Geraint Thomas will close his long and illustrious racing career with a farewell appearance in the 2025 men’s Tour of Britain, which begins in Suffolk on Tuesday.
Six days of racing will take a high-quality peloton from the eastern town of Woodbridge, to the mouth of the Severn, for a final celebratory stage next Sunday in Cardiff, which will provide a fitting climax to the Welshman’s career.
For Thomas, the wheel will have turned full circle, as his final professional race takes him back to south Wales where his path to Olympic and Tour de France success began, at the Maindy velodrome.
“If I didn’t live so close to Maindy or if I didn’t live in Cardiff, I may never have ridden a bike, never have had the career I had, the life I’ve had,” Thomas told the BBC.
It may have helped that his former coach Rod Ellingworth, one of his past mentors at British Cycling and Team Sky, is now race director of the British Cycling-run Tour of Britain.
Of the Welsh climax to the race, Thomas said: “I just feel so lucky to be able to call time on my career on my own terms, when I’m finishing and even more lucky to decide where, as well.”
Thomas expects there to be tears when he bows out in Cardiff after a 19‑season racing career. Among the highs are his 2018 Tour de France victory including a memorable stage win on Alpe d’Huez, his gold medals in the Olympic and Commonwealth Games, and multiple successes in other stage races such as the Criterium du Dauphine and Paris-Nice.
To mark the occasion, he will be wearing a fiery red jersey that celebrates his achievements and his Welshness, and that incorporates a Welsh dragon, the hairpins to the and a sketch of Thomas on a podium, by his young son, Macs.
“Certainly the most meaningful jersey, that’s for sure,” Thomas said on social media. “I think it definitely will be emotional come the final stage, finishing in Cardiff, wearing this.”
First, though, he has to navigate a punchy race route, that gets more challenging as it nears the Welsh border. The rolling roads of the opening few stages, with finishes in Southwold, Stowmarket, Ampthill and Burton Dassett, are succeeded by two days of racing in the climbs of south Wales. The penultimate stage takes in two ascents of the short but steep climb of the Tumble, overlooking Abergavenny, while the final day’s racing tackles the first category climb of Caerphilly Mountain, just 10 kilometres from the finish.
Headlining alongside Thomas are Remco Evenepoel, winner of the road race and time trial in the Paris Olympics, Kelso’s Oscar Onley, the breakthrough star of July’s Tour de France, the former world champion Julian Alaphilippe, and the fast-rising British sprinter Matthew Brennan.
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The former British national champion Fred Wright, Ben Wiggins (son of Sir Bradley), Joe Blackmore (winner of the 2024 Tour de l’Avenir), and the 2020 Giro d’Italia winner Tao Geoghegan Hart, set to return after a period of injury and illness, are also expected to start.
Although there remains no apparent British successor to Thomas’s 2018 Tour win, his legacy to cycling is evidenced by the number of young Britons now racing at elite level, across Europe. Perhaps Thomas’s greatest attribute has been his resilience, allied to a gallows sense of humour.
Asked in July by his rival Jonas Vingegaard if he was happy to be starting his final Tour de France, Thomas replied: “Mate, I should have stopped last year.”
