Geraint Thomas: The Welsh Wingman

Thomas: point to prove © Getty

WALK along Cardiff’s Queen Street this weekend and there is a chance that you’ll bump into an international sports star. Slim, six-foot tall with an easy manner, this sportsman is a lynchpin member of one of the richest and most hyped sports teams in its field, bidding for British success at the very highest level.

But he won’t be mobbed by autograph-hunters or even be stopped by well wishers; Geraint Thomas, a 23-year old professional cyclist, can walk through his home town almost unnoticed. “The occasional person says hello on the street, but people know my name not my face. I prefer it that way, it allows me to get on with the job,” he says.

In the field of professional cycling Thomas is very much on the map. He is home this weekend after seven days of intensive training on the continent. After his short break in Cardiff he’ll pack his bags and fly off on Monday to the Middle East to prepare for the start of what will be a long season competing in races around the globe.

An Olympic gold medalist, Thomas has landed a contract with Team Sky, the new British professional cycling outfit. Backed by the broadcaster behemoth, Team Sky has one of the biggest budgets amongst the professional ranks, second only to a team backed by a conglomerate of Russian businesses. It marks a new dawn for British professional cycling, which, in the past, has only ever managed to field underdog teams, run on shoestring budgets.

Expectations are high, especially after the team staged a coup by poaching Bradley Wiggins, the Londoner regarded as a genuine contender in the cycling’s blue ribbon event, the Tour de France. “It will be amazing to go into the Tour and try and achieve something that no British team has ever done – win it,” says Thomas.

Cycling is a team sport. Members race, eat and room together, often for a number of weeks when competing in long stage races. For each race there is a well-defined hierarchy and each member of the team has a specific role, based on his strengths.

Thomas is powerful rider who is good on the flat stages, but weaker in the mountains. He is one of the team’s domestiques (“servants”) whose role this year is to support Wiggins, the overall team leader, and help potential stage winners. It’ll mean acting as a wingman to Wiggins, cycling into the wind for hundreds of kilometres to protect the team leader, who will sit inches behind. It will also mean being a member of a ‘lead out train’ for the team’s sprinters, cycling at 55 kph over the final kilometre of a race in a tight bunch, jostling for position and making split second decisions while the body is gasping for oxygen, before catapulting the sprinter to the finish line. And it will involve riding at the very limits of the pain threshold in short time trials against the clock.

“Doing the lead out for the sprinters is like going to war. There are three or four of you, all in it together, ready to fight for the team. If it goes plan and your sprinter wins then the buzz is amazing. It brings the team very close.

“Time trials are raw; it’s you against the clock seeing how much hurt you can take without running out of gas and crawling to 10 kph,” he says.

Thomas’ first big race will be in the Tour of Qatar where he will be riding with Wiggins for seven days. “We are fielding a strong team. We aim to start with a bang by winning the yellow jersey for Team Sky in the team time trial,” he says.

After Qatar, Thomas will compete in the spring classics – tough one-day races in Europe dominated by the hardest men in the sport. This will include Paris-Roubaix, a long, flat race in northern France, which Thomas won as a junior. Known as the Hell of the North it’s a fearsome event on account of the rough cobblestones, the mud, the wind and if the cyclists are really unlucky, the driving rain. Broken wheels, handlebars and collarbones are the norm rather than the exception. And the baying crowds that pack the Roubaix velodrome, where the race ends with a single lap, will often see riders with bleeding fingers and ripped jerseys puffing around the banked track, with haunted expressions on their faces, their tanks absolutely empty. To Thomas, this sort of race is just part of the job. “Paris-Roubaix is amazing; much better than sitting in an office all day,” he says.

With the spring classics under his belt, Thomas will have a nervous few months to learn whether he is selected by the team to ride for the Tour de France in July. Most expect that he will, but he has a point to prove and results count, so he will be keen to do well in the first half of the season. If he is selected then the prologue – a short time trial that opens the gruelling three week event – will be Thomas’ biggest chance of glory. “Maybe not this year but my aim is to one day win the prologue and put the yellow jersey on my shoulders,” he says.

A big risk is a crash, which can blight a rider’s season, sometimes an entire career. Professional cycling is a hard sport and most riders will be hospitalised on a number of occasions during the 10 to 15 years they typically race for. Still in the early part of his career Thomas has been unlucky. In 2005 he fell hard in Sydney on a training ride and ruptured his spleen, which was later removed. Last year his season was ruined by big fall during a mountainous time trial in Macerata, Italy, where he broke his pelvis and fractured his nose.

Crashing, however, sorts out the cyclists who have the deep mental toughness for the sport from those who don’t. Some never fully recover from a hard fall, their appetite for risk diminished by the mind rewinding and playing back the moment of impact over again. But Thomas is unfazed. “You either stop racing because you can’t fully commit or you keep going as normal. You don’t think of the risks,” he says.

Thomas, from Whitchurch, began cycling at the age of 10 after seeing an advert for a youth group run by the Maindy Flyers cycling club. He quickly became hooked on racing and notched up a number of successes in junior contests, including the National Championships. He rose through the ranks and started out on the well-trodden path to a professional career by racing in Belgium. “It was at this point that I began to realise that I could do this for a living. I applied to university – but only because my mum wanted me to – but I then joined the [British Cycling] Academy in Manchester and things really took off from there,” he says. He had huge success on the velodrome as a track cyclist, becoming a double world champion and Olympic champion. On the road he became the youngest rider in the 2007 Tour de France when he rode for the Barloword team.

Thomas represents a new breed of young English-speaking riders that are entering the sport and replacing some of the older discredited riders who have been tainted by drugs scandals. The illegal use of the blood-boosting drug EPO, amphetamines and even blood transfusions have blighted the sport for at least two decades and rumour and suspicion still hangs over a handful of riders in the peloton.

Teams and their sponsors, where once they were complicit in the supply and use of drugs in the sport, are now taking a harder line on the cheats. Thomas has seen this first hand when Barloword, a brand management company, pulled its sponsorship of Thomas’ old team after a team member, Moises Duenas, tested positive for EPO. “When this happens it is a huge blow to the whole team. People sometimes forget that everyone’s jobs and incomes are under threat when one member of the team cheats,” he says.

Some professional cyclists have complained bitterly about the amount of drugs testing they have to endure, with officials – nicknamed vampires – turning up unannounced on their doorsteps to conduct blood tests. But Thomas takes a hard-line: “It is good that the agencies aren’t afraid to go after and catch the cheats.” Riders usually face a ban if they are caught cheating. Thomas suggests a much tougher penalty: “Why not throw them in jail?”

Team Sky and some of the newer teams in the peloton have established strict anti-doping policies. It is reported that team principal David Brailsford conducted huge amounts of due diligence on the riders he was targeting before signing them up. He knows that one drugs scandal could end the team and he apparently turned away some of the stars of the sport because he couldn’t be certain they were 100 per cent clean.

It is the racing that Brailsford wants Team Sky and its riders to be known for. Tomorrow, when he jumps on the plane marking the beginning of his racing season for Sky, Thomas will have that opportunity.