After spending winter at home in the pleasant summer temperatures of South Africa, Barloworld new boys Froome and Impey arrived for duty with the team in northern Italy in mid-January to the shock of proper wintry weather: sunless skies, clinging damp and sub-zero temperatures. Luckily they’d packed their winter woollies. ‘It took a while to get used to having to go out in two or three layers of clothing,’ said Froome.
Froome had signed a two-year deal with Barloworld. The team was sponsored by a South African multinational company, managed by Italians – with Italian as the lingua franca – but registered in Britain. It was a mix of often conflicting new and old cycling traditions, although there was a strong sense of camaraderie within the team.
While not a ProTour team, in the premier division of the sport, Barloworld’s status as a Professional Continental team meant they could manoeuvre for invitations to the prestigious spring Classics series in Belgium and the Netherlands, contest mid-level one-week stage races and vie with other second-tier teams to bag wild cards for the Grand Tours. Their case for securing last-minute entry to the three biggest stage races on the world cycling calendar – the Tours of Italy, France and Spain – had been strengthened by their exceptional Grand Tour debut at the 2007 Tour de France.
Little-known Colombian Mauricio Soler stunned the big guns of the climbing glitterati by winning the King of the Mountains’ polka-dot jersey and taking victory on Stage 9’s mountainous romp to Briançon. Hunter, the man instrumental in Froome’s arrival at the team, made a huge impression at the race with his swaggering win in Montpellier. He also finished second overall to Tom Boonen, Belgium’s classics specialist, and powerhouse rouleur, in the battle for the green points jersey for best sprinter.
The team’s sports director, Claudio Corti, was an avuncular, wily old-school Italian, a former professional, silver medallist at the 1984 World Championships in Barcelona and Italian national road champion in 1985 and 1986. With the Supermercati-Brianzoli-Chateau d’Ax team in 1990, in his first role as a sports director after retiring from racing, he led Gianni Bugno to victory at the Giro d’Italia.
In the team manager’s hot seat at Saeco, Corti forged his reputation as a latter-day cycling alchemist, guiding three more riders to the overall winner’s pink jersey in Milan: Ivan Gotti (1997), Gilberto Simoni (2003) and Damiano Cunego (2004). Completing Barloworld’s managerial line-up were Alberto Volpi (another ex-rider; tenth overall at the 1985 Giro d’Italia) and Valerio Tebaldi (a double Tour de France stage winner, in 1988 and 1989).
Corti had taken note of Froome’s sixth place overall with Konica-Minolta at the 2007 Giro del Capo, when his own rider, Alexander Efimkin, had taken overall victory in the South African race. Froome’s strong showing at the Tour of Britain confirmed Corti’s opinion, with Hunter’s endorsement persuading the Barloworld boss to offer the 22-year-old a deal.
‘I saw him in some races in 2007 and I was impressed with his physical attributes and his ability to stay with the top pros on difficult climbs,’ the unassuming Corti tells me in staccato English. The 58-year-old, originally from Bergamo, is currently general manager of Team Colombia, a Professional Continental team consisting predominantly of riders from the South American country.
Froome struck Corti as a serious individual, albeit ‘with a very nice character’, single-minded about what he wanted to achieve in cycling and bent on doing whatever it took to succeed. He was always asking questions, Corti says, and he was also a bit of a loner, which was no bad thing in the Italian’s opinion.
‘Chris had the right attitude to live the life of a pro,’ he explains. ‘He was happy to live alone and not just hang about with the other South Africans. He wanted to be by himself. It seemed to me that he was used to it, and he preferred to solve problems himself.’
Operating on a meagre budget, Team Barloworld’s set-up was slightly ramshackle, the training and dietary methods distinctly traditionalist, and, outwith training camps and races, the riders were largely left to their own devices, which suited the free-spirited Froome. But the pedigree of the team’s management – Corti’s reputation as a motivational man-manager was unquestionable – and riders was of a high standard, and they were riding the crest of a wave from the previous season. Added to that, the South African sponsors were ambitious for the future. Promotion from UCI ProContinental Team status to the top of the pile and a place in the eighteen-strong ProTeam division was Barloworld’s ultimate objective.
In late January new recruits Froome and Impey joined the team’s two other Africans, Hunter and John-Lee Augustyn, who, like Hunter, had been at Barloworld for one season already, at Marina di Bibbona on the Tuscan coast, for nine days of intense workouts at Barloworld’s first training camp of the new season.
Having moved from Kenya to South Africa, Belgium and Switzerland, now Froome was to call Italy home. The typical nomadic lifestyle of a professional cyclist can be a lonely, austere existence, an unremitting round of training, eating, sleeping, travelling and racing. Months on the road spent away from friends and family can be an emotional strain and a psychological burden, often acutely so for those hailing from distant continents such as Africa, Australasia …
The adjustment for Froome was not without difficulty. ‘Trying to set up in a new country, learn a new language – it was quite a shock in 2008. It was some first year as a neo-pro,’ he said.
In February Froome and his then girlfriend of three years, Andrea, chose as their Italian abode a small apartment on the outskirts of Chiari, a sleepy hamlet in the province of Brescia. The pretty town retains the shape of the original eleventh-century village, with canals tracing the line of the ancient walls and an attractive central square on the site of the old castle. Two key factors made Chiari the perfect base for the couple: the nearby Lombardy hills provided ideal terrain for Froome’s daily training rides, and its railway station enabled part-time model Andrea to chase work in the country’s fashion capital, Milan, a one-hour hop away.
Corti was pleased to see his new signing embrace life in Italy. ‘It showed he was a serious rider with clear ideas. I could tell he was content to stay and live in Italy. He rented a home and registered with the government, and he had a girlfriend.’
True to his lone-wolf instinct, Froome chose to live apart from the rest of the Barloworld riders, most of whom lived further north in Corti’s present-day base of Adro. Froome intentionally wanted to put some geographical space between himself and the rest of the team. He occasionally hooked up with teammates for the odd training ride and would call on Valerio Tebaldi when he wanted to do some motor pacing, but living apart from the gang appealed to his solitary nature and penchant for long, punishing solo rides.
‘I sometimes meet up with others but I honestly prefer to ride alone when I’m doing special workouts or even long rides,’ Froome said at the time. ‘It’s a very satisfying feeling to do a six-hour or seven-hour ride on your own.’ Those punishing solitary rides prompted Alberto Volpi to describe him as a ‘training fundamentalist’.
His only company would be his iPod, loaded with pulsing electronic dance music, with mixes by the likes of Dutch superstar DJ, Tiësto. ‘I don’t listen to stuff like that at home, but it’s good to have a beat to ride to when you’re on the bike,’ he said. Back in the village, the tall, pale foreigners were anonymous to the locals. No one knew Froome was a professional cyclist. The incognito lifestyle suited him just fine. ‘Northern Italy is a great place for a professional cyclist to live,’ he said. ‘The food, roads and weather are fantastic.’
His ‘special workouts’ invariably took him north of Chiari, through fields of high sweet corn and fruit trees, under the Milan–Venice autostrada towards Sarnico, on the southern tip of Lake Iseo, and on to a 30km route, popular with pro and amateur cyclists from the Brescia area. He would circumnavigate the lake clockwise before taking a detour up into the hills. Through the foreboding darkness of the long tunnel between Predore and Gallinarga that skirts the edge of the lush Parco del Corno di Predore, Froome would habitually hang a left at the lakeside village of Tavernola Bergamasca and climb the squiggle of narrow, hairpin switchbacks, up through green fields to the tiny village of Vigolo, with its breathtaking views over the lake.
Intent on enhancing his climbing power, Froome would use these long intervals in the hills above Lake Iseo to form the backbone of his training programme. He would ordinarily push himself to his anaerobic threshold and beyond, riding the whole way up the 8km climb out of the saddle, hovering on the very edge of his limit. ‘I try and do twenty-minute climbing intervals, riding at my heart-rate threshold of 150 until I get to almost the top of the climb and then I go over a little bit.
‘I follow my training programmes very closely and build them around events and key races. I try and mimic key parts of the race, so that I can adapt to it and handle it when I’m in the actual race.’
Due to ride a packed spring schedule of hilly Classics, like Amstel Gold and Liège–Bastogne–Liège, Froome worked hard in the early months of 2008 to reach peak form for April with multiple repetitions of 2km and 3km climbs.
From Vigolo, Froome’s regular early-season training run took him along the Strada Provinciale 78 to Parzanica and a spectacular descent to the glimmering water below, slaloming down a dozen zigzags, past Acquaiolo, to emerge finally at a cement works (the only blot on the beautiful landscape) back on the shore of Lake Iseo. The steep plunge to the lake enabled him to work on his, still wobbly, descending skills.
There would be no easing off on the final leg home, and he would invariably hit warp speed back to Chiari, grimacing with pain as the dial reached 65kph. The hard toil and concentrated effort were necessary if he were to achieve the glittering goal he had pinpointed for his first year at Barloworld.
‘I was told at the beginning of the year that riding the Tour de France was possible, but it was not 100%,’ Froome said. Could the 22-year-old really hope to be selected for the biggest race in the world in his debut season as a pro? With this tantalising prospect prominent in his mind he combined the short, punchy climbs with long-distance rides up into the mountains east towards Lake Endine and even further north to Clusone, often totalling 170km, so he could maintain a solid endurance base beyond spring and into the summer months.
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‘Biff, bang, wallop!’ read the 10 February 2008 headline in an online piece in the Star, one of South Africa’s biggest daily newspapers. Team Barloworld chose to make the inaugural Intaka Tech World’s View Challenge its first race of the season in early February. The UCI 1.1-ranked series was made up of five one-day races with different routes and distances each day, over 588km in total, through the rolling terrain of South Africa. The riders would enjoy a rest day between race days three and four. Having just got out of Africa, Froome, along with Hunter, Impey and Augustyn, was back in familiar territory. And it was a typically Froomean debut – a display of his entire racing repertoire from the sublime to the ridiculous.
The opening stage took place on an undulating circuit in and around Pietermaritzburg, 80km inland from Durban. In a frantic day of racing, which was marked by a peloton splintered by a series of breaks and dynamic intermediary sprints, Froome lost over seventeen minutes. On the second day he dropped out due to the tar-meltingly hot conditions, with temperatures hitting 48 degrees. He wasn’t alone: 75 out of 99 starters wilted in the desert heat on the 127.4km Thornville–Polyshorts Circuit.
Froome found his racing legs on Stage 3, but then, not for the first, or last, time in his fledgling career, a tendency for space-cadet behaviour emerged in a bizarre finish. It had all been looking so good for Froome on the third day of hard racing through the lush countryside around Wartburg, New Hanover and Dalton. He launched an attack 60km into the 108km stage and was joined by Milram’s Martin Velits and MTN Energade’s Ian McLeod. The trio built up a lead of three and a half minutes on the bunch, before Liquigas put six riders on the front of the peloton to crank up the pace and haul back their advantage.
Barloworld boss Corti gave Froome instructions not to work with Velits and McLeod and save his legs for the final climb, 10km from the finish. The plan worked a treat as Froome took flight, dancing away from his break partners over the summit of Copes Folly before descending from the lush upland savannah down to Pietermaritzburg. It was a bold move, tactically astute – the pursuing peloton were running out of road – and now Froome was about to reap the rewards of a satisfying day in the saddle. With Velits and McLeod blown off his back wheel, all he had to do was stay on his bike in the final stretch and the stage win was surely in the bag.
With less than 100m to go, Froome sat up in the saddle to zip up his jersey – it was flapping open to cool his sweat-soaked torso in the late-afternoon heat – to ensure the sponsor’s logo, Barloworld, was visible to the gaggle of photographers eagerly waiting to snap him as he crossed the finish line. But, at the exact moment he was making himself presentable, there was an almighty whooosh, as the head of the chasing bunch, a furious blur of legs and pedals engulfed in a dust cloud, conjured itself out of nowhere. In the final kilometre someone in the crowd had shouted to Froome that he had a two-minute gap on the bunch. With 100m to go, the gap had vaporised.
Teammate Robbie Hunter must have given Froome the fright of his life as he hurtled past to win the sprint ahead of Milram’s Björn Schröder and Konica-Minolta’s Christoff van Heerden. Daryl Impey crashed in the mêlée as three riders sought to avoid hitting Froome, hogging the middle of the road – ‘Look, Mum, no hands!’ – and dawdling towards the line. The startled Froome rolled over the finish line in seventh. ‘Yes, I thought I had won and I sat up in the final hundred metres,’ said a sheepish Froome afterwards. ‘I got a big shock when they came around me.’
‘That would have made a great picture: three guys from the same team in the finish straight – one zipping up his jersey too soon, another celebrating a win and another flying through the air as he crashed,’ Impey said with a laugh afterwards, his injuries fortunately not too serious.
Froome took the King of the Mountains jersey but he knew he had just blown the chance to win a UCI-ranked 1.1 race on his professional debut. It was a lesson learned. After a quiet day on Stage 4, he skipped the final stage of the series from Edendale to Cedara.
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Looney Tunes-style cartoon antics aside, it had been a promising start to the 2008 season for Froome, and Barloworld were back in South Africa in early March, and in Cape Town to defend their Giro del Capo crown, won the previous year by Efimkin, the Russian who had since departed to Quick Step.
Despite the searing heat, Froome rode consistently from seventh place on the opening stage in Wellington on 4 March all the way through to the final short time trial in Camps Bay. He even fulfilled domestique duties for teammate Christian Pfannberger on Stages 2 and 3, again in sweltering conditions that would have floored a camel, to help the Austrian champion protect the narrow race lead he had established by winning Stage 1 in Wellington.
Froome diligently ushered Pfannberger through the penultimate leg around Stellenbosch, taking in the tricky climb of Helshoogte Pass, to all but seal victory for his teammate. Only 5.5km of racing remained in the final day’s time trial.
Barloworld swept the board in Camps Bay – Pfannberger took third behind Team MTN’s David George in the ITT to clinch the team’s second consecutive overall victory, picking up the points jersey in the process. Froome’s seventh position in the race against the clock catapulted him into second on the GC.
Victory in the team classification and an unlikely King of the Mountains prize for sprinter Hunter rounded off a highly successful week for Corti’s men.
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Froome’s heady debut pro season continued apace in March with another encouraging performance in Portugal at the Volta ao Santarém, where he claimed the young rider’s jersey and sixth place overall. There then followed a below par showing at the Critérium International, where he trailed home in 46th place, 9:07 behind the winner Jens Voigt.
A daunting, jam-packed racing programme awaited Froome in April. He was about to be pitched headlong into the deep end of the toughest, most prestigious, most historic series of one-day races in the cycling calendar, the Spring Classics.
Claudio Corti sent a team to the Tour of Flanders, the traditional curtain-raiser of the run of six Classics, but Froome was not selected. The Italian decided Froome’s introduction into a world of uncompromising hardmen careering over perilous cobbled roads would begin at Gent–Wevelgem, inserted between Flanders and Paris–Roubaix. The race is not officially a Classic; it’s ranked one below, but in the hors catégorie class. At 209km it was over 50km shorter than the Tour of Flanders, although often run along many of the same roads as its more illustrious cousin.
At the 8km mark Froome had the chance to wave to his old Konica-Minolta barracks as the race passed through Tielt. After that, Óscar Freire became the first Spanish winner of the race, sprinting clear of the bunch in the final 250m. Froome negotiated the dastardly obstacles of his first major Belgian race – including the cobbled, brutally steep incline of the Kemmelberg, climbed not once, but twice, and the double ascent of the equally nasty Monteberg tossed in for good measure – and came home in one piece, in a large group nearly five minutes down on Freire, in 121st.
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Next up was the most coveted and most brutal one-day Classic of them all. Paris–Roubaix had garnered many nicknames since it was first staged in 1896 to publicise a newly built velodrome in an industrial suburb of Lille: the ‘Queen of Classics’, La Pascale (the Easter race) or simply the ‘Hell of the North’. Miguel Indurain, the Spanish champion at the height of his powers, steered well clear of Paris–Roubaix’s fierce inquisition. ‘Cycling’s last bit of madness,’ according to former Tour de France organiser Jacques Goddet. Chris Boardman preferred to be a spectator, saying, ‘I think it’s a circus. I can see why people enjoy watching it, but I don’t want to be one of the clowns.’
Steve Cummings, one of two British riders at Barloworld in 2008, along with the Welshman Geraint Thomas tells me that Froome had a sketchy grasp on the sport’s history: ‘Chris was really naïve and didn’t know that much about the Tour of Flanders or Paris–Roubaix.’
Froome was about to find out. History lessons aside, in the real world he was a natural stage racer, not a one-day rider. Still, he went along to the start line in Compiègne on 13 April to join 198 fellow riders under a suitably brooding sky, the road slick from an overnight drizzle.
There is no mention of Froome throughout the live rolling report of the 106th running of the race on the Cycling News website. In fact he didn’t even make it as far as the finish at the famous velodrome in Roubaix. The Hell of the North is merciless. An ability to suffer and absorb still more suffering is vital at Paris–Roubaix because the dreadful pounding on man and machine is relentless, the punctures frequent, the cobbles notoriously unpredictable to negotiate, pluming dust in dry conditions and mud when north-eastern France is at its most sullen.
Froome was there to help Barloworld’s two main hopes for success: Robbie Hunter and the Australian Baden Cooke, a sprinter and one-day race specialist. In his role as domestique he was obliged to sacrifice himself for his two teammates. This involved, among other things, stopping on several occasions to give replacement wheels from his own bike to Hunter and Cooke after they’d punctured.
In the dark depths of the Arenberg forest, the crooked pavé looks as though a madman has set upon it with a sledgehammer. On a wet day, the cobbles resemble giant polished ice-cubes encased in glutinous mud as thick as porridge. Navigating a safe passage over them on a racing bike is a unique skill, based on pushing a big gear, to smooth out some of the vibration, skimming across the surface like a pond-skating insect, for as long as your strength lasts, while trying to avoid the potholes and crashes, as riders all around come a cropper. A single rider losing control can cause an instant pile-up; if a rider punctures it can take several minutes to get a wheel change, because team cars get left way behind on the narrow pavé sections as the race gets strung out.
Each time Froome gifted a wheel to Hunter or Cooke, he’d have to hang about at the side of the road waiting for his team car to catch up. Then he’d take flight again to try and bridge the gap to the front of the race. His race came to an abrupt end, within 50km of the finish and while in a select group alongside Cooke (Hunter had by then dropped out; Cooke would go on to finish 31st, 11:08 behind second-time winner Tom Boonen), through a Froome-esque stroke of bad luck. Forced again into offering Cooke a wheel, and after getting a replacement for himself, he set off to give chase only to swing round a sharp corner and crash headlong into the back of a stationary commissaire’s car, snagged in a race-traffic jam.
After the race Froome had bruises and welts on his hands from the cobbles buffeting his bike, like a road worker doing an eight-hour pneumatic drilling shift without gloves. Years later, when asked to name his favourite race he replied, ‘Although it doesn’t really suit my style at the moment, I’d have to say Paris–Roubaix.’
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Three days later, wounds barely healed, Froome was in the thick of it once more at the Scheldeprijs Vlaanderen, the oldest cycle race in Flanders, a 207km career round Antwerp including seven treacherous cobbled sections. This is the last race for many of the Classics riders who build their season around the Tour of Flanders and Paris–Roubaix. Froome stayed out of trouble to finish a creditable 22nd, in the main peloton. Mark Cavendish spoiled Paris–Roubaix champion Tom Boonen’s party on the finishing straight in Schoten, making a late lunge to steal the win.
Froome and Barloworld left the cobbles behind them, probably with some relief, and headed to Holland for the first in a trio of races dubbed the Ardennes Classics: Amstel Gold, La Flèche Wallonne and Liège–Bastogne–Liège. Considering the punishing schedule of six energy-sapping races in the space of nineteen days, Froome fared worse over the hilly courses of Limburg and Ardennes.
The three classics are shoe-horned into a week, Sunday to Sunday, Flèche Wallonne on Wednesday, sandwiched between the newcomer Amstel, established in 1966, and the race known as La Doyenne, Liège–Bastogne–Liège, the oldest in the spring Classics calendar, dating from 1892. The Amstel parcours (course), through the Dutch Limburg, 257 twisty-turny kilometres, 30 inclines, innumerable geometry-defying bends, did not suit Froome’s climbing abilities. He crawled to the finish up the final climb of the notorious Cauberg in 139th place, in an eleven-man gruppetto[6] nearly twenty minutes behind surprise winner, the Italian Damiano Cunego.
In their preview of Flèche Wallonne, Cycling Weekly magazine gleefully announced that ‘Chris Froome, the 22-year-old Barloworld climber who used to ride for Kenya is now a bona fide Brit. He’s even listed on the official start sheet as a British rider. So hands off him, he’s ours.’
It appeared that in the short window of three days between Amstel Gold and Flèche Wallonne the paperwork had finally come through, thanks to the diligent efforts of Doug Dailey at British Cycling, for Froome to officially trade his Kenyan racing licence for a British one.
Before he could be granted a British racing licence by the UCI he had to officially hand back his Kenyan passport. This proved to be a trickier proposition than Froome first imagined. Initially the Kenyan authorities wouldn’t accept it, claiming they didn’t have the correct paperwork (what amounted to a simple receipt). But he didn’t want to surrender his passport without the proof he required for the UCI. Again, Froome found an ingenious solution to the problem when he was back in South Africa over the winter of 2007/08.
Dailey chuckles at the memory: ‘He’s a bright, resourceful guy, so he actually drew up his own affidavit, went along to the Kenyan embassy in Pretoria, handed in his passport and then gave them the paperwork to sign.’
With Froome’s British racing licence in place at the start of the Olympic year, undeniable proof that he was eligible to ride for Great Britain, Dailey set in motion the tedious process of getting the British Olympic Committee to negotiate with their Kenyan counterparts to waive the three-year rule[7] and allow Froome to be available for selection for Team GB at the 2008 Beijing Games.
Cycling Weekly’s Flèche preview also mentioned the hilltop finale of the race, the Mur de Huy, a fearsome 1,300m climb with an 18% gradient, describing it as being ‘like the equivalent of a Tour de France sprint finish in super slo-mo’. The winner is normally a punchy climber, nimble on the steep Ardennes hills, but forceful on the flat and possessing enough zip in their legs to accelerate up the Mur – the kind of rider the Italians call a scattista. The kind of rider that wasn’t Chris Froome, with his preference for longer, steeper Grand Tour-style climbs. He finished just ahead of the dreaded broom wagon that sweeps up the laggards at the back of a race, in 115th position, 9:56 adrift of Luxembourg’s Kim Kirchin.
Froome’s friend and Barloworld teammate, the South African climbing specialist, John-Lee Augustyn, who rode with him throughout the 2008 Classics season, recognised that Froome was more than a little shocked and unprepared for the arduous slog of riding such long distances over rough terrain while getting battered by fierce crosswinds from the North Sea. ‘And then when you get to 200km they start racing!’ says Augustyn. From a mountain-bike racing background, Augustyn was used to extremely tough, aggressive racing and therefore unfazed by the Classics. ‘The harder the better for me. I liked the Classics,’ he says.
By contrast, his African buddy Froome had a lot to learn – not just about how to prepare for such a stern test on the bike but how to read the mysterious hierarchy and learn the peculiar etiquette of the peloton, how to nuzzle your way into the bunch or earn the right to be at the head of the race.
In the beginning, especially when you are an unfamiliar face, Augustyn explains, it’s hard to break in, be accepted or to get a handle on the esoteric rules. No new rider is permitted to ride at the front until he’s proved himself worthy of notice. Especially in Flanders.
‘After the first year, they make space at the front, they open the gaps for you,’ says Augustyn. ‘It was very hard for Chris at first, because he’s quite an aggressive rider and his lines are not always the best, so the guys never gave him a gap; they shut him down. After you’ve had a few good results, they respect you a bit more so it becomes easier.’
Steve Cummings agrees with Augustyn’s assessment of Froome’s early months at Barloworld, adding that ‘he was unlike other riders and obviously came from a very different background to everyone else. As a bike rider he was pretty raw, and we just thought, Who is this guy? Chris has got the kind of style where he always looks flat out but he’s not. When people said that he won this race and that race and he was really strong as an amateur, we thought, Really? This guy? I found it quite hard to believe!’
Initially perplexed by his attributes as a cyclist, Cummings liked Froome a lot as a person. ‘We always had fun with him. He was a bit different and liked a laugh. At Barloworld we were always joking around. It maybe took him a while to get the dry British sense of humour, but once he did, that was it.’
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Liège–Bastogne–Liège’s palmarès reads like a roll call of cycling’s pantheon: Eddy Merckx, Jacques Anquetil, Michel Bartoli, Sean Kelly. One of the five Monuments of cycling,[8] in the past La Doyenne has found favour with both Classics specialists and the giants of the stage-race season alike. For one day in late April flyweight climbers lock horns with the hulking powerhouses of Belgium and northern France. The race, at over 250km, is dotted with a succession of small but tough climbs through the Ardennes hills, where American and German forces fought the Battle of the Bulge in the terrible winter of 1944. The hills start well before halfway at the town of Houffalize; the final phase begins with the toughest climb on the course, the Côte de la Redoute. This could have played to Froome’s strengths, but it wasn’t his day and he finished 84th, far behind Spanish winner Alejandro Valverde.
Chronic fatigue after six races in quick succession must have been a factor in the end. It had all proven to be a bit too much too soon for Froome. ‘That was some race. I ended up absolutely exhausted. I was almost blacking out with the pain,’ Froome said of his experience of La Doyenne. ‘Maybe I didn’t eat enough. But at least I finished.’ His forgetfulness when it came to refuelling, an understandable lapse on the part of a novice, would return to haunt him a few months later in the biggest race of his life to date.
‘Recently I’ve done a lot of races that haven’t suited me – flat races in Belgium. It’s not been so good,’ Froome said, with a weariness that suggested he was glad to see the back of April. ‘I’m a long-distance time triallist and climber; I’m best in stage races. Short prologues are definitely not my thing. I need time for my legs to warm up properly. I’m hoping to start doing races that are more my kind of thing.’
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The five-day Vuelta a Asturias, starting in Oviedo in northern Spain on 3 May, was a race more to Froome’s taste. On Stage 2b’s rain-soaked time-trial course, 17.2km from Nueva along the Costa Verde to an awkward, twisting finish into Llanes, Froome posted a tremendous time to finish fifth, just 26 seconds slower than local boy Samuel Sánchez. The performance was made even more impressive when Sánchez went on to take the gold medal in the Olympic men’s road race in Beijing in August.
Unfortunately Froome followed up this fine showing with a collapse on the penultimate queen stage (4) – an extremely taxing 180.2km route over three categorised climbs, from Pravia to the hors catégorie mountaintop finish at Santuario del Acebo. He came in over 26 minutes behind stage winner Tomasz Marczyn´ski.
The day after the Vuelta Asturias came full-circle to its final conclusion back in Oviedo, a stage that Froome didn’t start, drained by his previous exertions, the team was boosted by the news that Barloworld were to extend their sponsorship into season 2009.
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At the start of May Barloworld boss Claudio Corti sent a strong wildcard team to Sicily for the start of the Giro d’Italia, but Froome didn’t make the cut. While his South African teammates Augustyn, Hunter and Impey – also omitted from Corti’s Giro squad – raced in France at the Tour de Picardie, Froome took a well-earned break from competitive action and headed back to Chiari to train in the hills of Lombardy. The Tour de France was once more in his thoughts as he embarked on another of his epic ‘special workouts’ to Lake Endine and beyond, climbing high into the mountains around Clusone.
His main ambition for his debut pro season was no secret. He stated it loud and clear in an interview with Cycling Weekly on 3 June – to secure a place in the Barloworld line-up for the Tour de France in July. It would be a tense two-month wait before Corti finalised his nine-man team.
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Within days of the interview his mother, Jane, passed away after a short battle with cancer. ‘It was basically a bone marrow cancer, and she was only diagnosed a few days before she died,’ Froome said. He was racing in Spain’s Basque country at the time of her death, at the Euskal Bizikleta. Understandably out of sorts for the opening two stages of the three-day event, he stepped off his bike on the road to Arrate on 8 June when he heard the dreadful news. He immediately packed his bags and flew to Kenya to be with his family.
Less than two weeks later, on 25 June, Team Barloworld announced the pre-selection of their Tour de France line-up. Final confirmation of Corti’s starting nine took place after the Ster Elektrotoer stage race in the Netherlands, Barloworld’s final preparation before the Tour de France started on 5 July in Brest. Froome didn’t travel to the start in Schijndel with the rest of the team. He was so shattered by his mother’s death that he barely touched his bike for three weeks. However, selection for La Grande Boucle (a French name for the Tour de France meaning ‘the big loop’) proved to be a tonic for him after such a personal tragedy. Mental anguish perhaps could be alleviated, at least to a certain extent, by a different form of mental and physical stress.
‘While I loved the time I spent with my family [in Kenya], having the Tour coming up was a welcome distraction,’ said Froome. ‘But there are regrets. I’d basically been away from home for two years, and when you look back it’s easy to regret not spending more time with your loved ones.’
He arrived in Brest for the start of the 95th edition of the Tour de France stricken with grief. ‘It was hard for me. I hadn’t seen Mum for a long time so I went home for the funeral – only to get a call, two weeks before the Tour, to say I was riding. That pulled me back to reality. I had to carry on with life. I went straight to the start in Brittany with the only goal of finishing the Tour.’
When his place at the Tour was finally confirmed in late June, a journalist asked Froome if he would take any good luck charms along to the race. ‘No lucky charms,’ he replied, adding poignantly, ‘but I recently lost my mother. Since then I like to think that she is watching over me whenever I race.’