The World of Cycling According to G

by Geraint Thomas

Sit back or saddle up as double Olympic gold medallist and multiple world champion Geraint Thomas gives you a warts and all insight into the life of a pro cyclist. Along the way he reveals cycling's clandestine codes and secret stories, tales from the peloton, the key characters like Wiggins, Hoy and Cav, the pivotal races and essential etiquette. Geraint Thomas is treasured for treating his sport just as the rest of us see not a job but an escape and an adventure. He's been with Team Sky since its inception, and is one of our most successful and gifted track and road riders, but Geraint reminds us that getting on the bike still puts a smile on your face and fire in the legs like nothing else. Funny, informative, diverting and droll, this is a joyful celebration of the world of cycling.

Genres: Cycling, Nonfiction, Biography, Sports, Autobiography, Audiobook, Biography Memoir

373 pages, Hardcover

First published October 29, 2015

Reviews

[Adrian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Oh gosh, how do I rate this, well as you can see I've given it 3 stars. Yes I did enjoy it, especially the last quarter, but prior to that I found it too disjointed.
I am a keen follower of cycling, both track and grand tours, as well as a keen cyclist, and have read a few biographies of past and present heroes. I must admit I prefer the biographies that follow a timeline ( like Racing Through the Dark by David Millar) rather than books that have "topic" focussed chapters.
That said, it was still very interesting and enjoyable

[Ruthie · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Hey, Geraint, here's an easy way to earn a bit of dosh. You just sit and ramble about life as a professional cyclist. I record it and write it into some sort of structure."

"Do I get to talk about bodily functions, sleep, going out for beers, and NOT going out for beers?"

"Course you do. You're a Cardiff boy, aren't you? What else would we expect?"

"Do you want me to talk about drugs, or anything controversial?"

"No mate. Just keep it to the peeing, training, sleeping and drinking."

"Cracking."

[Kaido · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lihtne ja lõbus lugemine, mis kirjutatud ühe tavalise Walesi olümpiavõitjast pro poolt. Lugemise muutis natuke raskemaks britipärased ütlused või väljendit, millele oli eesti keelde raske mingit tõlget leida. Konteksti põhjal sai aru, millest jutt. Mida kaasa võtta? Üllatus oli see, et olgugi, et sa oled 5 tundi päevas sadulas ja teed ränkrasket füüsilist trenni, siis kaalu hoidmiseks on vaja korralikult ikkagi oma menüüd vaadata. Palja trenniga ei jõua kuhugi. Väga huvitav oli lugeda emotsionaalse tasakaalu hoidmisest võistluste, rattasõidu ja siis koduse elu vahel. Vahepeal tundus, et see elukorraldus on väga sarnane sõjaväele. Ühel hetkel on sul sära, fännid fotograafid, teisel hetkel oled vaikses majas, rutiinivabalt ja nagu ei oskagi midagi selle ajaga peale hakata. Geraint kirjeldab väga värvikalt kohtasid, kus ta käib trenni tegemas, erinevate maade rattureid, kultuure ja rattasõidu reegleid. Mulle meeldis, et siin ei olnud seda tüüpilist jalgpalluri frustreerivat, agoonilist lugu (tulin kuskilt agulist, sõin prügi 10 aastat, kõksisin 8 tundi päevas plekkpurgiga jne.), vaid selline loomulik, lõbus areng. Näiteks noorteklassis, kui Inglismaal veel rattasporti ei eksisteerinud ja õiget varustust polnud, tehti prügikottidest neile vihmakeebid.

[Pete Duffy · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very disorganized ghosted collection of observations and anecdotes thrown together into random subject chapters. Also it's very bland, written while he was still a rising star (of course at the top of the tree now since the 2018 TdF), he has not a single critical word about anyone or any governing body, drugs are not even mentioned once! However I still give it 3 stars because it does (eventually after a slow start) get into its stride and gives interesting and revealing insights into the daily regime of a top pro-cyclist. There's also quite a bit about his 2008 and 2012 track cycling achievements and the phenomenal rise of Team GB and team Sky under Dave Brailsford. G's absolute determination to succeed shines through and you do get a good sense, without him 'banging on about it' about how tough a sport pro-cycling is

[pedro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Funny, insightful down to earth. Did I mention it was funny? It is. A lot. Very well humored, besides telling his journey into the world of cycling, it does offer tips and advises to any aspiring pro-cyclist or weekend warrior.
I've met Geraint Thomas last year, when he wore yelloow for the first time that season, on to win the Tour. He his indeed what you grasp from the book he might be.

Allez Gee!

[Colin Swinburn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great read for a weekend cyclist. Particularly liked the sections of the dos and don'ts of cycling. "Don't have 3 front cogs, have two and just keep trying till you get up hills." Sadly as a mature rider I'll be sticking with three front cogs. "Wear white socks with white shoes, black socks with black shoes"....totally agree....
Overall a nice book and Geraint Thomas comes across as a lovely guy who it would be fun to have a drink with. I loved his observations on topics of all sorts, and they sort of felt very conversational.
Have recommended it to my cycling mates.

[Ivor Kovic · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very funny and entertaining book from the latest Tour de France winner. A cyclist with a vast experience across multiple disciplines. A very useful read for aspiring cyclists of any level, but also entertaining for anyone remotely interested in cycling and sports in general.

[James Mason · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little repetitive. Funny in places.

[Hiccopolit · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5. Enjoyably chirpy glimpse into world of professional cycling. Geraint is an amiable guide but the book covers a lot of ground already known to cyclists. Sometimes the "G" banter falls a bit flat - (ride for Sky - still don't know how to fix the reception etc).

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't usually read biographies and definitely not from sports people, but I enjoyed reading this during the Tour de France. It gives an insight into the peloton and the world of the pro cyclist.

Geraint is such a good team player. It feels like I've met him now.

And in 2018, I saw him cycle in the Tour of Britain. Superb and exciting!

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think my favourite cycling book

[AndrewCurry · Rating 4 out of 5]

My wife bought me Thomas’ book to cheer me up—long before he won the Touur de France—and to be honest I postponed reading it for a while, through fear of disappointment. I like Thomas for his refreshing candour after races as well as his undoubted toughness. But I was worried that his publisher and ghostwriter would have packaged up his ‘Cheeky Taffy’ persona at the expense of the cycling.

As it happens, The World According to G does have a fair amount of humour in here (for example, on the difficulties of re-adjusting to domestic life after beig away racing), but the cycling still gets its fair share of the content. Pretty much any cyclist will learn from his technical accounts of climbing and descending, and the pen portraits of the people he’s ridden with (Wiggins, Froome, Cav etc) are sharp. The ‘tells’ that indicate that another rider is struggling are revealing:

“[T]he peleton can be a horrible place to be when you’re struggling. Stories fly around: this bloke’s lost his nerve. He’s a bottler. He’s gone… Because, when someone’s nerves go, you can’t miss it. The body language on the bike tells its own honest tale. They let a gap grow in front of them. They track through corners as if they are going round a fifty-pence piece.”

He comes alive on the technical aspects of cycling. Thomas is fascinating on the precision needed to ride the team pursuit on the track, in which he is a multiple Olympic gold medallist.

“The judgments required are ridiculous, if you allow yourself to dwell on it: four of you, flat out at 63kph, each tyre an inch from the one in front… Tiny margins, huge consequences. There is no worse feeling than being in that line and knowing you are not recovering; being incapable of doing more than a half lap on your turn, knowing that the other guys are relying on you and that you are letting them down.”

In summary: a human account of what it’s like as a top professional rider.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. I've tagged this as autobiography, but it isn't really - it's a book about cycling (does what it says on the tin). It does have a fair amount about Thomas's past, but it's all focused on cycling.

Which is absolutely fine with me. I like an auto/biography now and then, but I'm generally more interested in reading about the career/life/event that people are famous for than about their childhood and schooldays.

I'm a relatively new fan of competitive cycling (both track and road - I blame the 2012 Olympics for the former and being a spinner who spends time on Ravelry for the latter), and of Geraint Thomas (let's be honest, I hadn't even heard of him before the 2012 Games). This book gives an informative but not too complicated/technical picture of the sport and a suggestion of the personality of the man.

The chapters are short, there are a few laughs here and there, and you get a sense of Thomas's personality. Only a sense, mind, because he a) obviously had no intention of producing anything resembling a traditional autobiography and b) had a ghostwriter and as far as I can tell Thomas told him stories and he (Tom Fordyce) stitched them together. There are some bits that could have done with a decent copy editor (or a better ghostwriter??) - for example when a sentence changes from third person to first person. YES, IN THE SAME SENTENCE. (It wasn't even a long sentence.)

Despite those minor niggles, it's a good read. Not necessarily something to savour in one sitting - the sections are too short and it bounces around from subject to subject too much for that, but a book to pick up and read for ten or fifteen minutes here and there.

[Heather Belleguelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I became a real fan of road cycling this summer when a minor injury confined me to the sofa during the last two weeks of the Tour de France. Along with every other British cycling fan, I was gripped with the race as Geraint Thomas made his way to victory in Paris. Therefore, when this book popped up on Kindle daily deal earlier this month, it was a bargain I wanted to snap up. It made an interesting and entertaining read, with information and anecdotes all told with Geraint’s dry and self-deprecating sense of humour.

The book is well put together with the help of ghost writer Tom Fordyce and covers all kinds of topics relating to cycling from people to places, and techniques to terminology. Geraint and Tom tell it like it is with no ceremony and (excessive) introduction. In fact, reading the first chapter makes you feel like you’ve walked into the middle of a conversation and missed the preamble to the topic. This style of storytelling though is part of the attraction of this account of the world of cycling, G style. I particularly smiled at the little snippets discussing aspects that would now be approached differently post-Tour win. For example: the formidable Alpe D’Huez climb, where Geraint won a stage, becoming the first Briton to do so, on his way to being crowned champion.

All in all, I highly recommend this book for a frank and entertaining insight into the life of a professional cyclist as told by one of Britain’s best. And I’m looking forward to following it up with reading The Tour According to G.

[Rachel Stevenson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Starts with a penis reference and goes uphill, Mont Ventoux-style, after that. The sections on G's life and early cycling success, as well as the gossipy bits about other riders (he criticises the media and the peloton for acting like “bitchy schoolgirls” when a rider is not doing well, but at the same time is quite happy to give out reasonably intimate details of other riders' lives. Re: the use of “schoolgirls” as a pejorative – there is only one mention of women's cycling in the book and that's the fact that Vicky Pendelton competed in the Beijing and London Olympics), are more interesting than the chapters about cycling itself. How to get into an echelon in crosswinds is not for the likes of me, it's for men who get to age 35 and join a local cycling club and all wear matching tops from Rapha and go out into the countryside on Saturdays taking up all the bike spots on the train and talk of doing, but crucially never actually do, l'Etape.

I did find it interesting that G does both track and field. Road cycling is split into sprinters, climbers and GC guys, like cricket is peopled by bowlers, batters and all rounders, but then cycling is also split into road racers and track racers. Some can do both – G, Cav, Wiggo, but you'd never see Chris Froome on a track nor would Laura Kenny dirty herself on the cobbles of the Paris Roubaix (Femmes), just as multiple Olympic gold winner Ed Clancy once did the Tour de France and abandoned after a mountain.

Oh, and I don't know if you knew this but Geraint is Welsh. As welsh as a leek, a daffodil, a bara brith, butt.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not quite similar to the cycling books I've been reading as of late. No mention of doping, no controversies, no negativity - just a straight-up, interesting cycling biography.

Needless to say you need to be interested in cycling, and to not have a hatred of Team Sky to enjoy this one, but Geraint's book was a really good read for me.
I've been interested in cycling for about 2 years now, so still chomping through all these books and viewings with my milk teeth but this was a really good biography. It was all about cycling. No tales of how his father used to treat him or his first job. Every story is to do with cycling and is relevant. He really understood hisnjey demographic when he went about writing this book.

Also, this book was made interesting for me because he's a boy from south Wales who moves off to Manchester later in his life to pursue his cycling career, which is exactly (minus the cycling career) what I did.
I could relate to all the places he talked about around both Cardiff and Manchester and he enlightened me to other "behind the scenes" areas in the cycling world that helped me bond better to the character that is G.

Really good read, solid 4 stars.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

You could tell this was ghost written by the same author as Crouch's book, as it had the same chatty style, quick to make light-hearted fun of mates but also discuss the more serious aspects of the sport.

The structure of this book is also much like Crouch's, and by moving between topics rather than giving a chronological account, it allows Thomas to touch on pet topics like coffee and food without the feeling it's too much of a tangent. Unsurprisingly, some subjects are more interesting than others (like beer), but the intricacies of bike handling in a mass group are covered as much as the Italians' love of pasta. And, cynically, it also leaves the option of a proper autobiography later.

The relaxed style did mean that it was a pleasant read, rather than a truly engrossing one, and if a given race was relevant to more than one topic there were a few repetitive lines. But I did find out a lot about Thomas and cycling in general, and I hope his Tour book is as good.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amusing, entertaining and fascinating book that also shows a deeper side to Geraint Thomas. That side is one of a deeply dedicated, intelligent, competitive cyclist, one of the best in the world. Along the way he never forgets his sense of humour, after all, “it’s only a cycle race”. My only disappointment is he makes no comment on the cheating philosophy of the likes of Lance Armstrong. Thomas rode his first TDF in 2007 so he must have come across this aspect of cycling and no doubt has opinions, it would have been interesting to hear them. If I was a professional cyclist Thomas would be number one on the list of teammates. I can’t help wondering what his true potential is, providing he remains upright and is let ‘off the leash’ by his team, could he be a TDF winner? The book highly recommended and will put a smile on your face.

[Andrew Owen]

Ruth Jones has written a pithy and amusing summary of this book. In some ways I agree and especially early on it feels very lightweight, hopping from one subject to the next. That said, by the end I felt he’d given some interesting and amusing insights into the sport (track and road) and his experiences.

Do not expect anything deep and it’s interesting what is left out. Geraint Thomas is one of the great riders of the past decade or so and seems like a nice guy with a sense of humour.

Spoiler alert - there is no mention of drugs or high profile cyclists beyond his immediate circle. No real reference to women’s cycling either. Given his status as a current rider I understand this but suspect he’ll never do a tell all book.

[John Thurlbeck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Autobiographies are not usually my interest, but I was loaned this book while on holiday in New Zealand, and then returned to it once Thomas had won the Tour De France to complete it. I was distracted by other reading material along the way but got there in the end.

It is funny, witty, and sickeningly grim in places, especially when you grasp the true inner life of a professional cyclist. Their life is a gruelling one, and to win the Tour probably took every ounce of grit and determination built up over years as a journeyman professional.

I think it is worth a read!

[Jo Highton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lighthearted, full of gentle humour, I found it fun to hear about life inside the world of professional cycling from the likeable G. He joined British cycling at the exciting time of the push for olympic success, tour success, the new era of Dave Brailsford, marginal gains and clean cycling. A new, exciting and joyful time. His pronouncements about the various countries he trains and races in are very entertaining. A great read for anyone who cycles or follows the sport.

[Rob · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just a little bit too gentle to make a really interesting read. None of the dirt spilt about those involved in the sport that Geraint has crossed.

Maybe you have to have retired from the sport before you can spill the beans.

If I was going to do a digested read it would be that you have to train hard, eat extremely carefully, be on the cutting edge of science and when you win and the season is over you can have a wild night out.

[Stuart Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this because it was different to the usual chronological autobiography. The thematic style makes Thomas come across as more human rather than the dull robots that some sportsmen seem to be. It probably helps to have some knowledge of cycling before reading this book as otherwise it might be a bit confusing in places - it will be interesting to see if the inevitable post Tour victory update changes anything.

[Phil Small · Rating 2 out of 5]

I like Geraint Thomas but this a completely unenlightening slice of ghostwritten fluff. A stocking filler, inoffensive but ultimately empty. There’s nothing here that you can’t read elsewhere and the quips the ghostwriter litters throughout really jar. With so many good cycling books out there (Racing Through The Dark, Rough Ride, even The Climb) don’t bother with this unless you want to dash through something light in a few hours.

[Hari · Rating 5 out of 5]

An insider’s simply written account of life as a professional cyclist. Filled with snippets about what drives professional sportspersons, growing up in Wales, changes in training methods and technologies and the characters that make up modern day professional cycling. Five stars simply because there is so much in this book that you cannot find elsewhere - especially following Armstrong’s fall from Grace.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not a cyclist myself, but I've watched the Tour de France for many, many years, and it was good to get a look behind the scenes, not just at that race, but the whole of the professional cycling world. Geraint writes amusingly and entertainingly about what is a very tough sport. Recommended for any cyclist, and anyone who has enjoyed watching or taking part in any kind of cycle racing. Very interesting and fun read.

[Pete Missingham · Rating 4 out of 5]

A little dated now that Team Sky no longer exists but overall it feels like a very good look at the cycling systems, both velodrome and road, from one of the better known insiders. It could maybe benefit from a glossary for those terms which were defined some pages ago only to be immediately forgotten.

[Paul M · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written before his TdeF win so maybe a sequel is required. A very enjoyable, insightful, and humorous look inside elite cycling. G (if you’ll excuse my presumption to use his nickname) comes across as an all round decent bloke that you’d be happy to sit and have a beer and a chat with. No way could I accompany him in a cycle ride!

[Adrian · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a typically Welsh viewpoint on the sport of professional cycling. It has a good insight into the sport and explains some of the subtlties of racing in a Grand Tour with team Sky and on the track, racing in the velodrome.

[Ruth Mackay · Rating 5 out of 5]

G is one of my fave cyclists

Being the cycling fan I am I have been watching the tour de France, la vuelta, the tour of Britain for the last few years. I have always watched the cycling at the Olympics both Rio, London and Beijing. G has fast become one of my fave cyclists. I follow him on Twitter and Facebook, so I thought it time to read his book. It's a great in sight into the cycling world and what it takes to be a pro of road and track. I admire him even more now.