Geoghegan Hart might have been able to beat Roglic and Jumbo-Visma, but instead of pink it became Amsterdam

Tao Geoghegan Hart is no ordinary. The 28-year-old Briton has been riding in the peloton for years and promptly won the Giro d'Italia in 2020. He will race for Lidl-Trek in 2024, leaving INEOS Grenadiers behind. In search of new successes, you could then popularly write. Not so with Geoghegan Hart. He has a different outlook on life, which is partly why our interview with Lidl-Trek's new leader in Spain was a special one.

Geoghegan Hart should start riding a good classification for Lidl-Trek in 2024, as if the past seven months didn't happen. Because in May, the climber might have been on his way to another overall victory at the Giro d'Italia, when things suddenly went wrong on stage 11. Geoghegan Hart fell hard and broke his hip. A long rehabilitation awaited, but it actually went very well. "It's going much better than expected. You try not to have high expectations because you can't predict such things. There is no timeline for it, although we did have an optimistic schedule in terms of the rehabilitation phase, which we wanted to complete by the end of September. That worked out," he said to IDLProcycling.

By the end of September, Geoghegan Hart was back on the bike, a good four months after his crash. 'That also gave me some time to relax, and to completely switch off for a week from all those months of rehab. Training is going well, although I was expecting some setbacks in the body, but everything is going great. There is absolutely nothing wrong with me anymore, although I still have forty or fifty centimeters titanium in my leg. That will be taken out next year during offseason . You don't feel anything, although I am often asked if I pass inspection at airports. Apparently it's just a bit of titanium, which is why even the latest scanners don't catch on," it sounds with a smile.

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Geoghegan Hart chose Amsterdam as rehabilitation site

Time for more serious business. Because ask any question of Geoghegan Hart, and you'll hang on his every answer for about three minutes. For example, when asked what all happened right after that crash. 'In the ambulance, I let all my friends and family know I was okay. For them it was harder than for me, I knew immediately what was wrong. I felt it and the scans confirmed then. They just see someone they love being lifted into an ambulance, with all the speculation and close-ups on television that came with it. I was glad I could call them right away, and that I knew my parents' numbers by heart.'

'I had an idea about how I wanted to handle this, actually I was thinking about it in the 72 hours after the crash,' he continued. 'Looking back on it, everything went as I had hoped. I got out what I wanted to get out. A reset? That's not the right word. Rehabilitation was much harder and more intense than a normal workout. I was away from the world I had been part of non-stop for more than a decade. I made the best of that, in the moments when I could, in the end.'

Here, too, the special person behind the rider emerges. 'I had surgery just a few hours after the crash and then had to make the first important decision: how and where do I want to rehabilitate? That could be at home in Andorra or somewhere with INEOS Grenadiers. In the end, I wanted to be in an interesting and new environment. We spend a lot of time on top of a mountain, in the middle of nowhere. That's great, and I love it, but I grew up in a city (London, ed.) where something happened every day. With all kinds of people, shopping malls, museums.... I had several ideas, but it had to be a place where people weren't on vacation all summer. That already ruled out many cities, and because I have connections in the Netherlands, there were personal reasons to be in Amsterdam,' he alludes to his relationship with Arsenal player Lotte Wubben-Moy, who has her parents living in the Netherlands. 'I had a great time there.'

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Why Geoghegan Hart won't talk about pressure and performance

Nevertheless, it started with difficulty in the Dutch capital. Geoghegan Hart could not walk in his first weeks. 'I had five or six hours of treatments and physio a day during that period, which was intense. People then want to squeeze you into a corner on how this changed you, but I don't believe in that so much. There were days when I couldn't do anything, which was exhausting. I never sleep after training on the bike, only if I'm really jet-lagged or something. But now I sometimes fell asleep at a movie and slept until the next morning. At the same time, as a rider, I had to get satisfaction from days where I sometimes only did something active for one or two hours. I was then at a later stage not tired, not getting satisfaction and wanting to do more. I then never rated my days higher than a 7.'

Once out of the gym, things weren't much better. 'I was treated at the Olympic Stadium and had an apartment in Amsterdam-Zuid. Only I couldn't walk, so I had to go by car. Terrible, because Amsterdam is the city to enjoy cycling. I hate the car and wanted so much to discover the city - with all those people. With friends and family around me, who were able to get to me quickly with the Eurostar, it ended up being a great time. I was finally able to show them the city and make the most of it. But it was also a different way of life, with an agenda every day, with appointments.... It makes you realize how good you have it as an individual.'

As the weeks progressed in Amsterdam, the rider quickly improved. And since he just stated that he is no longer bothered by anything, the question is justified: is he one hundred percent again? Geoghegan Hart shakes his head. 'I don't like the phrase "one hundred percent." Nobody in this hotel of Lidl-Trek, is one hundred percent, because you only want to be that when your goals are approaching. And even then, every rider wants to be better than they've ever been. So is that the new hundred percent, or 105 percent? I want to get back to the level I was at and improve from there. I think in 2023 I was better than ever, although I never got the chance to show that fully.'

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Geoghegan Hart wants to create INEOS group at Lidl-Trek

He says it himself: that Giro in 2023 might have been his. Teammate Geraint Thomas was driven out of pink on the penultimate day by Primoz Roglic, but Geoghegan Hart showed he might have been the very best in the first week and a half. 'I don't look back too much at what could have happened, then you can end up in a nasty tunnel. I'm especially proud of the group we created, the process. Even now we have a separate app group where that Giro group communicates with each other. There were five guys in that group who could have ridden a classification themselves, plus world endurance record holder Filippo Ganna. It could have easily been about egos, but I'm proud that I invested a lot in the atmosphere in that group and for that reason I still watched the Giro. Normally that would have been tough, but now I was curious to see what those guys would do. Of course it's hard not to know what I would have been capable of, but it's also nice to try to reach that level again.'

And to gather the same group around him again. Because whereas at INEOS Grenadiers Geoghegan Hart was by now part of the furniture, at Lidl-Trek he finds all new people in his path. So when asked how he likes these weeks, it's not about how good he feels, or his goals, but about the group feeling he wants to build again. 'The training camps are important for me, to create a small group again with whom you go out. That's also why I felt it was important to be at the first team meeting of Lidl-Trek in America in October. Talking to the owners, because you put on a shirt every day with their company on it.'

He talks about it as if the INEOS chapter is closed. It isn't, of course. 'It was hard to leave, I had been there since 2014. A team with a great history, and it's hard that I didn't get to say goodbye to a lot of people. There's just no good time to do that. When exactly do you change teams? In other sports, there is a day when you can thank people and reflect on the past. In cycling, there is no such transition, and there is no such time. How do you say thank you to 120 people? No one looks back, everyone is always looking forward. I see all the people from INEOS at the races again and I'm grateful to them. I've made a lot of friends from it.'

Geoghegan Hart prefers to look beyond cycling

In twenty minutes of Geoghegan Hart, there is little time left to talk about his cycling life. After his exposés on rehabilitation, the Giro and INEOS, he does make an attempt to touch on the Tour de France. His main goal in 2024. How is he working toward that? Has a burden fallen off his shoulders after 2023, now that he won again for the first time since his Giro final victory in 2020? The Briton remains silent for a moment, then comes up with an apt comparison. 'Top athletes are not robots, they are people. There are millions of things happening in every athlete's life and you put so much into it. Whether that's the time away from your family, kids and wife, or the hours you spend on the bike. You want to make the most of it, but there are so many times when you put so much into it but get nothing in return.'

'With that, I enjoy the process of getting better, but you always have ups and downs,' he continued. 'That's the relative side of the world. You see that now more than ever. You have to look outside of cycling. People ask me if I feel pressure because I hadn't won for two years. But look what people have to deal with in life today, every day. We as elite athletes are privileged, we get to do what we love. I talk about sacrifices, but they are not sacrifices at all. The same goes for you journalists, you also have a passion for the sport. Otherwise you don't travel all the way to Calpe in December, to do interviews. You do that because you love the sport, on and/or off the bike.'

Adding to that, Geoghegan Hart is well aware that a cyclist's life is just a strange one. 'Our lives are hard to explain. In the rehab center, I was with soccer players, tennis players, field hockey players.... Whether they knew anything about cycling or not, they didn't understand anything about what we do every day. That we are at home training with our rivals, that I train with someone with whom I am fighting for position in the race, while we are friends. There is so much beauty in cycling, so unique. We have to appreciate that, that's how I am in life.