Let me begin with something journalistically unprofessional. I like Geraint Thomas. In my few dealings with him he's been as courteous and obliging as you could hope for. This sentiment is widely shared amongst my colleagues at other media outlets.
He's the same as he is in TV interviews, on his podcast and via his social media, where he comes across as relatably unserious despite having won the Tour de France yellow jersey in 2018, a feat that separates him from anything humanly relatable at all.
The 39-year-old Welshman, retiring this year after nearly two decades as a pro cyclist, seems to agree with the assesment that he's a bit different to many of his succesful colleagues.
"I was the total opposite to both of them," he said of fellow British cycling stars Bradley Wiggins and Mark Cavendish in an interview with the Guardian, "just a normal bloke from Cardiff who you would go down the pub with and have a pint – who then ended up winning the Tour."
Caley Fretz
Thomas’s farewell season has coincided with an uncomfortable reckoning for the team formerly known as Sky, the once-invincible British project that reshaped cycling with marginal gains, massive budgets, and an enduring whiff of suspicion. While Thomas remains one of the sport’s most likable figures, the institution around him has been dragged back into scrutiny that many thought it had outgrown. The David Rozman investigation has reopened questions about the culture of control, secrecy, and trust that defined Sky’s rise and Ineos’s long-running dominance.
Thomas, currently existing in the relaxing purgatory between racing career and team management (he is rumoured and expected to be graduating into a team management role at Ineos Grenadiers next year), finds himself for the first time in years not beholden to media interviews – except that he has a new book to promote: "According to G: The Autobiography."
Now, the Guardian's Donald McRae is a serious journalist, a prolific profiler of sportspeople. He would have been more than happy for the access granted to him by Thomas and his PR team, who, in turn, would have also known that McRae wouldn't pull any punches with his questions. The biggest question currently surrounding the Ineos Grenadiers, where Thomas spent almost his entire road career, is the case of David Rozman, the team's head soigneur who, last we heard, was being investigated by anti-doping authorities over texts exchanged with Mark Schmidt (the doctor at the heart of the Operation Aderlass doping investigation) just before the team's winning 2012 Tour de France campaign.
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