From Crystal Palace's midfield to beating cancer, now Geoff Thomas is preparing to cover 10,504km in 63 days

The Geoff Thomas foundation is estimated to have already raised over £150m for leukaemia since the former footballer was diagnosed in 2003

Thomas is hoping to raise over £1m for this ride (Dave Hayward photos)

Geoff Thomas is no stranger to uphill struggles. Diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukaemia in the summer of 2003, the former Crystal Palace and England midfielder was given just three months to live.

Now, 14 years on, and very much alive and kicking, he’s preparing to lead the first amateur team to ever tackle cycling’s three Grand Tours back-to-back. Or, to put it another way, covering 10,504km in the Giro d’Italia and Tour de France an Vuelta a Espana by riding an average of 167km a day for 63 days.

It’s enough to make a shift in the Crystal Palace midfield in the 1990s resemble a walk in the park.

Left to right: 3TC riders Doug McKinnon, Marcus Leach, James Maltin, Geoff Thomas and Hayden Groves (Dave Hayward photos)

Speaking to The Independent from Dusseldorf on the eve of the tour – in between a training ride, a nap and the kind of enormous dinner required when you’re burning 8000 calories a day – Thomas appears relatively relaxed despite the size of the task facing him and four others in the coming weeks.

“The only time I cycle is when I or someone I know decides to do something a bit silly – like this, I guess,” he says. “I always leave it too late to prepare but I’m sure I’ll be fine. The problem is that a lot of my mates are really keen cyclists and they’re always up for ridiculous challenges. They used to dread my number coming up on their phone because they knew I would be asking them to do something crazy to raise money – now it’s been reversed!

“The hardest thing is the fatigue build-up. The first couple of days you can get through it on adrenaline and the excitement of it all. Then you just know that you’ve got to get off the bike, get some food, get some sleep and then do it all again the day after. It’s a mental test as well as a physical one.”

Thomas was diagnosed with cancer a year after retiring from football (Getty)

Thomas has had plenty of them in a life that has taken a very different course to the one he must have envisioned when he called time on his career in 2002. Within a year of his retirement, Thomas was given the news that transformed his life.

“That phone call still feels like yesterday, it’s something that never goes away,” he says. “I was in the car, on the A38 between Birmingham and Worcestershire and I got the phone call from the doctor. I’ve met so many people from different walks of life and everyone says the same thing, when you hear the word ‘cancer’, it just makes you stand still.

“You can only experience it when someone says it to you. What’s different, is how people cope after. I was very fortunate, I had a really good team behind me, really good family behind me. I know a lot of people didn’t or don’t have that support structure and that’s what we have to improve.”

Thomas retired in 2002 (Getty)

A bone marrow transplant from his sister coupled with the treatment he received at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham ultimately saved Thomas’s life. It also proved the precursor to Thomas emerging as one of the country’s leading fundraisers for leukaemia research.

“Football was my passion, it’s something I absolutely loved doing,” he says. “But I’ve got to say that I’ve loved the challenge of what I’ve done since. I’ve worked alongside so many amazing people, amazing doctors, professors, people in the charity sector, people who are just desperate to help out.

“I suppose we’ve brought teams together and you all hope that you come out winning. We are improving things when it comes to the fight against cancer. I just endeavour to keep the momentum going and hopefully one day, we can say that ‘that’s it – that’s our job done’. Even my illness, there wasn’t much hope, you would have been given three to five years max. Now it’s a tablet a day, or a dose of tablets a day that allow you to have a normal life. You don’t have to go through all the chemo or radiotherapy that you did 10 or 15 years ago. That form of leukaemia wasn’t the threat it was back then.”

The five riders will be the first amateur team to complete the feat (Getty)

Thomas says it’s impossible to tally up the amount of money he and his legions of helpers – some of whom were equally familiar figures at Selhurst Park during his playing career – have managed to raise. The work done by the Geoff Thomas Foundation has, though, brought at least £150m of new treatments and drugs into the NHS.

He hopes this latest challenge will raise at least a further £1m. All he and his team have to do is finish it.

“I’m in decent shape, probably not as good as I should be given what I’m about to do, but my motivation is what keeps me going,” he says. “A bit of fatigue and a bit of feeling down on myself can be got rid of pretty quickly just by just thinking about why we’re doing this. It’s not about the bike, it’s about beating a drum.”

For more information visit:

The Three Tours Challenge website:

https://www.3tourschallenge.com/

The Three Tours Challenge JustGiving page can be found here:

https://www.justgiving.com/ fundraising/3tours