‘I’ve had real highs and low lows’: Geraint Thomas targets Tour revival

With three stages under his belt and a wardrobe malfunction aside in the opening time trial, the 2022 Tour de France has been going well for Geraint Thomas. Certainly compared with his disastrous starts to the recent Grand Tours of France and Italy, the Welshman is doing very well indeed, but then the 36-year-old’s gift for deadpan understatement has long helped him survive the gladiatorial world of professional road racing.

Even at the worst of times, Thomas’s dry humour has remained intact. Over the past few years, since winning the Tour in 2018, he has needed it. There have been crashes and a dip in status after Ineos Grenadiers understudy Egan Bernal prevented the Welshman from taking back-to-back Tour wins in 2019.

“The way the 2019 Tour ended was a damp squib in a way,” Thomas told The Guardian during the first rest day of this year’s Tour. “As a team we were first and second, yet because the stage [to Tignes] got cancelled and the next stage got shortened, it was a slight anti-climax. I felt like I had more to give, but that’s just the way it was.”

“But I’m still proud of the result, because 2018 was a big winter. It was a ‘Jan Ullrich-style’ winter,” Thomas added referencing the 1997 winner’s reputation for off-season excesses. “Yeah, I definitely made the most of winning in 2018.”  

No matter how good his form, Thomas has, at times, seemed a magnet for bad luck, with crashes caused by rogue water bottles, badly positioned race motorbikes and in one of the gruelling Spring Classics, a freak gust of wind.

“I’ve had a long career,” he said. “I’ve had some real highs and some low lows, but I’ve got to the stage now where I’ve realised that all you can do is work hard and once you get into the races, just give it