As the 2023 road season comes to an end, INEOS Grenadiers’ top leader, Geraint Thomas, took some time to reflect on the past year.
“It feels like I had three good weeks,” he recaps on his own podcast, the Geraint Thomas Cycling Club. The highlight for the 37-year-old cyclist was clearly the Giro d’Italia. Although he lost the Maglia Rosa in a disappointing penultimate stage to Primoz Roglic in a brutal individual time trial on Monte Lussari.
“At the beginning of the year, that was my main goal. It was all about the Giro,” he recalls. “I think I can be happy with how everything went. In fact, it’s a kind of year to look back and be happy. I’ll just erase everything else from my memory except the second place in the Giro.”
Thomas reports that a stomach infection before the Giro left him weakened.
“I think I probably would have won if I hadn’t had that infection and lost all that base work. I would have been at least 15 seconds better, like in the opening time trial. I wouldn’t have lost as much time as I did in all the stages in the middle of it. I would have been much better.”
“Anyway, you can’t do anything about it. It’s what happened, it’s what I had, so you just have to deal with it, and I felt that way,” he concludes. “We did our best and salvaged the year.”