After three weeks and 3,356.8km of racing, just 14 seconds separated Geraint Thomas from winning the Giro d’Italia. As he reflected on his race behind the podium in Rome on Sunday evening, it was hard to tell what stung more, the margin of the defeat or the manner of it.
Thomas had carried the maglia rosa into the stage 20 time trial up Monte Lussari, and he initially looked to be fending off Primož Roglič’s challenge on the lower slopes of the climb. The upper reaches, however, proved an ordeal. The Welshman had deftly avoided crises across the three weeks of this race, only for his most trying moment to come right at the death.
“It was so close, so close,” Thomas said as shadows lengthened along Via dei Fori Imperiali. “It’s still frustrating, I think just because of the way I rode it, with the wheels falling off a bit in the last 3 or 4k. If I’d ridden it differently – if I’d started slowly and finished strong – I’d still have lost the same time, but it might feel a little different.
“But the fact I just fell away at the end makes it feel a bit worse. I just gave it everything. If it was a flat TT, it might have been different, but that’s just the way it is. That’s sport. It’s full of ups and downs.
“The emotions are still a bit raw, but we can still be proud of how we all rode and committed, and how we bounced back after some downs. We can be content, but at this team, we want to win, so it’s always a bit hard.”
Thomas set out from Abruzzo with Tao Geoghegan Hart as his co-leader, but the Londoner was forced out of the race with a broken hip after his crash on stage 11. For the final days of the race, Thomas had just four teammates by his side following the abandons of Filippo Ganna and Pavel Sivakov, but they helped to defend the maglia rosa through the Dolomites.
“That’s what made yesterday even harder for me, because I felt like I’d kind of let them down,” Thomas said. “I really wanted to finish it off for everyone. But we’ll get the band back together at some point and see if we can do it again.”
Vuelta and 2024
When Thomas finished a surprising third at last year’s Tour, it seemed like something of a last hurrah given the youth of the men who stood alongside him on the podium in Paris. His performance on this Giro has made a mockery of the idea, however, that he had reached the end of his days as a Grand Tour contender, even after turning 37 last Thursday.
“I don’t really think about it too much,” Thomas said. “I’ve never thought about my age. Although when I turned 37, I did think, ‘That is quite old.’ But I still love riding my bike, I still love training, I still love being with the boys. I think that keeps you young mentally, as well. I’m still competitive. I still love racing. I still love the argy-bargy of a sprint sometimes, so I’ll just keep doing it as long as I love it.”
Although Thomas’ existing deal with Ineos expires at the end of this season, he indicated his desire to continue racing into 2024 and possibly beyond. He is the only rider to have raced for the team – formerly Team Sky – in each of its fourteen seasons in the peloton.
“I’ll try to sort out my future in the next couple of weeks,” Thomas said. “I’m definitely not going to do more than two more years, I think. But saying that, I didn’t think I was going to go on after this year…”
In the more immediate future, Thomas’ appetite for Grand Tour racing remains in place. While Egan Bernal, Daniel Martínez and Tom Pidcock are set to headline the Ineos squad at the Tour, Thomas was already warming to the idea of lining out at the Vuelta a España, which gets underway in Barcelona on August 26. His lone previous appearance came in 2015, when he reached Madrid in a lowly 69th.
“I’m not going to commit to anything just yet, but I’ve already done the Vuelta once and it wasn’t a good experience, so it would be nice to go and have a better one,” said Thomas. “The Worlds are obviously in the UK as well, so that will be a big one, but the Vuelta would be nice…”
And what about the Giro? Thomas has had a difficult relationship with this race, crashing out in both 2017 and 2020, but he was on the cusp of surpassing Fiorenzo Magni as the oldest-ever winner until those final ramps of Monte Lussari. “I hope so,” Thomas said. “Never say never. As long as I keep racing, I think I’ll want to come back.”
