Geraint Thomas: ' Everyone is pushing to get back up there but It's hard'

Now aged 37, Geraint Thomas is one of the elder statesmen of the general classification battles at Grand Tours. As he's proven by finishing second at the 2023 Giro d'Italia and third at the 2022 Tour de France, he's still in contention.

Nevertheless, living with the underdog tag is nothing new to the Welshman who has been overcoming the odds throughout his career. "I never really realised the underdog thing until I kept on mentioning in my books about ‘proving someone wrong’ and then I thought about it a bit more,” Thomas says in conversation with GCN. “It’s not just me, but the team as well, but when someone talks down about you, it does give you some extra motivation and impetus to show them what we can do. It’s not like I go out training every day and I’ve got critics in the back of my mind but it’s more general when it comes to people saying you can’t do something."

Having recently signed a new contract with the INEOS Grenadiers, Thomas will be leading their Grand Tour charge for at least the next two seasons. With the number of Grand Tours since the last INEOS win mounting though, it won't be easy for Thomas to add to his Tour de France victory from 2018. "Everyone is pushing to get back up there but it’s hard and it’s not going to happen overnight," he admits. "Jumbo are just incredible at the moment and Pogačar and UAE, too. It’s a massive challenge but one that you have to relish really. That’s what it’s all about.”

“Mercedes were dominating in F1, and then suddenly they weren’t there but are coming back now. Same with the All Blacks. That’s just sport and if it was just the same people winning all the time it would be super boring,” Thomas argues, who experienced similar dominance to Jumbo-Visma's with Team Sky during the 2010s as the team won seven Maillot Jaune's in eight years.

“There’s always that fluctuation at the top and I don’t think that we’ve fallen that far away. I still think that we’re within touching distance. It’s hard as well when you’ve got two incredible guys like Jonas Vingegaard and Tadej Pogacar," he concludes. "You can’t just click your fingers and train a bit harder or eat a bit less. It takes the whole team, with everything that goes into it. At that level it’s also the mentality; in the race is where you finish it off, but it’s also about the whole season.”

“I just want to make the most of my time left,” Thomas says. “Personally, it’s still nice to be in the mix and honestly, I didn’t think I still would be. Two or three years after my win, until I was 35, I thought that would be it because that was the norm."