Geoghegan Hart accepts no margin for error at Tour de France after slow start
Tao Geoghegan Hart, the winner of the 2020 Giro d’Italia suffering among the peloton at the 2021 Tour de France, is hoping the final week of the race will be more fruitful for him than the opening fortnight.
“I will try and have a memorable experience in this Tour, because I would say that so far, it’s not been overly memorable,” the 26-year-old Londoner said. The Ineos Grenadiers rider was among those who crashed on the Tour’s first stage in the infamous sign-waving incident, in which a banner-waving spectator caused a mass pile-up.
“I was unlucky but also really lucky,” he said, “and then had a week or 10 days of struggling with the small repercussions of that crash. It was just pains and problems with my back, but then in the last two or three days, it’s been much better. I’m hoping that in this last phase of the race, I can try and take something from it.
“In that first big crash, there were seven of us together. The crash was coming across the road towards us and basically the six guys in front of me got through, I managed to stop but then somebody hit me from behind. That’s the reality of bike racing and you have to accept that.”
In what has been a Tour characterised by crashes and subsequent withdrawals, Geoghegan Hart has survived the worst and is still in the peloton.
“It’s always hard when you don’t feel yourself and you have pain, but at the same time, you are constantly reminded that there’s always someone in the race in a worse position,” he said. “There’s a lot of guys who’ve been at home for quite a while, which is really unfortunate, and there are others who are no doubt suffering even more, still in the race.”
But there is no doubt that 72nd place overall was not where he or his team management expected him to be, with a week to go. “It was a case of trying to stay in the game but you can’t protect four riders in the Tour – it’s never going to happen,” he said, “but if you look at that first week, at how the racing was, it’s always going to be the case that you lose riders from each team because not everyone can be in the front, not everyone can be in that first position.”
Compared to his experience of the Giro d’Italia, Geoghegan Hart said that in the Tour de France, the stakes were “even higher.”
“Every rider has a little bit more incentive and motivation to be into that corner in the right position, or to start that stage in the front 10, instead of the front 30. The level’s so high that stuff like positioning becomes even more important because if you sit 100 riders back, the effort required to get to the front is very large. There’s no room for error.”
Ineos Grenadiers’ hopes of rescuing what has been a lacklustre race so far now rest with Richard Carapaz, currently sitting in third overall, but with a cluster of other contenders breathing down his neck. “If I was in his shoes, I’d be looking around the bus for my teammates’ support and that’s a big motivation for me to give him as much support as I can,” said Geoghegan Hart.