'He's unbreakable' - Ineos Grenadiers teammates pay tribute to Geraint Thomas after retirement announcement

Ineos Grenadiers teammates at the Clásica Jaén have paid tribute to Geraint Thomas after the 2018 Tour de France winner announced this morning that he was retiring at the end of the season.

Thomas' career has included Olympic and World Championships track success with the GB squad, but the latter part of the career has been dominated by road racing with Sky and then Ineos Grenadiers.

Barring his four first years, since 2010 Thomas has spent with the British team and he is the only rider still on their roster to have remained with the squad since its inception.

"You have to call it one day," former World Champion Michal Kwiatkowski, who joined Sky in 2016, told Cyclingnews at the Clásica Jaén start. "I'm just happy that I was part of it for the few years we raced together.

"I have great memories, victories, training camps with him - it was great to have G there alongside me. He's had a great career, and it'll be nice to finish off this last year together in some races.

"We've already done the Tour Down Under together, we had some fun down there already and it'll be good to do some more races between now and the end of the year."

The Polish racer said his first memories of Thomas dated from around 2014. That year, Kwiatkowski was still racing with QuickStep and they were rivals in the Classics in particular, as well as races like the upcoming Volta ao Algarve, which Kwiatkowski won that February, while Thomas won in 2015 and 2016.

"He was always there with [retired Australian racer and Sky leader] Richie Porte," Kwiatkowski said, "and we were rivals then, fighting for the overall in Algarve but teammates later. It was always fun though."

Kwiatkowski highlighted both Thomas' versatility as a racer - the Briton has triumphed in everything from Olympic track racing to Grand Tours to Classics and week-long stage races -  and his cast-iron determination too, to fight back after the various injuries and crashes that dogged his career at times.

"It's impressive - looking at him, he goes through very bad moments, but he always bounces back. So I know how hard he works, he always reached the top again. It's not easy at his age, it would have been easier if he was 25, of course, but he's not and he's still got it. He still got back on top again.

"He's a tough man, very robust. I will remember him as being unbreakable.

Longtime teammate Egan Bernal, a teammate of Thomas' since 2018, the year Thomas won the Tour de France,  said at the start of the Clásica Jaén on Monday.

"He's a great teammate, a great leader and a wonderful person -  always with a great sense of humour. I have vivid memories of racing two Tours with him, the one in which he won and then the one I won the following year and he got second.

"I just wish him all the best for the rest of his career and for everything else, too."

While Bernal is racing his first event in Europe as newly crowned National Champion in the Spanish one-day race before riding in the Vuelta a Andalucia later this week, Kwiatkowski, too, is looking for more one-day success in Jaén and then Strade Bianche.

"I've got number 13 as a race number here, maybe for the first time in my career, I'm not sure, so we'll have to see how that affects things," Kwiatkowski told Cyclingnews with a smile.

"Obviously I didn't race so much last year with the injury" - a ruptured disc in his lower back- "but I had a good start to the year in Australia, and also a good training camp. I'm riding here in Jaén just to break up February a bit, but I'm still at the building phase, San Remo and Strade are still to come.

"I'm ready to race, the big goals are later on, but you always like to open the bag early, as they say. So we'll see how it goes today and later on, too." 

Both Bernal and Kwiatkowski are pencilled in to be racing in Tirreno-Adriatico later this spring, where they will likely coincide again with Thomas for the first time since he announced his retirement.