Inside Team Sky (20 page)

He is a serious man with a good sense of humour. A card-carrying Brit with an African heart. A leader who always says please and thank you. Even when he texts his friend Gary Blem for an
alteration to his bike, he makes it sound as though Gary will be donating a kidney which might save Chris’s life.

Cycling, though, awakens the general public once a year when the Tour starts and people are torn between the sunflowers of rural France and the strawberries and cream of Wimbledon. It takes a
long time for a quiet man to impress himself on the minds of the greater public. Even longer when the acrid smoke of the drug wars still distorts our way of seeing everything to do with the
sport.

If you are wised up and street savvy and reckon that you won’t get fooled again then there are certain givens about Chris Froome. Be honest, you hold them dear.

You know, for instance, that he once had to be towed over the top of a mountain in Italy. And not when driving his car. Enough said. And last week he was riding kiddies’ bikes around Kenya
and singing the ‘Up With People’ theme song as he went. Now he has the
maillot jaune
. What’s that all about?

While we are talking, let’s just point out that Froome’s cadence is an abomination to all right-thinking people and will hasten the apocalypse. And his bilharzia (so we’re told
but you’re not buying it) is his sooo convenient response to Lance’s missing testicle.

His partner Michelle Cound takes no prisoners on Twitter. She wears the lycra shorts in that house. And anyway, Chris Froome rides for a team whose motorised transportation choices alone
announce them as the axis of evil. Everybody knows that the team Chris Froome rides for has a golden syringe which they unsheathe every sunset, like Excalibur. The golden syringe is for
Froome’s use only. Not nice.

It’s a movie script, this story they are selling. Tarzan does the Tour. You’re not having any of it.

It may transpire in years to come that some of these things which you believe to be true are actually true. I don’t think they will, but it would be derelict today for any journalist not
to ask questions. Yet to close the mind off to the possibility that this is an interesting man, a man with a great story and an outlier in his sport – that would be to let Lance Armstrong win
twice. That would be to let Lance’s toxic cynicism enter your skin and your system like the waterborne parasite that you say Chris so conveniently suffers from. You once loved this sport and
when Lance turned out to be a phoney it hurt. So now you feel safer believing in nothing than believing anything. So Lance wins again.

In the house of Team Sky they expect you to look around. They want you to believe. Well, so did Lance, you say. He wanted us to believe. Team Sky expect you to ask questions. Smart, intelligent
questions. Well, actually, Lance didn’t want that. Team Sky simmer with frustration that all the good things they do weigh as nothing on the scales of perception compared to the mistakes they
make. Lance didn’t own a set of scales. Not for that purpose anyway.

So here he is, Chris Froome on Stage Thirteen of the Tour de France today wearing the yellow jersey. He is 3 minutes and 25 seconds ahead of Alejandro Valverde in the General
Classification as the riders mill about the start in Tours. Behind Valverde lie Bauke Mollema, Alberto Contador and Roman Kreuziger. All in pounce position.

Today’s stage isn’t billed as a game changer, but when we look back on it we can see that perhaps it has been. For the old Chris Froome this might have been the day to give it all
away. When he hit Europe first he had a talent which he didn’t know how to handle and a love of racing which wasn’t matched by any deep understanding of how to race.

In the end Mark Cavendish will win today’s stage, a 173km pull to Saint-Amand-Montrond, and it will be the twenty-fifth stage win of his career. The Manx sprinter will use the tactics of a
cuckoo riding off in a break with Alberto Contador’s Saxo-Tinkoff team before sprinting home. Cavendish, for all that his heart is forever beating luminously on his sleeve, has that street
savvy, especially when there’s a timing bridge at the end of the street.

Team Sky will have their own problems today. Down to seven riders now and one with a crack in his pelvis. Of the others, one is Froome and five are here to support Froome, but their willingness
to do so isn’t always matched by their ability or their energy. Still, the crisis has prompted Dave Brailsford to issue another of his business maxims. The fewer resources you have, he says,
the more resourceful you get. Dave should work in the newspaper business.

What is left in the Team Sky gang might well be wrung out of them by the time they reach the end of the neutral zone in Tours today – 14.5km to be ridden before racing proper begins.

That’s a long preamble. Time to think.

How did Chris Froome get here? Sift through his life story and calculate the odds on each passage leading to the next passage, ending up in Tours this morning wrapped in yellow. Impossible.

In the shorter term though, he started training to be in this place last winter when he was at home in Africa. Six-hour stints every day. He’d head out, sometimes to the Lowveld, and ride
hard for six hours at altitude. Over those lush mountain passes and peaks he’d picture the road he would be taking this summer. And he would push on. It’s the constant theme of the
journey that has got him to this place this morning. Chris Froome keeps on, keeping on.

On those African rides he was tended to by Stefan Legavre, a masseur who has worked with the Springboks but who has a love of cycling and turned his hands easily to the art of the
soigneur
. Otherwise they were lone ventures, this matchstick man on his sleek Italian Pinarello, sailing past the odd worker toiling over the handlebars of the ubiquitous black mamba bikes
of Africa.

Those sessions were typical of Froome and of Team Sky. When few in professional cycling are working, Team Sky are clocked in and the SRM details gathered on riders’ every training run are
being downloaded and whizzing down the wires to Tim Kerrison.

Froome jokes that his two brothers are both accountants and it was his fear of falling into that sort of life which sent him into pro cycling. In fact what he discovered is that there is
something inside him which refuses to quit or die.

‘I think a big part of it is a, it’s almost a ruthless . . . determination, desire.’

Stubbornness?

‘Stubborn. Yeah, I mean, I’ve found with my training, I’ve been very, very particular with my training, and I know it’s something that all my coaches sort of remind me of
is that, when I set a workout or I set a ride I’ll, say, ninety-nine per cent of the time, do exactly what’s been set out. It would be very rare that I get halfway through an effort and
I say, “Ah I don’t feel like doing it any more,” or anything. Even if I felt rubbish I’d turn myself inside out to do whatever I’d set out to do.’

So he goes out every day during that time of the year that many in the peloton consider to be holiday time and he leaves the soul of himself on the dark roads of South Africa. He never lets up
on himself. And the day he chooses for a quieter, shorter training he makes sure to eat less that day.

Froome spent a lot of time in the career neutral zone. Or so it seems at a cursory glance. We have never seen anybody arrive in the peloton with quite his back story so we aren’t too sure
what to measure it against. Perhaps he should have been an accountant like his brothers. The guy who turns out to be rather entertaining when you get talking to him at the office party, but who
says nothing for the rest of the year. Just another guy who keeps his dreams locked in a dusty box in the corner of his head.

There is an early escape today, once racing starts. There always is on these types of stage. Five or six guys making off like desperados. Or so they imagine. From outside the race they look like
plankton getting on with their day before the whale is roused. Still, one of the breakaways is Luis Angel Maté. A different kind of dreamer. It is fair to say that Maté has never seen
a break he didn’t like the look of. So he tucks in his hair braid and rides off with such optimism every day, like one of those persistent escapees in World War II films who always end up
back in the cooler but still dreaming. You would have to like him. And why shouldn’t Maté dream big? He’s twenty-nine and never going to win the Tour but one day the peloton
won’t quite catch the break and he’ll get a stage win.

Maté has five companions today. I wonder what exactly they talk about as they ride – great breakaways that nearly paid off, maybe this will be the day when the big bosses say,
‘Let those guys have it,’ or are their hearts heavy with fatalism? Maybe one breakaway in twenty will pay out big.
Directeurs sportifs
of smaller teams say if you’re not
in then you can’t win. Pragmatists say if you’re not in, you can’t lose. The dreamers go with each escape. And when they look at the man in yellow today, why not?

Still, whatever they talk about they must suspect that this is another day for the sprinters. Yesterday, Mark Cavendish had urine thrown at him by a spectator. His old friend Chris Froome
tweeted that such behaviour left a bad taste in the mouth. Especially Mark’s mouth. Cavendish has just a single stage win to his name so far on this Tour, which has seen him involved in far
more drama than he would have planned for. Marcel Kittel is the new sprinter on the block; even Cavendish has called him ‘the next big thing’.

But not so fast. Cav may not be at his best in this Tour, but he will get himself right and reclaim everything. He’s Mark Cavendish, serial winner, and not ready to leave the stage.

Wow. The peloton itself is riding with a Cavendish-like attitude today. The breakaway group gets caught with over 90km to ride and the serious pace is a rebuke for their temerity. The main
tyrants when it comes to punishing through pace today are Cav’s Omega Pharma-Quick Step who are really whipping things along, hoping their man will deliver at Saint-Amand-Montrond. At this
speed everybody is happy to follow the wheel in front.

Froome’s stubbornness and the sense of self-sufficiency he carries make him different. He recalls that from the time he was a young kid his upbringing was unique.
‘I was allowed to make my own decisions, I wasn’t sort of kept in a house and told, “Okay, these are the rules, don’t go outside, don’t speak to strangers,” or
anything like that. That sort of typical English upbringing, or a European upbringing would entail.

‘Even when I’d, sort of, leave home in the afternoons after school, on a bike, and then be back at night, that would have been when I was quite young. I think under ten, sort of
eight, nine, ten.’

Off to the townships or the Ngong Hills following David Kinjah and his dreadlocks. It was a perfect education in the old sense of the word. He absorbed a whole world. And as regards his
apprenticeship as a cyclist he grew up deficient in technique but pushing himself after older riders at an altitude of 1800m or so.

When he finished with boarding school in Johannesburg he went to university and, though he churned out good results, he regrets having spent yet more time dawdling in the neutral zone.

‘Yeah. I mean I was trying to get the degree behind me before going off and doing anything, but, I just got offered the opportunity I think a little bit earlier and I thought,
“Right, I’m going to go for it now and see where I get to, and if it does fail then I’ll come back to the studies.” But, it certainly would have made my life a lot easier if
I’d switched, just focused on the cycling straight after finishing school, instead of going on and doing another year.’

So people say he can’t be as good and as clean as he seems because his progress wasn’t signposted a long way back along the road. It wasn’t. Not even to himself. When he and a
pal started an Under-23 team in Johannesburg, not even a decade ago, he is remembered for his lank hair and bangles, his clothes, often
kikoys
, made of hemp and dyed in the colours of the
Swahili race and his white Golf car with tinted silver windows. Everybody saw him coming. And nobody saw him coming.

The one thing he had then and which people commented on from the time he arrived in pro cycling with Barloworld, was his attitude. Chris Froome was a ‘training fundamentalist’.

His early years in Europe read like amusing misadventures, a comic strip of crashes and illnesses and training rides where he would get thoroughly lost. But those experiences were punctuated
with races. He learned from every one and when a team came along that believed there was more to be had from a £900,000 rider with a coach than a £1 million rider without one, Froome
was in the right place at the right time.

Timing. The ultimate good luck when it comes to beating the odds.

Interestingly, but not to Team Sky, the Lotto-Belisol sprinter Marcel Kittel has allowed himself to get dropped off the peloton as they come through the feeding zone. At
roughly the halfway mark, Kittel’s group is over a minute behind. The peloton are hammering it today. It doesn’t look good for a sprinter to be dropping out the back.

Now. Alejandro Valverde suffers a puncture. It costs him 37 seconds and what gets people talking immediately is the fact that Chris Froome doesn’t slow the entire peloton down to allow
Valverde to catch up those 37 seconds. The immediate reaction is less condemnation and more sympathy. Froome doesn’t look like he could take off his cape and place it over a puddle at the
moment. His chivalry levels aren’t the ones depleted.

There’s too much at stake here. Alberto Contador and his Saxo-Tinkoff teammates see an opportunity, so too the Belkin team of Bauke Mollema and Laurens ten Dam. Valverde is second overall
and if he’s not allowed to regain contact, there’s more space on the podium for everyone else. So Saxo and Belkin aren’t slowing.

Besides, given that Kittel is still in the chasing group, Cavendish’s Omega Pharma team and Peter Sagan’s Cannondale squad have good reason to keep the hammer down. Kittel’s
been winning and when a sprinter does that he ceases to be a rival. He becomes an enemy.