“From the bright lights of Maindy to the Champs-Élysées. Thanks for everything. We made it.”
At his home in Wales, Luke Rowe has a framed yellow jersey hung on his office wall with the words above scrawled across the front in black fineline pen. The message is signed off with a single letter ‘G.’
It was a gift from Geraint Thomas, the Welsh rider’s long-time former team-mate and best friend, presented to Rowe after he helped his compatriot to an unexpected and historic Tour de France victory in 2018. When Thomas shot to sporting stardom over three weeks of brave and gutsy riding in the biggest bike race on the planet, he became the type of sportsman who is recognised by just one letter of his name.
That year saw Thomas go from Team Sky’s ‘plan B’ for the general classification to a hometown hero; he was the boy next door from Maindy who had done the impossible. His achievement was rewarded with a BBC Sports Personality of the Year award, an OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) and the track in Newport was officially renamed the Geraint Thomas National Velodrome. The Welsh rider had become a superstar.
But we know all this. To truly understand who Geraint Thomas is, we can’t start at the pinnacle of his time as a bike rider. Instead – as he enters the final season of his career which has spanned two decades – we must look back to the people and places that made him.
* * *
The Maindy Centre sits on the outskirts of Cardiff in between a Royal Air Force training base and Cathays High School. It is accessible if you turn off the North Road which links Maindy to the city centre, and is obscured by the green and grey building home to the local swimming pool which shares its grounds. It could not be further from the champagne showers and glitz of Paris at the end of the Tour de France. In fact, it is the type of place you would easily drive by if you weren’t aware of its existence; but this modest track has created some of the most accomplished sportspeople that Wales has ever seen.
Luke Rowe, Nicole Cooke, Owain Doull, Elinor and Megan Barker, alongside Thomas, are just a few of the success stories whose foundations were built on the 450 metres of uneven concrete – caused by subsidence and tree roots pushing through the cracked surface – that makes up Maindy Velodrome.
“By 2016, athletes from Maindy had won more gold medals than the French in cycling. At that point, we realised that in the last three Olympic Games, if Maindy was a nation, we’d have been the second most successful nation behind Great Britain in cycling,” says Alan Davis, who has spent the last 20 years as head coach of local club, Maindy Flyers.
Davis recalls the moment a 10-year-old Thomas first laid eyes on the sport that would end up shaping his life: “He was down here at this swimming gala and saw these kids were all on the track cycling. He came out of the pool and saw it and thought it looked good, so he and his parents made some enquiries and the next week he came down with his dad to give it a go.”
One of those children riding on the track that day was a seven-year-old Luke Rowe and his older brother Matthew: “Geraint was the same age as my older brother and I was the same age as Geraint’s younger brother so we would all have sleepovers and one set of parents would have all four of us, so we became really close,” says Rowe.
Both Davis and Rowe believe that Thomas’s potential was clear in those early days on the Maindy track. They put it down to both natural talent and a healthy dose of hard work, plus Thomas’s father Howell, a former international runner, ensuring that the Welshman was taught lessons about how to be a good athlete in his formative years.
“Howell just got it right with the level of support, not being overwhelming and staying realistic. On the rare occasions that he lost, Geraint would always shake the hand of the winner, congratulate them, come away and say: what do I have to do next time to win? He was never chucking stuff around, never getting angry, just wanting to get better. He had a good mindset but was also relying on what his biology did for him,” says Davis.
Rowe has similar memories: “It was obvious right from under-10 group races he was good, but when we got to about 14 it was evident he was one of the best in the country. He’d turn up to National Championships and would always win or podium. Back then we just rode our bikes. You never counted how much training you were doing, power meters and heart rate were unheard of. Geraint was just running on natural ability.”
It didn’t take long for a professional cycling career to become a serious possibility for Thomas, and it was Rod Ellingworth, then the lead coach of the Great Britain Cycling Team Academy, who accelerated the process for the Welsh rider. A blistering time in the 2,000-metre individual pursuit on the velodrome as a teenager meant Thomas demanded the attention of the national team – there was no missing the gangly kid whose pedalling technique was as smooth as butter.
“It was the National Track Champs in Manchester that was the first time I saw him properly on a bike and I knew he had something. It was the way he sat on the bike; he just looked like he was part of it. He was at one with the bike with his cadence, never fighting it, his shoulders were narrow and he was tucked down,” recalls Ellingworth. “He looked like a natural bike rider.”
Thomas’s physical ability was one thing, but his mentality also caught the eye of British Cycling. Davis, Rowe and Ellingworth all use similar descriptors to outline the 39-year-old’s character: “If he was any more laid back he’d fall over,” says Rowe, “He may as well be lying down,” laughs Davis. “It’s an incredible sense of relaxation and calm,” muses Ellingworth.
Part of the reason for Thomas’s triumph in the sport, it seems, is his unique ability to combine serious ambition while keeping things fun. Those who knew him in the early years of his cycling journey talk of his victories and talent, yet they also speak of a boy who was liked by all his peers for a jovial nature and vivacious side.
“G wasn’t a naughty kid, but I wouldn't say he was well-behaved – he had a bit of a fun streak within him,” says Rowe.
“He always had this balance of never taking the piss out of things completely, but he was one of the lads having a good laugh,” agrees Ellingworth. “But he had respect for people, and when it came down to it he’d ask questions. He was both logical and level-headed. You could see him working things out in his mind. When I met his parents it made a lot of sense, they worked hard and were disciplined with their kids.”
The environment that Ellingworth created when he ran the GB Academy while Thomas was an under-23 rider was important to the development of every rider in the Welshman’s world-beating generation of fellow racers. Ellingworth talks of the healthy internal competition within the team, as well as sessions where they made it clear that the pathway to success as a professional rider would be far from easy.
“They were some of the best days of my working career,” the British coach reflects on his time leading the Academy. “We didn’t know where that programme was going to take us and we certainly didn’t realise the success that was going to come out of that group. I put them through their paces, but Geraint never complained and they were all quite self-motivated.
“We put pressure on them from a sporting side, because they needed to learn to deal with that to be successful. I tried to change that within British Cycling at the time, because I felt like they were wrapping them up in cotton wool too much. They’d signed up for that expectation and we did a lot of sessions talking about what it takes to become an Olympic champion – but they had good support alongside that.”
Rowe believes that Ellingworth’s coaching style had a positive impact on the riders who he worked with: ”Rod was strict, but only to try to get the best out of us. It really was a mutual respect, not because he was authoritative. With Rod, you didn’t want to flick him, if he told you not to do something, you didn’t do it because we all respected him.”
Reminiscing on the under-23 years in Italy alongside Thomas, Rowe regales memories of “banter about rugby and pints of beer”, plus “thousands of outrageous stories that I really couldn’t tell you about”. He admits that, although they were and always had been dreamers, the notion that a rider of their generation could go on to win the yellow jersey seemed far-fetched for the Welsh boys who came from humble beginnings.
“We just started as two young kids on our BMX around the block. We rode the bike on the weekends and knocked around in the week and to come from that to even riding the biggest bike race in the world, let alone him winning it and me supporting him to do that, it is surreal,” reflects Rowe.
“There’s not many stories like that in the sporting world, sometimes you’ve got to pinch yourself and realise what we actually accomplished.”
* * *
There is no Geraint Thomas story without the Team Sky story. Fifteen years ago, the Welshman signed his first contract for the pioneering British team with lofty ambitions. The chapters that followed the years after Thomas joined are well-known: 10 Grand Tour victories, including seven prestigious Tour de France wins across four riders, one of them being Thomas’s in 2018. Fran Millar, who previously held a dual role as both Director of Business Operations and Head of Winning Behaviours at Team Sky, witnessed Thomas grow from an enthusiastic neo-pro to the leader of a squad that was known for blazing a trail when it came to new technologies and extremely professional working environments.
“He was a very funny, humble, normal guy,” says Millar. “But always a consummate professional – easy-going while knowing his value. He’s always been consistent about how he wants things to work and what he wants out of his career. I know he gives the impression that he is chilled and laid back but he’s actually also focused and ambitious. He knows what he wants and does the work to get it in a low-key, behind-the-scenes way which is endearing.”
Millar explains that creating a safe, supportive and familial working environment has been crucial to Thomas’s longstanding happiness within the Sky and then Ineos organisation. While the team has changed over the years with different riders, sponsors and management – plus their dominant spell has come to an end as others have caught up – Thomas has been a constant throughout, loyal to the squad from the start to the end.
“I remember Geraint getting married and having a kid, you’re part of the entire journey of each other’s lives,” says Millar. “The team was tight and became a family. I had a unique perspective because I had a big brother who had done it [David Millar] and I remember when he took the yellow jersey in 2000 at the Tour, my family couldn’t see him at the end of the race because they didn’t have a pass. When we started Team Sky I wanted to ensure that the families were treated as importantly as the riders – a happy athlete in a good environment is going to be performing better. All of that noise that goes on around an athlete, we worked very hard to minimise so that they could focus on performance.”
Rowe, who also rode for Sky under Millar’s guidance, shares a similar view of the team to his former colleague: “It is a world-class organisation. They care about the person. A rider was never a commodity to them, they considered the human inside that.”
If we imagine Thomas’s career with Sky as a mountain, it would be fair to say that his Tour victory signifies the very summit of his ascent to sporting stardom. The Welsh rider didn’t go into La Grande Boucle that year as a favourite for victory, sharing leadership at Team Sky with Chris Froome, but his consistently impressive performances over three weeks meant that the road decided Thomas would eventually be the man to take yellow for the British team. Sky were facing some criticism at the time from the French public who questioned the team’s ‘marginal gains’ approach and argued that their dominance was stifling racing. Thomas, however, had the ability to drown out the noise and roll with setbacks.
“During that Tour, Geraint was outstanding in terms of leadership and his attitude. He’d had a lot of knocks. He’d had a lot of falls. Technically, we all knew things like descents and bad weather were a challenge – you’re only a few millimetres away from it going wrong, but that Tour it just went right,” recalls Ellingworth.
“The cards fell perfectly for him, he is a very level-headed bike rider who knew he would have good and bad days. It wasn’t always a pleasant experience for us in France at that time, Team Sky got criticism from the general public who thought we were another American team who had come in and taken over their race. But G went through that really well.”
Millar shares a similar sentiment to Ellingworth, arguing that Thomas was able to maintain an impressive focus on the job at hand, no matter what was happening around him.
“A lot of that vitriol and anger was directed at Froomey. G was like, ‘I’m not going to let myself get sucked into this shitshow, because it’s not my shitshow to get sucked into.’ He walked the balance of that very well. One of the brilliant things about him winning is that irrespective of what people felt about Team Sky, they couldn't hate G. They knew he was a good guy, it turned people’s heads a bit,” she says.
The camaraderie and friendship between Thomas and the rest of the Sky squad was crucial to the Welshman’s victory in that Tour de France: “The actual team around him, Luke Rowe and people like that, they were like brothers in arms. They were up for the fight and strong together,” says Ellingworth.
“Well, the best way to stick two fingers up at people sometimes is just go out and win a bike race,” laughs Rowe. “And certainly, G was very good at that. We were only really concerned about performing and winning races – turning up and being the best we could.”
* * *
Geraint Thomas’s Tour victory was the catalyst for him becoming a public figure. His personality was thrown into the spotlight as well as his physical ability, and he slowly but steadily started to become his own brand. The fame that was generated from him being a yellow jersey winner transcended cycling and put Wales on the global sporting map.
“For the country, it was phenomenal. We’ve had a couple of truly outstanding, world-class performers in sports – Wales is a massive rugby nation, but we’ve never beaten the All Blacks. We’ve never really won anything. And here’s this lad in this highly-competitive professional cycling world beating everybody in the most famous bike race. We all got together as a club, and there were about 100 kids watching him do the final stage on TV, it was amazing,” remembers Davis.
“The First Minister in Wales said in his speech that Geraint had done more to raise the profile of Wales in 21 days at the Tour de France than he had achieved in 21 years as a politician. I remember Geraint saying to me that one minute he was on his bike and the next he was on the Graham Norton show with Kylie Minogue. He was a household name.”
Did the fame go to Thomas’s head? Did it change his laid-back, down-to-earth nature? Rowe is adamant his friend remained the same as ever before.
“He was still the same old G,” the Welshman says with a smile. “We just enjoyed that summer after he won, it was the biggest bike race in the world, so we celebrated it, and I was his wingman for a lot of it, which was great.”
Millar agrees that despite more people knowing his name, Thomas stayed true to the determined and friendly young man she had first come into contact with years before: “I think it probably made him really realise how talented he was, proving that to the world. It fuelled his sense of believing he could compete with the very best, but as a human he was exactly the same.”
Thomas’ humanity is perhaps best highlighted in the podcast he makes alongside Rowe, Watts Occuring, where he speaks openly about racing and life as a professional bike rider. It’s one of the few candid and honest insights behind the curtain – refreshing in a sport that has been shrouded in whispers and darkness in the past. Not only has the podcast garnered Thomas more fans, it has also helped him create a successful vocation outside of racing which will pay dividends when he retires from the sport at the end of 2025.
“We always encouraged him to show his personality and knew that him being himself wouldn’t cause us any problems,” says Millar. “He’s never been outspoken in a way that’s rude or anything. His British humour is tongue-in-cheek and a bit of a piss-take but it is never nasty and it can be charming.”
Rowe remembers the origins of the podcast he shares with Thomas, first created as a way to get out of interview requests during big races: “I remember that I had a little bit of media stuff to do, and I've always hated it. Our original plan was to just tell the media to get quotes from the podcast, and then we carried it on after the racing. I think what makes it successful is that we’re honest and we're not afraid to say what we think, even if it is a bit controversial.”
As his chapter in professional bike racing will draw to a close at the end of this year – a full stop finally put on the last page of an illustrious and historic career – the question that remains is what will Geraint Thomas do next? He is one of the few professional cyclists who has transcended sport, thanks to his podcast and loveable boy-next-door demeanour, as well as his results.
“I think he could do anything he wanted to, to be honest,” says Millar. “His Welshness gives him a level of identity and I think it would be great to see him leading a team or working within the business of the sport. The level of humility that he has and the way that he communicates about the sport means it would be a tragedy if he doesn’t stay in cycling in some way, shape or form.
“He’s an incredible ambassador and role model for our sport – we’ve been very lucky to have a Geraint Thomas,” she continues.
Rowe is in agreement that Thomas has a plethora of options for a rich career post-racing if he wants it: “He could sail into the sunset, never work another day and drink pina coladas on the beach. If he stays in the sport, there are plenty of choices within the media and I’m sure he’ll have a plan.”
For Ellingworth, seeing a rider like Thomas continue to encourage the next generation of future Tour champions is of utmost importance: “He’s such a big character in Wales, I’d love to see him doing something down there within cycling I think this is a moment for British Cycling to use Geraint to inspire more people.”
* * *
And what of the man himself? How will it feel to cross the finish line of a bike race for a final time, hang up his cycling shoes and take off a jersey that will never have a race number on it again?
“I’ll cry to be honest,” says Thomas over a phone call. “It’s going to be emotional. I want to still go to the Tour this year and do a good job there, so I’m trying to focus on that, but my last race will be mad. I think there will be friends and family there, but it is going to be weird not racing my bike again. It’s a feeling I’ve never had after all these years competing.”
Thomas believes that the relaxed attitude that those around him talk about has been crucial to the longevity of his career: “It sounds a bit hippie, doesn’t it, but I’ve just lived in the moment, not thought too far ahead and have loved what I’m doing. I don’t take myself too seriously because at the end of the day, we are just racing a bike. There are much more important things in the world.”
Like Rowe and Davis, Thomas remembers those early days in Maindy with sharp clarity, but it was never about becoming a Tour de France winner back then. It was simply riding bicycles for the love of it.
“I would ride around the lane down the back of my dad’s house and go in the woods to mess about on little gravel tracks. I went to Maindy and gave it a go on the track bikes and enjoyed it,” he says. “Cycling just gives you a bit more freedom to explore than you’d get on foot. It wasn’t until I was a junior and went to Belgium that it started to get real.”
Thomas admits that starting to wave goodbye to the sport which gave him so much has invited a period of reflection that he hasn’t had in his career so far: “Luke’s retired which made me start to think about everything a bit more. It is bonkers, people like Swifty [Ben Swift] and Luke who I started riding with when I was super young, we’ve now won Grand Tours together. It’s so mad because when we were kids in Cardiff, it wasn’t Welsh kids that were performing in cycling, it was Germans, French or Spanish, the traditional cycling nations. If one of us did well, it was out of the ordinary, so what we have done, it’s crazy.”
After 20 years as a professional cyclist, Geraint Thomas has ridden 21 Grand Tours and won the general classification of 10 races, including the Tour, Paris-Nice, the Tour de Romandie, the Critérium du Dauphiné and the Tour de Suisse, as well as had podiums at the Giro d’Italia. Alongside that, he’s built a personal brand and podcast empire which has captured the hearts of the cycling world, not to mention starting his own charity to help get young people into the sport, The Geraint Thomas Cycling Trust. As those around him predict, there’s plenty more to come from Thomas in the next chapter of his life post-racing, but none of that really matters to the Welshman who has never sought the spotlight he has ended up in. For Thomas, how does he want to be remembered? The answer, like the man himself, is humble.
“I’d want people to think of an honest, hard-working guy,” smiles Thomas. “Someone who just gave it everything.”
