At the twilight of summer, so the twilight of one man’s career. On Sunday Geraint Thomas will pull on a racing jersey, wave to the crowd on the start line, and set off on his last race as a professional rider. On what is likely to be a classically British late-summer day – light drizzle and autumnal chill – the Tour of Britain will come to a close with a send-off for one of its most celebrated riders.

That’s unlikely to be how the famously self-deprecating Thomas sees it, of course, but it feels only fitting that the spotlight now falls on a rider whose own achievements tended to take a back seat to others’ ambitions. In between seasons spent largely in service of others, from Chris Froome to Egan Bernal, Thomas notched three track world titles, two Olympic golds, victory in several major stage races and one-day Classics, and his crowning glory, the 2018 Tour de France.

Something of a jack of all trades, Thomas proved adept at pretty much every discipline, from time-trials to cobbled Classics to riding in the Alps. He was a workhorse rather than a preternatural talent in the mould of teammate Bernal or Tadej Pogacar, doggedly chipping away, going under the radar. And there were plenty of setbacks and ill luck among the triumphs: crashes, broken bones, a broken pelvis on stage one of the 2013 Tour, which could not stop him from riding the entire race in support of Froome’s eventual victory.

It was only right that he was rewarded in 2018, outstripping Froome as leader – even doing that in his usual understated manner – and storming to victory, most memorably in yellow on Alpe d’Huez, cementing himself as a great in his own right, not just in the background. A second grand tour title slipped agonisingly through his fingers on the penultimate day of the 2023 Giro d’Italia, but his is still a Hall of Fame career, and the Welshman can have few regrets.

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In later years he was outpaced by younger, flashier competitors, the likes of Pogacar and Jonas Vingegaard, but his years of experience and racecraft meant that more often than not he was still best of the rest. And he continued to be the consummate team player, seemingly happier supporting “the boys” than taking centre stage, even turning into a lead-out man for old friend and former teammate Mark Cavendish on the final stage of the 2023 Giro d’Italia.

Thomas’ retirement not only means the peloton will be missing one of its most popular riders, its foremost elder statesman: it also means the end of an epoch as the previous decade’s star riders drop away. Of the former Team Sky behemoths, only the recently re-injured Froome is still going, and that seems unlikely to be the case for long. Two of Thomas’ contemporaries riding the Tour of Britain, 38-year-olds Bauke Mollema and sprinter Alexander Kristoff, will also retire at the end of the year.

The ‘Sky train’ era is long gone; UAE and Visma-Lease a Bike have adopted many of the tactics but upped the ante. And Thomas’ own laid-back approach – beers to celebrate a hard-fought race, taking it easy in the off-season – is something of a relic in an increasingly data-centric, hyper-regimented sport. Part of ‘G’s’ appeal was always that in a highly professionalised peloton he always seemed the most like an ordinary bloke, the sort of guy you’d go for a pint with, who just happened to be an utterly supreme athlete.

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But Thomas – who spent 15 years with Sky, then Ineos – will remain part of the furniture, expected to shift into a management role. Perhaps one day he’ll follow the path of former Ineos directeur sportif Rod Ellingworth, now in charge of the Tour of Britain, which Thomas first raced as a fresh-faced 20-year-old.

Ellingworth’s route this year culminates in a stage from the Geraint Thomas National Velodrome to the finish on the streets of Thomas’ hometown, Cardiff, going past the Maindy outdoor velodrome he grew up racing on, coming within 100m of his parents’ house, and past the pub where he had his first “legal pint”. Thomas has admitted there will likely be tears at the finish line, and at the subsequent farewell ceremony in Cardiff Castle.

The fairytale ending would be Thomas riding into Cardiff as the winner, but what’s more likely is that one of the next generation of star British riders will take over that mantle. There was an obvious changing of the guard at this year’s Tour de France, as a Scot rather than a Welshman – 22-year-old Oscar Onley – finished fourth in Paris at the end of a breakout Tour. Matthew Brennan, who recently turned 20, has barely given anyone else a look-in at each of the races he’s won this season. The pair are well-placed to give the star power of Remco Evenepoel a run for his money.

Where does that leave Thomas? Possibly scrapping for the stage win in Cardiff, duking it out one more time, capping off a career of 25 professional wins with one more trip to the podium. Or maybe simply rolling down North Road, one final homecoming, soaking it all in. It’s been a hell of a ride.