“It’s not been a bad run, eh?” That is Geraint Thomas’ own assessment of his 19-year cycling career which came to an end at this year’s Tour of Britain.

Wales’s greatest ever road cyclist announced that 2025 will be his last year in professional cycling earlier in February, marking an extended victory lap for a true sporting legend.

Thomas the only Welshman – and third Briton – to win the Tour de France, and he dominated the field in 2018 for Team Sky (now INEOS), in the middle of a near decade-long supremacy of the famous race in cycling.

Thomas was also an Olympic champion in his early career, claiming gold as part of the team pursuit at both Beijing 2008 and London 2012, the former as part of a team with fellow Tour winner Bradley Wiggins.

In October 2023, Thomas signed a two-year deal with Ineos Grenadiers, which will prove to be his last.

“Looking back, I never thought I’d be doing 14 Tours and to win it was just bonkers,” Thomas said after his final Tour.

“I can look back with fond memories. It was something I always dreamed of doing so to have just done it and be in Paris once is special you know. To do 14 is unreal really, one hell of a journey.

“I’m not one to be too sentimental and look back or whatever, you’re always sort of thinking of the next thing. But I guess when it comes to the end there’s nothing else to look forward to is there?”

Having transitioned from track to road cycling in the wake of London 2012, Thomas spent much of his career playing a supporting role in four-time Tour champion Chris Froome’s historic run of titles.

After winning his own title in 2018, a year later Thomas would place second behind INEOS teammate Egan Bernal.

Thomas remained at the very pinnacle of road cycling until very recently, demonstrated by his third-place finish at the 2022 edition, coming in behind the two best road cyclists of the 2020s: Jonas Vingegaard and current reigning champion Tadej Pogacar.

Away from the French mountains, Thomas’ list of achievements is extensive.

The Cardiff-born rider twice went close at the Giro d’Italia, placing third in 2024 and second the year before.

Representing the red of Wales, Thomas won gold in the road race at the 2014 Commonwealth Games, as well as two bronzes in the time trials in 2014 and 2022, and a bronze in the points race in 2006 as a 20-year-old.

He was also part of the Great Britain team that helped Mark Cavendish become road race world champion in 2011, while his track exploits included three team pursuit World Championship golds.

Thomas is well known for studying at Cardiff comprehensive school, Whitchurch High School, and was the eldest of a famous trio that included Gareth Bale and Sam Warburton.

While cycling is a small sport compared to the all-encompassing football and rugby, for a while in the summer of 2018, while Warburton was battling his final injury, and Bale watching the World Cup from his home, Thomas dominated Welsh sporting conversation.

‘G’, as he is affectionately known, with his unkempt mop of hair, became a Welsh sporting icon.

He was voted BBC Sports Personality of the Year, sat next to Nicole Kidman on Graham Norton’s sofa and exchanged shirts with Lionel Messi at the Camp Nou.

It is a mark of Thomas’s longevity that he is the last to retire of the Whitchurch trio, despite being the oldest, with Warburton the first to finish in 2018, and Bale following in 2023.

Shortly after leaving school, Thomas joined the Barloworld team and in 2007 became the first Welsh cyclist to compete in the Tour de France since Colin Lewis in 1967.

Thomas’s successful partnership with Froome would start here, riding together for two years before both joining Team Sky in 2010.

Even before he joined the team that would define his career, Thomas was already a world champion track cyclist, winning the team pursuit at the 2007 Track World Championships.

World gold turned to Olympic gold in 2008 as Thomas left the roads for a while. Time trial became Thomas’s discipline of choice, quickly becoming one of the world’s best velodrome cyclists.

As British cycling looked to take its success on the track out onto the roads, Thomas was handed the chance to return to the tour with Team Sky.

Led by the now-famous Sir Dave Brailsford’s ‘marginal gains’ theory, the team brought the most money and scientific approach that the sport had ever seen.

Thomas’s time trial ability came in handy in 2017, when he won stage one of the Tour, holding the coveted yellow jersey for four stages. He would have to wait another year to hold it until the finish line.

In 2018, the perennial domestique turned pack leader, holding the yellow jersey from the 11th stage onwards, finally besting his teammate Chris Froome after helping him win four titles in five years.

Despite his pedigree in the sport, Thomas’s ability to hold onto the top spot for such a span was a great surprise, but also a joyful one for Welsh cycling fans.

“Since I was a kid, I dreamt of riding the Tour and being part of the Olympics and winning was obviously a dream as well, but to achieve that was just nuts,” he said at the time.

“I think now the decision is official, you do start to reflect because when you’re in it, it’s just one thing after the next, year after year, so you don’t really appreciate it.

“I guess at the time you enjoy it, but I don’t think you sit back and reflect and think, so there will be a bit of that this year.”

“Beijing was massive, my first Olympics and winning gold there,” added Thomas.

“But the Tour is what changed my life, being recognised all over the place.

“I was in Alcatraz, and some dude recognised me. I think that’s when you know it went up a level.

“The yellow jersey is iconic. You go anywhere in the world and people will know the yellow jersey, how it signifies cycling and its history. So, to be a part of that history and to win it, I just pinch myself.”

Now though, Thomas has ridden his last race. Having navigated his final Tour de France and one last summer on the road, Thomas brought the curtain down on his career at the Tour of Britain last week.

It is no coincidence that the final two stages of the seven-day race were be held in south Wales, with the seventh stage starting from the Geraint Thomas National Velodrome, before passing Maindy Velodrome – home to the Maindy Flyers, Thomas’ first cycling club – before finishing in Cardiff city centre.

“It was some way to finish, with the Tour of Britain as the final race. It’s full circle, isn’t it? Finishing my career back home.”

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