Speaking after the finish of the Tour de France on Sunday, Geraint Thomas clearly felt he could have finished not far from the top three if he had not had to spend so much time working on behalf of his team leader Chris Froome, the overall winner for the second time in three years.
“I think if I was leader here I’d run the podium close if I wasn’t doing so much early on [in the race],” Thomas said. “It’s certainly something I’d like to look at.”
“It was so close to being a really good result,” he added. “Fifteenth – I didn’t think I’d be that coming here. It was always going to catch up with me. I was hoping it would be on Monday [after the Tour finished], not on Friday. It’s certainly given me a lot of confidence and encouragement for the future.”
Apart from Froome’s overall victory, Thomas’s strong riding until the penultimate mountain stage was one of the highlights of a Tour in which British cyclists showed considerable promise.
Purely in terms of results this was not a match for the Tour of 2012 when Britain took first and second overall with Bradley Wiggins and Froome and added seven stages for Wiggins, Froome, Mark Cavendish and David Millar. But the 2015 Tour had one of the largest British entries in the race’s history.
The core of the winning team, Froome’s Sky, was British – Froome, Ian Stannard, Thomas, Luke Rowe and Peter Kennaugh – and there were stage wins for Froome, Cavendish and the 34-year-old Steve Cummings, riding for the wild-card MTN-Qhubeka team. Additionally, the 22-year-old Yates twins, Simon and Adam, showed maturity beyond their years, being at the head of affairs on several key mountain stages.
At the stage start on Friday morning Sky’s head of performance operations, Rod Ellingworth, recalled it was 10 years since he had taken the then 19-year-old Thomas to train in the Alps with the rest of the Great Britain academy. “He fell off, skinned his hands, came down to breakfast the next morning in his tracksuit before they all rode and I said to him: ‘Why aren’t you in your kit?’ He said: ‘I can’t ride,’ so I told him: ‘You don’t pedal with your hands,’ so he got in his kit and got riding. We were talking about it last night and he said: ‘Well, I still wasn’t last up the mountain.’”
That competitive spirit in the face of adversity shone through for Thomas – the speed with which he got back on his bike after a high-speed dive into a ditch at Gap was stunning – and the other scions of Ellingworth’s academy: Stannard, Kennaugh, Rowe and Cavendish.
“By virtue of having a very similar culture these lads walk in and they rip into each other,” said the Sky manager, Sir Dave Brailsford. “They’re really up front with one another. They have a bit of a bust-up and then they’re laughing and joking over dinner. In elite sport you have to have that ability to collide, learn from it, move on. They are brutal with their humour and they get on.”
John Herety has been a fixture in British team management since the 1990s and helped Ellingworth put the academy programme together in 2004, as well as managing Cummings early in his road career. He said: “Geraint Thomas is just showing what many of us have believed for years he can do. It’s been delayed a little by the work he’s done and his priorities – the track, the classics – but he’s always had that absolute class.
“I’d see him challenging for the overall soon. When you look at the Yates twins, Simon came through the academy” – after Ellingworth had moved to Sky – “but Adam went another route, through France. They will be big players very soon. They are so young but showed no fear and were right in there on so many occasions when the top riders came out to play. Their race sense is unbelievable – they just kept getting in the breaks – and they look the part on the bike.”
While Cavendish added a stage win to move to third in the all-time rankings, two victories behind the five-times winner, Bernard Hinault, Cummings’ win was a different matter, a career highlight for a rider who is far less prolific. “When I managed Steve you would wait for him to get a result, you’d begin wondering, and he’d land one,” Herety said. “He’s at his best in a team which lets him race the way he wants to, and where MTN have done well is to play to that strength.”
“What’s changed now is that the pro teams want the Brits,” Herety added before noting that with the GB Under-23 academy about to return to racing abroad, more opportunities for young riders are on the way.
“It’s like it went with the Australians a few years ago – if you run a WorldTour team and you buy a Brit, you know you are getting a reliable rider who will perform. That’s a major change and that’s why we are going to see more and more of them out there in the near future.”
