TAO GEOGHEGAN HART
COUNTERPOINT
THE STRONGEST TEAM EVER
With four grand tour winners and a host of other high performers, Ineos Grenadiers have one of the most formidable looking teams ever seen
Writer Edward Pickering Image De Waele/Getty Images
Tao Geoghegan Hart’s victory in the Giro doesn’t exactly make life difficult for Ineos Grenadiers, even if it was relatively unexpected. There are precisely no circumstances in which the team wouldn’t have taken that win. However, that’s not to say that it won’t cause complications.
Dave Brailsford has put together possibly the strongest and deepest grand tour team in cycling history. The easiest part of building such a team is buying in the riders. Brailsford has the largest budget in the WorldTour, which is why he can afford no fewer than eight riders who have finished in the top 10 of a grand tour (and if Michał Kwiatkowski had ridden the 2013 Tour de France 81 seconds faster, that number would have been nine). That’s at least twice as many as every other WorldTour team except Jumbo-Visma, and that’s not even taking into account that four -Geraint Thomas, Egan Bernal, Richard Carapaz and Geoghegan Hart -have actually won a grand tour.
The harder part is the man management. Four ambitious riders who are contenders in any grand tour means Ineos have more of those riders than there are grand tours in a year. If Richie Porte feels that his third place in last year’s Tour is not the high water mark of his career, then that’s five, and Pavel Sivakov is expected to develop into at least a podium contender in the next year or two. Six. The 2012 Tour, in which Chris Froome visibly chafed against having to hold back in the mountain stages when yellow jersey Bradley Wiggins faltered, showed how difficult it can be to manage a team when two individuals both want to win. When Thomas won the yellow jersey for Sky in 2018 he later wrote that he felt he wasn’t being prioritised by the team management. Twelve months later, Thomas looked like there was a tinge of regret that team-mate Bernal had put himself in a position to win the Tour while his own hands were effectively tied. Cyclists aren’t robots, even those who ride for Ineos Grenadiers.