Inside Team Sky (23 page)

‘Froomey, to me, he is Kenyan, a hundred per cent Kenyan, and I would love to tell everybody. I’ve discussed this with him. You know I’ve said to him, “Listen, well done,
this is great for African cycling.”’

When Froome rode his first Tour in 2008 he did so with a little Kenyan flag stitched into his
dossard
. Last year when Bradley Wiggins conquered France he had a small mod symbol stuck to
his bike. Blem wanted something which would personalise his friend’s bike and maybe even inspire him a little.

‘I wanted to let him know that there is actually a whole continent that is supporting him, you know; apart from the UK and the British ties to the team, he’s got a whole continent
that’s actually supporting him out there. And that’s why I had a few little inspirational stickers made, I know it’s small but it’s, it’s just something that if he
looks down and he’s suffering he can remember, maybe his mother even, in a sense. Or his roots. It’s just small things, you know, you never know if it will do anything for him or not
but . . .’

He settled for symbols rather than words. The centre of the Kenyan flag bears a Masai shield with spears. Giving more thought to the gesture than the average mechanic would give to a Christmas
present for a spouse, Blem had a sticker made first of the shield and spears in the colours which appear on the Kenyan flag. He then had a shield and spears made predominantly in the colour yellow
for when Chris Froome’s jersey colour inevitably changed during the Tour. He also had a little sticker made up in the colours of the Kenyan flag, but in the shape of the nation itself.

Froome was moved but wondered about such an expression of individuality within a team which discourages it. ‘Don’t you think I might get into shit for this, you know?’ Gary
Blem told his friend that if he had any doubts the bike would be stripped of its new decoration instantly. Froome shook his head.

‘Ah no, screw it, leave it, I’ll keep it on my bike.’ So today Chris Froome – reared in Kenya, educated in South Africa, resident in Monaco, and passport holder of
Britain – rides up Mont Ventoux with a Masai shield and spears on his bike, reminding him of where the story began. He is the boy from the Ngong Hills. The pale
mzungu
on the bike
too small for his spidery legs.

It is a still, oven-hot Provençal day. The peloton has learned the hard way that Team Sky like to ride at high tempo and drop challengers off the back with accelerated
bursts. There is only one response. To do the same. Or die trying. To string the black jerseys out, isolating them, letting each Sky rider do his own hard toting to nobody’s benefit but his
own.

So they leave Givors at a furious pace, about fifteen minutes before eleven in the morning. There are breaks from the start. Philippe Gilbert [BMC] and Lieuwe Westra [VCD] are hauled back after
a few kilometres. Three more race ahead without saying goodbye at 16km. Nothing doing. Katusha, the Russian team, are bullying the peloton along at top speed and the breakaways flare briefly before
dying.

An escape committee of ten gets away; a disparate group of individuals, a talented
rouleur
, a few useful
équipiers
, but no one worries the big guns keen to keep their
powder dry in the peloton. So the gap stays at just over a minute for a time; the elastic between the escapees and the pack taut. Then it snaps and the lead is 7 minutes.

Dave Brailsford travels on this 242km stage on the team bus, as does the doctor Alan Farrell and the physiotherapist Dan Guillemette. They watch the race on the decent-sized television at the
front which will be replaced by the big screen pulled from the ceiling once the bus has stopped.

The first hour of the race has been ridden at an average speed of 48.2kmh, the second at an even more punishing 50.4kmh. For a day which is going to take almost six hours and finish with the
ascent of Ventoux, this is too fast. So when the ten breakaways begin to increase their advantage, Brailsford kicks back.

‘We can relax a little bit now, let those guys build up a lead before reeling them in as we get closer to the beginning of the climb. What we didn’t want was for this attacking and
counter-attacking to continue, and then some dangerous people getting in breaks.’

But on Bastille Day, order can’t be maintained for long. For this is
le quatorze Juillet
, the day the French must show themselves. No one expects a home winner of the Centenary
Tour de France but, perhaps today, there can be a local hero. Five of the twenty-two teams in the race are French but only three are represented in the breakaway group.
Quel dommage
for
Europcar and Cofidis!

They have missed out and, of course, they then try to salvage the wreck of their day. Europcar’s best rider, Pierre Rolland, counter-attacks with the German Marcus Burghardt. They are in
turn chased by Cofidis’s Christophe Le Mével. Wearing the polka-dot jersey of mountains leader, Rolland chases for a long time, and gets to within 15 seconds of the breakaways.

Brailsford has a vested interest in the outcome of this race-within-a-race, and from his seat at the front of the team bus, he leans forward, animated. On days like this his chimp can feel
he’s back in the zoo at feeding time. ‘Go on, Rolland, you’re there, just one more bit.’ But the final bit is the hardest. Rolland can’t close and the gap begins to
widen again.

‘Shit,’ says Brailsford. ‘Rolland will sit up now, wait for his team and they will start chasing the break which is what we don’t want. But this is fairly typical of
Europcar, they miss their opportunity, they then try to get the break back and they piss off a lot of people. What we want is for the leaders to stay away, with our guys chipping away at the lead
until it all comes together at the foot of Ventoux. Then let the strong guys sort themselves out.’

Rolland does sit up, the pack devours him and then Europcar’s green jerseys are massed at the front, trying to save their honour. Brailsford thinks it’s all a waste of time, which it
is, but he lived in St Etienne for three years and learned to understand the mentality and the culture. So despite the protestations, he knows.

On Bastille Day, no Frenchman takes defeat lying down.

This is how to behave, Gary Blem believes. With respect and consideration. The way that Chris Froome behaves. Guy like that, with his politeness and his steel always wrapped in
velvet? Men will walk the line for him.

Gary with his shoulder-length hair. When you see him first you wonder if perhaps he won’t be the rebel digit in Dave Brailsford’s complex equation for success, but his loyalty runs
deep. There are things he likes and dislikes about the environment he is in, but the big picture never eludes him. Today he has watched young Pete Kennaugh put in a tough, tough shift and he
admires him for it. Kennaugh is young and he still wants to tackle the world and wrestle it to the floor. Søren Kristiansen, the team chef, complains that Kennaugh has been short and
disrespectful towards him, but Søren, a Dane, has never lived on the Isle of Man.

And Kennaugh has that thing, that edge his fellow Manxman, Mark Cavendish has, a belief that he is the best and the strongest. And by the way, everybody else is wrong.

Blem watches and tolerates. But there is a line he doesn’t like to see crossed.

‘There’s a point you know, I leave them in the race because in the race they always stress, but, after the race if the rider’s still got the same attitude, straight away
I’ll put them in their place. But in a nice way. I’ll speak to them and say, “Look, what is your issue? If you have a problem with me, tell me straight and I can always organise
someone else to look after you or whatever, but at the end of the day we need to work together.” It’s about respect.’

And that’s how he gets through the long days. Team Sky isn’t an outfit that does high fives. Certainly not without cleaning their hands with alcohol rub immediately afterwards. The
idea is to keep the emotion in check. Let the computer run the race. The chimp inside you can celebrate in Paris.

So this Chris Froome. He’s the guy who came with his girlfriend Michelle to Gary’s barbecue back in Pretoria last November. The guy who played with Gary’s baby daughter Hannah
and who never spoke about cycling.

‘An average human being. Nothing special. You know?’

As Ventoux looms, the affairs of the breakaways become less relevant. Their expiry date comes in the trees of the foothills, reeled in like a fish on the end of a line. This
doesn’t happen without a last nervous twitch from the dying French challenge. Sylvain Chavanel counter-attacks from the fragmenting lead group, as if somehow he can stay ahead of the tidal
wave surging towards him. Futile.

The serious business will go down in the group surrounding Froome and his yellow jersey. There he has Richie Porte and Pete Kennaugh for protection and another twenty-three riders eyeing his top
like vultures. Among them: 2011 champion Cadel Evans; the two Saxo-Tinkoff riders Alberto Contador and his sidekick Roman Kreuziger; the two Movistars Alejandro Valverde and Nairo Quintana; the
Belkins Bauke Mollema and Laurens ten Dam; and Garmin’s Dan Martin.

The plan to isolate and exhaust Froome before Mont Ventoux has not been a success. It is time for Plan B. Ventoux’s first 5km are cruelly gentle, because the 16km of climbing that follow
are murderously steep. Much of the middle section, with its 8 to 10 per cent gradients, is lined with trees that offer protection from the sun. But then you leave the forest and come out onto the
famous scree slopes, with the weather tower on top and the micro climate which makes this place different from most places on earth.

With more than 200km in their legs, even the modest early slopes claim good men. Rolland who had fought so valiantly for Europcar drops like a stone, as does the talented young American Tejay
van Garderen, who should be doing better. Also feeling the hard tug of gravity is Andy Schleck, who enjoyed greater success on this climb four years ago when he and his brother Frank slugged it out
with Contador on the penultimate stage of the race.

The first sign of a Plan B comes from the precocious young Colombian Quintana. It’s an oddity of Tour coverage that any Colombian doing anything impressive on the mountain stages is beyond
question, because like some sort of exotic species they are bred at altitude. Froome’s life at altitude in Nairobi and the Ngong Hills will not buy him any such exemption from suspicion. Few
even realise he was nurtured at altitude.

Anyway, with the smooth acceleration we will become accustomed to, Quintana breaks away with 10km to go. At this point Team Sky’s tough young Manx Pete Kennaugh is just about to clock off
his shift of hauling Froome through the early inclines.

Froome is a quiet and reserved man addicted to his pleases and thank yous, but through this terrain he needs tough cookies. Kennaugh is four years younger than Richie Porte, but climbs well and
isn’t afraid to get to the front of this elite group on one of the most brutal mountains and push on. Some of the guys complain he’s too headstrong and too lippy, but they know
he’s worth the effort.

Porte, the Tasmanian (or ‘the angry little man’ of the Tour, as Froome occasionally refers to his friend in jest), takes over at this point. He ups the tempo. Riders fall off the
back, but it is still the Sky way, chipping away at the breakaway’s advantage without going into the red zone to do so.

Froome has such an air of formality about him sometimes that you almost expect him to stop the bike to shake Kennaugh’s hand, thank him for his sterling work and wish him a safe journey to
the top, but instead he and Porte maintain the same relentless tempo. So strong, that now every other member of their elite group has been burned off. It’s the two of them bearing down on the
Colombian.

There are moments in any Tour de France that are pivotal and this is one of them. Froome isn’t making a swashbuckling solo pursuit of the Colombian. His comrade Porte is calmly leading him
to his prey. ‘Froomey, I will bring you to him, then you deal with him.’

Soon Quintana is in their sights, the picture of his back and behind growing bigger with each pedal stroke. They join up and take a little breather, giving Contador an opportunity to come from a
little behind and make the leaders a group of four. Buoyed by this little victory, the Spaniard will think that maybe he can do something now, but Froome knows Quintana is the greater threat.

There is an arresting theatrical drama about Ventoux when the riders get to the top of the tree line and come out into the blinding light of the moonscape beyond. It is a mountain built to stage
final acts.

This final act begins with Froome attacking and leaving everybody for dead except Quintana. Tactically it is a master class, and illustrates how much wisdom Team Sky have been able to plant in
Froome’s head these past few years. The younger, straight out of Africa, Froome would have chased down every break of the day before finding himself out of gas.

Or on another day from the early years he would have looked around him, taking in all the big names, and decided his only chance was to attack from far out, when they weren’t paying much
attention. They would think he was mad and do what bike riders have done since 1903: give him enough rope to hang himself. He would often get a good placing on the stage but would have emptied his
tank to do so. The next day, he would sleep with the fishes.

But here on Ventoux, he is calculating, waiting for the right moment. And his understanding of the perfect strategic climb is no coincidence. Froome has climbed Ventoux before. Twice.

Back in May, Chris came to the mountain to film an episode of
The Ride
, organised by Eurosport and Oakley. One amateur, a Norwegian competition winner named Jonas, would climb with two
pros: Sean Kelly, former Irish pro cyclist and 1982 Tour de France stage winner; and this year’s hot favourite, the Kenyan man of the mountains.

Along the route Sean recalled his experiences on the inclines, where he attacked and where he struggled. The pace was steady despite Sean attacking from a little way out and a valiant attack in
the final stages by the Norwegian amateur on the year’s most hotly tipped pro. Still, Froome yearned for a harder ride, for a proper go at the climb he would have to repeat in the Tour just
two months away.