Geraint Thomas called time on 19 years of professional riding at the end of the 2025 season, drawing to a close a career that saw the Welshman establish himself as a prolific winner on both the road and track, with his crowning glory of course coming in 2018, when he won the Tour de France.
Thomas also won the Lifetime Achievement gong in our 2025 Rider of the Year Awards, supported by Lezyne, in recognition of a remarkable career.
We’ve picked out eight of the 39-year-old's best achievements from his long, illustrious time on two wheels, to prove just how deserving he is of this accolade.
Rider of the Year 2025
Geraint Thomas is our Lifetime Achievement winner in the 2025 BikeRadar and Cycling Plus Rider of the Year Awards, supported by Lezyne.
Read more from Rider of the Year 2025
Riding his whole professional career without one of his organs
The season before turning pro, the then-world junior scratch race champion ended up in intensive care in Sydney, Australia, facing the loss of his spleen, which had ruptured.
The 18-year-old had come down heavily in a crash when a piece of metal mangled his bike’s forks, and after arriving in hospital, his condition deteriorated to the extent that doctors had to remove his spleen to save his life.
The spleen is a small organ just above the stomach that helps to prevent your body from infection. Although you can live without it, your body is more at risk of infection. Try telling that to a rider with one of the best sick records of the past two decades…
Longest Tour de France career of any past yellow jersey winner
Speaking of durability and longevity, we were trying to think of a stat to tell the story of Thomas’ remarkably long career at the top.
The still-active Chris Froome, 40, might argue, but few general classification riders make it to the age that Thomas, 39, has.
And if you discount 2025’s victory lap of a season, he was still competing at the sharp end of Grand Tours as recently as 2024 – unlike Froome, who never regained his top level after his 2019 crash.
Thomas’ 14 Tour de France appearances put him 15th on the overall list, with only Joop Zoetemelk and Lucien Van Impe as former winners ahead of him. Neither can match Thomas’ longevity, however, with those 14 appearances spanning an incredible 18 years (2007-2025).
“It’s something I’m really proud of. All the wins are great but being able to be competitive and stay at the top for that long is special,” he told The Guardian this year.
Third at the 2024 Giro d’Italia
For a man who valued longevity so highly, it should come as no surprise to find how much he rated his third place behind the irrepressible Tadej Pogačar at the 2024 Giro d’Italia.
A year earlier, he’d been edged agonisingly into second at the Giro on the penultimate stage by Primož Roglič – a near-miss that might have finished other 37-year-olds off.
When Thomas returned to Italy in 2024, wounds not yet healed, it was no close-run thing. Pogačar, as expected, crushed the race, winning six stages and the general classification by nearly 10 minutes.
But in third, just behind former team-mate Dani Martinez, but ahead of many younger GC riders, was the ageless Thomas, who would later say a Giro podium at 38 gave him as much pride as winning the Tour de France.
Winning the 2018 Tour de France
Yes, winning the Tour de France – it’s a good time to mention that. Such was Team Sky’s dominance at the time (they’d won five of the previous six Tours), the churlish take on Thomas’ 2018 yellow jersey was that it was simply his time to step up and get the win for the world’s leading team.
But that would be to ignore the fact that a) nobody wins a race as difficult or as complex as this one like that and b) this was very much a race that Thomas won himself.
Battling not only external rivals but internal frictions, such as the role of then-reigning Vuelta and Giro champion Chris Froome, he soared to back-to-back Alpine stage wins at La Rosière and, most memorably, Alpe d’Huez, to cement his position as the strongest rider in the race.
A one-team man
After that career peak, Thomas would spend almost as long at Sky (and soon to be Ineos) as he had done leading up to 2018.
Since the team was created in 2010, he’s been the one ever-present – even Dave Brailsford, the long-time team principal, has taken time out of the team as the head of Ineos’ wider sports division, which includes Manchester United.
Given Thomas’ status in the team, and the fact he’s a native English speaker and convivial with the media, he was often the point man to the press during the team’s many controversies: the TUEs (Therapeutic Use Exemptions), Jiffy Bag-gate, Richard Freeman and the hiring of staff without due diligence on their pasts.
A defender of his team as well as not being shy to say when they've got things wrong, Thomas has gained enough media savvy to be useful to their communications department when he moves into a management role with the team in 2026.
Sports Personality of the Year winner in 2018
Thomas’ affability made him a shoo-in for the 2018 BBC SPOTY awards in 2018, on the back of his Tour de France win.
It’s arguably the most prestigious sports awards ceremony in the UK, and Thomas is the most recent of four cyclists to win the award this century, after the three Sirs: Chris Hoy (2008), Mark Cavendish (2011) and Bradley Wiggins (2012).
Despite British wins in other major races, including two Giro victories – in 2020 (Tao Geoghegan Hart) and 2025 (Simon Yates), no race strikes a chord with the British public like the Tour does.
2014 Commonwealth Games gold
Thomas was the fifth Welsh sportsperson to win SPOTY’s top gong and was no doubt spurred on by a strong vote from his countryfolk.
There is no prouder Welshman than Thomas and that goes some way to explaining why his best performance for the national team on the road came not representing Great Britain at the Olympics or Worlds but riding for Wales at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.
The Commonwealth field wasn’t the strongest, with cycling’s European heartlands not a part of the Games, but to win alone in a rare outing in Welsh colours clearly meant the world to G.
2012 Olympic team pursuit gold
That’s not to say Thomas didn’t enjoy success in Great Britain colours.
He was a key lieutenant to Mark Cavendish, a rider he’d grown up with on the Great Britain development squad, on the Manx’s way to winning the UCI Road Race World Championship in Copenhagen in 2011, then enjoyed collective gold in the team pursuit on the track in Beijing in 2008.
The peak would come four years later in London, where, cheered on by a partisan home crowd, the pursuit team repeated the feat. The decision to target the Olympics meant he missed being part of the team that won the Tour de France with Bradley Wiggins, although there’d be plenty of that to come down the road.
