This year INEOS has won only 14 races, four of them in the usually weak national championships, and count only two Grand Tour stage wins, both in the Giro d’Italia. It was also in this year’s Giro that it registered its only Grand Tour podium finish, a third place by Geraint Thomas. The team currently sits in sixth place in the UCI Team Rankings, light-years behind the leaders, UAE Team Emirates.
Part of this is due to the failure of its two-time Grand Tour winner, Egan Bernal, to recover his best form after the January 2022 training ride crash that nearly took his life. The 2019 Tour de France and 2021 Giro winner is now 27 and almost three years have passed since that horrific accident, so it seems unlikely that he will ever be the rider he once was.
The team’s designated Grand Tour GC rider Carlos Rodríguez is only 23 and could still improve. But it is doubtful that he will improve enough to win a Grand Tour. After all, he has never finished on a Grand Tour podium, his best showing a fifth place in the 2023 Tour, and has won only one Grand Tour stage, in that same race.
Worse, the team’s best riders are leaving or want to leave. The Ecuadorian champion and Giro stage winner Jhonathan Narváez is moving to UAE Team Emirates at the end of the year, the 25-year-old speedy all-rounder Ethan Hayter is going to Soudal–Quick Step and Tom Pidcock, who this year has won the Amstel Gold Race and the gold medal in the Olympics cross-country mountain bike competition, is also unhappy.
“It’s true that there are a number of things within the team that I have to deal with at the moment,” he told Het Laatste Nieuws during the Tour of Britain. “And to be honest, [the team] don’t help me to perform optimally. I have to think about a lot more than just performance-related things at the moment. And that means that the focus on the things that are really important, namely racing, is not ideal.”
Pidcock has a contract with INEOS Grenadiers until 2027. Asked if he could leave the team before then, he said, “I have a contract until the end of 2027. I can’t say more than that.”
As for Narváez, he just wanted to be with a top team. “Since the beginning of my career I’ve always wanted to be involved at the highest level of cycling and we can say that UAE Team Emirates is the best team in the world in the last years,” said the Ecuadorian, who has been at INEOS for six seasons.
There have also been staff issues. For example, the team chose not to bring sport director Steve Cummings to this year’s Tour de France, a move that shocked much of the cycling world. The reason was apparently discord between Cummings and Pidcock, who told Cycling Weekly that the team would be “better” without Cummings at the Tour.
It wasn’t. Rodríguez finished a distant seventh, Pidcock had to abandon because of Covid and INEOS did not win a single stage.
In addition, the former track world champion Dan Bigham, who had been working with the team’s time trial riders, suddenly quit because of dissatisfaction with the team’s approach.
“How I want to do performance is not particularly aligned with how Ineos wanted to go about it,” he told the Telegraph daily. “I wanted more autonomy, more ability to action my ideas. And I wasn’t really getting that at Ineos. I feel that a lot of performance we’re leaving on the table and that frustrates me because it’s clear as day we should be doing things a lot better. Let’s be honest, INEOS are not where they want to be, not where they need to be and the gap is not small.”
Ouch.
All this chaos and negative publicity is not good for recruiting the kind of riders the team desperately needs, such as, for example, Remco Evenepoel. They had been wooing the 23-year-old Kern Pharma rider Pablo Castrillo, but then he won two mountain stages of the Vuelta a España, in his signature storming, never-say-die style, and now other, more stable teams are pursuing him, notably Astana, Cofidis, Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe and Movistar.
The team’s most significant signings so far have been the solid 31-year-old domestique Bob Jungels and the 23-year-old French rider Axel Laurance, who won the Tour of Norway this year. They are both excellent additions, but they are not what INEOS Grenadiers needs to get out of the doldrum: a savior.
