“I’ve done interviews in worse places,” John Allert remarks as he, a member of Ineos Grenadiers staff and myself squeeze through a door at the back of Pinarello’s rather bling Regent Street store, clamber over a party’s worth of bags and coats, and contort ourselves onto the sole Dogma-sized patch of quiet floorspace in the building.
On the other side of the glass from our very cosy bike fit studio-turned-cloakroom-turned-interview perch is a sea of shiny carbon bikes worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, and just as many merry drinkers trying above all else to avoid knocking said bikes over in a crash of carbon and canapés. Who said cycling’s a rich person’s sport?
The event is to celebrate Pinarello’s London store reopening after a couple of months of refurbishment and the assembled masses, whose baggage and extras we’re now balanced precariously on top of, include CEO Fausto Pinarello, figures from across the brand’s two sponsored pro teams Ineos Grenadiers and Pinarello-Q36.5, Irish cycling royalty in Sean Kelly and Sam Bennett, and, I’m told, several select (and presumably very deep-pocketed) customers.
Back on our snugly huddled-up side of the glass, Ineos Grenadiers CEO Allert runs me through where cycling’s most famous team sits going into the 2026 season. Allert’s background is in sports marketing, previously at McLaren where he worked on the brand’s Formula 1 team and led its expansion into cycling as Bahrain McLaren, the team now known as Bahrain Victorious, before in 2023 he joined Ineos Grenadiers as managing director and more recently as the big boss.
It has been no secret the past few years have focused on attempting to turn around the fortunes of one of cycling’s superteams. The Grand Tours dried up following the Sky surplus of the 2010s, Egan Bernal’s 2021 Giro the last three-week GC win to talk of.
It will be five years this May since the team last won a Grand Tour and this summer’s Tour will bring up the seven-year anniversary of Bernal’s Tour victory which, at the time, looked the first of many. Seven years without a yellow jersey would have seemed scarcely believable back in 2019, after all, of the eight preceding years, seven had brought seven Champs-Élysées champagne photos.
However, Allert is convinced there are signs of progress, not least in the seven race wins amassed already this season. For context, last season it took until the end of March to reach that tally, the year before win number seven did not arrive until the Giro d’Italia in May.
“It’s well-documented that we’ve put a lot of effort, time and investment in kind of resetting the team for a completely new chapter,” he says. “That’s long since started now. We’re on a new journey.”
Wins in Algarve, Australia and Provence may not be Monuments and Grand Tour stages but Allert is confident the results “speak for themselves”, even if it is “early, early days”. One thing he doesn’t seem to care for is any suggestion that the team’s more illustrious past may see the current generation held, fairly or unfairly by fans, to higher standards than riders on other teams.
“I would much rather have a heritage that people talk about as being impressive and dynamic, moving the sport on than not have that at all. So I actually see it as a positive. We’ve got a lot of people still in the team from that era. There is a lot of knowledge as a result of that.
“It’s also an important cultural reference point for us too. It gives us a lot of pride. It’s still a magnet for riders. You saw recently Oscar [Onley] joining the team and the photos of him as a kid wearing that jersey. I think we all wear that with pride and we embrace it. It’s not a negative for us. It’s something that we’re very proud of, but we’re desperately trying to build the new chapter and be as equally proud of the new chapter as we are of the old.
“I think we’re ambitious but we’re pragmatic. There are obviously still some very dominant riders out there that you need to beat if you want to win at the top level. We’re doing everything to set our stall out and make sure that we’re as well placed to do that as anyone.”
As touched upon above, the winter brought the signings of Oscar Onley and Kévin Vauquelin, two riders who made their debut for the team finishing fourth and fifth respectively at Volta ao Algarve last week.
“We’re very confident in the guys that we’ve brought into the team,” Allert said. “They love being in the team. The group has gelled really quickly. I’m just excited to see what they’re going to bring this year and beyond.”
There’s also praise for Dave Brailsford whose brief foray into the unforgiving world of football ended last summer with a return to a renewed focus on cycling matters at Ineos.
Calling Brailsford “the architect” to the legacy we discussed earlier, Allert says the return “has been great” for the team.
“He’s somebody who commands respect for the results that he’s achieved and the way he’s gone about achieving them,” Allert explains. “I love working with him, he’s funny in a way that people may not appreciate. He’s a fun guy, he’s got a great sense of humour, he’s very warm. I don’t feel like saying he’s back in the team because, to be fair, he never fully left the team. But yeah, I think he’s a great asset.”
Allert’s positivity continues to those controversial white shorts (or are they more ‘washed too many times grey’?) that had cycling fans covering their eyes during the off-season. Perhaps this is where the Ineos Grenadiers’ CEO’s marketing background can’t help but pull a turn.
“I am a fan of the shorts,” he smiles. “The shorts are part of a kit that has a lot of good reason behind it. They reflect the aesthetic of where amateur cycling is. We’ve got an amazing relationship with Gobik who has an incredibly sophisticated design aesthetic and we wear them with pride.”
There’s the marketing professional.
One area where there’s not going to be any discussion is the story that hit the front pages of almost every newspaper here in the UK the other week, Ineos owner and petrochemicals billionaire Jim Ratcliffe’s immigration comments.
Ratcliffe’s claim that Britain has been “colonised by immigrants” sparked calls for an apology by the Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the Ineos boss later following up by saying he was sorry if his “choice of language has offended some people in the UK and Europe”.
When I bring up the situation with Allert, and ask if it’s made life more difficult to run an international cycling team with riders from around the world, it is immediately clear this is one subject no amount of marketing expertise will see him touch. It’s an issue for Ineos corporate, he tells me, the follow-up receiving the same reply.
You can probably work out where this is going by now but, as it was a couple of weeks ago, Ineos Grenadiers’ corporate communications department’s stance also remains one of silence.
4 thoughts on “The search for success continues at Ineos Grenadiers… just don’t ask about Jim Ratcliffe’s ‘colonised by immigrants’ comments”
Isn’t it great how ultra-rich people who complain about immigration not even live in there… or even funnier, are immigrants by themself?
Ratcliffe lives in Monaco (maybe only on Paper to save taxes)
Maybe because the ultra-rich don’t want the common people to realise just how abusive the ultra-rich are and instead blame some out-group who will not have the resources/safety to defend themselves.
The important thing to keep in mind is that the ultra-rich got that wealthy by exploiting others. We should be spurning their opinions rather than amplifying them.
Yes. And what was even funnier was his attempts to lobby for taxpayer funding from central government to pay directly for a new Manchester United stadium.
Describing the proposed structure as a “National Stadium Of The North”, was an attempt to divert attention from the main beneficiaries being the Glaziers and himself.
Black skin is not the problem. White bibs are.