2018 Tour De France - Thomas: A Worthy Champion

Uncertain whether he would hold up over three weeks, the Welshman didn’t put a foot wrong throughout

Geraint Thomas may have been a surprise Tour de France champion, but as the strongest rider on every terrain there was no question that he fully deserved his victory. From the moment that Dave Brailsford informed the Welshman to prepare for the Tour as Sky’s leader during the winter, with Chris Froome embroiled in his salbutamol case, Thomas, as he often stated, lived in his own bubble. He focused on his training, his diet, on anything that he could control, and didn’t worry about anything else.

Often criticised for his tendency to crash, for his inexperience as a Grand Tour leader, the 32-year old Welshman was the only one of the Tour favourites to pick his way through all of the traps that race director Thierry Gouvenou set in the opening nine days. No doubt his experience of the Classics gave him an edge during the elbows-out battles for position through the Vendée, Brittany and across northern France to Roubaix’s cobbles, where he was always likely to feel at home.

The mountains were his biggest test, and he stuck to the strategy that had served him so well as he rode to victory at the Critérium du Dauphiné. He let his Sky team-mates dominate the pace-making, then tracked his rivals, attacking only in the final few hundred metres in order to open small gaps and snatch bonus seconds. It was a clinical approach that put the onus on Thomas’s rivals to take the race to Sky. The fact that they rarely could said everything about the degree of control Thomas and Sky retained.