So many similarities, so many differences: nine months after he last pulled on his race gear, clattered down a team bus stairs and headed for a sign-on. Tao Geoghegan Hart was finally back in business at a bike race, now at stage 1 of the 2024 Volta ao Algarve.
The journey back from the point where Geoghegan Hart lay on the ground mid-way through stage 11 of the 2023 Giro d’Italia nursing a fractured femur to a point when he could race again has been a long one, involving months of rehabilitation. But this February 13 in Portugal’s premier week-long race, he was finally there.
Some of the automatisms had slipped a little, the 2020 Giro d’Italia winner told reporters at the start, like the time he needed to pin a number on his back, now wearing the kit of his new team, Lidl-Trek, for the first time at a race, too.
It also happened that Ineos Grenadiers, Geoghegan Hart’s previous team, immediately preceded Lidl-Trek on Algarve’s cramped sign-on podium. When the Briton crossed paths with his former teammates, they exchanged hugs and grins, clearly pleased to see him again.
Then there were signatures and smiles for the fans, a brief interview with the media, and after the riders assembled on Portimão’s cobbled seafront for the start, a whistle blown for the off. Business as usual, then, for Geoghegan Hart, for all the long build-up has been so different for him.
“It’s just like starting any season, really. It’s been a good winter and in the end it’s always strange to jump on the bus for the first time and all those things. I had to look a bit longer for the scissors and pins for the numbers but otherwise it’s pretty normal,” Geoghegan Hart told reporters.
“I’ve got really good feelings, it’s been super-nice last few weeks with Jasper [Stuyven] together. We trained really well, no problems, so now another story and I’m looking forward to it today in windy Portugal.”
His goals were equally familiar and unusual: “to get back in the race, [find the] race feeling, race rhythm. It’s been, I don’t know, eight months or so without that and it’s always different from training. So I just enjoy it and make the most of that.”
Some five hours later, after a not exceptionally arduous but very long stage, Geoghegan Hart rolled across the line in one of the small knots of riders that formed following a series of crashes in the final kilometres. With all of them happening inside in the last three kilometres, there was no particular…
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