Ineos Grenadiers team manager Dave Brailsford has acknowledged that the team's WorldTour rivals have improved and overtaken his own team in 2020 and plans to take a new and different approach in the coming years.
Since its creation as Team Sky in 2010, Brailsford has overseen the team's rise to dominance in the Tour de France. Chris Froome also won the 2018 Giro d'Italia and Vuelta a EspaƱa in 2011 and 2017, and the riders have also dominated other stage races and some of the classics.
However, the team is far less present this year. Egan Bernal was forced to abandon this year's Tour de France due to back pain, and Geraint Thomas was unable to continue after breaking his pelvis in a crash caused by Bidon at the Giro d'Italia.
With their hopes of winning the Tour de France overall gone, the British team focused on trying to win a stage, and Mihau Kwiatkowski and Richard Karapas finished arm-in-arm on stage 18 of the Tour de France. On Wednesday, Filippo Ganna won the fifth stage of the Giro d'Italia, just days after conquering the mountains of Calabria and winning the opening time trial to Palermo.
After the Tour de France debacle, Brailsford went back to the drawing board and promised to "put together a team and coaching staff that can deliver results and win races again."
Although apparently not directly related to the review, team CEO Fran Miller announced that she had left to take a similar role at Belstaff, an apparel brand owned by Jim Ratcliffe, another Ineos owner.
Chris Froome will move to Israel's Startup Nation in 2021, and Thomas is entering the final year of a contract agreed to after his 2018 Tour de France win.New contracts for 2021 include Adam Yates and young British prospects Tom Pidcock, and Richie Porte, Daniel Martinez, and Lawrence De Plus.
The first step in Brailsford's review was to acknowledge that Ineos had been overtaken by rival Grand Tour teams such as Jumbo Visma.
"If you've found a way to win, you have to stick to it. As a result, we kept our heads down, kept working, and didn't realize we were being overtaken by other teams," Brailsford told the Belgian newspaper Het Nieuwsblad at the Giro d'Italia.
"Only now do I realize that we have to keep questioning ourselves and keep reinventing ourselves."
"Now is the time to step back and think about the next five years. We can't afford to continue doing things the way we have been doing them. It's time to admit that we have been overtaken by other teams and take a different approach."
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