For almost half an hour, Tao Geoghegan Hart has been speaking candidly and eloquently, like he always does, about the importance of taking his 2025 season race by race. He has managed – and this is no easy feat to pull off in the cliché-plagued cycling world – to rationalise his approach with thorough explanations, pointing to his long recovery from a broken leg sustained at the 2023 Giro d’Italia when he believes he was at the peak of his powers, successfully making the case for patience while at the same time acknowledging the high hopes Lidl-Trek held and still hold for him when they prised him away from Ineos Grenadiers, the British team whose launch in 2010 he famously attended as a young fan.
It is when the conversation turns to sports politics, though, that Geoghegan Hart is most illuminating. He insists his words are nothing more than just his musings. When he does propose solutions, he quips, partly accurately in this case at least, that his response will form the headline to articles subsequently spawned from his group interview, but what he does offer is a perspective that perhaps the sport’s power brokers might do well in heeding. As the discussion over One Cycling – the Saudi Arabia-backed project designed to revamp the sport’s economic structure and make racing more comprehensible – nears its conclusion and towards a potentially game-changing agreement, and the sport continues to rattle with the pressing issue of rider safety, as well as debating the merits of a transfer system, no-one seems to be consulting the riders, the protagonists in all of this.
Do they want change? “I think it’s pretty clear that the narrative of the sport needs to be clearer, easier to follow,” the Londoner says. “The marketplace for sports entertainment is ever more crowded, with new competitions all the time in e-gaming and applications, and things I probably don’t know that even exist capturing the attention of young fans. I think cycling really needs to make more of an impact on young people and inspire young fans as well as people who have been fans of the sport for a long time.
“It’s not about changing the fundamentals of the sport, but the calendar being easier to understand would help a lot. The intricacies of cycling is something people love once when they’re inside the sport. There’s always another layer to understand, a new race to discover, a new history to uncover, but equally, the year having a bit more rhythm to it makes more sense to the casual fans and that would probably help all involved I think.”
One of the cornerstones of the One Cycling talks is the idea of the best riders going head-to-head more frequently and not just at a handful of races or, in the case of Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard, typically once a season. “Whether that means big riders competing against each other more regularly is hard to say,” Geoghegan Hart continues. “You compare it to tennis where they have smaller events and then the big Grand Slams [where all the best players compete], but there’s only four of them in a year. In cycling, that’s never going to be realistic because we have so many amazing races, and it’s also not possible to target every race as a rider. You could also end up with less diversity of winners than we have now, and I think cycling needs an element of the unexpected and fairytale stories – that gives people inspiration to follow the sport.
“For me, if I was going to propose some reform, I’d probably start by waking up to the fact that the environment and, in particular, weather conditions have changed from 30 years ago, and the calendar could do well with having some adjustments with that in mind. It would make a big difference for riders and organisers. The last thing anyone wants is to see races getting stopped or these issues we have every year that are becoming more common. The weather is getting more extreme, but there are some adjustments you could make that would make things a little easier, perhaps.”
So what, then, could be a solution to avoid the baking-hot conditions experienced in the summer, especially at the Tour de France and Vuelta a España? “The sport is doing a super good job of analysing big data sets compared to 10 years ago – the world has changed in regards to that,” he goes on. “It would be very easy to do an analysis of which periods and which races are regularly having issues and the level of issues. For me, adverse conditions are part of cycling – no one is going to forget the mythical stages where riders have done amazing things in very tough conditions. But there is a limit also, especially with the heat. We don’t want to reinvent cycling – that’s the last thing anyone should do. The history and heritage of the sport is the most amazing and important things we have. But it’s going to be in everyone’s interest if there is one race that is regularly struggling with the conditions and is on the limit, and we can find a better moment [in the calendar].”
When the conversation turns to artificial intelligence and how AI will come to be used by cyclists in the coming years, Geoghegan Hart returns to the previous theme, seemingly agitated by the apparent need to drastically alter professional bike racing. “The sport is in a great place,” he says. “I sometimes find it surprising when I see how much, not negativity, but news there is around the need for reform in cycling. I’m not privy to everything, and there are people with more knowledge than me who know what’s going on behind the scenes, but if I see Lidl coming into the sport and other big partners which teams have taken on board, massive multinational companies, that’s a really good thing. I also have friends in many different endurance sports, and there’s not 1,000 people making a very good living, but, in cycling, there are and it’s easy to forget that.”
Geoghegan Hart will turn 30 at the end of March; this is his ninth season in the WorldTour. Once he was the burgeoning star of British cycling, now he’s one of its most established figures. He's had a career that’s promised, delivered and stuttered – winner of the Giro d’Italia in 2020, but then a winning drought that stretched into the early part of 2023. Then, just as he “was 100% sure I was going to fight for that GC [in the 2023 Giro]”, he fractured his femur and hip while sitting third overall at the race’s halfway point. Last year, his first with Lidl-Trek, for whom he was supposed to be lead at the Tour de France, brought with it 53 race days, but few of them were memorable. “I had moments last year where I felt decent, but never one day where I was really feeling the conditions I had in the previous season for multiple months,” he recalls.
This season is all about finding the form he had in 2023. To do that, there’s no grand ambition, no season schedule scribbled down in permanent marker, not even a Grand Tour. Rather, it’s about “taking it one step at a time. I want to focus on the first period – that’s my big goal,” he outlines. “It’s a bit nonsensical to look past that, to look at big goals. The more logical approach is to focus on getting back to my best and feeling like the page has been turned from breaking my leg in 2023. Before I can do that, it doesn’t make sense to look at the big picture.”
When the form and condition returns – and he’s confident they both will – Geoghegan Hart will then start looking at races with the same ambition he had before. “It would be super nice to get some wins,” he says when asked what would constitute a successful 2025. “It would also be super satisfying to fight up in the GC of races. But more than anything just feeling like things are clicking. That’s the key thing. I’d like to be here next year, and the team is recognising me as someone who contributes to races and is leading the team and doing it as much off the bike as on it. That’s important to me. I feel all the hard work you put in, all the shit you put your family through when they have to watch the races has to be worth it. I want to enjoy it, to feel purpose, to be fulfilled. There’s the side of the results and the side of enjoying your job, enjoying the process of your job and working hard.”
