If you squinted hard enough, it was just like the old days. An Ineos rider attacking two of the biggest names in the sport and riding away solo to win on one of the Tour de France’s toughest, most prestigious summit finishes. Of course, in reality, the stage victory may have been the same, but the bigger picture had changed.
It’s fair to say that Thymen Arensman saved the Ineos Grenadiers’ Tour de France. The Dutch climber is responsible for the British squad’s only two victories at this year’s race, courtesy of two different but equally brilliant climbing performances.
On Superbagnères in the Pyrenees, Arensman proved the best of the breakaway, comfortably holding off a very late-charging Tadej Pogačar by over a minute. Then, in equally gloomy conditions on La Plagne, the 25-year-old rode across to and then away from Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard on the final climb.
But despite Arensman’s excellence in the mountains, for a squad that built its reputation on dominating cycling’s biggest race during the 2010s, Ineos’ yellow jersey challenge has, once again, been underwhelming.
At the end of a Tour dominated by yet another off-road controversy for the British team – concerning alleged historic texts between a soigneur and a doping doctor, and punctuated by stony-faced silences and statements that raise more questions than they answer – Arensman heads into Paris as Ineos’ highest-placed rider on GC, in 12th, almost 53 minutes behind Pogačar.
You have to scroll a bit to find the team’s next highest-placed rider, French puncheur Axel Laurance, who sits in 53rd, over three hours down.
2018 Tour winner Geraint Thomas, who’s retiring in September and who’s been very vocal about his dreams of beers and beaches during the last three weeks, is 58th.
The squad’s designated GC contender Carlos Rodriguez crashed out of the race with a fractured pelvis on stage 17, while sitting in tenth place overall. Rodriguez has been Ineos’ main yellow jersey hope in recent years, though he is yet to break into the upper echelon of favourites, finishing seventh and fifth in 2024 and 2023, respectively.
The squad hasn’t finished on the podium since Thomas finished third, seven and a half minutes down on Jonas Vingegaard, in 2022.
It’s hard to believe, then, that just six years ago Ineos finished one-two on the final podium in Paris, courtesy of Egan Bernal, whose path to recovery from his horrendous 2022 crash continued at the Giro d’Italia, where he placed seventh, and Thomas.
That 2019 Tour marked the culmination of almost a full decade of imperious dominance at the Tour and the squad’s seventh yellow jersey in eight years, thanks to Bernal, Thomas, Froome, and Wiggins.
It also, in hindsight, marked the end of an era. Since then, the British squad has struggled as rival super teams Visma-Lease a Bike and UAE Team Emirates and a new generation of super talent have emerged.
Since that 2019 Tour, and the rise of Pogačar and Vingegaard, Ineos’ best result at the Tour has been third, which they’ve managed just twice, with Thomas in 2022 and Richard Carapaz in 2021.
So what’s gone wrong for a team that once dominated cycling’s biggest race?
This prolonged downturn at the Tour, one former staff member noted to road.cc at the Tour, is associated with the departure of Dave Brailsford. The marginal gains guru stepped back from the squad at the start of the decade to oversee Ineos’ other sporting endeavours, including a short-lived stint spent attempting, with little success, to revive another sleeping sporting giant, Manchester United.
But after being jettisoned from Old Trafford, as part of Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s latest shake-up of his beleaguered sporting empire, Sir Dave was back at the Tour this month, a return that ended up dealing more with historic texts, new allegations, and sweary exchanges with journalists than results on the road.
However, while the stuttering Ineos PR machine struggles to cope with yet another doping saga, according to Ineos sports director Zak Dempster, the squad is already working hard to learn the lessons of its latest underwhelming GC challenge.
“You sit down at the start of September, when you’re sitting in Paris watching what the Tour is, and you try to understand how we could play to our strengths and address our weaknesses to deliver a good GC,” Dempster told road.cc at the team bus earlier this week.
“And that first part of the race didn’t go well, and it really came to a head on Hautacam, and that was really tough to see. But at the same time, that’s just sport.
“Definitely we didn’t just go ‘oh well’ and carry on. We’ve looked at why we think that is and that’ll be a discussion that will continue on after the race. But we’ve fully focused on delivering stage wins. Where we are on GC, whether it’s sixth or tenth, we could care less. What we want is to win stages.”
With the Tour’s big two seemingly pulling further and further from the rest (Vingegaard is the only rider within ten minutes of Pogačar on GC), does Dempster believe that Ineos have a potential Tour de France winner in their current squad.
“Who knows? You never know what the future holds,” the Australian says. “Our focus as a team, especially my job, is about delivering a structure that will give talents like that the platform to become grand our winners.
“If you think back, I’ve said it a few times, when Egan won his first Tour everyone was expecting him to go on and win a few more. Then Pogačar did the same thing, and a fishmonger from Denmark came out and smashed him around.
“You never know what the future holds and our focus will be on developing that talent, but also recruiting that talent. So, if we don’t have one, we have to put systems in place to recruit one.”
But with that bona fide Tour challenger seemingly absent in the Ineos ranks, with Thomas’ retirement looming and Bernal still a long way off his grand tour-winning days, do Arensman’s marauding exploits in the Alps and Pyrenees offer a glimpse of the future?
Should Ineos now focus on stage hunting at the Tour? Or is that all-or-nothing GC approach from the Sky days still too firmly engrained within the team?
“Honestly I think this team didn’t adapt to how we could get the most success for a long time,” Dempster admits.
“And this winter, after the second half of the season last year, we had a real opportunity to reset and rethink how we were going about things. With Thymen the approach was let’s go for GC at the Giro, that didn’t end up working. But then the approach was come here and race aggressively for stage wins.
“I think that will in the end help him due to the current way that racing is to better deliver as a GC rider in the future. So I think it’s about taking a step back sometimes and having those tough conversations to adapt to hopefully get the most success possible.“
Nevertheless, Dempster insists that, despite Arensman securing success through an attacking, breakaway-oriented approach at the Tour, the Dutch climber is still viewed as a GC rider by the team.
“Yeah, definitely,” the sports director tells road.cc, when asked whether Arensman would still target high overall placings at grand tours in the future.
“Now, with these long-range attacks it’s standard procedure for a GC rider. I think that suits him that these finals end up lasting three climbs, it’s even better for him for how fast it’s going throughout the stage. I think having him with that skill in his toolbox, that he can go up the road, can read a breakaway, can skip ahead of it.
“That’ll only put him in an even stronger position to hopefully deliver a grand tour podium one day.”
3 thoughts on “What is going on with the Ineos Grenadiers at the Tour de France?”
Everything Ineos do with
Everything Ineos do with their talent is poisonous. They can’t recruit, develop or retain it, in spite of the interview words.
No wonder they are a spent force.
Ineos were the future once;
Ineos were the future once; they’ve been chased down and eclipsed. There are few certainties in sport but dominance never lasts and the opposition always catch up. Which of course is why sport in its myriad of forms is exciting despite being, essentially, pointless!
Formerly all conquering team
Formerly all conquering team now rubbish and owned by Ineos. But enough about Manchester United.