\u201cI know that\u2019s the general sentiment,\u201d he says. \u201cBut I was never part of that world. I was never chasing it. That wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut, I mean, I\u2019ve always felt British. I mean, I am British! My family\u2019s British. I was a British kid growing up in Africa. Anyway, I\u2019m completely at peace with it. I feel honoured to have received the OBE, that was such a cool recognition.\u201d<\/p>\n
Froome looks out across the water again. He says he feels \u201cfulfilled\u201d. It was all worth it. He would not want his children to go through what he did. \u201cI mean, unless you really have that bug in you, that drive, that absolute willpower to go through hell…\u201d he says. \u201cIf I look back on my last 20 years, I\u2019m 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\u2019m kind of discovering normal life now for the first time.\u201d<\/p>\n
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<\/a> at the height of the French public\u2019s 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 Espa\u00f1a. After a nine-month investigation, the UCI and Wada cleared him, effectively conceding the test was faulty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cI know that\u2019s the general sentiment,\u201d he says. \u201cBut I was never part of that world. I was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":713152,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[35740,4985,217,101,5438,58919,6549,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-713151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cycling","tag-chris-froome","tag-cycling","tag-sport","tag-sports","tag-standard","tag-top-story","tag-tour-de-france","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/713151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=713151"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/713151\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/713152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=713151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=713151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=713151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}