Special bond seals friendship behind the scenes
Froome’s ‘carer’ has so much respect for rider he named son after him
Care package: David Rozman’s healing hands help to keep Chris Froome going all the way to the finishing line in the Tour de France
SCOTT MITCHELL
David Walsh
Sunday July 24 2016, 12.01am, The Sunday Times
You won’t have heard of David Rozman. He comes from Kranj in Slovenia. It is Slovenia’s fourth- largest city, less than 13 miles north of the capital Ljubljana. To him, Kranj is more town than city. He still lives there with his wife Manja and their two boys, Kris and Ian.
Rozman is the eldest of six children. When he looks back he sees nothing but smiling faces. Fun drawn from the simplest things. Janez, his father, worked for a rental company and didn’t make much money. They had nothing but they had more than enough. David says he never saw his parents argue.
Janez rose every day at 4am, got the boys up at 4.30am and by 5am they were on their early morning training ride. Dad and the boys. On their return, Janez made breakfast so that his wife, Ana, could have another hour in bed.
At 7.30pm each day the family gathered for prayers. Devoutly Catholic, they talked about their day and each child would tell of something good that happened and thank God for making it possible. Wrongs, they admitted to those, too, and when appropriate apologised to their siblings. Rozman recalls one evening when his brother Janez thanked God “for enabling me to drop David on the climb today”.
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Nobody spends more one-on-one time with Froome than his massage therapist
They all did well at school because Janez and Ana had a simple rule. All privileges were suspended if grades fell. The boys wouldn’t be permitted to ride their bikes. So they were good students. David went to the University of Ljubljana’s sports facility and studied to be a sports teacher.
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Less than two years later his father was moved from the rental company’s garage. His wages fell to €500-a-month. Even in Slovenia, that’s not much for a man with a wife and six children — Ana had given up her job after the arrival of Urska, the couple’s third child.
Two years into his course David felt his education was a luxury his family couldn’t afford. As the eldest child it was his responsibility to support his parents financially. He got a job with a Slovenian cycling team, helping with massage. They told him he had magic hands and though it wasn’t what he’d wanted to do, the money was needed.
One team led to another until he landed a job with Team Sky. That was five years ago. For more than four-and-a-half years, he has been Chris Froome’s soigneur and perhaps his most trusted confidante in the team. Rozman spends about 200 days per year with the team.
Much of the time is spent looking after Froome and on a race like the Tour de France, nobody spends more one-on-one time with the rider than his massage therapist.
In the old days they were referred to as soigneurs and often their roles involved more than massage. Some carried banned products for their riders, advised on dosages and administered injections. Team Sky prefers the word “carer” and that is how Rozman describes what he does.
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He first met Froome at a Majorca training camp in 2011. “On the massage table he had this soft voice and was saying ‘Thank you’ all the time. I’d never seen a rider like this before. Not even a person like this. You can’t imagine the impression this made on me. That’s where it all started.”
You may think Rozman is too close to Froome to offer an objective view. I’ve known him for three years and consider him intelligent and honest. “Towards the end of 2011, he and Richie Porte went to Sean Yates [then a Team Sky sports director] and asked that I look after them. Sean told me, ‘You’re doing Chris and Richie’.”
Arrested by Froome’s politeness in Majorca, Rozman felt that at times it was too much. “At the feed zone in races I’d hand him a musette and he would say thank you. In the evening I’d tell him, ‘Please stop saying thank you, that’s my job. Take the musette and concentrate on your job.’ The next day he takes the musette, says thank you and as he’s riding away and he’s looking back, ‘Sorry, I forgot,’ and I’m thinking he’s going to crash because he wasn’t the best at handling his bike in the bunch.”
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If he is lying, I will never again believe in the human race. I would stop working in cycling if that turned out to be the case
Little things struck Rozman. The way Froome would crush the tin foil used to wrap his rice cakes during races, always putting it into his jersey pocket rather than chucking it. When Froome crashed before the start of the first stage of the 2013 Tour in Corsica, Rozman made the biggest mistake of his professional life.
Froome grazed his right thigh in the fall and Rozman used an ice-cool spray on the wound. It was a product he hadn’t used before and he burnt Froome’s skin. The skin burned before their eyes.
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For the entirety of that Tour, which Froome won, Rozman couldn’t touch the thigh and quad. It was that bad. “If I was Chris I would have sacked me. He just got on with it. Same at the end of that Tour, he asked me to do the criteriums with him. First day we’re heading to Holland, I have my wife Manja and little Kris with us. We’re in a car park, I take his bike and put it on the roof. We leave the car park but I haven’t noticed the steel frame at the exit and the top bar smashes the bike. I’m shaking. Chris looks at the bike, says it’s only the handlebars and pulls them back to where they should be.
“He gets them sort of straight and says, ‘They’re fine.’ That evening the criterium circuit had cobbles. I prayed he wouldn’t crash.”
Kris Rozman, now three, got his name from where you might now expect. “It had nothing to do with what Chris has done as a cyclist. If that was it, I’d have a little Lance at home. It is the person I look up to, not the cyclist.
“My wife said, ‘If you want to name him after Chris because of the person he is, that’s OK.’
“She also said, ‘One day you may have a fight with Chris Froome, or something will happen, and maybe you will want to reconsider our son’s name but it will be too late then.’ I said no, that won’t happen.”
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He knows there are those who think Froome must be doping. “If I was on the outside I might think that. I know he’s honest. Little things. He would forget his sunglasses, and say, ‘David, could you go to my room and get the sunglasses? They’re in my suitcase.’ He is always open, never has to hide anything. When you massage a rider, there is just a towel and a naked body. You would see the mark of a needle. I would know.
“It’s one of those moral things, he is so against it. If he is lying, I will never again believe in the human race. I would stop working in cycling if that turned out to be the case. I know that’s not going to happen.”
Rozman tells a story about his family. He left the Tour before the first stage. His youngest brother Bernard was ordained as a priest back in Kranj and he wanted to be there. On the evening before, with all the family present, the youngest, Lucija, presented Bernard with a copy of the Bible, handwritten in calligraphic style. For two years she had got up at 4am and devoted two hours to her task. It came to 1,700 pages. Bernard knew nothing of what his sister was doing. “You should have seen the look on his face, on all our faces,” David says.
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