Team Sky best place for Thomas, says Brailsford

Team Sky boss Dave Brailsford said he intended to negotiate a new deal for Tour de France champion Geraint Thomas after the Welshman said he was ‘open to hearing other options’. Thomas has been with Team Sky since its inception in 2010, mainly living in the shadows of first Bradley Wiggins and then Chris Froome before his breakout victory this year.His new-found status as Grand Tour winner would make him an obvious target for rival teams, but Brailsford believes the 32-year-old Welshman is best-served by staying at Sky. “I am pretty positive this is the best team for Geraint,” fellow Welshman Brailsford said yesterday. “It’s not unusual that these guys win something big and it puts them in a different place to when they started out. With the contract negotiations we will sit down and thrash it all out. We’re a team that wants him, a team where he has been very successful, one where he knows the staff. Like anyone he is entitled to listen to other options but I’d like to think we will get it all sorted out.”Thomas rode a superb race to eclipse teammate Froome who had been favourite to win a fourth consecutive Tour de France. However, with Froome and highly-rated Colombian Egan Bernal competing with Thomas to be Sky’s top dog on the road, he is not assured of being team leader at future Tours.“For sure, you want to listen to what people have to say because there are a lot of other strong teams around, it’s not just like Sky is up here and everyone is down there,” Thomas was quoted as saying this week.“You just need to sit down properly, look at the positives and negatives and go from there. It’s quite fortunate I didn’t sign (a new deal) before the Tour! But the way the team is run works really well for me. But I’m open to hearing other options.”A move to another outfit would allow Thomas the sole ‘team leader’ status he has never enjoyed but Brailsford says it would not boost his chances of winning another Grand Tour. “It’s always been the case at Team Sky that we have individuals who can perform at the highest level,” he said.“In our sport you don’t sit down and write a name on a piece a paper and say he will be the team leader next year. Take Geraint for example, in order to win the Tour de France (again) he would have to beat Chris Froome and Egan Bernal. In our sport it has a structure where you’re on a team with someone but to win you have to be better than them, whether you’re in another team or in that team.”Thomas overwhelmed as Tour victory serenaded by Elton John, Henry and BaleMeanwhile, Thomas has been overwhelmed by the reaction to his Tour de France victory with one particular favourite a video featuring the likes of Elton John, Thierry Henry, Gareth Bale and Sam Warburton.The 32-year-old Welshman — who went to the same school as the younger duo of Bale and Warburton — admitted he had watched the video endlessly in a taxi on the way back to his hotel following celebrating his epic win on Sunday in Paris. Thomas, who according to the papers has pencilled in a return to Cardiff for a parade today from his home in Monaco, said the impact of his achievement has yet to sink in. He told the paper his life has been “turned upside down” although he had yet to give much thought to the remark by 2012 Tour de France champion Wiggins that his life would change irrevocably.“It’s just been one thing after the next,” said Thomas, an avid Arsenal fan who received a call from former Gunners manager Frenchman Arsene Wenger following his win. “Maybe when I get home tomorrow, shut the front door and sit on the sofa, it will start to sink in. I don’t know. I guess I’ll have to experience it to know what it’s really going to be like. But I don’t mind. I’m generally a pretty relaxed guy. We’ll see how it goes. Hopefully I can just go with the flow.”Thomas, who set to sign a new contract with Team Sky worth £3,500,000 ($4.6mn, 3.9mn euros), said an early indication of how much had changed came with a photo he posted on Instagram of him and his wife Sara eating Welsh cakes in their hotel room in the early hours of Monday.“That was crazy because I put that on my Instagram and then next day it’s on the front of a newspaper,” he said. “It’s probably a sign of things to come.”He admitted he deliberately dropped the microphone on the winners podium after being encouraged to do so by Sara and the team’s director of business operations Fran Millar, who were standing behind the podium. “At the very end I thought ‘Sod it! I’ll do it’... and then it went viral,” said Thomas. “It was a bit different anyway.”