Onley's Tour absence exposes limits of Ineos reboot

The reboot hadn’t exactly captured the imagination, and the news on Thursday was in keeping with the prevailing tone of Netcompany-Ineos’ troubled Tour de France build-up. 

There had already been murmurs that Oscar Onley would miss the Tour due to his heavy crash at the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, and the rider himself hinted as much when he posted a training ride on Strava under the pithy title of “road to the tour… of Guangxi.”

Onley has endured an ill-starred time of it since swapping Picnic-PostNL for Ineos last winter, with abandons at Paris-Nice, the Tour de Romandie and the Dauphiné. That unfortunate sequence continued with the confirmation that he will miss the Tour.

It’s a blow for Onley, who was hoping to build on his breakout fourth-place finish at last year’s race, but it’s an even bigger setback for Netcompany-Ineos, who have been desperately trying to find ways to make themselves relevant again in July. Onley was never going to win the 2026 Tour, but his presence would at least have offered a hopeful message about his team’s future.

The Tour was their fiefdom in their first decade of existence, with the team winning seven editions out of eight with four different riders between 2012 and 2019. In the 2020s, by contrast, they have steadily faded from the picture.

At the beginning of the Tadej Pogačar-Jonas Vingegaard era, Ineos could at least lay claim to being still the best of the rest, with Richard Carapaz taking third in 2021 and Geraint Thomas managing the same a year later.

As the 2020s have drawn on, however, Ineos have drifted further from the summit in July. Carlos Rodríguez was their best finisher in 2023 with fifth, but the Spaniard dropped to seventh in 2024. Last year, Thymen Arensman was their highest finisher in 12th.

That Tour coincided with the return of Dave Brailsford to a day-to-day role with the team after his very public failure at Manchester United. Then-CEO John Allert described the returning Brailsford as being “like a kid in a sweet shop” but there was no flicker of outward enthusiasm from the dour figure who ignored all media requests last July.

Behind the scenes, however, Brailsford was working on a restructuring of the team. When the retiring Geraint Thomas was appointed director of racing last winter, it looked as though the idea was to shake the team out of its current torpor by restoring a link to its glorious past. A move not unlike Manchester United’s recent appointment of Michael Carrick, in other words.

But a managerial change clearly wasn’t enough by itself. The team was also in dire need of a leader for its Tour project, given that Rodríguez had by now confirmed his limitations as a contender, Thymen Arensman hadn’t yet delivered on his potential, and Egan Bernal was still enduring the fall-out of his career-altering 2022 crash. 

Pogačar and Vingegaard are unassailable – and also un-signable – while Ineos’ long-term attempts to woo Remco Evenepoel had come to nothing. But even if the Tour was unwinnable for the foreseeable future, Ineos still needed a coherent narrative to sell to their benefactor, the Brexit-backing billionaire Jim Ratcliffe.

Enter Onley. His fourth place at the Tour had underscored that Ineos had taken their eye off the ball when it came to developing and recruiting the best young British talent. And they had also, let’s not forget, managed to lose the services of a disaffected Tom Pidcock in late 2024. 

By prising Onley away from Picnic-PostNL last December, Ineos suddenly had a story to sell to the British media and public again. Sure, the Scot is light years off the level of Pogačar – he was 12:12 down in Paris last July – but he’s still only 23 and at the beginning of his journey as a Grand Tour contender.

There were obvious parallels with the dawn of Team Sky in the winter of 2009, when Brailsford managed to persuade Bradley Wiggins – fourth at that year’s Tour – to leave Garmin and become the figurehead of his new team.

And it’s easy to forget that Brailsford’s stated ambition of winning the Tour with a British rider within five years looked utterly fanciful at that point, with Alberto Contador and Andy Schleck seemingly destined to dominate for the foreseeable future.

But the lie of the land is very different now. Team Sky, as they were then, had a budget that initially dwarfed most of their rivals, and they made that not-so-marginal gain count again and again over the following decade.

That competitive advantage has been eroded by the arrival of UAE’s money in the peloton, not to mention the growing ambitions of teams like Red Bull and Lidl-Trek. Netcompany-Ineos remain a big-budget operation and a very serious one – 23 wins so far in 2026, including some of real quality – but the peloton’s ‘alien’ talents are all riding elsewhere, and there’s no sense that they can bridge the gap with their current roster.

No matter, the hope was to develop Onley and build a Tour team around him, but little about Netcompany-Ineos’ season to date suggested that they would seriously compete for a podium finish in July, far less trouble Pogačar or Vinegaard. 

Kévin Vauquelin, the team’s other GC signing last winter, has been struggling with illness in recent days, but even if he does make it to the Tour, a top 10 finish would seem to be the very summit of his ambitions. 

The withdrawal of Onley might well open a berth for Arensman, who salvaged two fine stage wins from their Tour a year ago. The Dutchman placed fourth at the Giro, his best GC result to date, but given the loftier opposition at the Tour, it’s hard to envisage a repeat showing in July.

Filippo Ganna gives them a strong chance of an impact in the team time trial on the opening day, but that might be as good as it gets. All signs point to another Tour in the shadows from a GC perspective.

Brailsford and Thomas might look to console themselves by remembering that Sky’s first Tour in 2010 was a fiasco, while Wiggins crashed out of the 2011 race in the opening week. That abandon saw him ride the Vuelta a España, where his and Chris Froome’s podium places would prefigure their Tour victory of 2012.

Like Wiggins, Onley will now surely be redirected towards the Vuelta, and a high overall finish there is within his range. But lightning never strikes twice and reboots rarely hit in the same way as the original either.

Onley’s absence from the Tour is a setback, of course, but his presence wouldn’t have been an instant remedy to all the team’s current shortcomings either. A return to past glories still seems as distant now as it did a year ago when Brailsford returned.