Skyfall: The inside story of Ineos Grenadiers' decline

Jonny Long (0:06)

Hello, welcome to this Escape Collective podcast special on our latest investigative piece, Skyfall, the inside story of Ineos Grenadiers' decline. My name's Jonny Long. I co-wrote this exclusive story you're about to hear with one of our regular contributors, Chris Marshall Bell, as well as my colleague, Ronan McLaughlin. And to give everyone their proper credit, as they deserve, Joe Lindsay was the adult in the editing room, making sure everything was buttoned up and proper. Okay, now how this is gonna work is I'm just going to read the story out for you. For those who prefer podcast articles. And if you're listening to this on a free podcast feed, then it's going to cut off about halfway through. So you need to sign up and become a member at escapecollective.com/join to get the full access to this story, as well as all of the other great coverage we have on our site. As well as this episode, we're also going to follow it up with a bit of a roundtable discussion expanding on what's going on at Ineos. Bring you some tidbits we didn't get into the published article, and also bring you some behind the scenes reporting with some extra insight on maybe stuff that didn't quite fit in a proper published, polished thing. So here we go. After speaking to a dozen team insiders who told us what's gone wrong for Cycling's once dominant team, this is Skyfall. The inside story of Ineos Grenadiers' decline.

The higher you climb, the harder you fall. In just three years, the Ineos Grenadiers, Cycling's most dominant team, transformed from an innovative powerhouse into a rudderless corporation, hemorrhaging talent and results despite its massive budget. To dissect this empire's collapse, Escape Collective spoke with more than a dozen sources in and around Ineos, former riders and staff, agents, and other well-connected people in pro cycling, to learn what took the team from winning seven tours in eight seasons to struggle to hold on to talent both on and off the bike. The dividing line between the team's old Grand Tour's conquering era and its new, scrappier self is difficult to pinpoint. Perhaps it was the upheaval of the pandemic-scrambled 2020 season, or its 2021 sequel, which saw the emergence of Tadej Pogacar and Jonas Vingego and the rising juggernauts of UAET Memorets and Jumbo Visma overthrow Ineos' previously untroubled hegemony. Or maybe it was Egan Bernal's 2021 Giro d'Italia win, Ineos' last Grand Tour victory, and one that came in a much different style to the controlling, mountain train style victories of its 2010s heyday. Another good place to start is Bernal's life-threatening crash that next off-season. But you can make an argument that Ineos' current era truly began later, with its 2022 plan to branch out and take their Grand Tour dominance to the cobbled classics. Spring had always played second fiddle to the team's yellow jersey obsession. But with Bernal facing a long recovery and Ineos suddenly bereft of a single Grand Tour leader, Paris Roubaix offered what looked to be a watershed moment. Team founder and mastermind Dave Brelsford, not as omnipresent at races as he once was due to various health problems, stood defiantly and victoriously just past the finish line in the velodrome, hands aloft, to welcome his rider Dylan Van Barla home.

SPEAKER_1 (3:16)

Around turn four, into the home straight, and Dylan Van Barla can see the finish line. Solo, on his own, the job done, Dylan Van Barla, it's all yours. The famous old concrete track, belonging to Dylan Van Barla, and for the first time in their history, to the Ineos Grenadiers. Dylan Van Barla wins the fastest ever edition of Paris Roubaix. And finally, Dave Brailsford can celebrate.

Jonny Long (3:48)

This came just a week after the Grand Tour Super Domestique, Michal Kwiatkowski won Ampstel Gold Race. Standing trackside that day, there was the sense that spring had sprung for a team that risked being left behind. After three years of turmoil and setback, the ownership change in 2019, the crash-induced decline of Chris Froome, the health issues of its charismatic chef de mission, the shocking death of beloved lead sports director, Nicola Portal, the keystone and heart of the team, the fallout from the Richard Freeman scandal that saw its former team doctor lose his medical license and get a four-year anti-doping ban for ordering illegal substances knowing or believing they were for Sky or British cycling riders, the eruption of the Pagache Vingego era, and the serious injury to Bernal. Ineos looked to have righted the ship and be weathering everything that was being thrown at them. But since that day in the Roubaix Velodrome, the result sheet speaks for itself. Zero Grand Tour victories, zero monuments, and of the week-long stage races, only victories at the Tour de Suisse and the Tour de Romandie, when previously the likes of Paris Nice and the Criterium du Dauphiné used to be won as warm-ups for the Tour. If 2023 was shaky, it at least saw 38 wins, including two stages of the Tour de France, but then 2024 hit, and the victory total dropped to 14, the lowest in its history. Tom Pigcock, the team's highest paid rider and highest profile rider, was openly agitated and not so openly agitating for an exit, a move which looked close in October, but ultimately fell through. Staff turnover continues, with lead sports director Steve Cummings and highly regarded performance engineer Dan Bigham out the door. The latter publicly lamented the lack of focus on his area of expertise. Criticism bubbled up publicly from the team's longest tenured riders, Geraint Thomas and Luke Rowe. Even quiet, homegrown talents like Ethan Hayter described a tricky year with a team that could do with a couple of changes as he exited the squad. Hayter's mild critique undersells the state of Ineos. The team today is a shadow of its former self. All of the smart people have left, a former staff member told Escape Collective, when asked to reflect on what has changed within the team. Things were alright with Sky, one former rider added, but within Ineos there is too much structure, compliance and acting like a big corporation. The team's go-getting, question-everything approach to all aspects of bike racing, from sports science to tactics, has been replaced by a cautious corporatist ethos and calcified decision-making. That culture and its erratic approach to top talent has led to an exodus of top riders and key staff and alienated some still on the team, like Pigcock. Ineos is still richly funded, but scattered and ineffective. Its billionaire owner Jim Ratcliffe dissatisfied at both its underperformance and being eclipsed by the sport's newest wave of top teams, as well as distracted by his new adventures, chiefly his new controlling stake in Manchester United. Many of the people we spoke to did so on condition of anonymity due to legal and professional concerns. But the picture that emerges is clear. A tale of internal politics, power vacuums, mismanagement and ego, of a sporting force reduced to a billionaire's lethargic plaything. This is the story of Skyfall.