Chris Froome's first Mentor

[Leongsam]

http://news.sky.com/story/1118163/chris-froome-cheered-on-by-kenyan-mentor


By Enda Brady, Sky News Correspondent, in Kenya

David Kinjah can still remember the day 17 years ago when an 11-year-old boy and his mother came to see him in the village of Kikuyu, in the hills 40km northwest of the Kenyan capital Nairobi.

Kinjah, 42, was an elite Kenyan rider back then and was asked by Froome's mother if he would show her son how to ride and stay safe on the country's pothole-riddled roads.

Now that boy is about to make history and win the 100th Tour de France.

"He was an energetic boy with a little BMX and he was just bike mad," said Kinjah, who coaches a group of young riders called the 'Safari Simbaz'.

"He got a lot of strange looks from people being the only white kid in the village, it was unusual. But he quickly learned to speak Swahili and some of our regional language Kikuyu and he was completely comfortable. The best language he spoke was the language of the bicycle. That was all he was interested in."

Soon Kinjah and Froome were embarking on gruelling 70kms training sessions together and when the teenager left Kenya to go to another school in South Africa, he still kept coming back in the holidays.

<figure class="inlinedImage inlinedLANDSCAPE" style="margin: 0px 0px 14px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; clear: both; color: rgb(68, 68, 68); font-family: Tahoma, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">

<figcaption style="margin: 0px; padding: 4px 0px 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: transparent; line-height: 1.36; color: rgb(136, 136, 136); clear: both;">A group of cyclists train in Kenya, where Chris Froome learned to ride</figcaption></figure>"I always thought that my training would be too hard for him, but he never flinched, never complained. Chris knew what he wanted and he worked hard to get there. But back then you could never have predicted that he would go on to top the world of cycling. It was always cycling, cycling, cycling with us but we had such fun together."

Froome has gone on to dominate this year's Tour de France and his progress is followed closely in the village of Kikuyu, where local riders gather at Kinja's house to watch coverage of the race on the only TV with a satellite feed.

"At 3pm every day we stop what we are doing and we watch the Tour. We're very proud of Chris. He hasn't changed one bit. He's not the kind of guy to walk on people's heads, he respects everybody. He never stops working hard, that's why he is where he is today."

As we chat, I notice Kinjah's beautifully stitched cycling shoes. He's proud to wear them, he tells me, because Froome wore this exact pair in last year's Tour where he finished second behind Bradley Wiggins.

"Chris likes to send me some of his stuff that he wears. We have the same size feet, a perfect fit really. I like cycling in them because it makes me feel the weight of the Tour de France. I can feel the weight of that history when I ride here in Kenya and it makes me feel honoured."

<figure class="inlinedImage inlinedLANDSCAPE" style="margin: 0px 0px 14px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; clear: both; color: rgb(68, 68, 68); font-family: Tahoma, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">

<figcaption style="margin: 0px; padding: 4px 0px 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: transparent; line-height: 1.36; color: rgb(136, 136, 136); clear: both;">Chris Froome and his Sky Procycling team members during stage 16 of Le Tour</figcaption></figure>One question Kinjah is tired of answering, however, is the issue of doping in cycling. He's adamant that his protege has got where he is today through nothing more than hard work.

"People should not judge a book by the cover. They don't know Chris Froome and they don't know where he has come from and where he has been," he said.
"He wants to win seven Tours so he can delete the Lance Armstrong wins and put them all back clean. That's what he wants to do."

Kinjah plans to celebrate his friend's victory with a 'yellow jersey ride' on Sunday and he's predicting Froome's success will have a huge impact on African cycling.
"The potential is here, there is so much talent. It's only a matter of time before we find another Chris Froome.

"I'm proud of what he has achieved. His mother was a marvellous woman, she got into cycling too and helped us greatly. She would be very proud of what her boy has done with his life."

 

[Leongsam]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2013/jul/19/chris-froome-kenyan-tour-de-france

Tour de France leader Chris Froome, whose first team was the Safari Simbas of Kenya. Photograph: Doug Pensinger/Getty Images

For Bradley Wiggins last year, read Chris Froome in 2013. This is the second year in succession that a Briton has dominated the Tour de France, both members of the same team, the black-clad Team Sky. But there the resemblance ends.

Wiggins could hardly be more British, with his mutton-chop sideburns, a love of all things Mod, and his penchant for self-deprecating backchat. Froome is self-effacing, polite to a fault – it is impossible to imagine him producing the rant laced with four-letter words that was a low point of Wiggins's Tour win – and, although his passport is British, his background is African.

But tomorrow, all being well, Froome will follow Wiggins on to the top step of the podium in Paris to win the biggest prize in cycling.

Born in Kenya, Froome was educated in South Africa from the age of 14. He started mountain biking to get out of the house. Initially he rode with a group called the Safari Simbas, run by a dreadlocked Kenyan called David Kinjah, to whom Froome still donates spare kit. To begin with, Kinjah recalled, young Froome rode an old road bike borrowed from one of his teachers; he could hardly reach the pedals.

Kinjah noted that young Froome was overambitious for his age and physical qualities, and that he would drive himself so hard at times in races that he would faint. He told the magazine Cycle Sport: "He's thin and strong, but too long for a real climber. A real sprinter he never will be. But the longer the race, the stronger Chris gets."

Froome's first sight of the Tour was on television aged 17 at boarding school when he watched Lance Armstrong and Ivan Basso doing battle. After being talent spotted from the small-time Konica-Minolta team to join the slightly larger Barloworld team, their Italian manager Claudio Corti came to the same conclusion as Kinjah: Froome could figure well in long stage races such as the Tour de France.

Something similar struck his current manager Dave Brailsford at the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne in 2006. Froome was a one-man Kenyan team, doing it all for himself in the same way that he had made himself a Kenyan national champion's jersey. "He looked after himself, came to the team managers' meeting, turned up in his sandshoes and he performed really well," recalled Brailsford.

Brailsford and Froome's paths crossed next at the world championships in Salzburg that year, after the youngster had hacked into the Hotmail account of the Kenyan cycling association to get his race entry in.

Froome recalled that he took four buses and walked two kilometres to his lodgings, then got lost in the rain on his way to the manager's meeting because his map had fallen apart in the rain. "It was raining, he shuffled into the back of the room, pissing wet through because he'd ridden to the meeting for himself," recalled Brailsford, who sums up: "If you're that committed and you're determined enough to do those type of things, translating that into a winning mentality isn't difficult."

By 2011, however, Froome's days as a professional cyclist seemed to be numbered: he had struggled to achieve consistent results in his season and a half at Sky. But it was then that he was diagnosed with the parasitic disease bilharzia, otherwise known as schistosomiasis, which is transmitted by water snails and has been described as second only to malaria in its debilitating effects.

Froome has described the parasite as "[feeding] on your red blood cells, so for an endurance athlete it's basically doing the opposite of what [performance-enhancing drug] EPO does. It was a nightmare."

He is not entirely cured – more traces of the parasite were found in his blood earlier this year – but the disease can be treated. His trainer Tim Kerrison says that the main difference in Froome after the diagnosis has been simply that he can train and race more consistently.

As for what this year's Tour winner is like away from the bike, he gives less of himself away than Wiggins. The British cyclist David Millar, currently riding in the Tour with Team Garmin, describes Froome as the archetype of the perfect Team Sky rider: "To be good at Sky, you need to be 25 years old, have no wife and child and dedicate yourself body and soul to your profession. That's how Chris is. He's the opposite of Wiggins, whose head has fallen off – he's a straightforward character, who accepts discipline and knows how to control his emotions."

"He was well brought up, but a bit quiet, a bit withdrawn," says Corti. He is known for enjoying spear fishing near his Monaco home, and he has an exotic past: his former amateur team manager recalls him as a young man with long, straggly hair, fluent in Swahili, driving "a wreck of a car", studying for his masters at races, wearing "more bangles than a girl and clothing made of hemp."

Froome is the opposite of Wiggins in another way, coming from a non-cycling family background and from a country with few links to the road cycling tradition. The Welshman Geraint Thomas, a Barloworld colleague, who now rides for Sky, too, said: "His personality hasn't changed. He's still a bit clueless when it comes to knowing the other riders and so on. Compared to Brad, I'd say Brad wears his heart on his sleeve. If Brad has a bad day you can definitely tell. I haven't had a bad day with Chris yet."