“I know that’s the general sentiment,” he says. “But I was never part of that world. I was never chasing it. That wasn’t why I rode my bike or why I raced. So I never really felt that was something I needed to address, even though I was aware, as you say, that a lot of people struggled to relate to me growing up in East Africa, and studying in South Africa. No one could really kind of, I guess, put me in a box.
“But, I mean, I’ve always felt British. I mean, I am British! My family’s British. I was a British kid growing up in Africa. Anyway, I’m completely at peace with it. I feel honoured to have received the OBE, that was such a cool recognition.”
Froome looks out across the water again. He says he feels “fulfilled”. It was all worth it. He would not want his children to go through what he did. “I mean, unless you really have that bug in you, that drive, that absolute willpower to go through hell…” he says. “If I look back on my last 20 years, I’m so grateful for everything. It was my dream to be a pro bike rider. I lived that dream. But would I necessarily choose that life for my kids? No. I mean, I feel as if, at the same time, I missed so much of being a normal human being in those last 20 years. I only feel as if I’m kind of discovering normal life now for the first time.”
Returning to our earlier conversation about the nighttime tests, I finish by asking Froome whether he feels for riders such as Pogacar and Vingegaard today, and also whether we can believe in what we are seeing. Froome is uniquely well placed to comment, having had urine thrown at him at the height of the French public’s scepticism towards Team Sky, when they were fending off allegations of unethical use of medication. Froome himself returned an adverse analytical finding for asthma drug salbutamol during the 2017 Vuelta a España. After a nine-month investigation, the UCI and Wada cleared him, effectively conceding the test was faulty.