Thank you, Geraint Thomas.
That’s not a thank you from me, by the way, it was the chorus from small Suffolk towns and villages at the start of this week. It was the same chorus that continued through Bedfordshire in midweek as the Tour of Britain wormed its way towards Wales this weekend, where “Thank you, Geraint” will feel more like a national uprising than a polite refrain from ardent admirers.
In this, the last week of Thomas’s cycling career, this is all so very striking: hordes of fans of different shapes and sizes flocking around the Ineos Grenadiers team bus, wondering if they will get to see him in the flesh — then delighted and slightly dumbfounded when he actually appears, and then even more taken aback when he doesn’t just scribble a couple of token autographs, but stops and talks to everyone, absolutely everyone, as if they were his neighbour and they were chatting over the garden fence.
Thomas’s fans have turned out in numbers for the last event of his career and he is rewarding them by posing for selfies and signing autographs
TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER MARC ASPLAND
Some of the Gerainterie — that’s the collective noun for the Thomas tribe — are a bit lost for words, as you might be if it was Elton John who had just stepped off the bus, but the words they all manage to locate are, “Thank you”.
There we were at the race start in Woodbridge, east Suffolk, on Tuesday morning, the boats bobbing on the small marina next to us, the Gerainterie, as we admired Thomas’s Pinarello, parked in front of the bus and specially pimped up for the week with gold embossing on the frame recording his greatest achievements: the two Olympic golds, the 2018 Tour de France, a list that stretches halfway down the top tube.
Mary Fenn, a 75-year-old from Sudbury next to me, had a big cardboard “Good Luck” sign that she made at home. “I’d be proud to have him as a son,” she confided.
Then Thomas, 39, appeared from the bus, an everyday messiah in Lycra wearing a jersey specially designed for his farewell race, with names and more achievements from his past on it; a reference to his victory on Alpe d’Huez, a drawing by his five-year-old son of him on a podium.
Mary said, “Thank you”. Henry, a seven-year-old from Felixstowe, presented him with a small figurine of a cyclist that he had painted to look like Thomas, who received it as if it’s Christmas. “Thank you,” said Henry’s dad.
It could be an emotional day for Thomas on Sunday when he finishes his career in his home town of Cardiff
TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER MARC ASPLAND
Dave, the man next to him, slightly panicked and asked if it’s just a happy coincidence that the final stage on Sunday finishes in Cardiff. What, you mean the stage that happens to start in Newport at the Geraint Thomas National Velodrome of Wales, that goes past the Maindy track where he learnt his craft, that goes within 100 metres of his parents’ house and past the pub where he had his first pint — the stage that reads like a Geraint Thomas life story?
“No,” Thomas replied charitably, it probably wasn’t a coincidence, “I think they helped me out a bit.”
“Thank you,” Dave said.
Here’s the thing. Thomas’s career wasn’t like the three knights of British cycling. He wasn’t a showman, a record-breaking exponent of the astonishing like Sir Mark Cavendish. He wasn’t a stockpiler of gold medals like Sir Chris Hoy. He didn’t break the mould, flick victory signs and persuade you that cyclists were rock stars like Sir Bradley Wiggins.
Most of the Gerainterie get all that, though it’s just not so straightforward to explain. They get it because they are cycling people, many of them in cleats and Lycra having ridden to Woodbridge or the finish by the seaside in Southwold. So they understand the essential deal with being an elite rider like Thomas: that you spend almost your entire career trying not to win, but trying to help someone else win instead.
Thomas is bowing out on a special custom-painted Pinarello bike
TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER MARC ASPLAND
This week is a case in point. No, Thomas wasn’t trying to win the stage into Southwold on Tuesday, he was doing a shift to try to deliver Sam Watson, a team-mate 16 years his junior, to the podium.
There is no other sport that demands selflessness like road cycling and there may be no other rider with such a long and glittering record of working for other people than Thomas. His years on the Tour de France that ended this summer stretch back to 2007; no other rider has spanned so many years.
I personally recall — as if you could forget — the stage three start in Ajaccio in 2013 when he had fractured his pelvis, watching the soigneurs literally lifting him on to his bike, thinking: there’s no way he can ride, this is extreme folly, he’ll get as far as the first turn in the road and then he’ll stop. But he was in the service of Chris Froome that year and he got him through that stage and the following 18, all the way to Paris.
He was almost comical in his allegiance to the cause. He could smash into a telegraph pole and down a ditch (2016) or hit a hay bale and flip head over the handlebars (2017) and still bounce straight back into the saddle, back up the road to Froome’s support.
He was never not himself except, arguably, for the 2018 Tour when he went and won it, but even that was in character: he started as a domestique riding for Froome again, but Froome’s crashes eventually meant that the leadership was passed to Thomas: OK, I’ll give it go.
Kind of worked out, didn’t it?
That’s what is particularly interesting about that list of achievements on his bike frame: how much longer might it have been if he had stamped his feet and said, “I want this to be more about me!” As it turns out, Thomas doesn’t have that in him.
For the Tour of Britain, his Ryanair flight into Stansted on Monday was terribly delayed, which meant that it wasn’t until 2am that he got into his accommodation, a University of Essex bedsit with a single bed and a mattress where, he said, you could feel every spring. Up at 7.30am the next morning for the race, what he certainly doesn’t have in him is the ability to say: “I’m done in, I’m not working for Sam Watson today.”
Watson went on to finish sixth that day and, after the stage, reflected on what it was like having Thomas pulling for him. When he was young, he said, he remembered coming home from school and watching Thomas on the TV. “So when you first then join the team, you kind of pinch yourself that it’s him. It’s still cool, but he’s so down to earth you forget about it.”
So no, it’s not weird having a Tour de France winner in your service. “You can be completely yourself around him,” says Watson. Thomas wouldn’t have it any other way.
Thomas’s autobiography comes out this autumn
TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER MARC ASPLAND
Thomas has made a career of this, of being one of the troops, of saying: it’s not about me. I think that’s why thank you are the words coming first: thank you for being that guy, thank you for doing it for so long, for being so true to yourself (apart from the year you won it), for not becoming flash or self-important. Thank you for being one of the troops, because that’s what almost all of us are, we just don’t happen to win the Tour de France in the process.
The irony of this week is that it is about Thomas, like it or not. “I feel like Elton John,” he said, “though my farewell tour’s not going to be as long as his.”
At the end of it, after the stage on Sunday, a special farewell event has been organised for him plus 4,000 punters in Cardiff Castle. “I thought,” said Thomas, “it’s going be embarrassing when they only get rid of 2,000 tickets.” They sold out in 90 minutes.
That’s a lot of people saying thank you.