Inside Team Sky by David Walsh

we journalists jumped on one boat. Then we get to work on another boat. It may have been
Smerelda
but it wasn’t mega. The Corsicans never
tire of pointing out that Christopher Columbus came from the town of Calvi where the third and final Corsican stage finished and Napoleon came from Ajaccio. Had either man seen the Tour’s
difficulties in extricating that bus from under the timing bridge at the finish line on Stage One, they might have gone out into the world a little more timorously.
    For Team Sky the chaos and carnage of that first day of racing on the island are still being audited. Alan Farrell, the team doctor, is on his second Tour and the sight of Geraint Thomas lying
on the hot asphalt beside the kerb unable to get up, having somersaulted over his own handlebars, was novel but worrying. Ian Stannard had been brought down too and Froome had squeaked past,
narrowly avoiding the chaos.
    Thomas, or G as he is affectionately known, was the principal casualty though. Very little stops G Thomas. Eight years ago his handlebar impacted with his torso so violently that he had to have
his spleen removed. After a few weeks of morphine-masked pain he was up and about, gleefully showing his scar to innocent bystanders and claiming that he had been bitten by a shark.
    A regular X-ray on the day of the crash failed to show the small fissure in the rider’s pelvis. Thomas must have suspected he was suffering from a little more than bruising the next day,
however, when having been lifted onto his bike he set off on the second stage, an undulating 156km slog to Ajaccio. The first 10km of the race were punctuated by roundabouts and the process of
slowing into them, and accelerating out, produced an exquisite pain the like of which he had never experienced before. He couldn’t generate any power in his left leg and was seriously worried
that despite his bravery he would finish outside the time limit and everything would have been in vain.
    By the time an MRI scan showed the full damage to his pelvis he had ridden the second stage and could see no reason to let the team down by not riding on. He submitted to a regime of pre-race
coffees, ibuprofen and paracetamol, as well as three sessions of physio and some acupuncture daily with Dan Guillemette, the team’s head physio and a former elite amateur cyclist himself.
Other than that he was devouring Jo Nesbo thrillers to keep his head occupied and to stop himself thinking about his mother’s encouraging words – that he should get some sense and quit
the race.
    On Monday morning at Ajaccio the onlookers were wincing empathetically as G tried twice to get his leg over the saddle. In the end he was hoisted into place again.
    Stage Three went fine for Team Sky, yet the moment on everybody’s lips at dinner that night was the same one that sent shivers down the spines of those in the team car. G, bloody G Thomas,
materialised on the shoulder of his colleagues, shouting at them to lift it. What a bloody war!
    Nobody was sorry to leave Corsica behind but for G Thomas the road ahead is as treacherous as the road behind. Today, Tuesday, in Nice brings a 25km team time trial. Geraint Thomas has been told
that, as much as his teammates love him, they won’t be waiting for him. They can’t be waiting for him. When he gets dropped early as he inevitably will, he is alone with just his pain
for company.
    C’est la guerre, mon amie, c’est la guerre
.
    Nice, France. The Promenade des Anglais.
    Team Sky is another country. They do things differently here. With the three Corsican stages out of the way the race organisers arranged to fly the riders to Nice for Stage Four. Everybody else
was to make the long schlep via ferry. People who have worked the Tour for a long time see nothing unusual here. The Tour is the Tour. As the miles go by, as the days pass and as the stages mount
up, everybody gets more fatigued and more jaded until a caravan of wall-eyed zombies rolls into Paris.