From the moment Geraint Thomas signed a contract extension for 2018 with Team Sky speculation began on how the squad would handle the Welshman’s ambitions in the Tour de France, given that a first option on leadership would always be given to Chris Froome. That issue has bubbled away in the background over the last nine months but it should come to a head this week.
As the Tour ended its first week in Chartres on Friday the potential for some sticky moments around the Team Sky dinner table was obvious, as Thomas had handled the opening days with the aplomb of a potential winner. He was within an ace of taking the yellow jersey, only six seconds behind the Belgian Greg Van Avermaet, and had opened up a 59-second lead on his nominal leader, Froome.
On day one, in a particularly chaotic phase of racing, Froome was forced off the road after trying to get through a gap in the peloton which did not exist. Thomas, meanwhile, was one of an elite group to avoid trouble. The Welshman added to the 51seconds he gained there by targeting bonus seconds on offer at the newly instituted sprints late in the stages, and in Thursday’s first true test for the favourites at Mûr‑de‑Bretagne, he finished five seconds ahead of Froome.
The case for Thomas as a potential Tour leader is not as clear-cut as might be imagined, even following his run of wins in major stage races such as the Critérium du Dauphiné, Tour of the Alps and Paris‑Nice. He has never finished higher than 15th in a three-week Tour and in 2015, when he held fourth overall with three days remaining, he suffered a spectacular off day.
The million‑dollar question is whether he can maintain a challenge in the Tour for the full three weeks or whether his potential is only as a winner of week-long stage races. The counter-argument is simple: in every Tour he rode up to 2017 Thomas was expending energy on the flat stages to support Froome, and the effort told on him late in the race. Thomas himself made the point in 2015. “From day one I was never worrying about myself,” he said after that year’s Tour. “I was always thinking about Froomey. So it definitely gave me the confidence that, if I focus on it 100% as a back-up GC rider, behind Froomey, and be protected myself, I’ll have a real good goal.”
As well as questions over his stamina there is a suspicion that Thomas is accident prone, something he denied in a Guardian interview last year after he had crashed out of both the Grand Tours he had targeted.
He has suffered at least eight major falls in the past five years, and they have cost him the chance to show his paces in races such as Paris‑Roubaix as well as the Tour and the Giro d’Italia.
His argument that these tend to be racing incidents rather than carelessness has some foundation but racing incidents are not shared out equally and cycling history is littered with riders with an unfortunate propensity to get mixed up in them for whatever reason.
Cycling history is also full of entertaining tales of team workers turning on their leaders, and Team Sky has been far from immune to such conflict. The years 2011-13 were marked by a tussle for No 1 status between Froome and Bradley Wiggins, which had an impact on the 2012 Tour in particular, where Mark Cavendish made it three leaders vying for support.
Last year there were intriguing scenes when Mikel Landa appeared to be “going rogue”in the Pyrenees; it is no surprise that Landa has moved on – amusingly into another situation with ample potential for conflict – to join Movistar.
There remains a chance that Thomas might move into the yellow jersey on Sunday’s stage through the cobbles of the Hell of the North to Roubaix, where almost anything can happen and probably will.
The current leader, Greg Van Avermaet, has a strong pedigree here, having won the Paris-Roubaix one-day Classic in 2017, but Thomas first showed himself in the Tour in a similar stage in 2010.
However, the final decision over who is the Sky No 1 is likely to come in the Alps or later, as Thomas himself said on Friday, and whatever that may entail for internal politics it is in the team’s interests to keep their opponents guessing.
Whether this Tour ends up with Thomas on the podium, way down in the standings or nursing yet another broken bone, he has had an inspirational influence on cycling in his homeland in the last 10 years. In 2007 he became only the second Welshman to finish the Tour; this year, as before, he has been joined in Team Sky’s Tour lineup by his neighbour, the Classics specialist Luke Rowe, who has become an essential wingman to Froome.
Wales has been punching well above its weight in cycling in recent years, with Owain Doull joining the duo at Sky last year, while last week it was revealed that the climber Steve Williams will join Vincenzo Nibali’s Bahrein-Merida team later this season, giving Wales five cyclists in the World Tour together with Scott Davies at Dimension-Data.
Coming up fast behind the quartet is a national under-23 team packed with promising youngsters. The potential for the future there is obvious; the immediate question is whether Wales’s finest can realise his personal potential in the next fortnight.
