‘If you didn’t see the crash yourself please reserve your opinions. It wasn’t a “lack of vision” as you pointed out as often as you could today. I was pushed into the barrier.’
Sure enough, there were pictures that came out later which proved I was right. But the only way we were ever going to speak to him again that race was if I apologised. I texted back two replies:
‘To be fair, at the time I said it was an assumption and we could be wrong. I’m a huge fan and wish you the very best. Hope you race on well. Fond regards.’
‘I’ll say something on air today.’
His reply: ‘Thanks Carlton, I’d appreciate that. The last thing I need right now is media reporting that “I wasn’t looking where I was going” or similar.’
The next day, on air, I said that Froome had claimed that it had been a racing incident and that the viewers could draw their own conclusions.
What Froome presents is a polished persona, but on the inside there’s a demon. The convivial diplomat that we see in a pre- or post-race interview is dumped unceremoniously in the bin as soon as he climbs aboard the Sky bus or his bike. He is actually anything but bland. Froome does whatever has to be done.
Geraint Thomas
Interviewer: ‘How did you do that?’
Geraint Thomas: ‘Honestly, I have absolutely no idea!’
Clever, cuddly, classy. Everybody loves Geraint. A cycling god you can worship without having to justify your religion. When anyone says: ‘I love G’, nobody ever asks why. People know a good guy when they see one. And we’ve seen a lot of this multiple Olympic and World track champion. Oh, and did I mention he won the Tour de France?
Geraint Thomas has always been one of the more colourful individuals in the peloton with his witty ripostes to reporters and tongue-in-cheek comments after hard-fought battles in the Tour, Giro and Vuelta. Along with Bradley Wiggins and Mark Cavendish, he brings a bit of British dry humour to the continental scene, in stark contrast to the far more serious Froome and the evasive Simon Yates.
Geraint is a grounded guy who loves his rugby and football. Given this, it’s easy to forget what a phenomenal cyclist he is. His status as wingman to Froome in the Grand Tours means we often forget that he’s a successful double Olympic gold medallist and three-time World Champion on the track in the brutal event of the team pursuit.
Growing up in rugby-mad Cardiff, he had to endure his fair share of teasing from his contemporaries to whom he had to justify shaving his legs and wearing Lycra bib shorts. But his early success with local club Maindy Flyers set him on the path to cycling glory. Like many of our British road racing stars – Wiggo, Cav and Yates – he found initial success on the track.
The fact is that G is just the sort of guy you’d want in the highly pressurised environment of an Olympic cycling team, to lighten up the atmosphere with a quip before the most important race of your career. He has developed a mindset over the years to overcome that excruciating fear, paranoia and sickening anxiety before these huge moments: he focuses on the process, not the outcome, and reverts to what he calls the computer in his head, programmed by coach Steve Peters. Off the track, there are times he lets the computer default to daft. He once put out a rumour that one of Team Sky’s secrets to success was to eat only onions for one day a week. Some professionals missed the mischief in this and took his comment at face value. There are no methane-powered bikes, but that month we did wonder.
What we all love about G is that he is so down to earth. He doesn’t overcomplicate things. He once said, ‘At the end of the day, we just train hard, rest well, eat well – and that’s it. It’s just hard work and I think sometimes they think we must be doing some crazy new diet or crazy new training regime, but it’s pretty simple.’ So keep him well serviced, fill him up, point him out of the bus and off he goes. ‘Nothing complicated.’ Believe me, in the complicated world of team road cycling this view is as refreshing as it comes.
He likes to party and has been known to fully enjoy his time off the bike. Beers, burgers and Welsh cakes – he tweeted that the baked delicacies were the only way to celebrate after winning the Tour de France. But all this ignores the fact that he’s led an incredibly disciplined life since the age of nine, when he began to take cycling seriously.
Like a lot of professional cyclists, he’s an absolute hardman. He ruptured his spleen in a crash back in 2005 and raced with a fractured pelvis in 2013 on nothing more than ibuprofen. His crash on the 2015 tour, when he was wrapped around a telegraph pole on the descent of Col de Manse, was a classic G moment. To everyone who saw it, it looked like an horrendous crash, one likely to have horrible consequences. G, though, clambered back up the mountainside and remounted his bike, his only complaint that he’d lost a pair of his trademark white sunglasses. ‘I feel all right for now,’ he explained at the finish line. ‘I guess my doctor will ask me my name soon. I’ll say: Chris Froome.’
He’s been beset by bad luck on the few occasions when he’s been let off the leash. His first attempt as a general classification Grand Tour contender ended when he smashed into a badly parked police motorbike on the Giro. For any rider to suffer injury and have to bow out from a race is disappointing, but given how few chances he’d
