Chris Froome Bo dy
The Fastest (and Hardest) Man on Two Wheels 35 years old | 186cm | 66kg
Chris Froome makes long-term and short-term targets central to his success. “I’m a forward thinker, always planning, sometimes way too far in advance,” he told Men’s Health in 2015, shortly before the second of his four Tour de France victories. “So, I enjoy reaching the smaller goals, which are motivating to reach the larger goals.” He could not have imagined that such targets would include “learn to walk again”, as they did after a horrific freak crash in June 2019.
On a recon of the time trial course at the Criterium du Dauphiné race in Roanne, France, gusty wind funnelled between buildings and took his front wheel just as he lifted a hand to clear his nostrils. Attempting to recover control, he veered off the road and into a wall, breaking his ribs, right femur, elbow, hip and sternum and the lowest vertebra in his neck. His team had clocked him at 54km per hour.
Such a calamitous accident was atypical in the extreme, and Froome’s rehabilitation came with many uncertainties. “It was progressive, really, because we just didn’t know how long it would take in terms of recovery,” said Froome’s coach, Tim Kerrison.
“We had some different plans right at the beginning, but it’s been an ongoing review.” Not least because, despite the extent of his injuries, very quickly Froome began surpassing smaller comeback goals.
Seven weeks after the crash, it was said that he was “ahead of all predictions that were made initially of how long it would take to get to even this point”. In early August 2019, he was having three to four hours of physio every morning, then two hours of exercise after lunch. Afternoon shifts involved pedalling a stationary bike using only his left leg as his right leg healed, propped on a platform.
At the end of August, 10 weeks after the crash, he was doing track sessions on a bike; by the end of October, a team time trial at an exhibition race. In November, he had his final operation, which included removing from his right hip a 10-inch plate with screws as long as his thumb. In January this year, he joined a training camp with his beloved TeamINEOS. By February, he was performing on the UAE Tour –one that was unfortunately cut short by the pandemic – at which his stats were close to top-level.
Upon reviving in intensive care in France, Froome was told by the surgeon that there was nothing to stop him making a 100% recovery. “That’s all I wanted to hear at that point,” he said later. “From that point on, it felt like everything was so positive.”
He immediately set a larger goal: to win the next Tour de France. At the time of writing this, despite some scepticism, that was scheduled to begin on 29 August. If it isn’t postponed, Froome will be 35 and very possibly in yellow-jersey form, having come back from – no hype, this – one of the worst injuries in his sport.