Geraint Thomas has said his Ineos Grenadiers team did not have faith in him, despite him now being placed third overall in the Tour de France, behind Jonas Vingegaard and Tadej Pogacar, with only three stages remaining.
Thomas, who won the Tour of Switzerland in June and is now 12 minutes ahead of his nearest teammate, Adam Yates, won the 2018 Tour and finished second in 2019. He is also the only rider in the peloton within 10 minutes of both Vingegaard and Pogacar and, barring accidents, will finish third in Paris on Sunday.
“I always believed,” he told Velonews.com. “Not many other people did, to be honest. It was a super-hard end to the year [in 2021] for a couple of different reasons, but I always believed that I still had the legs to do something. With these two [Vingegaard and Pogacar] in front of me, there’s not a lot that I could have done about that, but it was nice to be best of the rest.”
Asked if his team, which came into the Tour citing Yates and Dani Martínez as their team leaders, had shared his level of belief, he replied: “I don’t think so.”
“From the negotiations with the contract, it’s just how it was,” he said. “It’s all talk about the younger generation now. They obviously do believe that I can still be good and that I can still contribute to the team but Egan [Bernal] is the leader and he crashed. Then it’s Dani and Yates, and I was the leadout man in Suisse.
“That’s fine. It just gave me a bit more impetus and I’ve changed my training a bit this year. I’ve got a new coach and that’s given me a new lease of life. I have a slightly different diet too, eating more on the bike.”
Unlike in 2018, when by his own admission he was “cruising”, Thomas has had to use all his guile and experience in this year’s race. “When I won, cruising makes it sound easy, but I just felt like I was in control the whole time, a bit like how Vingegaard is now,” he said.
“Mentally I was in a great place, enjoying the pressure. I didn’t feel any pressure, it was just one day on to the next and ticking the boxes. I felt like I was fully in control the entire time.”
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Thomas suffered a relatively lean spell after the 2019 Tour and admitted that the scepticism towards his future potential for success had become an irritant. “Last year it was tough, to be honest. But once the season was done and I got away from this whole world, it was just about getting in the best possible shape.
“It does give you some motivation. It’s [people] making out that they think I’m crap. They [the team] didn’t, it was just a lot of other people as well. Maybe it’s about my age and stuff, but it is what it is. So it’s nice to be riding well and being up there.”
