Unfinished business? Geraint Thomas battles for Giro d’Italia crown again

When Geraint Thomas made his Giro d’Italia debut in 2008 as a fresh-faced racer at Barloworld not even halfway through his second season as a pro, Tadej Pogačar was just nine years old. Fast forward another 16 months of May, though, and in 2024 they are poised to be two of the key protagonists primed to battle out next month’s Giro d’Italia. 

It's the debutant Pogačar who enters with all the expectations on him to perform in Italy. He’s no longer a Slovenian child with dreams of riding the biggest bike races but perhaps the best we’ve seen for decades - a serial winner with 70 pro wins, two Grand Tours and six Monuments to his name. 

Intriguingly, as cycling re-enters an age of perennial winners spearheaded by the likes of Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates), Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease A Bike) and Mathieu van der Poel (Alpecin-Deceuninck), the 37-year-old Thomas refuses to change his racing and training strategies… but on the other hand, why should he? An 18-year-career of trusting his ability to time his peak correctly for the vital races has seen him win the Tour de France, two Olympic Gold Medals and make the podium in four Grand Tours. 

Thomas represents an old-school art which is quickly dying out as the sport relies more and more heavily on the latest research into recovery times, nutrition and performance repeatability. It's not just the above-mentioned superstars who are firing on all cylinders right from the season’s onset in January until its denouement in autumn, but the majority of a more professionalised peloton.

“I guess over the years I’ve just done it pretty well numerous times,” Thomas told Cyclingnews and Cycling Weekly during the Tour of the Alps in his continued trust in his legs to come good.

“It doesn’t make it any easier though, you’ve still got to work super hard and put in those hard yards but just trust the process and keep doing the right things. As long as I do everything I can then it is what it is - you are where you are.”

Thomas was speaking so matter of factly in the midst of trusting his form to reach its peak while riding his final preparation race for the Giro. 

The 2024 Tour of the Alps ended as a typical five-day performance from the Welshman who showed signs of his best on the opening and final stages. But he was quite far off overall winner Juan Pedro López (Lidl-Trek) and runner-up Ben O’Connor (Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale), two men who will also be at the start of next month’s corsa rosa. 

Coming down from altitude camp in Sierra Nevada, Thomas showed no signs of panic after finishing a lowkey 13th in the Tour of the Alps. He was in agreement with sports director Zak Dempster that he just needs to freshen up now, ahead of the incoming three-week test. “Once I rest up and soak up all this work, I should have made a good step,” he said.

'Bigger fish to fry'

“We’ve got bigger fish to fry,” Dempster told Cyclingnews. “Getting the most out of the Tour of the Alps is just about racing it as hard as possible. Whatever that result might be, we’ll take it and on we go to the big objective at the Giro.”

Despite his ever-cool nature, Thomas did concede that the mental effect of being quite far off riders he is scheduled to compete with at the Giro isn’t the easiest. After all, it was Pogačar who he watched dazzle the competition at the pair’s only stage race meeting this season so far, during the Volta a Catalunya.

“It's still hard when you go to Catalunya and you want to perform well,” Thomas said. “Trusting that process and losing a couple of minutes every day is hard sometimes but you know you just have to commit to what you’re doing.”

As Pogačar becomes more Merckxian by the pedal stroke, expectations vary on whether Thomas and company will be able to cling to his back wheel when he inevitably attacks up Oropa, Prati di Tivo and/or Monte Grappa. In some quarters, Pogačar’s success has even been billed as a foregone conclusion without much in the way of a Grand Tour’s typically dramatic nature. 

Thomas himself has been on the wrong side of this drama as recently as last year’s Giro where the maglia rosa slipped away from him during the penultimate stage. However, Pogačar has similarly seen his usually infallible legs buckle under the pressure of Vingegaard’s exploits at high altitude in the last two Tours. Everyone can have a bad day across 21 days of racing, even those with an air of invincibility.

“Pogačar is obviously an amazing bike rider, isn’t he? He’s started super well this year and he’s going to be as strong as ever at the Giro,” Thomas said. 

“He’s the pre-race favourite and has a strong team around him, which changes the dynamic of the race a bit. But that also means all eyes will be on him," read Thomas in a statement from Ineos.

“Our plan is to be aggressive, take the race on. So I think just race the race as we see it day by day and try to take any opportunities that come our way.”

The comeback trail from 2023

A return to the Giro after the devastation of 2023 has been on Thomas’ mind since he announced a two-year extension with Ineos Grenadiers in October. 

The pain of defeat at the final hurdle at the hands of Primož Roglič was of course disappointing but Thomas always stated that if you had told him at the start of the year that he would finish second at the Giro, he “would have bitten your hand off.” 

Thomas’s pre-Giro preparation in 2023 was derailed by a urine infection which kept him off the bike for much of the spring. After a “smoother” and “more enjoyable” run-in, 2024 offers a chance at redemption and to see Thomas back at his best.

“With last year’s Giro, If you look from Catalunya to Tour of the Alps, it was about the best comeback since Easter Sunday I think,” joked Dempster in reflection of Thomas’ previous Giro performance. “Whereas now he’s had a good build, a consistent build and he’s in good shape.”

Both Monaco residents, Pogačar and Thomas have been spotted training together in Sierra Nevada as they prepare to take on the Giro d’Italia and Tour de France double, but Thomas admitted their shared goals hadn’t cropped up in conversation.

“We’ve not really spoken about the Giro, just the odd chat about it but nothing too much, both of us just get on with what we're doing really,” he said. “I don’t think he needs any advice.”

Alongside Thomas will be a mix of experience and youth for Ineos withThymen Arensman set to be the key mountain domestique in the challenge against Pogačar. The Dutchman has shown himself to be a strong Grand Tour GC rider in his own right, having finished sixth at both the Giro and Vuelta.

“G and Thymen have got a good relationship,” said Dempster, who will be one of the sports directors present at the Giro. 

“They’re not very snappy compared to Pogačar but at the same time, we could say Thymen is a proven performer in the third week of Grand Tours. As for G I think everyone knows his history of being a pro for the last 18 years. I think they’ve got similar strengths and other points to compliment each other so we should be confident with those two guys for sure.”

'Unfinished business'?

Set to turn 38 on the second last day of the Giro d’Italia, for some riders as the end of their career looms closer, finding the motivation to push their body to the maximum can prove complicated. But if Thomas already showed in 2023 that he was still up for a GC battle right the way through to the final time trial - not to mention giving an old friend a fine lead out on the last day of racing in Rome - the fact that he came so close last May will likely provide him with a fresh layer of impulse.

“You’d have to ask him if he’s got a sense of unfinished business, but I suspect he has - we all have, haven’t we? So yeah, of course, it’s a motivator,” Ineos Grenadiers Director of Racing Steve Cummings tells Cyclingnews. 

“I know Geraint and the team have gone into real detail on the preparation, no stone has been left unturned.

“Having said that, it’s the Giro, isn’t it? A lot of the roads are covered in snow so you can’t see every road and it always throws up surprises. But yeah - world-class preparation I’d say.”

As for specific details on what such a thorough build-up means in concrete terms, Cummings says in many cases it’s been a case of copy-paste on how it worked for Ineos in the build-up to the Giro d'Italia 2023.

“They’ve done a fair few recons, but the main thing is already last year the preparation worked really well and that’s been mirrored this year: the altitude camps, keeping the group together, a really good team spirit...”

“That’s something we did really well last year and I think we’ve tried to do this year. It’s too early to conclude but I suspect it’ll work. On top of that, all the riders are in good condition and ready to go.”

It so happens that Cummings was Thomas’ teammate at the Giro d’Italia with Barloworld way back in 2008 - a race in which multiple emblematic figures of British like Dave Millar, Charly Wegelius, Bradley Wiggins and Mark Cavendish also took part. And in Italy and beyond, Cummings’ career path has crossed with the Welshman’s on countless occasions both before and since.  

So apart from his role as Ineos race head, on a personal and historical note, Cummings is clearly looking forward to seeing how this next chapter of Thomas and the team racing in Italy unfolds. He's also deeply convinced there will be no lack of successful performances for the team over the next few weeks and not just on the GC front either.

“Having such a strong favourite like Pogačar means that there’s likely to be more opportunities for us in terms of stage wins,” Cummings says, “and we’ll look to take calculated risks wherever possible. I’m really excited to see how that transpires on the road.”

The Giro-Tour double

If Ineos Grenadiers have taken a similar approach to their 2024 Giro build-up to 2023, there are some parallels in terms of the opposition, too. Remco Evenepoel’s and Primož Roglič’s joint status as leading pre-race favourites last May has been inherited by Pogacar alone. But be it one rider or two, for a team like Ineos the initial scenario they face as a result is not so different.

“It’s no secret that Pogačar is a level above everybody, but this is cycling and this season has already proved that a lot of things can happen,” Cummings argues.

“We’re ready for all kinds of situations. If you look at the team, it’s really well-rounded and as for Geraint himself, it's about having that experience and knowing how to prepare - I don’t want to say 100 times, but it must be getting on for that.

“He knows how to take care of himself and there’s a skill and an art to doing that in a Grand Tour. So yeah, I’m looking forward to it.”

The extra layer of intrigue for Thomas about this year’s Grand Tour challenges is that for the first time ever - barring when he crashed out of both races in 2017 - he’s going for a Giro-Tour double.

One point undoubtedly in Thomas' favour about that new goal is that having both the experience and the kind of ‘diesel motor’ that only comes with age could serve him well in what is effectively one of road cycling’s toughest endurance tests. Furthermore, at a point in his career where Thomas’ virtual collection, race-wise, of ‘been there, done that’ t-shirts is now as extensive as it can get, travelling into unchartered waters with a Giro-Tour double is bound to have an added attraction.

“It’s something he’s not done before and he’s really excited about it,” Cummings says, "and that’s why we’ve gone for it. As you get older and you’ve achieved so much as he has, you look for new challenges and this is one of them.

“The good thing, in any case, is the preparation between the Giro and the Tour is all planned. So that means we can look at the here and now, and then we’ll deal with what comes after the Giro, afterwards.”

Cummings laughs when reminded that as a pro he did a difficult Giro-Tour double way back in 2010, a task that mainly involved working for Sky teammate Bradley Wiggins.

“There were some days in the race that I couldn’t get over a railway bridge!" he jokes. "Seriously, though, there’s so much that’s been learned since then that it seems like a different sport: so much more data, so much more information about managing fatigue, so much more we know about nutrition.

“There’s really no comparison. But mentally doing two Grand Tours back to back is the biggest challenge of it and that’s not changed. Also, Geraint has got a young family and he needs to spend time with them, and that’s fitted in with the plan for between the Giro and the Tour, too.

“So after the Giro, he’ll go back to Monaco, but then go up to Isola [in the Alps] nearby for altitude training and he’ll be able to see some of the stage finishes for the Tour around there. But he can have his family with him up there, too, and rather than with the team, it’ll be more of a family environment.

“After that, he’ll come back home and then he’ll go on to the Tour.”

Thomas, Ineos and the next generation

Ineos Grenadiers at the Giro d’Italia is far from being just about Thomas, Arensman and the GC bid, with interest high in how Tobias Foss, a former top ten finisher overall, and Filippo Ganna can fare, particularly in the time trials. At the opposite end of the spectrum to Thomas, too, Ineos Grenadiers are also fielding a rider 16 years his junior: Magnus Sheffield.

From Cummings' point of view, there are multiple goals for the young American. But one key element - which circles directly back to Thomas - is that of the Grand Tour apprentice making his debut in a three-week stage race by learning from one of the masters of the art - at a point, too, where Thomas is still seeking to impact at the maximum GC level possible.

“With Magnus, I guess there are two things,” Cummings concludes. “There’s the here and now and trying to develop him for later on in many ways.”

“He reminds me a lot of Geraint when Geraint was younger and he always raced the Classics. Magnus has done the same this year and if you were thinking about the Giro alone it’s probably not the optimal preparation.

“But there’s a long-term aspect here about developing him as a racer as well as just being physically ready for the Giro. So I’ve no doubt he’ll be ready for this year” - taking second in the Tour de Romandie TT being one very promising result - “and he’s already close, so it’ll be exciting.

“He’s a rider who’s already shown he has the potential to win at WorldTour level, so if he gets the opportunity on stages, we hope he can grab them with both hands.”

On top of that for Sheffield from Saturday onwards are missions of helping the team and what Cummings simply calls “learning from the master” - Geraint Thomas. That’s a strong sign that while Ineos Grenadiers are very much focused on the here and now in this year’s Giro d’Italia, the not-so-distant future of the team in GC racing is far from forgotten as well. And that for all he has an old-school approach, in both these cases and so much more, the Welshman is very much set to be playing a key role in Italy this May.

Get unlimited access to all of our coverage of the Giro d'Italia - including live reporting, breaking news and analysis on the ground from every stage of the race as it happens and more. Find out more