It might be only a year since Chris Froome retired, but it’s more than eight years since his most recent win, so it’s easy to forget how he once dominated the Grand Tours. He won seven three-week races in the eight seasons between 2011 and 2018, as well as the Critérium du Dauphiné three times and the Tour de Romandie twice. For a long stretch of the 2010s he was the sport’s best stage racer, bar none.
Despite that success and status, it’s surprising how little we’ve heard from the now-41-year-old in recent years. Yes, his career tailed off without a single victory after he joined Israel-Premier Tech in 2021, and the 2025 crash which ended his career a few months prematurely drew attention, but he was too busy recovering from life-threatening injuries to be speaking to the press. But other than a couple of interviews at the Tour de France last year, where he was working as an ambassador for Škoda, there’s been little else until the last couple of weeks.
Doing brand ambassador work, as well as investing in a few cycling companies, is how Froome spends a lot of his time now. It’s at an event for two of these brands – a joint Ekoï and Factor ride-out in south-west London – that Cyclingnews is reunited with the four-time Tour de France winner, the leafy Surrey Hills a far-cry away from the mountains of France and the intensity of his racing career.
“Your absolute goal is to get to that point where you can drive your opponents to think that they’re only racing for second place.”
Chris Froome
Socalising before the ride, there’s a hint he likes life away from the spotlight. He’s relaxed, smiling and chatting with the other guests as if he was just any other cyclist. Other than his colourful and flashy Factor One bike – a brand he’s a shareholder in – he’s no different on the road:the smiles, photos and chattiness continue, and he even pushes one of the slower punters up some of the climbs. He might be the star of the show, but for all intents and purposes, he’s just one of the group today.
“I’m trying to get out once or twice a week at least,” he tells Cyclingnews after the ride. “Just with friends, keeping it social, or pro riders who are on their recovery days – I wouldn’t dare go with them on a normal training day anymore. That chapter is firmly closed for me, no temptation to want to get back into any competitive kind of racing or anything.”
Such is his low-key persona and the passing of time it’s easy for to forget that he was to the 2010s what Tadej Pogačar is to the 2020s, and for now at least he has more Grand Tour wins than the Slovenian. However, Froome is the first to baulk at the comparison.
Tadej Pogačar is ‘writing his own history’, says Froome
“What he’s doing is just is just phenomenal, nothing but admiration and respect,” Froome says of his Slovenian successor, winning many of the things Froome used to win, albeit in a totally different way and indeed era.
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“What he’s doing is not rewriting history, but he’s writing his own history in the sport. When the level is so high already, and the margins between everyone else are so slim he’s able to be head and shoulders above everyone else. What he’s doing in Classics is probably even more impressive to me than what he’s doing in the Grand Tours.
“I understand what training it took to be ready for races like the Tour de France or Vuelta and Giro, but I would write myself off from being competitive in one-day races. I understood that they’re almost like two different sports. So how he’s able to do both and literally just go from February until October at that level is…”
Froome tails off before modestly admitting that, like Pogačar, he too dominated the sport, and while he understands how fans might find such dominance boring, he doesn’t.
“We’re witnessing something very special, and it’s a pleasure to watch him race. It must be extremely demoralising for his competitors, but as a bike rider, this is what you strive to become.
“Your absolute goal is to get to that point where you can drive your opponents to think that they’re only racing for second place. He did that the first time they hit the mountains on stage six this year up Tourmalet, and he had almost three minutes on Vingegaard.
“I had huge respect for that, that that is 100% what I would try and do. First mountain top finish lay down the law, absolutely blow them away, and mentally you’ve already won the race. So, yeah, I would very much make that my goal in a lot of lot of these races.”
Froome might come across as mild-mannered, but in talking about Pogačar he offered an insight into the mentality which made him the Grand Tour great he was, but where would he be now?
“No, no, no, there’s no question. I would be probably just cracking a top 20 in the race now, even though it’s only six, seven years on from when I was winning,” he says with a rueful smile, citing improvements in tyres, bikes and aerodynamics, but emphasising nutrition.
“When I was winning the Tour de France we were probably fuelling not more than about 40-50 grams [of carbohydrates] an hour, and now it’s over over 100, 150 at times on the big stages. We’re not talking about a 20, 30% increase in fuelling, we’re talking about a 300% increase.”
‘I had to see if I could come back and win’
While Froome experienced plenty of success through his career, it was punctuated by two very serious crashes. Just last year, weeks before what should have been his final race, he crashed while on a training ride, suffering multiple internal injuries, ending his career, and in 2019 he lost control of his bike while sighting the Critérium du Dauphiné time trial. As a result he knows something of how Pogačar might feel after his crash on stage 8 of the recent Vuelta a España, which ended the UAE Team Emirates-XRG rider’s race and season.
“I think it’s really personal,” he says. “Thankfully for him, it wasn’t his error, it was one of those fluke accidents, so I wouldn’t imagine there would be any reason for him to have any fear after this. Some guys just have to see someone else crashing and they’ll have fear for months down the line.
“I was incredibly fortunate that after my 2019 crash, when I broke my leg in two places, that I didn’t have that fear. But I also don’t remember my crash, it was just erased from my memory, I must have hit my head hard enough, or it was enough of a shock that I don’t remember the crash at all. [Otherwise] I’d be always second guessing myself, going into corners at high speed, thinking, ‘What if I mess this one up like I did before?’”
That crash in June 2019 saw him not only forced out of that year’s Tour de France, but it also marked the end of his career as a winner. He returned to racing the following February but failed to bag even a top 10 finish throughout 2020, his final season with what was by then Ineos Grenadiers.
A move to Israel-Premier Tech proved no more successful, though he came oh so close to winning on Alpe d’Huez during the 2022 Tour de France, eventually finishing third behind a rampant Tom Pidcock, a result he describes as good as a win. While he managed second place in the team time trial at the 2024 Tour du Rwanda, that day on the Alpe was the last individual top 10 placing of his career, and the man who had once been the greatest Grand Tour rider of his generation faded away, his team boss Sylvan Adams branding him as ‘not value for money’. But Froome sees it from his own perspective.
‘My competitive career honestly ended when I hit that wall in 2019’
“I just felt so fortunate to be able to come back to the sport I love doing. I got into the sport quite late and I made it a goal to be racing into my 40s, and I don’t think anyone understood at the age of 36, when I had a big crash, why I would want to come back.
“I honestly felt that had I not continued on and really given it everything I had to see if I could come back and win a fifth Tour de France, I would probably have spent the rest of my life questioning,” he says, speaking more hesitantly, emotion clear.
“I can now retire satisfied that I did everything I could. It’s no longer a question in my mind. What if? What if? What if? I know. I did it. I realised I wasn’t able to get back to that level. That the level had changed. It wasn’t the same level as it was pre-crash.
“But I think it took a good two and a half, three years of chasing it for it to really sink in, that level where I was previously has changed, the sport’s moved on. But I think my competitive career honestly ended when I hit that wall in 2019.”
Back in the Surrey Hills, there might be some steep gradients and even some gravel on the lanes, but it’s a far cry from the Colle delle Finestre where Froome took the final win of his career, more than seven years before he finally retired. There, during the 2018 Giro d’Italia, he memorably obliterated the competition, in the pre-Pogačar era, his attack was barely conceivable, planting confusion among his rivals and completing the then Team Sky rider’s Grand Tour clean sweep.
“The one single, best day on the bike, hands down,” Froome asserts. “I think there was never one day that won me the Grand Tour like that did. I was almost four minutes down in GC, just rolling the dice and banking on something happening behind me, that they wouldn’t have collusion in chasing.
“I knew that my team had set a hard enough tempo on the Colle delle Finestre that people wouldn’t have domestiques left. So it would be between the rest of the guys who were up there on GC, who was going to pull, who was going to take responsibility, and it just so happened to work in my favour that they were kind of bickering amongst themselves. They had Carapaz and Amador sitting on, not pulling through. It was basically Pinot and Dumoulin doing all the work, and they probably were in a very negative mindset chasing me, whereas I was out front and I was just having the day of my life.”
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