Ineos Grenadiers must take ‘look in the mirror’

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Ineos Grenadiers needs an off-season intervention to return to its glory days of yellow jerseys and WorldTour dominance.

That’s according to Geraint Thomas and Luke Rowe, two of the team’s franchise riders with deep links to the team’s golden decade when it dominated the Tour de France.

Speaking on their “Watts Occurring” podcast, both went public this week on their views on the team’s recent spate of uneven results and lack of ability to equal the peloton’s grand tour crushers like Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard.

“That winning attitude is so hard to get, and it’s so easy to lose. I wouldn’t say we lost it completely, it’s waning,” said Thomas, a Tour winner in 2018. “It’s going to be hard to get that back.

“I still think we have the right guys around to do that,” Thomas said on the podcast. “It definitely needs a few honest conversations and looking in the mirror this November and December.”

Rowe suggested the team’s malaise dates back a few seasons, saying a mix of injuries, missed chances, close-calls, illness, a loss of focus, staff shake-ups, and botched recruitment all add up.

“We might as well address the elephant in the room. We both ride for [Ineos] and it is evident that the team is struggling,” Rowe said Wednesday. “It’s a hot topic and everyone wants to know the in’s and out’s of it.”

This grand tour racing season, Ineos Grenadiers hit third at the Giro d’Italia with Thomas, while Carlos Rodriguez led the team at the Tour de France and Vuelta a España, with seventh and 10th, respectively.

That’s far from the team’s glory days when Ineos was the team setting the pace and tone inside the WorldTour.

Thomas said the team’s low point came at the Tour of Britain earlier this month.

The team didn’t win a stage or hit the final podium racing on home roads and team star Tom Pidcock pulled out with a concussion.

“You put into the mix everything else, the Tour of Britain was embarrassing, wasn’t it really?” Thomas said. “They just weren’t in it really.”

‘A couple of footsteps behind’

The pair addressed the question of what’s going on inside Ineos Grenadiers and the team’s inability to challenge for the Tour.

Its last yellow jersey came with Egan Bernal in 2019, and though Thomas hit third in 2022, the team is being overshadowed by the rise of Pogačar and Vingegaard.

“To be slightly more critical, there have been times we’ve been completely blown out of the races. Not just a footstep behind, but a couple of footsteps behind,” Rowe said. “It’s tricky what we’re doing here, we’re trying to be brutally honest here.

“Just to zoom out, to answer the question with more detail and truth, you have to rewind to two or three years,” Rowe said. “There has been a slow and steady decrease. What is the answer to that? That is the million-dollar question. I don’t know the answer.”

Full show out now:

– Vuelta review
– Tour of Britain recap
– Pre-pod naps

And much more…https://t.co/D4ljyqyroU

— Watts Occurring (@Watts_Occurring) September 12, 2024

Rowe admitted that the team is a long way from its glory days when it won seven out of eight yellow jerseys with four different riders.

“I would question some of the recruitment,” Rowe said. “We haven’t got the best guy in the world. We haven’t got the second-best guy.

“To win the biggest bike race in the world you need the best individual,” Rowe said. “That is something that [ex-trainer] Tim Kerrison always said when were at training camps. He would say, ‘we have all the team here, but at the end of the day, we need the best horse at the top of this game.’ And for a long time, that was [Chris Froome].”

The 34-year-old Rowe is retiring this season while Thomas has one more year on his current contract, and suggested he’d like to race the Tour de France one more time.

“Let’s face it, Pog and Vingo are going to be hard to topple, but there are still a lot of other races to win,” Thomas said. “It’s not one thing, but there are loads of things, and it all adds up. There is not one silver bullet to the reason why we’ve struggled for results this year.”

‘Nothing worth fighting for comes easy’

Both insisted there’s room for optimism for Ineos fans.

Riders like Pidcock, Josh Tarling, Thymen Arensman, Magnus Sheffield, and Rodriguez still have huge potential.

Ineos Grenadiers still boasts one of the deepest budgets in the men’s WorldTour.

Rowe said expects the team’s owner Jim Ratcliffe and longtime manager Dave Brailsford to get things moving over the winter.

Tom Pidcock says “issues” within Ineos Grenadiers undermining his racinghttps://t.co/Mlh47HoTWH

— StickyBottle.com (@sticky_bottle) September 9, 2024

Brailsford stepped back from the day-to-day management of the team after Ratcliffe bought Team Sky in 2019, but remains involved behind the scenes.

“We know the organization, we know the people running the team, and they’re not the kind of people who are going to see it go by the wayside,” Rowe said. “They’re used to adversity and bad times, and fighting back. Nothing worth fighting for comes easy. They’re not going to get it on a plate.

“From the outside, there is a lot of doom and gloom at the moment, but I’ve got to believe that people within this organization have the belief and passion to get back on top, but it is a long process.

“We have the right people in the right places with the right resources to be the best team in the world, and I am sure that will happen over time.”

Thomas said the team needs to refocus on winning races and bringing the team together to work on focused targets.

“It’s been ‘close but no cigar’ this year a lot of the time. There are a lot of good bike riders on the team who can get results,” Thomas said.  “It is bad, and it looks bad on paper, and we’re not happy with that. We’re going to get going again next year.”