Field of Dreams
Riding a newly-built pump track alongside local Rwandan riders, in front of a raucous crowd of schoolchildren isn’t where you’d expect to find fourtime Tour de France winner Chris Froome, but here he is clearly enjoying the novelty as much as anyone else.
The pumptrack is courtesy of Israel-premier Tech’s Field of Dreams project, an initiative to help the children of Rwanda get into cycling. It was launched last month in the presence of the team’s co-owner, Sylvan Adams, and Rwandan dignitaries. The site consists of the pump track and a kilometre-long course in Bugesera, southern Rwanda.
This is the culmination of phase one of the team’s plan, through its Racing for Change initiative, to help the children of Bugesera, and further afield in Rwanda, through cycling. Cycling is everything in this part of the central African country, with bikes used from visits to the hospital to trips to school. Adams, speaking to Cycling
Weekly at the track, made it clear that this was not the end: “We are just getting started.”
“The next phase is a building,” he said, “which will house the academy, which means we will bring coaches, bike mechanics, and other facilities like housing, so we can get people from outside of this region in. This will really be the Rwandan cycling academy.”
Some 1,200 supporters contributed to the project, as well as funding from Adams, Israel-premier Tech’s co-owner Ron Baron, and other sponsors. It is part of the Community of Hope, an education hub for children founded by Serge Gasore, a survivor of the Rwandan genocide.
The track’s impact was clear to see already, with the local Bugesera Women’s Team and other young Rwandans delighting in their new pump track, alongside Froome. With bikes and time, one can only imagine how important it is to the local community.
There was dancing and cheering from local children, but also a sense that projects like this can actually make a difference, give people something to do for fun.
Liliane Kayirebwa, the vice-president of the Rwandan cycling federation, the FERWACY, and the president of the Bugesera Women’s Team, said: “Cycling has helped the girls so much, because we help them study, and ride their bikes, and now we have so many sponsors, so they have helped us with bikes, jerseys, and shoes.
“They [Israel-premier Tech] gave us a teacher for English, and they pay mechanics and a coach for the girls.
“Riding bikes is just part of culture here,” she continued. “Every family has one bike. It will help our children to try to ride as professionals, and this pump track is the only one in Africa, it will help us so much.”
It took a long time and a lot of hard work on and off the bike for Froome to get back to a point where he felt comfortable and pain-free on a bike. All this while trying to renegotiate his contract with Team Sky who he’d been riding with since it launched in 2010, before eventually switching to a lucrative deal with Sylvan Adams’s Israel Start-up Nation team. It was clearly a stressful period, and Froome, with his glittering palmarès, could easily have taken retirement. But one gets the sense that cycling is everything to him, it’s all he has known for much of his life, and the journey back to being a useful professional rider again was necessary.
When he is on a bike, having fun, as he was in Rwanda, you get a sight of the real man, the one that hasn’t had the joy media-trained out of him. You also see this in his Youtube channel, something he has started since his Sky/ineos days.
“There are parts of cycling that become a lot more like work,” he explains. “When you’re doing massive intervals, you’re low on fuel, it sometimes feels like hard work. But then there are days like yesterday [when Froome helped launch Israelpremier Tech’s Rwanda project], where you get to just enjoy yourself, on a pump track, or go out for an easier relaxed ride. That kind of stuff makes it worth the harder days when it does feel like work and the weather’s grim, and you don’t want to be out on the bike.
“There were times where I was in pain on the bike, and that was tough. But that was a part of the rehab process. I knew I’d have to go through to get to now, where I’m pain-free, and it feels like I can just get stuck into it again.”
The present and the future
Froome does not think about his cycling legacy. That’s for other people to debate and mull over. He knows that his career will not last forever, but won’t entertain thoughts of how he will be remembered: “It’s not really something I think about.”
However, he is thinking about the future of cycling, especially in terms of helping those who don’t have access to the same pathways as he did. The 37-year-old is investing in a community project in Kenya for getting children into cycling, details of which he is coy on.
“It’s something that I’ve wanted to do, but never really been able to dedicate the time to while I’ve been professional,” he explains. “I’ve managed to team up with some people who are going to be able to make it happen. I’ll have more on that in the coming months.
“It’s about the joy that can be brought in and what it will do to the community as a whole. It’s a continued project for perpetual uplift for the community.”
Another part of Froome’s future in cycling is the investments he holds in multiple brands – Hammerhead, Factor and Quadlock to name three.
“I like to invest in companies and people who I believe in and when I believe in the product and the people behind the project,” he says. “It’s a way for me to stay involved in the cycling world, I guess beyond cycling. I’m certainly at the tail-end of my career now, I’m no spring chicken anymore. It has been something that I’ve been thinking about.”
However, while he has been trying to get back to his best possible self, the sport of cycling has moved on. Froome has only raced in five events against Tadej Pogačar and two times against Remco Evenepoel, but never challenged them for the overall.
“I feel that the wealth of knowledge