Thomas - The world of cycling according to G

The World of Cycling According to G

Geraint Thomas

Written with Tom Fordyce

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by

Quercus Publishing Ltd

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

An Hachette UK company

Copyright 2015 Geraint Thomas

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asserted in accordance with the

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HB ISBN 978 1 78429 636 0

EBOOK ISBN 978 1 78429 639 1

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in future editions any inadvertent omissions

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to the extent permitted by law for any errors or omissions

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For Sa. Not really used to saying things like this. Been a cracking six years so far, heres to the rest like...

Contents

LIVING IT

Bib Shorts and Bare Arms

In few sports is it as easy to get it wrong with your clothing as in cycling. Its most defining item, the bib short, is something that no fashion designer would ever consciously come up with. Perhaps if they were Austrian, you might argue, but even then the fabric is wrong. Pull on the bib short in front of a new ladyfriend unfamiliar with the garment and you can see the confusion and distress on her face: have I started going out with a deviant, or a Freddie Mercury impersonator?

The first time I wore bib shorts as a kid, down to a Maindy mini-league race in Cardiff, I wore pants under them. Why wouldnt you? I wore pants under my rugby shorts. I wore pants when playing football. It led to an awkward but important conversation in the changing rooms. What, youve got pants on? Well, yeah... havent you?

You can try to fight these things, but in time you have to accept it. Cyclists do not wear pants, at least not when theyre cycling. Its the same as shaving your legs. When you are a twelve-year-old boy in Cardiff you do not want to be rocking up at school with shaved legs. Its a matter of choosing which world you belong too, the normal hairy-legged world of the playground, or the smooth, clean-shaven changing rooms of the velodrome. So I fought it until I was fourteen and away at a race in Germany where I thought no prying eyes could find me. Into a Portaloo with the cheapest disposable razor I could find, hacking away like a blindfolded lumberjack. I stumbled out of that toilet looking like Johnny Hoogerlands backside after he was knocked off by a car straight into that barbed-wire fence during the 2011 Tour: wild gashes, blood everywhere. Mixed in among random hairy patches over my calves and thighs.

It takes some longer than others. Aged fifteen you would still see girls wearing thongs beneath their bib shorts. You never thought of saying anything, because you were fifteen and you could see girls wearing thongs.

My first proper cycling jersey was in the luminous yellow of Maindy Flyers. While the design these days is more subtle, I look back on the dayglo years with pride. The top was of its era, and it comes with its own set of special memories. Ive kept a jersey from every club or team I have ridden for precisely that purpose: a sartorial time-travel machine to bring the past back to life.

Even in the late 1990s, there was neither the beautifully designed cycling clothing of today nor the number and size of bike shops. What you could buy in the shops that were around cost you a year of prize money. I used to get my gear from the car-boot-style sales they held in the car parks outside the various velodromes, where youd find random items hanging off coat racks and plastic tubs of gloves or caps. Youd pick up a horrendous multicoloured jersey for a fiver and wear it with immense pride. At one place, I bagged a pair of T-Mobile team shorts. Grey panel down the side, three stripes down the leg. If it had been possible to wear them to bed and school as well as in the saddle I would have done so.

There was seldom a thought for the practicalities. If you reckoned it looked the business then that would trump everything else. Its raining? If being dry means you cant see my multicoloured magic then soak me to the bone. Have you seen my T-Mobile shorts?

Technology was still in its scratchy infancy. The jerseys made you both hot and cold at the same time. The shorts very rarely maintained their shape. At one race on the Manchester Youth Tour, when I was thirteen, our rain jackets were black bin bags with holes cut in them for our heads and arms. You wouldnt see that in a Rapha store. Not at a bin-bag price-point.

You learned through osmosis. Either that or hypothermia. I remember going out for an evening winter ride, snow falling heavily on the streets of Cardiff. The lad I was supposed to be meeting was late, leaving me riding up and down a rapidly disappearing stretch of tarmac with my legs going the same colour as a Welsh rugby shirt.

Eventually he arrived just before snowdrifts cut the road off like a mountain pass. Whoah, whats happened to your legs? Why arent you wearing tights? What do you mean, tights? Is this like the pants thing?

By the time I got home I was so cold I had to be helped directly into bed, kit stripped off, wearing a thick woollen jumper, jogging bottoms, three pairs of socks and curled up under two duvets, shower forgotten. I couldnt move. Every ten minutes my mum would come running upstairs to make sure I hadnt died.

Things came second-hand a helmet also worn by the British team, imbuing its teenage wearer with the same sense of cool. A first pair of cycling-specific shades, loved so much I barely wore them. In fact I hardly took them out of my bedroom. Very little fitted. Skinsuits were not suited to your skin. It was like wearing a onesie that had gone wrong in the wash.

As in every sport there was always one kid who had all the gear: bike, replica kit, shades, team gloves. Helmet? We thought so.

It didnt so much make you jealous as desperate to beat them. There was a lad called Ben Crawforth who was very evenly matched with me. Wed trade victories: whoever didnt win that day would always be in second. There you go, my dad would say; Hes in ordinary kit, and he still wins. The next race Ben rocked up on a pimped-up bike. I beat him. Motivation.

Dont think the pros have got everything right. You might not see the ultimate horror a lad putting on his arm and leg warmers before anything else, and his girlfriend waking up to see what appears to be a floating limbless torso backlit against the bedroom wall but mistakes abound. Bloodied backsides hanging out of shorts are a common sight after crashes in the peloton. At Barloworld, the young Chris Froome decided his team-issue skinsuit had the wrong dimensions, and took some nail scissors to the sleeves. Skinsuits are seldom flattering. Theyre even less flattering when theyre entirely sleeveless. Barloworld, to make matters worse, was an Italian team. If you are going to get away with a skinsuit with no arms and ripped shoulders, it will not be with an Italian team.