A stronger Ineos head to the Tour without Geraint Thomas or Chris Froome – Blazin' Saddles
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Updated 20/08/2020 at 18:33 GMT
Egan Bernal stands a far better chance of winning the Tour de France for Ineos without the help of stuttering former winners Chris Froome and Geraint Thomas, argues Felix Lowe. But what next for the snubbed duo at what looks to be the end of an era for British cycling?
Geraint Thomas in yellow flanked by Sky teammates Chris Froome and Egan Bernal - Tour de France 2018
Image credit: Getty Images
Now the dust has settled on David Brailsford's decision to drop both Chris Froome and Geraint Thomas from the "Ineos Grenadiers" at the Tour de France, we can probably all agree that it was the best move to make in the circumstances.
Without an undercooked Thomas and an out-of-sorts Froome still battling back from injury, Ineos have a better shot at defending Egan Bernal's yellow jersey in the face of the mounting challenge coming from the strong squad behind Primoz Roglic at rivals Jumbo-Visma.
It's not as if the writing wasn't on the wall.
When Bernal blew off the lockdown cobwebs with victory at the Route d'Occitanie, it wasn't so much because of Froome's support in the mountains as in spite of the 35-year-old's underwhelming performance.
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Highlights as Egan Bernal wins Stage 3 of Route d'Occitanie to lay down marker for Tour de France
Froome at least put in a half-decent shift as a domestique en route to finishing 37th, almost 10 minutes down on Bernal.
At the Tour de l'Ain five days later, Ineos fielded their three "leaders" together for the first time since the 2018 Tour de France, when Bernal finished 15th on his maiden Grand Tour, which was won by Thomas with Froome in third.
But the alarm bells rang out for Ineos in the four-day race, which saw Primoz Roglic takes convincing Stage 2 win at Criterium du Dauphine. Even more alarmingly, Jumbo-Visma also placed Steven Kruiswijk and George Bennett in the top five, with Tom Dumoulin, in his first race back in over a year, coming eleventh.
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Tour de l'Ain Stage 3 highlights - Primoz Roglic and Egan Bernal battle it out for GC honours
The Critérium du Dauphiné was the final straw for Brailsford. He clearly wanted to give Froome and Thomas one last chance to prove their worth before making Ineos' selection for the Tour – and neither did enough.
Thomas finished almost 54 minutes down, Froome a further half-hour back. Bernal? He didn't even race the final weekend – withdrawing because of a back injury after dropping to seventh place in stage 3.
The inside information from Ineos is that Bernal is fine, his removal from the race only ever precautionary. The Dauphiné was a particularly hard and intense edition, with 27 categorised climbs crammed into its five undulating days. The 23-year-old didn't need to ride the final weekend to know where he was at ahead of the Tour. After all, the Dauphiné was never really about him; it was about Froome and Thomas – and Brailsford had clearly seen everything he needed to know.
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Chris Froome dropped towards the end of race
Brailsford has never been one for sentimentality: Bradley Wiggins never rode the Tour again after he won for Sky in 2012; Mark Cavendish was forced to stuff his rainbow jersey with water bottles; Thomas never became the team's bona fide top dog despite winning the Tour in 2018; and winning a fifth Tour for Froome has never seemed like a priority despite the prestige it would bring.
There were rumours circulating early this week that perhaps Richard Carapaz, the Ecuadorian who joined this year from Movistar after winning last year's Giro, would switch bubbles and join Ineos for the Tour. Such rumours were easily dismissed on the grounds that Carapaz had crashed out of the Tour of Poland earlier in the month, and that he wasn't deemed fit enough to start Tuesday's Giro dell'Emilia.
But then Brailsford delivered the bombshell.
Froome missing out would not have come so much as a surprise – but no one really expected the double whammy of seeing Thomas dropped as well.
In comes Carapaz and the Russian youngster Pavel Sivakov. If the former is a bit of a gamble, it's one Brailsford felt he was forced to make. Alongside Andrey Amador and Jonathan Castroviejo, Carapaz will be the third former Movistar rider in Ineos' starting eight. How times have changed.
As for Sivakov, no one can argue the 23-year-old hasn't earned his chance to make his Tour debut. Runner-up behind Bernal at the Route d'Occitanie, Sivakov proved his worth in his own dress rehearsal at the Dauphiné while his more experienced British colleagues fluffed their lines: eleventh overall, strong support in the mountains, and a gutsy battle for victory in the final stage after a nasty-looking, but not serious crash.
Carapaz may be a Grand Tour winner, but he will know his role this September expands to being a Plan B at best. Without the clear uncertainty that would naturally come with throwing the Tour's previous three winners together in one team, Ineos will arrive at the Grand Depart in Nice in nine days with a clear game plan – something that could not have been said before this week.
There will no doubt be times when the experience that comes from two veteran riders with five Tour victories between them will be sorely missed. But not the aggro or baggage that comes with accommodating the egos of three potential winners.
Although it's not as if having three potential winners is the problem for Brailsford. He knows he can manage such a luxurious issue as that. What he was worried about was having two water-carriers resting on their laurels and dining out on their previous records. If neither Froome nor Thomas could have won the Tour this year, they may have jeopardised the hopes of the only Ineos rider who can. Bernal needs bodies behind him, not weighing him down.
Even with the latest announcement that Jumbo-Visma will be without the injured Kruijswijk during the Tour, the Dutch team are still a formidable force.
Roglic, the reigning Vuelta champion, has proved himself to be one of the best all-round stage racers there is – even if there are perhaps still question marks over his form in the third week of a Grand Tour, particularly one devoid of any large, flat time trials on which he can build up a cushion.
With the in-form Sepp Kuss, Wout van Aert and George Bennett in support, the experience of Robert Gesink and Tony Martin, the promise of Amund Grondahl Jansen, and a potential Plan B in the returning-to-full-fitness Dumoulin, Roglic has a support cast to make any rival go green with envy.
But Brailsford will hope that by jettisoning the deadwood – however big their Tour palmares – he will have a more unified and focused team around Bernal in his bid to deliver to Ineos their eighth Tour de France victory in nine years.
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David Brailsford explains why Chris Froome and Geraint Thomas left out of Ineos Tour de France team
End of an era for British cycling?
British riders – and in particular, British riders at Sky/Ineos – have won six of the past eight Tours, with Bradley Wiggins' dam-busting victory and Thomas' 2018 win book-ending Froome's four triumphs.
But for the first time since 2009 – the year Wiggins was denied a place on the final podium in Paris by the returning Lance Armstrong – British interests at the Tour, certainly when it comes to yellow jerseys, will be absent in 2020.
At least back then, when Wiggins was still gauging his potential under the stewardship of Jonathan Vaughters at Garmin-Slipstream, Britain could rely on Mark Cavendish to pick up stage wins (a stellar six in the 2009 race, to be precise).
No chance of this in 2020 – unless Cavendish not only makes Bahrain-McLaren's team selection for the Tour, but sprouts wings. This is a sprinter who has not won a sprint since February 2018 – five months before Thomas took that maillot jaune into Paris.
The first Tour to be held during the coronavirus pandemic will have no British rider targeting the yellow jersey – unless something miraculous happens to Luke Rowe's legs over the next week or so.
Welshman Rowe will be the only British rider among the new-look Ineos Grenadiers – signifying a veritable changing of the guard for the British team.
Ineos admittedly only boasted Rowe and Thomas in their line-up in 2018, but prior to that the team always fielded at least three – and sometimes as many as five – home-grown riders, with the exception of 2014, the year Froome crashed out and Thomas came 22nd as Vincenzo Nibali broke the run for Astana.
In 2010, in his first Tour for Sky, Wiggins disappointed by finishing 24th after entering with high hopes of making a splash in the general classification. 12 months later, Wiggins looked to be on top form as he won the Dauphiné but crashed out of the Tour in stage 7. His stars aligned in 2012 and the Tour's history since has been largely dominated by Brailsford and the various incarnations of his team.
Adam Yates has been named among Mitchelton-Scott's eight for the Tour and will hope to get his career back on track after a disappointing couple of years has seen him eclipsed by his twin brother, Simon, who this week announced the prolongation of his contract at the Australian team.
Another climber from Lancashire, Hugh Carthy, may make the selection for EF Pro Cycling but he would be riding in support of Colombia's Rigoberto Uran. At the time of writing, the only other potential British starter is 24-year-old Conor Swift for the Arkea-Samsic squad of Nairo Quintana.
It looks highly likely that the Tour will boast no British stage winners for the first time since 2014, which itself was a momentary blip following the last barren race in 2007. The end of an era, indeed.
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Tour de France winners for Team Sky and Team Ineos between 2012 and 2019
Image credit: Getty Images
What next for Froome and Thomas?
The Ineos PR machine worked wonders by dressing up the double boycott of two of Britain's most successful riders as a positive moment of clarity for the team.
"3 Grand Tours. 3 Leaders. 1 Common purpose."
Wiggins was certainly not wrong in lauding Brailsford's ".
With question marks now over Richard Carapaz's defence of his Giro crown, maglia rosa duties will be delegated to Thomas while Froome has been allocated the old trusty Spanish olive branch.
Speaking on a video made by Ineos, Froome spoke diplomatically of readjusting his targets and expectations from the Tour to the Vuelta for what could be his final race before joining Israel Start-Up Nation in 2021.
"Given where I've come from through the last year, I'm not confident that I can fulfil the necessary job that would be needed from me at this year's Tour de France," he said.
I think it's a lot more realistic targeting the Vuelta and gives me a chance to get stuck into something that's deliverable. At the end of the day, people have to remember that I'm coming back from a horrendous crash last year where I fractured a lot of bones in my body. The recovery is complete – I don't have any pain or lingering issues – but certainly that was a big knock to me, and I'm still coming back to that full level of fitness. It's great for me now to have that clarity, to know that the Vuelta will be my big goal for the season.
Whether Froome can be competitive enough to bring home a third red jersey remains to be seen. Following his Tour snub, French newspaper L'Equipe certainly feels like the four-time winner will never join Anquetil, Merckx, Hinault and Indurain in the hallowed club of five-time winners of the world's biggest bike race.
For Thomas, the snub may well have been more of a shock. Many felt – including Bradley Wiggins on his Eurosport podcast – that the Welshman could well have won last year's Tour were it not for the cancellation of the weather-affected stage 19 and subsequent shortening of the penultimate stage.
Thomas was off the pace in the Dauphiné but still had time to regain his pre-pandemic levels – plus the experience to be able to ride into some form over a three-week race. If he couldn't target yellow himself, Thomas had already shown himself to be a capable servant – both to Froome and Bernal. As such, his disappointment is understandable.
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Chris Froome and Geraint Thomas at the 2018 Tour de France
Image credit: Getty Images
"As you've seen, I won't be at the Tour this year, unfortunately," a bereft-looking Thomas said in a message to his followers on social media.
"It's been a funny old year – racing wise, training wise – but, er, made the decision to target the Giro, try and get a pink jersey."
Note the lack of a pronoun before "made". It certainly ratcheted up the ambiguity levels regarding who actually made that decision.
"Um, so, yeah, that's a big challenge ahead. I'm looking forward to it," Thomas promised, sounding about as excited as a Democrat being sent to a Trump rally in Florida without a face mask.
But in the Giro, Thomas will have the chance to bounce back on a course suited to his strengths with an ultimate prize that would lay his 2017 demons to rest and put him among the select group of riders who have won two different Grand Tours. Who knows, he could use it as a stepping stone to making history by completing the grand slam with a Vuelta victory further down the line – perhaps a more realistic target given Bernal's now undisputed position as team leader when it comes to chasing yellow jerseys.
With Belgian Remco Evenepoel ruled out of making his Giro d'Italia debut this October following his horror crash in Il Lombardia, race organisers RCS will welcome Thomas's addition to their startlist with open arms.
The Welshman was last given Sky leadership in Italy in 2017 when he crashed out in controversial circumstances on the stage to Blockhaus at the end of the opening week. He has unfinished business with the Giro – as does another rider who expected to be taking on Ineos over the French roads this September.
After breaking a bone in his shoulder during the Dauphiné, Steven Kruijswijk has not recovered in time to make Jumbo-Visma's team for the Tour. The Dutchman, who came within a couple of stages of winning the 2016 Giro before seeing his chances hit a snow wall on top of the Colle dell'Agnello, will hope to give Thomas a run for his money.
They will be joined by the likes of Vincenzo Nibali, Jakob Fuglsang, Rafal Majka and Simon Yates – another rider looking to overturn some Giro heartbreak – in what could well see an exciting fight for pink. Also joining in could be that man Carapaz, if he is able to carry his form over from the Tour. Playing second fiddle to the Ecuadorian once again could be a bitter pill to swallow for Thomas.
Felix Lowe - @Saddleblaze
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