After leaving the Pyrenees in a surprising fifth place overall in the Tour de France, Geraint Thomas was already speculating that he might slip back down the standings in the final week. Entering the Alps, there had been talk that Thomas might even lift himself on to the podium behind Chris Froome after Tejay van Garderen was forced to quit and Alberto Contador slipped down the standings following a crash, but his chances ended on the Col de la Croix de Fer where he was left behind by the leaders, 70km from the finish, ending up 53rd on the stage, 22min behind, and dropping to 15th overall.
“I was just empty today,” Thomas said. “It was always going to happen, I guess. I was hoping it was going to happen on Monday but it happened today. As they say, sometimes you’re the hammer, sometimes you’re the nail. I was a cheap Ikea nail today. It was a tough start, when you’ve just got nothing in the legs, there’s nothing you can do.”
Thomas had been the last rider to leave the Team Sky bus at the start in Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne, slipping almost as the start flag fell; this did not bode well, and he was already struggling as Vincenzo Nibali, Alberto Contador and Alejandro Valverde put on the pressure on the opening climb of the day, the Col du Chaussy. At the summit, Thomas was in a small group 35sec behind the leaders, but he linked up again when the race regrouped around Froome and the other contenders after the descent.
It did not bode well for the Croix de Fer, but at the very least Thomas has shown his credentials as a possible team leader for Grand Tours in future.
On the descent to Gap on Monday, the 25-year-old provided one of the lasting images of the Tour when he was pushed off course by Warren Barguil and flew off the road, hitting a light post with his head as he did so. Thomas was straight back on his bike losing less than a minute in a carbon-copy of an incident at Gent-Wevelgem this spring when he was blown into a ditch but remounted to finish third.
At the start of his career, when he rode the 2007 Tour de France at the age of 21, Thomas was abortively nicknamed “the penguin”, as David Millar thought he resembled one of the birds from the film Madagascar, with a cuddly exterior hiding the inner assassin.
Thomas’s reputation as a hardman was cemented when he shocked his team doctors by completing the 2013 Tour de France with a cracked pelvis, his hip numb, the muscles constantly tense, pain hitting him every time he accelerated.
A top 10 overall placing in the Tour would be the highlight of a strong season in which the Commonwealth Games champion has taken the Tour of Algarve and the GP E3 one-day Classic and was just 6sec away from winning the Tour of Switzerland, widely regarded as the fourth hardest stage race behind the three great Tours.
The “next logical step” said the Sky head, Sir Dave Brailsford, will be for him to lead at the Giro or Vuelta, but probably not until next year, with Froome expected to ride the Vuelta. “It’s just mathematics,” said his former Sky team-mate Steve Cummings, like Sir Bradley Wiggins and Thomas a product of the Great Britain pursuit squad. “He’s slimmed down and down. He’s always been a hard one. I remember him coming to the Los Angeles world championship in 2005 when he had his spleen removed. He couldn’t even ride his bike but was still smiling.”
“We started cycling at the same time, down the Maindy track [in Cardiff] when we were eight or 10,” said his current team-mate Luke Rowe, a fellow South Wales native. “We’ve gone through the system together and I’ve seen him progress season on season. He might have won Paris-Nice last year if he hadn’t crashed, he could have made the podium there this year. He’s just got better and better. I think the Tour de France suits him best because of the character of the climbs, and there’s no saying he won’t soon be a leader in his own right.”
