Geraint Thomas plans to continue his racing career until the Paris Olympics in 2024, despite a hugely disappointing performance in this year’s Tour de France. The 2018 Tour champion, who dislocated his shoulder on stage three of the Tour, admitted that prior to Sunday morning’s second Alpine stage to Tignes, he had come close to quitting the French race. “I think if I hadn’t bounced back as I did on Sunday, it would be more of a discussion,” the leader of the Ineos Grenadiers team said during the Tour’s first rest day in Tignes. “But it’s the Tour, it’s the biggest bike race in the world and I didn’t want to just leave.” But the 35-year-old Welshman admitted that he had to “go deep” to survive last weekend’s pair of Alpine stages, which were dominated by the uncontainable attacks of the current race leader, Tadej Pogacar. “I go deep with everything, whether that’s a bike race – or going out on the piss,” Thomas said. “That’s just the way I am. I am not one to give up easily, which is the reason I started the stage on Sunday. To be honest, I thought: ‘This is just going to be the same as Saturday,’ but you fight and give it everything, and then suddenly you can turn it around and come out better.” “The pain from the injury is a lot better now – it’s more just the pain in my legs. It’s more that getting through those early days took a lot more out of me than it normally would. It was that cumulative effect of digging in, which wears you out. But the shoulder’s not really painful now. It’s just dealing with the fatigue and racing the Tour.” But as UAE Team Emirates leader Pogacar ran riot, to the point where his Spanish rival, Enric Mas of Movistar, described being overtaken by the 22-year-old as if he “didn’t exist”, Thomas instead spent Saturday and Sunday pondering whether to stay in the Tour or go home. “It’s the whole Olympic thing, weighing up what’s best,” he said referring to the proximity of the Tour’s finish on 18 July to the Tokyo Olympics a week later. “To be honest, I think it’s six and two threes. Staying here, I’ve got massage and physio, a chef and obviously everything is looked after. I can go easy some days, I can go deeper others.” “Training-wise, that’s ideal. The only thing is the quick turnaround from Paris to travelling out there [to Japan]. But it was good for my head to have a better day on Sunday because during stage eight [to Le Grand-Bornand] my head was in a bucket, to be honest. It was tough to take.” Nonetheless, Thomas has not ruled out leaving the Tour before it reaches Paris with the aim of allowing greater recovery time prior to flying out to Tokyo. “I thought I could go full tilt at both,” he said, “but obviously the overall, or even the podium, is off the cards. I still think it’s possible to finish, but I’ve just got to take it day by day. There are still some great opportunities for myself and the team. So play it by ear really, but hopefully I will just continue to feel better.” Pogacar, who leads the Tour overall from Sunday’s stage winner, Ben O’Connor, by 2min 1sec, could be heading towards one of the biggest winning margins in recent years, if he continues to ride so voraciously. At the moment, there is little that Tour debutant O’Connor of the AG2R Citroën team, Ineos Grenadiers or Thomas can do to rein in the defending champion. Thomas is now just under 40 minutes behind the race leader, with hopes of even a top-10 finish now long gone. But the Welshman remains bullish. “Hopefully, I’ll feel like I can go for a stage and just enjoy the racing because I’m not going to have many more Tours in me,” he said. “This isn’t the last Tour, but the contract’s up this year and the Paris Olympics would be a nice final goal, so maybe three more years. But there’s certainly a couple more Tours in there.”