Geraint Thomas - How a Welshman Won the Tour De France

Geraint Thomas

How a welshman won The Tour de France

Phil Stead

First impression: 2018

© Copyright Phil Stead and Y Lolfa Cyf., 2018

The contents of this book are subject to copyright, and may not be reproduced by any means, mechanical or electronic, without the prior, written consent of the publishers.

The publishers wish to acknowledge the support of

Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru

Cover design: Y Lolfa

Front cover photograph: Press Association

All other photographs: Phil Stead unless otherwise stated

ISBN: 978-1-78461-679-3

Published and printed in Wales on paper from well-maintained forests by

Y Lolfa Cyf., Talybont, Ceredigion SY24 5HE

website www.ylolfa.com

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Prologue

I remember the moment I fell in love with cycling and the Tour de France. I was in my grandmother’s house when I caught sight of a man on the television. He was skinny, emaciated, with an exhausted, haunted look in his eyes. The trunk of his body was white, glaringly so against the dark brown tan which started above his elbows and ran down to his fingerless-gloved hands. He was wearing a pair of black bib shorts which were hanging loosely from his scrawny shoulders. He was the strangest, most captivating sportsman that I had ever seen. His name was Robert Millar and glorious archive footage showed him winning the polka-dot ‘King of the Mountains’ jersey at the 1984 Tour de France.

The film I saw was The High Life, and it portrayed Millar with unflinching honesty as he was cheated out of the 1985 Vuelta a España by a Spanish conspiracy. I bought his replica Panasonic jersey, which I wore on occasional rides to visit my grandmother in Llantrisant. Millar was a Scotsman in a foreign land, out of place among the suntanned Mediterranean gods who dominated the sport. He flew up hills and won stages with a flamboyant style that I would later hear the French call ‘panache’. He took risks and cycled from the heart.

From 1986, I followed the Tour religiously every summer on Channel 4. I loved the whole European thrill of it, from the programme’s theme tune (written by the Buzzcocks’ Pete Shelley) to the insane crowds on the mountain stages. The presenter and commentator was Phil Liggett, a voice synonymous with the Tour for many years. With no Brits to feature, he would cheerlead riders from ‘English-speaking nations’. There weren’t many of those either, though in 1986, two Irishmen were at the top of the sport. The first was Stephen Roche, who won the Tour in 1987. In those days, it was all about the Tour de France for me, and I only later became aware of Roche’s other achievements, including wins at the Giro d’Italia and the World Championships. The second was Sean Kelly, a gruff hardman from a farming family in Waterford. Kelly was a sprinter who won the green Tour de France points jersey four times. But again, I would only learn later about his incredible wins in the classic one-day races. He became a hero to me and now commentates on Eurosport’s cycling coverage. Our paths would cross on the 2018 Tour.

As much as I admired sprinters like Kelly and the Uzbek rider Abdoujaparov, I preferred the climbers like Robert Millar, Luis Herrera and Claudio Chiappucci. It was not unusual in those days for climbers to escape for what seemed like hours in the searing heat on lonely alpine passes. This was the glory that thrilled me – heroic bravery and derring-do as the race met the clouds. And I found all that and more in my next idol, a curious-looking Italian called Marco Pantani.

Miguel Induráin had been boring the life out of cycling for years when Pantani appeared. Induráin’s tactic was to win the time trial and defend his lead with monotonous excellence in the mountains. He won five Tours in a row between 1991 and 1995. I sat amongst a group of his supporters on the Alpine slopes of Morzine during the 1994 tour and secretly wished he would lose.

Pantani was Induráin’s antithesis. He was the first cyclist I had really loved watching since Robert Millar. He would dance on his pedals and fly past competitors at will as the race climbed high. I had never seen a cyclist like him, and when I bumped into him at the end of a stage in the Alps in 1994, my adulation only grew. He was the first Tour de France cyclist that I had ever met, and from that day ‘Elefantino’ became my hero. I was desperate for Pantani to win the Tour, and in 1998 I had one of the best sporting experiences of my life when I watched him appear out of the mist at the summit of the Galibier and win the race.

Then along came Lance Armstrong and his robotic US Postal team to squeeze the life out of Marco. I hated Armstrong at the time – he was Pantani’s rival, and I was always suspicious of his astounding recovery from cancer. My dislike of Armstrong was more down to his lies and bullying than his drug taking. I’ve always held mixed views about the complex issue of doping, but the barefaced lying of people like him and another Pantani rival, French climber Richard Virenque, sickened me.

Of course it was later revealed that Marco Pantani was one of the vast majority of riders who were loaded with EPO in those days. For a while I felt cheated; that my spiritual experience at the top of the Galibier had been a falsehood. It drove me away from cycling, but I cried at the news of his death in 2004 and have always considered him a victim of a sick sporting culture. Pantani would have been great if drugs had never existed. I couldn’t say the same about other riders of that period. I was reeling from the revelations of Operación Puerto, which in 2006 exposed a sport-wide culture of performance-enhancing drug use. I had completely lost faith with the sport, especially as some of my favourite riders had been implicated. During that period, I didn’t feel that I could believe what I was seeing.

The formation in 2009 of Team Sky, with its clean cycling promise, drew me back in. The team included a Welshman in its ranks – a young man called Geraint Thomas who had ridden the Tour for Barloworld in 2007. There was a different feeling in 2009 – not only with the formation of Team Sky, but other teams – like Garmin-Slipstream – who espoused a clean riding philosophy. A returning Lance Armstrong looked beatable and I greatly enjoyed watching him lose his invincibility. I felt there was an even playing field and I watched Bradley Wiggins from the top of the Ventoux that year with a new enthusiasm.

I was a rare creature in those days: a Welsh cycling fan who didn’t own lycra. Pro-Cycling fans are common across Europe, but in the UK the sport has only historically interested other cyclists. I loved to watch cycling from an armchair, never fit enough to take part at any level. That changed in 2011 when I suffered a life-threatening illness. Morbidly overweight, I developed a couple of blood clots in my lungs and became incapacitated for a long time. During that period, I vowed that if I recovered, I would take cycling more seriously. And I did. I lost 7 stone and became addicted to the sport as a participant as well as a spectator. Over the next few years, I followed the Tour with my bike and rode many of the iconic climbs.

I bought a motorhome and our family holidays would be spent in the Alps or the Pyrenees, riding and fighting for freebies from the promotional caravan. I was witness to some key Tour de France moments and proudly waved my Welsh flag at Geraint and Luke Rowe. I broadened my horizons, travelling to watch famous one-day races like Paris-Roubaix and the great Italian classic, Il Lombardia.

I never really took to Bradley Wiggins or Chris Froome. To this Welshman, they were blocking Geraint Thomas’s chances of glory. If Geraint had been at another team, I was sure that he would have emerged earlier as a race winner. I resented Thomas’s sacrifices for others, even though he never did. I couldn’t imagine him leading at Team Sky and when he announced his decision to forsake the one-day classics to concentrate on stage races in 2015, I thought he was crazy. There was no way he could ever be more than a Top 5 rider in the Tour, so why give up the chance to become a winner in the classics? It’s important to remember here that I’m just a fan. I had no insight, no access, no idea what went on at Sky HQ. I had no idea what Geraint thought he could achieve.

The first indication that I was wrong about his prospects came almost immediately, in the Pyrenean stages of the Tour that year. Thomas was climbing with the best and his performance, especially in the driving rain on Plateau de Beille, promised much. Further improvement would come in 2017 when a lean, almost gaunt Thomas took the Tour of the Alps ahead of established Tour riders like Thibaut Pinot, Mikel Landa, and Domenico Pozzovivo. Thomas’s newly streamlined physique dramatically improved his climbing and he looked like a different rider from that cherubic-faced lad who had won Olympic gold on the track. But the Tour de France needs more than ability: it needs consistency over three weeks and importantly, the knack of avoiding accidents. Geraint Thomas had a long history of mishaps, mainly unavoidable freak accidents which earned him the nickname ‘crash magnet’.

Thomas’s first major crash occurred during training in Australia in 2005, when a piece of metal in the road was flicked up into the wheel of his bike. He fell onto his handlebars and ruptured his spleen, which then had to be removed. The 18 year old spent time in intensive care in Sydney, with his family at his side.

Then in 2009, Thomas broke his nose and his pelvis when he crashed over a railing during the Tirreno-Adriatico race. He was highly placed in the 2011 Tour of Britain before a crash took him out of contention. In 2013 he fractured his pelvis again, this time in the very first stage of the Tour de France. Nonetheless, he bravely continued riding, earning his reputation as one of the tough men of the peloton as he astonishingly completed the whole race despite his injury.

In 2015, he was well placed when he crashed spectacularly into a telegraph pole on a descent of the Col de Manse after Warren Barguil collided with him. Despite this latest misfortune, he retained his sense of humour. I feel alright for now, he would joke afterwards. I guess my doctor will ask me my name soon. I’ll say ‘Chris Froome’. Two years later, Thomas was taken down in a freak crash in the Giro d’Italia after Wilco Kelderman hit a police motorbike. He recovered to start the Tour de France, only to crash out yet again after wearing the yellow jersey. Thomas was leading at a crucial point of the 2018 Tirreno-Adriatico race when his chain slipped. With no time to recover, he lost the jersey. I don’t know what the stages are of grief, but I’m still pretty angry, he told Cycling News.

While Sky’s data showed that Thomas was the strongest rider in the team, and possibly the whole peloton, he had always worked in the service of another rider. So when cycling journalist Richard Moore claimed the idea that Thomas could win the Tour was ‘fanciful’, I’m ashamed to say that I agreed with him. There had been too many crashes for them all to be a coincidence. Thomas was accident-prone and had still not proven himself to be able to sustain a challenge on a three-week race. But I was happy to be wrong about that too.

When the Sky team was announced for the 2018