July 14, 2022
The four-time Tour de France winner finally silenced doubters with a podium finish on stage 12 to Alpe d’Huez, showing us all we should have never counted him out
“People say hang up your bike, you’re finished, you’re never going to get back and it just makes me laugh. I know I can get there. It’s going to take time and I’ve got a lot of work to do, but I’m prepared to do that work. That’s what drives me and that’s what gets me out of bed in the morning.”
Today, on the brutal slopes of Alpe d’Huez, Chris Froome taught us all a lesson. Three years on from a training crash which almost cost him his life – a broken pelvis, femur and four ribs, plus the loss of four pints of blood just a few of the injuries he sustained – he was fighting for the win in one of the biggest mountain stages of this year’s Tour de France. Honestly, I can admit that is a sentence I didn’t think I would be writing this year.
As Froome himself outlines in the quote above (taken from the YouTube video he published May 2021 titled ‘Chris hits back’) I wasn’t the only person who doubted the British rider’s ability to return to the highest level of professional cycling. Froome has been honest and vocal about the swathes of messages he receives from fans telling him that he should retire, that he will never be able to compete with the fresh, young generation that is taking over the modern racing scene.
It only took a glance on social media as Froome suffered around the Tour de France last year – finishing outside the top-100 riders in almost every stage – to see how heavily weighted the public opinion was against the 37-year-old. Many of us seemed to forget that this is a man who has won the Tour four times before, and results like that don’t come from nowhere. Form is fleeting and temporary and it can be brought back with training and hard work. The skill, raw talent and tactical astuteness that one needs to win bike races, on the other hand, is something that’s hard to learn, and is rarely forgotten.
But the lesson that Froome taught us all today, is that it really only matters if one person believes: yourself. As he bridged across to the break with Ineos Grenadier rider and eventual stage winner Tom Pidcock, rode strongly on the Col de la Croix de Fer and then hung on to the leaders until there were just eight kilometres of the stage remaining, Froome…