Geraint Thomas says he is “relishing the Alps” as the 2019 Tour de France heads across the Rhône valley towards a triptych of decisive mountain stages at the end of this week.

“I feel motivated to get there and try and finish this Tour off well,” the defending champion said. “It’s been slightly up and down, compared to last year. I’m itching to go now. I much prefer the Alps. I’ve got a lot better memories of there.

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“I finished the stage feeling really strong yesterday,” he said of the final Pyrenean stage to Foix Prat d’Albis on Sunday. “Halfway through I didn’t, but then I came through that. Finishing really well, as I did, was good for the confidence and I am really relishing the Alps now. It’s almost like the rest day is in the way.”

Speaking to the BBC Bespoke podcast and the Guardian, the 2018 champion insisted that there was no rivalry with Team Ineos co-leader Egan Bernal and that both riders — currently separated by only 27 seconds — were still riding with a common objective.

But Thomas then added: “Obviously, I want to be the one to win. The main thing is that we don’t race against each other and throw away the race. We’ve got to be honest with how we are feeling. If I’m on a really bad day and I just tell Egan to stay with me and we ride together and both lose a minute then that’s obviously not the way to go. I’m confident that we can keep that communication and honesty going.”

The team principal, Dave Brailsford, dismissed any suggestions of a building rivalry between the pair, but accepted that the situation remained unpredictable.

“There’s no sign of a rivalry at the moment,” he said. “The situation changes second by second. That’s what we saw yesterday. That whole dynamic is live. There’s no set play.”

But Brailsford also acknowledged the building momentum of the Tour’s French renaissance. “If a French guy won the Tour de France then I think it would be a brilliant thing for the sport, for the Tour and it would be something that would light it all up,” he said. “We’d have to go back to the drawing board but I think it would be a shot in the arm for the whole sport.”

With five meaningful stages and two summit finishes still to come before the Champs Élysées, Brailsford and his team are in unknown territory, having always been in control of the overall classification by this stage of the Tour in their wins in 2012, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018.

This year’s race, however, is very different. Six riders are within a little over two minutes of Julian Alaphilippe’s yellow jersey, and with a weaker Ineos team, compared to the Sky of previous Tour successes, neither Thomas nor Bernal can be assured of final victory.

“We’ve won this race in a similar kind of fashion where we get a lead and defend a lead,” Brailsford said. “It’s like defending a 1-0 lead, whereas this feels more like racing, which is why I loved the sport in the first place. It’s a different challenge.”

“Nobody, myself included, expected Alaphilippe to hang on this long into the race,” he said. “Everyone was thinking ‘We have to do something to get rid of this guy’, but we don’t want to overcook ourselves getting rid of him because we were thinking inevitably he was going to go anyway. Everybody has been caught in the middle waiting to see what everyone else would do which is why the race is so uncontrolled.”

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With the time gaps between the main contenders so slim, Brailsford is not alone in predicting an Alpine cliff-hanger. “You can’t rule it out on the very final climb,” he said, of Saturday’s climactic ski-station finish to Val Thorens. “The last 800 metres, going up through the village there, you couldn’t rule out the race coming down to the finish on that very last mountain.”

Thomas, meanwhile, admitted that his ironic comments in Brussels, hoping for a “boring” race, had backfired. “Everyone loves to have a go at us, whatever we do and they always bang on about us being boring the way we ride, we’re like robots and we’re all science,” he said. “It’s just irritating. It’s definitely not boring now. Alaphilippe’s got a big part to play in that and it must be fun for everybody to watch.”