By now, Geraint Thomas has seen just about everything there is to see in professional cycling, and so the umpteenth Tadej Pogačar masterpiece was never likely to be met with much surprise or wonderment from the Welshman.
“Nothing new, that, is it? We expected it,” Thomas said when he reached the summit of Oropa at the end of stage 2 of the Giro d’Italia, after yet another display of almost routine dominance from Pogačar.
Despite a puncture at the base of the climb, Pogačar claimed his eighth victory of the season and moved into the maglia rosa, already armed with a 45-second overall lead. Thomas was content to take third on the stage, 27 seconds down on Pogačar, and in the overall standings he now lies second, 45 seconds behind the seemingly unassailable favourite.
In the 1963 World Series, when Mickey Mantle was repeatedly struck out by Sandy Koufax, he couldn’t hide his frustration at the otherworldly pitching of his foe. “How the fuck is anybody supposed to hit that shit?” he said, a quotation that would echo in major league baseball history.
Thomas, by contrast, was rather calmer in the face of Pogačar’s unhittable fastball here, showing the same kind of self-control that served him so well at the 2022 Tour de France and, indeed, at last year’s Giro.
When Pogačar launched his winning acceleration with 4.4km remaining, Thomas understood immediately that the Slovenian was playing an entirely different game to everybody else, and he opted against trying to swing for the fences in response.
The Ineos rider instead preferred to dose his effort carefully, and after working his way up to the wheel of Ben O’Connor (Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale), he was happy to follow the Australian, shaking off his requests for help.
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“I was hoping to follow but I knew if I tried to keep going like that, I’d blow up,” Thomas said of Pogačar’s initial acceleration.
“I felt bad for sitting on Ben, but I was on the limit for a while there and I had to recover. The group came up to us, and then it was a case of trying to recover and trying to get some seconds in the sprint for second place.”
On the limit
Pogačar, as is his wont, was in a category all of his own on the upper reaches of Oropa. The contest behind him, meanwhile, was a tale of two distinct approaches. While Thomas and Daniel Martínez (Bora-Hansgrohe) accepted the need to follow at a distance, O’Connor paid a price for his efforts to stay in close contact with the Slovenian, losing a minute by the summit.
“I don’t know really what happened to him,” Thomas said of O’Connor. “I felt quite bad for not pulling but I was just like, ‘Mate, I’m on the limit now’. I had to judge it and wait for that group to come and get us and try to recover.”
Thomas was pipped by his former teammate Martínez in the seven-man sprint for second place, but he had already picked up a pair of bonus seconds at the intermediate sprint at the base of the climb, where his Ineos squad had set the tempo, partly in defence of Jhonatan Narváez’s overnight lead, but largely to avoid any risks on the passage through Biella.
Indeed, Thomas was unaware that Pogačar had punctured – and fallen – at the base of the final climb until he was informed over his radio earpiece that the UAE Team Emirates rider had returned to the peloton.
“Honestly, I didn’t know until we got to the climb, and they said ‘Tadej’s back’,” Thomas said. “The radios are just terrible, so I had no real idea. The plan was to go on the front on the penultimate climb and take it up there, not to attack, but to be safe at the front because we knew it would be chaos behind.”
Though Thomas’ teammate Narváez sprang a surprise by beating Pogačar to the line in Turin on Saturday, the opening weekend of this Giro has played out more or less according to the expected script.
As anticipated, Pogačar laid down a marker – and established an early lead – at Oropa, but Thomas, after a subdued season to this point, again has the look of a man firmly in the contest for a podium finish, twelve months after he came within 14 seconds of being the oldest Giro winner in history.
“I didn’t feel quite as good as I did yesterday,” Thomas said. “I felt punchier yesterday, but I felt OK for the second day, so hopefully I can ride into the race. It’s all to play for, but obviously Tadej is, well, he’s Tadej…”
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