“We couldn’t have asked for more,” Sports Director Roman Kreuziger said. “We set out to win a stage and took two. We aimed for a top-three GC finish, and we secured two spots on the podium—including the overall victory. Plus, we won the team classification. That’s something to be very proud of.”
Indeed. The performances were as unexpected as they were dominant, unexpected because, though the team had the sixth-highest budget in the peloton last year, its results had been disappointing. Not that the team was in danger of relegation. In some ways, an even greater threat loomed—Bahrain-Victorious risked slipping into mediocrity.
After a decent 2023, when the team won 19 races, including six Grand Tour stages, and finished sixth in the UCI World Road Rankings with 15,787 points, Bahrain-Victorious slipped badly last year, winning only 13 races, none in a Grand Tour, and with only a single GC victory in the 2.Pro-level Skoda Tour of Luxembourg. As a result, the team slipped to 17th in the year’s UCI rankings, with only 9,547 points, behind such teams as Intermarché-Wanty, which has only about a third of Bahrain’s budget.
So, something had to be done—and it was. The team hired the well-respected and incredibly successful Rod Ellingworth to be its Special Projects Manager, and until someone tells me different, I will believe that the team’s Volta a Valenciana performance was largely the result of his input.
The name Rod Ellingworth will be very familiar to cycling fans since he had a hand in the success of one of the most dominant teams in the sport’s history, Team Sky, the forerunner of the less successful INEOS Grenadiers. Ellingworth was with Team Sky from 2010 to 2019, first as a coach and from January 2013 as their performance manager, responsible for overseeing the team’s sports directors and race coaches. During that period, the British team won the Tour de France seven times, the last time in 2019, as INEOS Grenadiers.
After a brief stint with Bahrain-McLaren in 2020, he returned to INEOS the following year as deputy principal. Now, at the start of this season, he has rejoined Bahrain-Victorious. In an interview with Bici.pro, Ellingworth explained that he had left Bahrain-McLaren after a year due to concerns related to the COVID epidemic and that he was excited to be working with the riders now on the team.
“I think the arrival of Lenny Martinez is really exciting,” he said. “There is a really young group, with him, Antonio Tiberi, and Santiago Buitrago, who was there back then [in 2020]. He had just arrived, he was a young guy, and we knew there was a lot of work to do. And you can see that he has progressed very well within this group. The other two are new to me. To have all three of them together is really exciting.”
The 21-year-old Martinez had been touted as a potential French Tour de France winner but has so far largely disappointed, with a second in a stage of the 2023 Vuelta a España his only notable Grand Tour result. He was the prize Bahrain-Victorious recruit of the transfer season, moving from the French team Groupama-FDJ perhaps because of the prospect of working with Ellingworth.
The 23-year-old Tiberi also looks like a promising young rider and was responsible for the team’s only GC win last year, in the Skoda Tour of Luxembourg, as well as finishing fifth in last year’s Giro d’Italia. It is a daunting task to be a GC rider in the era of Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard, but if anyone knows how to prepare riders for top Grand Tour performances, it is Ellingworth.
In the interview with Bici.pro, the 52-year-old Ellingworth described the key to Team Sky’s astonishing success. “People tell me that we have set benchmarks, a new vision. In reality, we have introduced into the world of professional cycling many simple things that came from our experience with British Cycling and the Olympic program,” he explained. “Many of these things were linked to putting the athlete at the center, making the athlete the most important person, as we believe he should be. To make sure that everything is done for him, as I had already experienced in the past. Many professional teams perhaps thought that it was more about communication or marketing. We have tried to be more performance-oriented in our approach, and this has worked quite well.”
And it still seems to be working. It sounds so obvious and so simple, but if recent results are anything to go by, Buitrago, Martinez, Tiberi, and the entire Bahrain-Victorious team may be at the beginning of a very exciting ride.
