Geraint Thomas to skip next year’s Tour de France and target Giro d’Italia?

2018 Tour de France champion Geraint Thomas may skip next year’s race and instead target the Giro d’Italia.

This year, he finished runner-up to Team Ineos colleague Egan Bernal, and with four-time yellow jersey winner Chris Froome, who missed July’s race through injury, set to return to racing the UCI WorldTour outfit has no shortage of former champions.

Speaking ahead of today’s world championship road race, Thomas said: “I’m going to wait at least until I see the courses, the routes for the Giro and the Tour and then go from there.

“You’d think Egan would want to ride [the Tour] again, obviously, being the defending champ. Froomey, it’s his big goal, he wants to win five.

“I’m definitely not going to make a call until at least December training camp, sit down with the team. Obviously, we’ll be chatting to them before that anyway, but maybe make a call around then really.

“Even if I did the Giro, it would still certainly excite me and get me out of bed in the morning.”

Team Ineos and its predecessor, Team Sky, have won seven of the past eight editions of the Tour de France, the sequence only broken by Vincenzo Nibali’s victory in 2014.

Next year, however, they will face a challenge from a Jumbo-Visma team that not only sports Vuelta champion Primoz Roglic and Steven Kruijswijk, third at this year’s Tour de France, on its roster but has also recruited former Giro d’Italia winner Tom Dumoulin.

Team Ineos meanwhile has signed current Giro d’Italia champion Richard Carapaz from Movistar, but according to Thomas the team would be best off using the two joint leader approach that has brought it success in recent editions of the Tour.

 “I think two does work and has worked for the last two years,” he explained. “As long as we keep that same philosophy. I’ll look at both the routes and see what motivates me and see what the other guys are thinking as well. And then just go from there.”