Back to these sandshoes. I'm not really clear on what the alleged issue here is, whether it's a Rasmussen-like story of
blood doping products being trafficked in hollowed-out heels or whether it's just a fashion
faux pas and the word 'sandshoes' is supposed to be delivered in a
Lady Bracknell-like voice, or with all the disdain of Jeeves giving
Bertie Wooster's Old Etonian spats a withering look.
Whatever. Here's something relevant from the pen of David Walsh, ghosting
The Climb for Froome. The place is Melbourne, the time is 2006, the occasion the Commie Games. Froome has gone off early in the time trial and is back at the finish sitting in the hot seat waiting for someone to better his performance:
All of my family saw me on TV. The broadcast kept on switching back to the hot seat and this young, skinny guy. Cyclingnews.com called me 'Chris Froome, time trial revelation.' I was sitting there in the hot seat when two managers from the English team first noticed me. Their names were Dave Brailsford and Shane Sutton.
'See what that kid has done?'
'Who?'
'That Kenyan kid, wearing the sandals.'
'Doesn't look like a Kenyan.'
'Well, he is.'
I wound up 17th overall in a field of seventy-two riders but, thanks to spending over an hour in the leader's chair, the result seemed to bestow more attention on me than a 17th-placed finisher had ever received before.
So, at the Commie Games in 2006, Brailsford and Sutton saw him sitting in the hot seat at the time trial, wearing sandals. Photographic evidence would be nice, if someone wants to go on to Getty or see if they can find the race on Youtube (I've drawn a blank on both). But let's suspend our disbelief a moment and imagine he was, as reported, wearing sandals.
Now I'm not much of a shoes guy, I live in fear of
the Shoe Event Horizon (look at that, from Oscar Wilde to PG Wodehouse to Douglas Adams, all in the Clinic – who woulda thunk it?). But I'd guess that sandals (Jesus boots, Birksenstocks, whatever you want to call 'em) and sandshoes (Plimsoles) can be the same thing, in a generic footwear kind of way, if you squint really, really hard and turn off the lights. We're surely not going to get into an argument over one of them being open-toed shoes for tossers and the other canvas-topped runners your dad might think he looks cool in, are we?
Point is, there's no suggestion in that anecdote that he rode the time trial in sandals/sandshoes. The other anecdote, Fotheringham in the
Guardian, quoting Brailsford apparently conflating the Commie Games in Spring 2006 and the Worlds in Autumn 2006, there's room for interpretation as to whether it's being implied he raced in sandshoes or turned up to the managers' meeting in them (totes a fashion
faux pas, that) but there's also room for interpretation as to who's making the error, Brailsford (whose memory often leaves you wondering whether he's suffering from early-onset Alzheimers or is just an inveterate bullshitter) or Fotheringham (whose family motto ought be '
nisi stulti reprehendo veritates').
So, sartorial sins aside, the sandshoes story doesn't seem to have any real value, one way or the other. It's a non-story.
But, add to it this with regard to
The Climb's claim that “Cyclingnews.com called me 'Chris Froome, time trial revelation.'” I can't find any evidence of that having actually happened. Here's the CN Commie Games
main page and here's
the race report (where he's “Christopher Froome”, not Chris) and nowhere do they call him a time trial revelation (the report does acknowledge that he “recorded an impressive time which made a mockery of his ranking for the event”). I even did a Google search on
Froome “time trial revelation” and, from that, it'd seem that the source for the quote in
The Climb can only be ...
The Climb itself.
(And
The Climb's claim that Froome was 17th out of 72 riders? The CN report shows 67 riders finishing, with a DNF and a DNS bringing that up to a field of 68 or 69 riders, depending on how you want to count.)
So is that what's really at stake here, that you get one thing about the guy that's a little bit dodge but really rather insignificant and you try and stand it up only behind it is something else that's a little bit dodge but really rather insignificant and you dig further only to find that behind that is something else that's a little bit dodge but really rather insignificant and so on and so forth in an Escher-like progression of error, *** and outright lies? Because despite all these things seeming a little bit dodge but really rather insignificant (we're not really arguing the difference between sandals and sandshoes) their sum is like the apocryphal
rounding differences in banks' computers: very significant, when compounded.
And, as that quote from
The Climb shows, Froome can't wash his hands of all this nonsense and say it's always someone else saying these things. He contributes to the problem, as we all know.