STILL GOT IT

The Tour de France is skewing younger than ever, but can the peloton’s elder statesmen still cut it at the sharp end? James Shrubsall explores what it takes to age gracefully as a Grand Tour racer

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This will be Geraint Thomas’s final Tour de France. The 2018 champion turned 39 on 25 May, and plans to retire at the end of the season, closing out a remarkable two-decade career. He aims to bow out while still riding well, which may well be determined by how he performs at the Tour. Going by the provisional start-list at the time of writing, the Welshman will be the oldest rider in the race - 39 years, 41 days when it gets under way in Lille on 5 July.

A former winner he may be, but this time around he'll be riding in support of 24-year-old Carlos Rodríguez. Whereas Thomas was born in the late-1980s, Rodríguez didn’t say hola to the world until 2001. Ineos’s veteran rider won't be the only member of the ‘old guard’ this year. Canada’s Mike Woods isn’t far behind him at 38 years, 266 days - and he isn’t planning to retire this year. Only one other rider on the start-list will have passed his 37th birthday: Jayco-Alula’s Luka Mezgec, and only just - he turned 37 on 27 June. The Tour skews towards younger riders more than ever before.

It wasn’t always thus. If 39 seems a touch too old to be pushing limits around France for three weeks, consider this: Thomas is far from the oldest rider to complete the Tour. In the second edition of the race, in 1904, Frenchman Henri Paret finished 11th at the age of 50. Rather more recently, Alejandro Valverde finished the Tour aged 41 in 2022, while Matteo Tosatto was 42 when he completed the race in 2016. The oldest modern-era finisher remains Jens Voigt, who was two months shy of 43 when he crossed the finish line on the Champs-Élysées in 2014.

The old boys’ club has been part of the makeup of the Tour de France for as long as the race has existed, although that might be set to change.