Ineos' drift from Tour de France glory has no end in sight

An anecdote from Mark Cavendish’s newly published autobiography underlined just how long Ineos Grenadiers have been in their current state of drift. After being left in the lurch in the winter of 2022, Cavendish pitched his services to Dave Brailsford for the following season, reckoning that his old team might bite given the absence of a potential Tour de France winner in their ranks. It took a week for the response to filter back, by way of Rod Ellingworth: “The answer, in summary: no thanks, Cav.”

The reason, at least in part, was that Ineos were engaged in a concerted effort to prise Remco Evenepoel away from his contract at Soudal-QuickStep. With Egan Bernal still recovering from his training crash the previous January, Ineos found themselves without a true challenger for the Tour. 

At the time, Ineos’ three-year drought still seemed like an aberration, and podium finishes from Richard Carapaz and Geraint Thomas shrugged off as mere consolation prizes. Signing Evenepoel would resolve the conundrum in one fell swoop and give the team a figurehead to build around after being overtaken by Tadej Pogacar and Jonas Vingegaard.

The saga dragged on until January, by which point it became clear that Evenepoel preferred to remain in Patrick Lefevere’s stable. The rumour was resurrected intermittently in the years since, but when the sweepstakes for Evenepoel’s services finally opened in earnest this summer, Ineos never even had a seat at the table. 

To nobody’s surprise, the Belgian stayed on Specialized bikes and signed with Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe, who have benefited from an infusion of additional sponsorship euros over the past 18 months. Evenepoel joins Florian Lipowitz, Primoz Roglic, Jai Hindley and Dani Martinez in one of the deepest Grand Tour rosters in the WorldTour.

Ineos, by contrast, are still stewing over the same existential crisis they had in the winter of 2022: how on earth are they going to win the Tour de France again? 

Bernal’s 2022 training crash was, of course, a pivotal moment in Ineos’ current malaise. Even in his pomp, the Colombian didn’t possess the same physical gifts as Pogacar, but he had a Nibali-esque ability to find a way to win even when he wasn’t necessarily the best rider in a given race. A fully fit Bernal would surely have posed questions for the Pogacar-Vingegaard duopoly that nobody else has yet managed.

But the fact that Ineos were already so reliant on a single rider by the time of his crash tells its own tale of the inertia that has gradually subsumed the team since Jim Radcliffe stepped in as title sponsor in the summer of 2019. 

In the Team Sky era, the depth chart was such that Brailsford could simply nudge Bradley Wiggins aside to make room for Chris Froome. In 2018, Sky could play Froome and Geraint Thomas off one another to win the Tour. Twelve months later, Bernal and Thomas occupied the top two places.

In 2020, meanwhile, Ineos felt they could afford the flex of leaving both Thomas and Froome out of their Tour line-up altogether, and they finished the year with a most unexpected Grand Tour triumph as Tao Geoghegan Hart popped up to win the Giro d’Italia, propelled by the best climbing performances of Rohan Dennis’ turbulent career.

That astonishing Grand Tour depth is not even faintly echoed on the current roster. Bernal’s comeback has been admirable, and he might well improve on his seventh place at this year’s Giro, but going toe to toe with Pogacar et al is no longer in his range. Carlos Rodríguez is a fine rider, but his fifth-place finish on the 2023 Tour increasingly looks like a highwater mark rather than a stepping stone. Thymen Arensman has had more misses than hits in his tilts at Grand Tour GC.

So far, Ineos’ transfer dealings have done nothing to arrest the hole at the heart of a team that was established with the Tour as its raison d’être. Kévin Vauquelin has potential to achieve more in July, but he is hardly a guarantee of anything more than a high overall finish.

The team’s curious failure to attract the best young British talent had been glaringly apparent for several years, but Oscar Onley’s sparkling Tour for Picnic-PostNL - with former British Cycling coach Matt Winston in the team car - hammered home the point. Ineos have fallen asleep at the wheel on recruitment.

There are, of course, persistent rumours that they are waiting in the wings to sign Derek Gee if and when he extricates himself from his Israel-Premier Tech contract. His arrival would at least give Ineos a project to start building around in hope, much as Wiggins did back in 2010, but the sport has also changed dramatically since then.

A rider of Gee’s profile – strong against the watch, solid in the mountains – was an ideal prototype for a Grand Tour winner a decade ago, as men like Thomas and Tom Dumoulin demonstrated. But in the Pogacar era, it’s not at all clear if the formula that served the team so well in the Sky days can enjoy anything like the same success again.

The sense of drift at Ineos isn’t limited to the Tour or to the riders who are currently on their roster. It’s also underscored by the talent that has walked out the door in recent years, with UAE Team Emirates-XRG and Visma | Lease a Bike pillaging some key climbing talent. 

The most glaring example, however, is Tom Pidcock, who departed in less than amicable circumstances last winter. At the time, one wondered if Pidcock was more trouble than he had been worth for Ineos, given his penchant for mountain biking and his reluctance to commit to a real tilt at the Tour. 

But much like Scott McTominay after his move from Manchester United (the other great example of Ineos’ reverse Midas touch, of course) to Napoli, Pidcock has looked a man transfigured at Q36.5, most notably at the Vuelta, where his podium finish finally indicated what he can achieve in Grand Tours.

The exodus has also hit team management. Aerodynamicist Dan Bigham left for Red Bull, while the team inexplicably parted company with the highly rated Steve Cummings last year. Most strikingly of all, Zak Dempster, who made such a positive impression in his three years as a sports director, has been wooed by Red Bull to lead their retooling around Evenepoel, with Oliver Cookson following him.

Meanwhile, Luke Rowe rejected a role at Ineos in favour of joining Decathlon as a DS last year, though the newly retired Geraint Thomas is set to move into a yet-to-be-defined role in the team management for 2026. 

It remains to be seen if Thomas’ likely arrival will trigger a significant reshuffling of the deck at Ineos, and the sense of flux around the structure of the team hasn’t been helped by Dave Brailsford’s return to the fold on the eve of the Tour. 

John Allert remains the CEO of the team and Scott Drawer is still the performance director, but the buck clearly stops with Brailsford once again. As Daniel Benson reported, his first act on retaking the reins was reportedly to pause the team’s ongoing transfer negotiations, but so far, the squad has yet to make a significant splash on the market.

When Allert revealed Brailsford’s return on the eve of the Tour, he suggested his boss was “like a kid in a sweet shop.” Perhaps, but only if the kid was Augustus Gloop and the sweet shop was Willy Wonka’s factory, given how Brailsford spent most of the race scowling and fobbing off reporters as questions swirled over an inquiry into Slovenian soigneur David Rozman’s links to the disgraced doctor Mark Schmidt. 

Geraint Thomas later complained that Ineos are “held to a different standard to other teams” but the Welshman would do well to remember that Brailsford himself trumpeted that very ideal by enacting a so-called ‘zero tolerance’ policy to doping when Team Sky was launched in 2010. And Brailsford’s own repeated failures to live up to that initial pledge of transparency hardly helped the reputation of the entire operation.

Brailsford’s return to Ineos after he was relieved of his duties at Manchester United also ends the notion that the current iteration of the team, with an emphasis on youth and an eye towards more attacking riding, marks any kind of deliberate break with the past. For better and for worse, Brailsford embodies the old way of doing business at this team.

Although UAE Team Emirates-XRG long since superseded their status as the peloton’s biggest spenders, and although Red Bull, Lidl-Trek and Decathlon are stepping up their financial outlay, Ineos’ budget remains among the highest in the peloton. And although they have repeatedly been outflanked on recruitment in recent years, they have finally begun to place a bigger emphasis on trying to find the stars of tomorrow, exemplified by the signing of first-year junior Benjamin Noval to a contract that starts in 2027.  

Ineos will start 2026 with ambitions for Filippo Ganna in the Classics and they will hope youngsters like Josh Tarling and Ben Turner can take a leap forward, but Jim Radcliffe’s estimated input of €40 million per year is clearly made with the Tour in mind, not Milan-San Remo or Paris-Roubaix. The tacit question is whether Radcliffe will see fit to increase that outlay to compete with UAE, but it hardly seems likely given his investment in Manchester United.

An oft-repeated Ineos Sports refrain, mind, at Manchester United and elsewhere, is 'best in class.' But in cycling as in football, they rarely seem to live up to the ideal in practice. 

Yet just like it was on the team’s launch 16 years ago, the Tour de France remains the be all and end all of Ineos’ existence. Finding a way to be relevant again in July is an increasingly urgent question. As things stand, there is no obvious answer at hand.