Who are Ineos Grenadiers? – Ned Boulting's Tour de France column

12th on GC, no stage win, and with a new French sponsor, Ned ponders on the team's future

Someone I know very well in the cycling world, but whose identity I should probably withhold, passed a comment on the new Ineos/Total Energies jersey for the Tour de France. “It makes them look like just another team, doesn’t it?”

I hadn’t looked at it that way. But once seen, it could no longer be unseen. The ethically questionable addition of petrochemical money to an already uncomfortable sponsor is one thing; suggestive of the waning interest of Jim Ratcliffe, and an end to the team’s access to the deepest recesses of a billionaire’s pockets. But, it’s the eye-catchingly shabby application of the new logo to the Ineos jersey (already looking incrementally more and more bland) that seems in keeping with the rapidly diminishing status of a once all-conquering team.

There was a moment in commentary, I think on stage one, when I noticed for the first time the circular Total Energies logo on the riders’ backsides which appears to have been applied using an iron, like a heat transfer sticker from the 1970s. How very un-Sky it all is.

I was remembering to Alex Dowsett and David Millar how I had been involved in screen-testing the first ever iteration of the Team Sky jersey, prior to their launch, back in the late summer of 2009. The team had approached me to ask if I could rustle up a cameraman and a moto pilot, plus a rider who could be trusted to keep quiet and was prepared to pull on 6 different prototype designs, very early one morning in Richmond Park.

That’s how we ended up filming Yanto Barker, from behind, from in front, standing up on the pedals, down on the drops, and even standing in front of a camera giving an interview. Then we had to edit the footage down and send it to the attention of James Murdoch himself at BskyB for approval. I may have misremembered this, but I think he rejected them all.

But that famous attention to detail, as lampoonable as it was, did ultimately yield massive results, most particularly at the Tour de France, which they won 7 times in 9 years with 4 different riders; an unprecedented achievement by any standards. Then a few things happened.

Firstly, they had back luck; both with Chris Froome’s 2019 crash and then Egan Bernal’s. That was the hammer blow. Bernal should have been a core member of the Remco/Pog/Ving triumvirate. There should have been four.

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And then other teams caught up. It is a compliment to the team’s standards that Jumbo-Visma learnt from them, then overtook them. But what UAE Team Emirates have done, in terms of accelerating progress, particularly in recruitment, has left Ineos floundering. They have stopped attracting the best, and young British talent, tellingly, is looking elsewhere.

Perhaps it’s because they got SO good at turning out champions, they started to assume they could make the model work without recruiting the best talent at their starting point.

But they are where they are now. For all that Sam Watson has produced a mature performance, the rest of the team has been entirely without presence or purpose. The sight of Geraint Thomas getting up the road on the Mûr-de-Bretagne stage, when the breakaway stood no chance of success, was symptomatic of their purposelessness.

How they now turn this drift around and start to fire again, with Dave Brailsford back at the helm, will arguably be the biggest challenge of the team’s existence.

Ned Boulting commentates on the Tour de France for ITV and writes a column for Cycling Weekly magazine during the race.