SPOTY 2013 spotlight: Chris Froome

It just wouldn’t be right if there wasn’t a male cyclist amongst the contenders to be Sports Personality of the Year.

Sir Chris Hoy, Mark Cavendish and Sir Bradley Wiggins have captured the imagination of the British public in recent years, winning the Sports Personality award on three of the last five occasions.

In 2013, British cycling has belonged to Chris Froome.

Last year, Froome was forced to play second fiddle to Wiggins throughout a momentous summer.

At the Tour De France, he played a pivotal role in guiding Wiggins to become the first Briton to win the world’s most famous cycle race.

Froome followed Team Sky’s instructions to keep their main man out of trouble and away from his rivals. He did this job to perfection and even finished second himself.

At the Olympics, he sacrificed himself for Cavendish in the road race, sadly to no avail before taking bronze in the time trial while Wiggins won gold.

But this year was Froome’s chance to shine. With Sir Bradley unable to race in France because of injury, the 28-year-old became the main man.

He took the leader’s yellow jersey in stage eight and held it all the way to the ceremonial procession down Paris’s Champs-Elysees two weeks later.

For that, and victories in four other minor tours, Froome was awarded the prestigious Velo d’Or as the outstanding cyclist of the year.

Chris was born in Nairobi to his Kenyan-born mother Jane and English father Clive, but things got tough when his parents separated and his father moved to South Africa.

With his two older brothers away at boarding school in England, Chris was taken to a cycling meet to channel his youthful energy.

That’s where the love affair began as he went off riding with local youngsters the only white boy in the group.

He certainly had plenty of adventures along the way, including once being chased by a hippo, after cycling too far down a bank.

As a teenager, Froome went off to school in South Africa and there his cycling blossomed.

Although when he competed in the Under-23 time trial at the 2006 World Championships, he was so eager to do well that he came down the ramp too fast and crashed into a race official! Thankfully, neither of them were injured.

Chris also represented Kenya in that year’s Commonwealth Games but it became evident that he would have to leave Africa to fulfil his ambitions.

So, he used his British connections to help him, culminating in his Tour de France triumph.