was so poor seven years ago that he drove a battered white Golf with silver-tinted windows and wheels that didn't match. He looked nothing like the lean, shaven-headed pro who now leads Team Sky's black-clad phalanx of riders, tracked by their shiny Jaguars, towards another potentially historic win. Edwards, instead, recalls Froome as "a fluffy creature who drove to races in his wreck of a car. He had long, straggly hair and wore more bangles than a girl. Chris was fluent in Swahili and he dressed in clothing, made from hemp, in the colours of the Swahili people. He did not look like a future Tour de France winner."
His results on the South African circuit were mediocre. Edwards remembers flashes of brilliance when Froome would ride near the front before he got dropped. Yet most races were around Johannesburg, where the terrain is flat, and rarely stretched past 100 kilometres. Froome needed something more gruelling, like a European race, to reveal his winning capacity for suffering. He was also completing his bachelor of commerce degree and, cramming for his finals, he turned up for the Tour of Tzaneen with his text books.
His parents worried about his future for they did not see much point in bike-riding. Jane Froome had her doubts confirmed when, watching him ride for the first time in that same race, she saw her son being shelled from the back of the peloton. As Edwards drove the team car she asked him a gentle yet pointed question: "Is Chris any good at riding a bike?"
Edwards did not have a convincing answer; but he knew Froome was exceedingly bright and that "he smashed out the distinctions at university. Chris's intelligence is a huge factor in his career."
That intelligence has strengthened his bond with Tim Kerrison, Sky's deeply scientific head of performance. Clarity and rigour link Kerrison and Robbie Nilsen, the attorney who helped Froome unleash his intellect in the cycling domain when they started an under-23 team together at the Hi-Q cycling academy in Johannesburg.
The attorney and the student lost themselves in the science of cycling. Nilsen, who dreamed of one day coaching a South African in the Tour de France, offered Froome structure and a tangible intellectual partnership. They were fanatical about uncovering the secrets of sporting improvement and Nilsen recognised that "Chris had a hell of talent – but it was absolutely untapped. It felt as if we were doing these amazing field experiments to make him a much better rider. His true ability started to emerge."
Froome was amusing when describing to me his chaotic debut at the 2006 world under-23 championships. He had blagged his way into the event by using the Kenyan cycling association's Hotmail account to log his entry as the country's sole rider. Arriving alone in Salzburg, and carrying his bikes and bags, he got lost in the rain. Froome's sodden map fell apart and he was 20 minutes late for the managers' meeting where officials reacted suspiciously. It took Froome a while to convince them he was Kenya's 'manager'.
"The next day," Froome remembered, "and 150m into the time-trial, I rode straight into a commissaire holding a bunch of papers which went flying in the air. Both of us hit the ground. It was quite a start to European racing."
Froome's big chance came a year later. Robbie Hunter, the first South African rider in the Tour de France, wanted to include a local colleague in his new team. So, in 2008, Froome joined Barloworld, a ramshackle South African-financed team led by Hunter, and began to thrive within the hard world of European cycling. After riding the Paris-Roubaix classic, he startled Nilsen by insisting that the infamous cobbles were "the easy part". That ability to withstand pain underlined the fortitude that will sustain Froome over the next three weeks of racing.
His unexpected Tour debut followed a return to Kenya for his mother's funeral in June 2008. She had died from cancer a few weeks earlier and Froome had not seen her for a long time.
Yet his grief was turned inside out when Nilsen confirmed his surprise inclusion in Barloworld's Tour team. Nilsen had just 10 days to devise "a crash-course programme" to prepare Froome.
If he remembers being "in the gruppetto [the back of the peloton] most days", Froome finished 14th in the time-trial and climbed authoritatively with the leaders up Alpe d'Huez. He told Nilsen that, despite the Tour's shattering demands, he had never felt alone. The memory of his mother, and a talented young South African cyclist called Edwin Cocks, who had died in 2004, drove him on through the ordeal.
Hunter was so impressed he suggested to Blem, who had just left Barloworld as chief mechanic, that "Froome could win the Tour one day".
It was a bold prediction that Nilsen would eventually endorse. Froome missed the next three Tours because, undetected by European doctors, he was ill with bilharzia – a parasitic disease he had caught in Africa. His performances for his new team at Sky were so inconsistent that Froome seemed in danger of being axed. It was only when visiting Kenya that, before a routine UCI blood passport test, Froome asked the doctor to see if he could identify a cause of his mysterious exhaustion and sickness. The Kenyan blood tests proved that Froome was riddled with bilharzia.
In the exact opposite of a drug like EPO, bilharzia destroys red blood cells and so Nilsen was stunned by Froome's ability to keep riding despite the debilitating disease. He told his friend that, restored to full health, he would win the Tour de France. "Chris just looked at me and said: 'Are you serious?'" Nilsen recalls. "I had no doubt."
His breakthrough second place at the 2011 Tour of Spain was unsurprising to those who knew him best. Froome entered the Vuelta as Sky's main domestique but he beat Wiggins in his time-trial speciality and, in the mountains, was superior to climbers such as Vincenzo Nibali and Joaquim Rodríguez. Nilsen, who still looks after Froome's contracts, is convinced he would have won the Vuelta if he had not been forced to hold back in the early stages to protect Wiggins.
The same scenario unfolded during last year's Tour when Wiggins appeared unable to keep pace with Froome on two mountain stages. Froome obeyed team orders to drop back. "Chris could have ridden away from Brad," says Blem, who again looked after Wiggins's bikes during his illness-stricken Giro d'Italia in May. "But I have so much respect for Sean Yates [then Sky's directeur sportif] because he stuck to the plan. We were there to win the Tour and it was vital that Brad, a pure Brit, won."
Froome has always held a British passport– his father is English and his mother's parents emigrated from the UK to Kenya – but his nationality matters less than his ability and dedication. In the past five months he has won the Tour of Oman, the Critérium International, the Tour de Romandie and the Critérium du Dauphiné in imperious style.
Yet, for Blem, the real marker of Froome's readiness came in the only race he did not win this year. At the Tirreno-Adriatico in March, where he finished second to Nibali, Froome won the fourth stage after overcoming an attack led by Contador on the final climb to Prati di Tivo.
"He told me it was his worst day on the bike," Blem says, "but when he saw Contador up the road there was no way he was letting him go. He went after him and won that stage. I said to him: 'You've just beaten Contador on your bad legs, when you felt like crap. Imagine what you could've done on a good day.'"
Last year, unlike Wiggins, Froome constantly tinkered with his bike's set-up. Most nights on the Tour he texted Blem politely, asking him to raise his saddle or lower the stem by a few millimetres. Froome would then bring his own tape measure to check the precision of his request. This year Froome is more settled. "And he's not volatile like Cav," Blem says. "Chris will never shout or scream. He's always humble and grateful and we love working with him."
That same affection for Froome, and a deeper understanding of his character, might spread from Africa to Europe over the next tumultuous few weeks. His oldest friends, meanwhile, are planning private celebrations – with a comic twist that suits Froome's tangled past.
Edwards, his first manager, chuckles darkly. "As soon as he takes off his helmet and we hear that accent we'll believe that, rather than just the next Tour de France winner, it's our old buddy. I said to him: 'Froome, if you win it I'm opening up a bank account in the Cayman Islands. I'm holding photos I have of you with your long hair and ill-fitting cycling gear as hostage. I'm going to threaten you with photo releases. This will be blackmail of the highest order.'"
It could also be a landmark moment if a rider shaped in Africa, made in Europe and defined by Team Sky becomes the second straight British winner of the Tour. National identity might be a shifting concept but Froome's African roots and British descent are inextricably entwined. Over the next few weeks those who have followed him longest will relish the thought that Jane Froome's son, the once long-haired driver of a rickety old car, can ride a bike better than anyone else in the Tour de France. Reported by guardian.co.uk 4 hours ago.
Even as winter rolled across Europe in December and January the Tour de France burned inside Chris Froome. He was far from the cold and the snow but, back in Africa where he was born and raised, Froome followed a brutal training regime as thoughts of the Tour consumed him. His daily block of six hours on the bike during South Africa's blazing midsummer has been the bedrock on which he has established himself as the favourite for this year's race, beginning in Corsica next Saturday.
Froome drew on the resolve that underpins an evocative story: a once shy kid from Kenya strives to win the world's greatest bike race. A lone soigneur, Stefan Legavre, went on the road with him every day as Froome stuck to his punishing schedule at altitude. The crucial stretches of climbing, however, were done on the beautiful mountain passes of the Lowveld, where he could imagine beating the two-time Tour winner Alberto Contador on this year's imposing course that twice forces the riders up Alpe d'Huez.
During a rare break he and Michelle Cound, his fiancée, went to Gary Blem's home in Johannesburg for a braai [barbecue]. Blem was brought to Team Sky last year as its lead mechanic by Mark Cavendish from their previous team, HTC-Highroad. Responsible for the bikes of Bradley Wiggins and Froome, Blem was a close witness to the way, amid occasional acrimony, they nailed down the top two places on the 2012 podium.
As he watched Froome interact with typical humility around Blem's family, the mechanic felt certain he was working with the next winner of the Tour de France. Blem believed that, as he says now, "Chris wants to win the Tour seven times. He is intensely focused. Honestly, man, this guy's unbelievable."
Similar incredulity rose up in his other friends as they adjusted to the new reality that, rather than being the local domestique of his past, Froome looks primed to follow a string of substantial victories this year by winning the Tour. Instead of regarding him as the reserved figure he cuts in Britain, where he is reduced to the polar opposite of the charismatic Wiggins, the tight-knit South African cycling community echoes with colourful insights into Froome. He is cherished here with the kind of fevour that enveloped Wiggins throughout 2012. Froome will never be an eccentric mod beloved in Britain like "Wiggo", but his links with Kenya, South Africa and the United Kingdom uncover his layered character and a compulsion to succeed against mighty odds.
I met Froome in January, soon after he had arrived for Team Sky's winter camp in Mallorca. He emerged as a warm and generous man – whose humility could not mask his fierce determination. His African past lit him up from the inside and, to me, made him more interesting than most in the Tour peloton.
Froome explained that he had learned to ride a mountain bike in the highlands above Nairobi alongside a dreadlocked rider called David Kinjah. In and around Kikuyu township, where Kinjah still lives among the tin huts, the black Kenyan passed on his enduring passion to an impressionable white boy. "Kinjah helped me see you didn't need the best bike or perfect conditions," Froome said. "You can just get on a bike and go – no matter where you are."
That simple truth, however, did not explain Froome's transformation. Some of his cycling allies in Johannesburg, where Froome had moved as a teenager when his parents sent him to boarding school, could not square his rise to the peak of European cycling with the endearing image they carried in their heads. Gareth Edwards, who now works as a television anchor, managed Froome's first real team, Super C, which they remember as a bunch of amateur riders in ill-fitting gear.
Froome was so poor seven years ago that he drove a battered white Golf with silver-tinted windows and wheels that didn't match. He looked nothing like the lean, shaven-headed pro who now leads Team Sky's black-clad phalanx of riders, tracked by their shiny Jaguars, towards another potentially historic win. Edwards, instead, recalls Froome as "a fluffy creature who drove to races in his wreck of a car. He had long, straggly hair and wore more bangles than a girl. Chris was fluent in Swahili and he dressed in clothing, made from hemp, in the colours of the Swahili people. He did not look like a future Tour de France winner."
His results on the South African circuit were mediocre. Edwards remembers flashes of brilliance when Froome would ride near the front before he got dropped. Yet most races were around Johannesburg, where the terrain is flat, and rarely stretched past 100 kilometres. Froome needed something more gruelling, like a European race, to reveal his winning capacity for suffering. He was also completing his bachelor of commerce degree and, cramming for his finals, he turned up for the Tour of Tzaneen with his text books.
His parents worried about his future for they did not see much point in bike-riding. Jane Froome had her doubts confirmed when, watching him ride for the first time in that same race, she saw her son being shelled from the back of the peloton. As Edwards drove the team car she asked him a gentle yet pointed question: "Is Chris any good at riding a bike?"
Edwards did not have a convincing answer; but he knew Froome was exceedingly bright and that "he smashed out the distinctions at university. Chris's intelligence is a huge factor in his career."
That intelligence has strengthened his bond with Tim Kerrison, Sky's deeply scientific head of performance. Clarity and rigour link Kerrison and Robbie Nilsen, the attorney who helped Froome unleash his intellect in the cycling domain when they started an under-23 team together at the Hi-Q cycling academy in Johannesburg.
The attorney and the student lost themselves in the science of cycling. Nilsen, who dreamed of one day coaching a South African in the Tour de France, offered Froome structure and a tangible intellectual partnership. They were fanatical about uncovering the secrets of sporting improvement and Nilsen recognised that "Chris had a hell of talent – but it was absolutely untapped. It felt as if we were doing these amazing field experiments to make him a much better rider. His true ability started to emerge."
Froome was amusing when describing to me his chaotic debut at the 2006 world under-23 championships. He had blagged his way into the event by using the Kenyan cycling association's Hotmail account to log his entry as the country's sole rider. Arriving alone in Salzburg, and carrying his bikes and bags, he got lost in the rain. Froome's sodden map fell apart and he was 20 minutes late for the managers' meeting where officials reacted suspiciously. It took Froome a while to convince them he was Kenya's 'manager'.
"The next day," Froome remembered, "and 150m into the time-trial, I rode straight into a commissaire holding a bunch of papers which went flying in the air. Both of us hit the ground. It was quite a start to European racing."
Froome's big chance came a year later. Robbie Hunter, the first South African rider in the Tour de France, wanted to include a local colleague in his new team. So, in 2008, Froome joined Barloworld, a ramshackle South African-financed team led by Hunter, and began to thrive within the hard world of European cycling. After riding the Paris-Roubaix classic, he startled Nilsen by insisting that the infamous cobbles were "the easy part". That ability to withstand pain underlined the fortitude that will sustain Froome over the next three weeks of racing.
His unexpected Tour debut followed a return to Kenya for his mother's funeral in June 2008. She had died from cancer a few weeks earlier and Froome had not seen her for a long time.
Yet his grief was turned inside out when Nilsen confirmed his surprise inclusion in Barloworld's Tour team. Nilsen had just 10 days to devise "a crash-course programme" to prepare Froome.
If he remembers being "in the gruppetto [the back of the peloton] most days", Froome finished 14th in the time-trial and climbed authoritatively with the leaders up Alpe d'Huez. He told Nilsen that, despite the Tour's shattering demands, he had never felt alone. The memory of his mother, and a talented young South African cyclist called Edwin Cocks, who had died in 2004, drove him on through the ordeal.
Hunter was so impressed he suggested to Blem, who had just left Barloworld as chief mechanic, that "Froome could win the Tour one day".
It was a bold prediction that Nilsen would eventually endorse. Froome missed the next three Tours because, undetected by European doctors, he was ill with bilharzia – a parasitic disease he had caught in Africa. His performances for his new team at Sky were so inconsistent that Froome seemed in danger of being axed. It was only when visiting Kenya that, before a routine UCI blood passport test, Froome asked the doctor to see if he could identify a cause of his mysterious exhaustion and sickness. The Kenyan blood tests proved that Froome was riddled with bilharzia.
In the exact opposite of a drug like EPO, bilharzia destroys red blood cells and so Nilsen was stunned by Froome's ability to keep riding despite the debilitating disease. He told his friend that, restored to full health, he would win the Tour de France. "Chris just looked at me and said: 'Are you serious?'" Nilsen recalls. "I had no doubt."
His breakthrough second place at the 2011 Tour of Spain was unsurprising to those who knew him best. Froome entered the Vuelta as Sky's main domestique but he beat Wiggins in his time-trial speciality and, in the mountains, was superior to climbers such as Vincenzo Nibali and Joaquim Rodríguez. Nilsen, who still looks after Froome's contracts, is convinced he would have won the Vuelta if he had not been forced to hold back in the early stages to protect Wiggins.
The same scenario unfolded during last year's Tour when Wiggins appeared unable to keep pace with Froome on two mountain stages. Froome obeyed team orders to drop back. "Chris could have ridden away from Brad," says Blem, who again looked after Wiggins's bikes during his illness-stricken Giro d'Italia in May. "But I have so much respect for Sean Yates [then Sky's directeur sportif] because he stuck to the plan. We were there to win the Tour and it was vital that Brad, a pure Brit, won."
Froome has always held a British passport– his father is English and his mother's parents emigrated from the UK to Kenya – but his nationality matters less than his ability and dedication. In the past five months he has won the Tour of Oman, the Critérium International, the Tour de Romandie and the Critérium du Dauphiné in imperious style.
Yet, for Blem, the real marker of Froome's readiness came in the only race he did not win this year. At the Tirreno-Adriatico in March, where he finished second to Nibali, Froome won the fourth stage after overcoming an attack led by Contador on the final climb to Prati di Tivo.
"He told me it was his worst day on the bike," Blem says, "but when he saw Contador up the road there was no way he was letting him go. He went after him and won that stage. I said to him: 'You've just beaten Contador on your bad legs, when you felt like crap. Imagine what you could've done on a good day.'"
Last year, unlike Wiggins, Froome constantly tinkered with his bike's set-up. Most nights on the Tour he texted Blem politely, asking him to raise his saddle or lower the stem by a few millimetres. Froome would then bring his own tape measure to check the precision of his request. This year Froome is more settled. "And he's not volatile like Cav," Blem says. "Chris will never shout or scream. He's always humble and grateful and we love working with him."
That same affection for Froome, and a deeper understanding of his character, might spread from Africa to Europe over the next tumultuous few weeks. His oldest friends, meanwhile, are planning private celebrations – with a comic twist that suits Froome's tangled past.
Edwards, his first manager, chuckles darkly. "As soon as he takes off his helmet and we hear that accent we'll believe that, rather than just the next Tour de France winner, it's our old buddy. I said to him: 'Froome, if you win it I'm opening up a bank account in the Cayman Islands. I'm holding photos I have of you with your long hair and ill-fitting cycling gear as hostage. I'm going to threaten you with photo releases. This will be blackmail of the highest order.'"
It could also be a landmark moment if a rider shaped in Africa, made in Europe and defined by Team Sky becomes the second straight British winner of the Tour. National identity might be a shifting concept but Froome's African roots and British descent are inextricably entwined. Over the next few weeks those who have followed him longest will relish the thought that Jane Froome's son, the once long-haired driver of a rickety old car, can ride a bike better than anyone else in the Tour de France. Reported by guardian.co.uk 4 hours ago.