{"id":196786,"date":"2024-09-18T11:30:57","date_gmt":"2024-09-18T11:30:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.welovecycling.com\/wide\/?p=196786"},"modified":"2024-10-31T08:06:46","modified_gmt":"2024-10-31T08:06:46","slug":"2025-team-preview-ineos-grenadiers-failure-chaos-and-a-doubtful-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.welovecycling.com\/wide\/2024\/09\/18\/2025-team-preview-ineos-grenadiers-failure-chaos-and-a-doubtful-future\/","title":{"rendered":"INEOS Grenadiers: Failure, Chaos and a Doubtful Future"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s time to admit the obvious: INEOS Grenadiers have become a mediocre team \u2013 and the future looks uncertain, at best. The team is so far from its halcyon days, when as Team Sky it dominated the Grand Tours and almost everything else \u2013 that they probably can\u2019t even remember them.<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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\u2019Italia. It was also in this year\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Part of this is due to the failure of its two-time Grand Tour winner, Egan Bernal<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

The team\u2019s designated Grand Tour GC rider Carlos Rodr\u00edguez\u00a0is 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.<\/p>\n

\n
\"visma-lease-a-bike-look-to-bounce-back-from-crash-plagued-year\"\/<\/a><\/div>
\n Road cycling<\/a>\n <\/div>\n
\n \n

Visma\u2013Lease a Bike Look to Bounce Back from Crash-Plagued Year<\/span><\/h3>\n <\/a>\n <\/div>\n <\/article>\n<\/div>\n

Worse, the team\u2019s best riders are leaving or want to leave. The Ecuadorian champion and Giro stage winner Jhonathan Narv\u00e1ez 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\u2013Quick 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s true that there are a number of things within the team that I have to deal with at the moment,\u201d he told Het Laatste Nieuws<\/em><\/a> during the Tour of Britain. \u201cAnd to be honest, [the team] don\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pidcock has a contract with INEOS Grenadiers until 2027. Asked if he could leave the team before then, he said, \u201cI have a contract until the end of 2027. I can’t say more than that.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for Narv\u00e1ez, 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,\u201d said the Ecuadorian, who has been at INEOS for six seasons.<\/p>\n

There have also been staff issues. For example, the team chose not to bring sport director Steve Cummings to this year\u2019s 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<\/a> that the team would be \u201cbetter\u201d without Cummings at the Tour.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t. Rodr\u00edguez finished a distant seventh, Pidcock had to abandon because of Covid and INEOS did not win a single stage.<\/p>\n

In addition, the former track world champion Dan Bigham, who had been working with the team\u2019s time trial riders, suddenly quit because of dissatisfaction with the team\u2019s approach.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow I want to do performance is not particularly aligned with how Ineos wanted to go about it,\u201d he told the Telegraph<\/a> daily. \u201cI wanted more autonomy, more ability to action my ideas. And I wasn\u2019t really getting that at Ineos. I feel that a lot of performance we\u2019re leaving on the table and that frustrates me because it\u2019s clear as day we should be doing things a lot better. Let\u2019s be honest, INEOS are not where they want to be, not where they need to be and the gap is not small.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ouch.<\/p>\n

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 Espa\u00f1a, 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.<\/p>\n

The team\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s time to admit the obvious: INEOS Grenadiers have become a mediocre team \u2013 and the future looks uncertain, at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":196787,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[329],"tags":[6101,2621,4367,7268,3871],"global-categories":[3366],"class_list":["post-196786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-road-cycling","tag-carlos-rodriguez","tag-egan-bernal","tag-ineos-grenadiers","tag-steve-cummings","tag-tom-pidcock","global-categories-cycling"],"yoast_head":"\nINEOS Grenadiers: Failure, Chaos and a Doubtful Future<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"It\u2019s time to admit the obvious: INEOS Grenadiers have become a mediocre team \u2013 and the future looks uncertain, at best. 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