After three years in the shadows at Lidl-Trek, Tao Geoghegan Hart will move to EF Education EasyPost for the 2027 season and is hoping to regain some of the form that saw him take overall victory at the 2020 Giro d’Italia.
Early in his career Geoghegan Hart was one of the peloton’s most promising young riders, joining Team Sky in 2017 and going on to win the Giro in 2020, but his career hit a roadblock when he crashed out of the 2023 Giro d'Italia and broke his leg.
He joined Lidl-Trek in 2024 and though there have been glimmers of his earlier form, he has largely struggled in the past three years, rarely troubling race top 10s, and his departure has been inevitable for some time.
Amid doubts about a future team, it was announced on Monday that he is joining EF Education-EasyPost on what appears to be a one-year contract.
"On a personal level, it’s really about trying to refind the condition I had in my best years – the ceiling of that, the journey towards it, and the end results themselves," Geoghegan Hart said.
"It’s an exciting prospect to come into a new environment with new ideas, new perspectives, and different people."
Geoghegan Hart's move to EF comes after what he described as "a very interesting, personal conversation" with the team’s CEO, Jonathan Vaughters, about his troubles and what opportunities might be available to the British rider in the future.
"I have a framed ticket stub on my wall – an Eric Cantona one – that says ‘nostalgia is poison.’ I’m much more interested in looking forward in the moment," Geoghegan Hart said in EF's press release.
"In a split second in bike racing, so much can change,” he added of his crash. “But in the end, nothing changes you. You might have different goals for the six to 12 months after a crash like that, a different experience coming back and different challenges, but in the end it’s always, from my experience, the same mentality and approach.
"One clear motivation for me is to really feel like I’m beyond it – in some ways I do, and in other ways I don’t, which is always an interesting thing to encounter. Three and a half years is a long time, but it also went by very quickly, and you don’t necessarily feel quite back to where you were before. It’s a big experience to undergo as an athlete. You take it as it comes and try to do your best each day."
While the length of Geoghegan Hart’s new contract appears to be only one year, and his role is as yet unclear, he is a rider Vaughters admires and who could fit with the team's ethos of trying to unlock hidden potential and value.
"Tao is an incredibly gifted rider with the perseverance and stubbornness to come back from a horrific crash injury. While the fruits of his work to come back from injury have not blossomed yet, we are taking the bet that 2027 will be the year that this happens,” Vaughters said.
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