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Giro d'Italia 2020: How Hackney boy Tao Geoghegan Hart became king of Italy

AP
AP

Back in 2012, Bradley Wiggins famously said “kids from Kilburn aren’t supposed to win the Tour de France”. Well, Wiggins did just that. And now a boy from Hackney has gone and won the Giro d'Italia. They surely are not supposed to do that, either.

While his name may have Gaelic roots and he may live 2,000m above sea level in the cycling haven of Andorra, Tao Geoghegan Hart really is a down-to-earth east London boy.

As he tweeted before yesterday’s final stage: “Sundays for me will always be playing football on the marshes and going to Brick Lane market with my old man and brother. Today is just another Sunday. I haven’t seen my family in 10 months, but they are always with me.”

Later in the day, Sir Dave Brailsford, Geoghegan Hart’s Ineos Grenadiers team boss, was hailing his win as “a story from a comic book” — and he is not far wrong. In 2010, as Team Sky launched in London, Geoghegan Hart — then a 14-year-old taking his first steps in cycling — bunked off school in Stoke Newington to join an amateur peloton riding through the city behind Wiggins and Co.

By then, he was already a sports nut, as an Arsenal fan and a goalkeeper. He is the oldest of five children and gets his name from his father, a builder with Scottish and Irish roots. His charming website, which also features a blog post about coffee and recommended training routes, has an audio clip of him explaining how to pronounce his name (Tayo Gay-gan Hart), which Italian commentators have found a real mouthful in recent weeks.

(AP)
(AP)

While he was also a talented enough swimmer to have been the youngest of six Hackney teens to swim the Channel in 2008, he was gripped by cycling.

He saw a poster for the newly-formed Cycling Club Hackney at his school and was soon competing in his first race. Before long, he rocked up at Condor Cycles asking for a job, which he was given. He was spending his teen years charging up Highgate Hill with his school-mate Alex Peters, who would also go on to be a pro cyclist, and racing officially across the city.

Fast forward a decade and even in the race itself, Geoghegan Hart is a fairytale winner.

He started the Giro as one of Geraint Thomas’s domestiques. Then, if you were picking a British winner, you would have plumped for Thomas or Simon Yates, two of the four previous winners of Grand Tour events from the UK alongside Wiggins and Chris Froome.

(AP)
(AP)

But Thomas fell hard on Stage 3 and fractured his pelvis, while Yates tested positive for coronavirus after Stage 7. When he won Stage 15, Geoghegan Hart was still almost three minutes off the overall lead.

But when he won Saturday’s gruelling 20th stage, there was less than a second dividing him and the Australian Jai Hindley after more than 85 hours of racing. It was the first time in more than a century of Grand Tours that the leading two riders came into the final stage on the same time.

In the final time trial, Geoghegan Hart was 39 seconds quicker than his Australian rival, becoming the first Giro winner to have never held the pink jersey until the finishing line.

Whatever he may say, yesterday was not just another Sunday.