With stage three ending in a big bunch sprint, it was Artem Shmidt who led us in on the day. At the halfway point of #TOG2024, @O_RodGar is up there in the GC mix, with an eye on Saturday's queen stage.
"Hopefully I can help get the team back to where it was" - INEOS wonderkid sets out stall for future success
CyclingFriday, 18 October 2024 at 18:00
It's not all that long ago that the INEOS Grenadiers were considered the undisputed kings of the peloton. Having seen the likes of UAE Team Emirates, Team Visma | Lease a Bike, Red Bull - BORA - hansgrohe and more overtake them in recent seasons however, question marks surround the future of the former Team Sky.
One of those riders that INEOS hope can guide them to a bright and successful future, is the 20-year-old American, Artem Shmidt, who's been riding for the team since August. "From a personal standpoint, I just hope to continue now to develop and hopefully I can help get the team back to where it was," he says in conversation with Cycling Weekly. "Whether that’s a team role over the next few years, I really want to prioritise that, helping the team the best I can to get back to where it has been before."
In the 2010s the INEOS Grenadiers, then named Team Sky, were the dominant force in cycling, holding a strong grip over the Grand Tours through the likes of Bradley Wiggins, Chris Froome, Geraint Thomas, Egan Bernal and Tao Geoghegan Hart thanks to their revolutionary 'marginal gains' system and their typical 'Sky Train' tactics that the peloton struggled to compete with.
In more recent years and especially in 2024 however, problems have begun to arise. The latest of which has seen an internal dispute end in Tom Pidcock's shock 'deselection' from Il Lombardia, a call that come from the team's upper management no less.
The team haven't completely given up the ghost just yet though. Of late there has been a concerted effort in attempting to bring in potential stars of the future such as Shmidt, his compatriot Andrew August and Danish youngsters Theodor Storm and Peter Oxenberg among others. "For sure it’s the plan," Shmidt notes. "We signed a lot of young guys lately, including myself, AJ August, Magnus Sheffield and Michael Leonard. So I hope we can all develop, push on and help the team in the best way we can." Time will tell if these riders can bring back INEOS to the top of the peloton.
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Nov 05, 13:04
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- Exactly who, Joey, is "they"? Flimsy, illogical conspiracy theories aside, it is in no one's interest (financial or otherwise) to "drive away small local events." Major cultural and macroeconomic factors are reducing ridership, but there is no "they" in this context.verve82520-12-2024
- And our virtual platforms allow us to "ride" famous place that we can't get to in person, which is a pretty fabulous aspect of this weird weird sport.RidesHills19-12-2024
- Which off-season are you referring to? The one after he won the Tour of California? The one after he won 3 stages and was on the podium of the Vuelta? The one after TJV screwed up, never put him away, and lost the Tour on the time trial? We've seen the guy hit the wall, lose energy, nearly fail, and lose races ("I'm dead") more than once. He's got a visible threshold and his fueling regimen is a clear weak spot. You'll need more detail to make this more than under defined insinuations .RidesHills19-12-2024
- Interesting analysis. And yet, I'm in the US, and at a recent wedding reception as a group of us older folks had to stand at a certain place to keep track of a thing, we got to talking, and every single one of us had a favorite rider, a favorite circuit of races, a moment when we fell in love with the sport, and a joy in the complexities of it all. None of us knew about the other's fandom until that moment. It's wonderful that these are my brothers-in-law, and we now know to talk about this when the spouses aren't listening. Point being: there are fans all over, and for US folks, the loss of GCN+ has been huge. As so often, it's the media bottleneck that matters more than anything else. Look at F1 in the US before Netflix, as an example.RidesHills19-12-2024
- On the one hand, what he says is trivial. Of course it's genetics. It always is, in any sport. That's just obvious. Look at Mondo Duplantis, whose sprinting speed is key to his pole vaulting, for example - he's just plain faster than other vaulters and good at the rest of the event as well. In cycling, even when you take the most genetically weird group of people and give them amazing training, some will be better than others, as well. Distributions are distributions and there are outliers and that's just that. Pogacar's body is built for this kind of thing, it seems, with him only recently having had to pick up skills that others have used all along. I'm still inclined to believe that these folks are using entirely legal means to arrive at their shockingly good performance, given how more senior riders kinda complain about (or at least comment on) the regimens and control over the nutrition and exercise and all that. And in every population, there are edge cases of truly exceptional behavior.RidesHills19-12-2024
- And it’s likely going to get worse. They are going all-out to drive away small local events which are where a lot of new riders come from. They want fee income and Olympic medals. That’s all.JoeyB19-12-2024
- Oh Lordspock12319-12-2024
- Interesting suggestion, fo you think testing Tadej’s (or Bolts’ or so many others’) parents would have given us a preview of his potential then or what criteria do you have to pick parents with?Mistermaumau19-12-2024
- Even amateur teams suffer this sort. But this is also largely due to the precarious sponsorship, in very few sports do you find kit with so many sponsors having to be integrated and changing so regularly.Mistermaumau19-12-2024
- I think it’s pretty obvious what was responsible for destroying interest that used to be there.Mistermaumau19-12-2024