For the second year, Ineos Grenadiers came up short in the battle for the yellow jersey. Procyclingspeaks to the team’s lead DS, Gabriel Rasch, to find out what happened and what they’ve learned

Interview Sophie Hurcom /// Image Cor Vos

Thomas’s GC tilt was over before it began after a crash on stage 3

We went in with multiple GC contenders. We didn’t have four leaders, we went in with the aim of protecting G [Geraint Thomas] and Richard [Carapaz] more but we wanted to try to keep more guys on the GC. That was our game plan to challenge Pogacar and Roglic in the mountains later on. I think that first week was very difficult. You had riders like Van der Poel and Van Aert and they made the race extremely hard. They were going like every day was the last day.

When we lost G out of GC, he wasn’t out after his first crash but he struggled with the pain and everything. We kind of went all-in for Richard, and I think after the race now, you try and we tried.People say we rode like Sky used to do, but we had that Ventoux stage where we wanted to make the race really hard from the get go and see if we could exploit Pogacar if he had a bad day, or Vingegaard. But they didn’t really have a bad day. And then we tried this other option, with making the race harder for a shorter time. We just had to try, didn’t we? It’s easy to say afterwards that it didn’t work, but if it could have worked then it would be a shame if we didn’t try.