Re:
PremierAndrew said:
How many of those 30+ first timers in the top 10 were super talented and amongst the elite in a different specialisation of pro cycling before turning their attention to climbing/GC?
Not to mention Thomas would almost certainly have had his first top 10 at the Giro last year were it not for his crash, and this is before even considering his role as a domestique the whole time.
Of course Thomas is suspicious, but the way this is being spun by some posters here is ridiculous. His performance on PSM was way more surprising at the time than this Tour victory is now
There is actually a glaring factual inaccuracy in my analysis - while Thomas is the only one to have their first top 10 be a podium in the Tour, he isn't the only one to have their first top 10 be a GT win, as Rominger's 1992 Vuelta is his first top 10 too.
Also, there are very few riders who have already specialised and been among the elite in a different specialisation who have given that up to try to be a completely different type of rider, let alone succeeded, so it's hard to really see too many people that you could put a legit comparison to Geraint with. Jean-Christophe Péraud was a European champion and Olympic silver medallist in mountain bike before switching to the road at 32, but he didn't do any road racing at the top level before that, so his maiden top 10 is in fact in only his 2nd GT (similarly, Ezequiel Mosquera has never finished a GT outside of the top 10, and Michael Woods' maiden GT top 10 was only his second start), whereas Thomas was a veteran of 12 GTs before making his maiden top 10 with his Tour win (and even had he top 10ed the Giro last season that would still have been his 11th). Gadret is perhaps a better call, his first top 10 was his 9th GT, and he had two top 20s in the preceding season and an earlier top 20, relatively akin to Thomas who had two 15ths before his win; Gadret was a two-time national cyclocross champion and twice top 10 in the Cyclocross World Cup. Ryder Hesjedal is another possible comparison, having started off as a mountain biker, winning a silver medal in the XCO in 2003, but having 5 nondescript years between his conversion to the road and his discovery of GT skills in 2010.
I actually found
more experienced stagers hitting their first GT top 10 than I anticipated, and the fact that so many of them are comparatively recent suggests that the profile of GT riders is getting older, but it's worth noting that 35/48 of those finished between 6th and 10th, so only 13 were top 5s (just over 25%), only 5 were podiums (just over 10%) and Rominger was as mentioned the only other one to win from the criteria listed. The late conversion for Thomas is indeed exacerbated by his crashing out and his domestique role, however the fact that he was there to domestique in the high mountains in 2015 was surprising enough given, while he'd shown some decent performances that suggested he was a better climber than most Northern Classics men (winning one of the few editions of the Bayern Rundfahrt that weren't "win the TT win the race", having a Winklmoosalm MTF), in 2015 he really steps up his climbing big-time, with major performances on Monchique, Croix de Chaubouret and, most surprisingly, the Rettenbachferner. But he's still a Classics man at 29 - he still wins E3 and podiums Gent-Wevelgem that year. It's not like he's transitioned through the Ardennes and Lombardia as you might expect from somebody moving from the Classics to becoming a stage racer in the mountains. He had been 22nd the previous year in the Tour admittedly, but that was the one time he wasn't really domestiquing, with Froome crashing out. And in that race he lost 15 minutes to Nibali across two Alpine stages and more than double that over the Pyrenees, so realistically we can say that he still had a lot further to go. The last 3 seasons he's more or less abandoned his Classics aims, but in 2015 he was becoming a guy who can finish 2nd in the Tour de Suisse at the same time as hitting the podium of Gent-Wevelgem.
But because of what you say about riders being at different stages in their career and having different specialisms, and the different starting points with potential late starters to their cycling career such as Peraud mentioned above, here's 30 years' worth of GT winners, and how many GTs it took them to register a top 20, a top 10, and a win, and I've asterisked those who were 30 or more when they won their first GT.
* Séan Kelly: 4 - 4 - 15
Andrew Hampsten: 1 - 2 - 4
Pedro Delgado: 2 - 4 - 5
Laurent Fignon: 1 - 2 - 3
Greg LeMond: 2 - 2 - 6
Marco Giovannetti: 1 - 2 - 8
Gianni Bugno: 5 - 7 - 7
Melcior Mauri: 6 - 6 - 6
* Franco Chioccioli: 2 - 4 - 10
Miguel Indurain: 10 - 12 - 14
* Tony Rominger: 8 - 8 - 8
Evgeni Berzin: 2 - 2 - 2
Laurent Jalabert: 9 - 9 - 10
Pavel Tonkov: 1 - 1 - 7
* Bjarne Riis: 11 - 11 - 16
Alex Zülle: 4 - 5 - 9
Ivan Gotti: 2 - 3 -6
Jan Ullrich: 2 - 2 - 3
Marco Pantani: 2 - 2 - 8
Abraham Olano: 3 - 4 - 10
Lance Armstrong: 5 - 5 - 6
Stefano Garzelli: 1 - 1 - 5
Roberto Heras: 1 - 1 - 6
Gilberto Simoni: 6 - 7 - 10
Ángel Casero: 1 - 7 - 12
Paolo Savoldelli: 2 - 3 - 11
Aitor González: 2 - 2 - 3
Damiano Cunego: 2 - 2 - 2
Ivan Basso: 4 - 5 - 9
(Floyd Landis: 4 - 6 - 8)
Óscar Pereiro: 1 - 4 - 7
Aleksandr Vinokourov: 2 - 6 - 9
* Danilo di Luca: 6 - 9 - 13
Alberto Contador: 2 - 2 - 2
Denis Menchov: 3 - 7 - 11 (7 depending on your position on the 2005 Vuelta)
* Carlos Sastre: 2 - 2 - 18
Alejandro Valverde: 2 - 2 - 10
Andy Schleck: 1 - 1 - 5
Vincenzo Nibali: 1 - 4 - 6
* Michele Scarponi: 1 - 9 - 10
* Cadel Evans: 1 - 3 - 12
* Juan José Cobo: 3 - 5 - 6
* Ryder Hesjedal: 7 - 7 - 9
* Bradley Wiggins: 6 - 6 - 11
Chris Froome: 4 - 4 - 7
* Chris Horner: 3 - 8 - 11
Nairo Quintana: 2 - 2 - 3
Fabio Aru: 2 - 2 -5
Tom Dumoulin: 5 - 5 - 8
* Geraint Thomas: 7 - 13 - 13
There are a couple of names that seem to fit with Thomas a bit more readily there; Indurain and Jalabert, notably. Jalabert doubly fits because of his excelling as a sprinter with two maillots vert and multiple GT stages, though he'd also top 10ed Liège and Lombardia and podiumed Paris-Nice back in 1991, and his 1995 self-reinvention came aged 26. Indurain was doing 2 GTs a year from the age of 20, so although the number of GTs looks huge, he was still only 26 when he started to hit podiums, and at the age at which Thomas hit the top step of the podium last month, Miguelón had already withdrawn from his last race. Riis doesn't have the background of being hugely successful in a different format of racing, which impedes his usefulness as a comparison though obviously his self-reinvention at 29 does invite parallels. Di Luca and Armstrong were both strong in hilly classics before reinventing themselves as GT riders, but Armstrong has the medical interlude and di Luca already had Oil For Drugs in his back pocket before he became a GT winner, and every time he actually
finished a GT he was in the top 25 to that point. Lots of crashes and planned withdrawals though. Scarponi was not dissimilar with plenty of hilly classic results, but four top 20s in his first 6 GTs. Sastre and Evans both had a huge number of top 10s and podiums before finally managing to make it to the top step so though they didn't score a maiden victory until well into their 30s, they were both staples of the GT leaderboards so not comparable at all to Thomas (Sastre had 9 top 10s including 3 podiums before finally winning the Tour, Evans had 7 including 3 podiums of his own likewise). Quite a few of the most similar riders to Thomas don't enter as many GTs before their breakouts (Wiggins most notably) as Thomas has, which is a slight problem for the data as while it may account for late converts to the sport, it doesn't account for injuries and team policies (Chioccioli for example only did the Giro for a whole decade, while Indurain was doing two GTs a year from age 20 onward) as well as normalizing riders who have long gaps in their palmarès due to not doing GTs like Cobo and pre-2011 Froome, whose level in 2010 meant neither were selected for several consecutive such races, while Horner's paltry number of GTs due to his very late return to Europe in his mid-30s makes parsing his numbers for any meaningful conclusions very tricky indeed.
Of the four riders who took more GTs to get to a win than Thomas, however - Séan Kelly had 6 earlier top 10s (as well as withdrawing from the Vuelta while leading a year earlier), Carlos Sastre had been racking up top 10s for almost an entire decade, Miguel Indurain was six years younger than Thomas at the point he made it to the top step and retired by Thomas' age which limits his usefulness in a discussion of late bloomers, and Bjarne Riis is Bjarne Riis (and doesn't have the previous successes in other fields that Thomas has to point to).
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