Geraint Thomas runs out of steam as Primoz Roglic all but seals Giro d’Italia

Even in extremis, Geraint Thomas summoned an endearingly bleak sense of humour. He had just lost the maglia rosa, and with it his vision of winning a first Giro d’Italia at the age of 37, after a time-trial up Monte Lussari that was not so much punishing as downright sadistic.

The margin of defeat was so unbearably slender, as he let a 26-second lead in the general classification slip to a 14-second deficit, that he felt he could only find comfort in the bottom of a glass. “It’s over for me,” he said, with the most rueful of smiles. “I’m on the p--- for the next two months.”

As ever in sport, it is the hope that kills. It had looked as if a mechanical malfunction for Primoz Roglic, his closest pursuer and a consummate time-trialler, would offer some form of celestial intervention. Instead, Roglic fixed his dropped chain in the blink of an eye, pumping his legs like pistons on the savage final ascent, where the gradient reached 22 per cent in places.

A time of 44 min 23 sec was 42 seconds faster than anyone else had managed all day. And Thomas, left as the lone man on the road, could only thread his way through the legion of euphoric Slovenian fans, realising with hideous clarity that his race was run.

For three weeks Thomas had waged a magnificent campaign, retaining his advantage through biblical rain and the worst that the queen stage in the Dolomites, with its 5,400 metres (17,700 feet) of climbing, could throw at him. But he always knew that this gnarliest of tests in the heart of Roglic territory, just 12 miles from the Slovenian border, stood between him and glory.

His pre-stage prediction of “exciting to watch, horrible to do” proved grimly prescient as Roglic clawed back the time with ferocious intent.

Thomas appeared the model of composure when he switched both his bike and helmet halfway through, ready for the transition from the flat to the steep. But as he neared the finish line at this ancient pilgrimage spot in deepest Udine, he was labouring, sensing from the locals’ jubilation that the damage inflicted by Roglic up ahead was irreparable.

“I could feel my legs going a kilometre and a half from the top of the climb,” Thomas reflected. “I don’t want to sound like I’m making excuses, but I just didn’t feel like I had that real ‘grunt’. Primoz smashed me and, to be honest, he deserves that.

“He had a mechanical as well, and he still put 40 seconds into me, so chapeau to him.”

Thomas is old enough and wizened enough to recognise a rider’s superiority when he sees it. The one consolation, perhaps, is that the Welshman did not throw this precious chance away, instead finding himself thwarted by a supreme Roglic performance.

But this defeat at the death will cut deep, no matter how many cathartic drinking sessions he enjoys. Only nine of the previous 292 grand tours had been decided by 15 seconds or less. It was Thomas’s misfortune to emerge on the wrong side of the 10th.

As leader of Ineos Grenadiers, Thomas had envisaged clinking glasses of prosecco to toast his victory at the end of Sunday’s 84-mile procession in Rome. Now, in a galling twist, the acclaim will all be for the conquest of Roglic, celebrating a maiden Giro to sit alongside his three Vuelta a Espana victories.

Roglic will feel justice has been served

But Roglic has his reasons for believing that justice has been served. After all, it was in the penultimate stage of the 2020 Tour de France that he suffered his own time-trial horror, shipping two minutes to compatriot Tadej Pogacar at La Planche des Belles Filles to surrender the yellow jersey.

Those ghosts threatened to resurface as his chain slipped in the most brutal section of the climb. But this time Roglic, fortified by bitter experience and roared home by supporters leaping out into the road, would not be denied.

“I had the legs here and the crowd here gave me a few extra watts,” the former ski jumper said. “I was flying. It is something incredible. It’s not a story of victory, but of energy. It’s a moment to live and remember.”

It had seemed for all the world as if this should be Thomas’ year. While he will always be defined by his win in the 2018 Tour de France, he has made little secret of his designs on the Giro, which to this point had been cursed by wretched luck.

In 2017, he was involved in a mass pile-up triggered by the poor positioning of a police outrider’s motorbike, and in 2020 his race fell apart after he took a heavy tumble when colliding with a rogue water bottle.

Ably protected by his domestiques, Thomas had given every sense of riding out the tempest. “I’m gutted for the boys, they’ve worked so hard,” he said. “If you had told me back in March that this would be the result, I’d have bitten your hand off. But now I’m devastated.”

Seldom, as Roglic communed a few yards away with his adoring throng, were the feelings of joy and desolation more starkly juxtaposed.