Sort of guy you’d have a pint with

IT’S A rare elite cyclist who begins his reflections on life in the sport by admitting that he once wore pants under his Lycra kit at a race in Cardiff’s northern suburbs.

‘It led to an awkward but important conversation in the changing room,’ said Geraint Thomas. ‘“What, you’ve got pants on?” “Well yeah, haven’t you?” ’

Many such stories made a book which Thomas wrote a few years ago into a publishing hit and one of the best in cycling’s vast catalogue of literature. He told of shaving his legs as a 14-year-old in a Portaloo at a race in Germany and of loving his first cycling shades so much that he barely wore them. Of suffering such an extreme case of the chronic fatigue cyclists call ‘the bonk’ that, after pedalling home, ‘I just kept nudging the doorbell with my forehead in the hope that someone inside might hear me.’

After these 21 days in which the French have made it patently clear how much they loathe the clinical, robotic, po-faced Team Sky machine, Thomas provides the antidote. Never have one team more needed a winner as self-deprecating as the man they all call ‘G’.

The nine-year-old Thomas turned up to swim at his local leisure centre when he peered through a fence and saw the local Maindy Flyers cycling club training.

‘He came along a few days later and had a go himself,’ said the club’s Debbie Wharton yesterday. ‘When he first started, he was just like any of the other kids, wearing baggy shorts and trainers.’

Despite prodigious early promise, many were coming around to the view that the 32-year-old had been cut out for a life in the slipstream. His years on the Tour have been defined by his work as a domestique for Chris Froome.

‘A bad day is when Froome is alone in the front group of 20 and there are 60 kilometres to go,’ he said in the book. ‘A good day is when you deflect every nightmarish arrow slung at you. One by one, you throw yourself on to the pyre so that your leader may be venerated.’

It is impossible to avoid the impression that he likes Froome far more than Bradley Wiggins. Thomas found Wiggins’s mood unpredictable, while he has found Froome’s lack of ego and often vacant personality endearing.

Thomas also delighted in Froome’s lack of cycling knowledge. ‘Who’s that Astana guy? He’s quick,’ he asked Thomas after the 2013 Tour of Oman.

‘Mate, it’s Nibali,’ Thomas informed him.’ Even in the last three weeks, Thomas has been brutally straight about his own place in the pecking order.

‘I’m just, er, maybe a bit more than a pawn,’ he said after the defining Stage 12, when he eased away from Froome to record an historic second consecutive stage win at Alpe d’Huez. That was the evening Chris Boardman wondered aloud whether all this modesty was actually a cover for a slight mental deficit.

‘He’s had several opportunities in the past and folded,’ said Boardman on ITV. ‘I think he’s a little bit fragile on that front and it’s a way to deflect the pressure.’

It was an allusion to the solitary off-days which Thomas always seems to have had in the mountains. He was fourth overall after a brilliant Stage 17 climb in 2015, but lost 22 minutes two days later and finished 15th. ‘Others were always the stars,’ one source told

Sportsmail. ‘First, Mark Cavendish, who he came through the track academy with, then Wiggins and Froome on the road. Elite competitors tend not to be normal. Thomas is balanced. You could have a pint with him.’ Yet Thomas harks back to the school of hard knocks in a way that suggests even mental struggles will be overcome in the end.

There was the operation to remove his spleen in 2005, after a piece of metal flicked up from the road into the spokes of his front wheel in Australia. It was serious. His family was asked to fly out to be at his bedside.

And then there were his 20 days of competition in the 2013 Tour de France with a fractured pelvis, which required him to be lifted into his saddle. ‘The worst pain I’ve ever experienced on a bike,’ is how he described that race.

‘Why did I keep going? Because I had trained all year for it. Because my team-mate Chris Froome had a great shot at winning the yellow jersey.’

The notion of Thomas winning this weekend is something that Dave Brailsford could not have scripted better as a riposte to those who view his outfit as a soulless form of anti-cycling.

Yet the whole thing has been unintentional. Thomas will see the funny side of that.