From Channel swimmer to Giro winner
Tao Geoghegan Hart, who once played truant to see Sky's launch, on Sunday became the renamed team's latest major tour winner when he seized his opportunity in the closing time trial at the Giro d'Italia.
"It's incredible! It was impossible for me to even think about winning the Giro when we started in Sicily," said the 25-year-old who started the race working for former Tour de France winner Geraint Thomas.
Thomas crashed in the third stage, and Geoghegan Hart, a Londoner with Scottish and Irish roots, became the fifth Briton to win a major tour and the second to win the Giro, following Chris Froome in 2018.
All 12 British triumphs have come since 2011. Sunday's was the 11th in the colours of the team now known as Ineos.
When it was launched, as Sky in 2010, with Brad Wiggins as the star, Geoghegan Hart, a schoolboy from Hackney in east London, turned up to watch.
With his good looks, reddish hair, relaxed nature and easy banter he most resembles Wiggins, another Londoner and Sky's Tour de France groundbreaker.Geoghegan Hart's name can cause problems and the second line on his personal web page reads: "It's 'Tayo GAY-gan Hart'."
He is passionate about coffee. His web page has a photo of the gear he takes with him: bags of beans, scales, press, grinder, dripper, filters, jugs, kettle with adaptor plug and a mug, "of course".On Sunday, after his triumph, he insisted the coffee would still smell the same.
"I'm going to stay the same person," he said. "Wake up every day looking forward to riding my bike, loving my life and being grateful for the amazing position, the privilege, that I'm in to be in this team and at these races."
The son of a builder and the eldest of five siblings, Geoghegan Hart tried team sports such as football. At 13, was the youngest member of a six-person relay team from a local club that swum the English Channel.
"He came to us through soccer and swimming; he liked the idea of cycling because he was fed up of other people letting him down, and cycling is a sport where it's largely down to the individual," Hackney Cycling Club coach Keir Apperley told The Guardian.Geoghegan Hart joined Sky in 2017 as a trainee. He moved to Girona in Spain, a popular base for cyclists.
In 2018 he rode his first big tour, the Vuelta. Last year, he was part of the victorious Ineos team at the Giro but crashed and broke a collarbone on the 13th stage. Even so, he developed a taste for the race.
"I really liked the Giro", he said earlier this year. "There are a lot more opportunities than in the Tour de France."
That opportunity arrived this year. Geoghegan Hart grabbed it.
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