"I honestly thought I’d never leave" - Luke Rowe excited for fresh start after INEOS Grenadiers departure

Following his retirement from the professional peloton, Luke Rowe makes the step up to a sports director role in 2025. Rather than at the INEOS Grenadiers though, where the Welshman spent the entirety of his career, it's Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale Team that have offered a pathway for the future.

“It was a tough move, I honestly thought I’d never leave INEOS Grenadiers,” the long-time road captain of the British-based team explains at Rouleur Live. “I found I perform best on the bike when I’m uncomfortable. If you get too comfortable, you can go on a hamster wheel and go through the motions a bit, which I kind of fear for myself. If I stayed at INEOS, I would just become too comfortable.”

Although Rowe took just 2 victories himself over the years, he was an instrumental part of Tour de France success for the likes of Chris Froome, Geraint Thomas and Egan Bernal. As he explains though, he needed a change of scenery to reignite his fire. “You know everyone. You know the way everything works. You know all the riders, and a lot of them, not just colleagues and mates, that was also a tricky dynamic,” he says. “People say, ‘Well, why did you leave then?’ There's no real reason. And obviously, what's going on, whatever, blah, blah, blah, there's no real reason. There's a good bunch of guys, a good bunch of people, and I believe they really want to do good stuff again.”

And so, when Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale Team came calling, Rowe couldn't turn down the opportunity. “The easy option [staying at INEOS] is that you know everything and it’s comfortable. Or there’s this curveball where you go 'phwoar.' Let’s go for it and see what happens, I might be unemployed after six months,” he jokes. “I’ve actually joined the team at quite a tricky time really, because they've won maybe like 10-15 races [each year] and then this year they've won [around] 30. So to join the year after that is tough, because how do you follow up an amazing, great, successful year, you're almost setting something to fail.”

“It's amazing, after speaking to so many teams - and I’m not on about INEOS, it’s not focused on them - lots of teams just go through the motions year on year, like ‘Let's try and go to every race, to try and win. Let's get success. There's no one, two, five, 10-year plan and how we're going to get there, but Decathlon AG2R were spot on,” he concludes. “I went into them and they had this presentation and showed me everything, and it's like, ‘this is where we are now’. And actually, it was really realistic with where they are now. They were saying, ‘see all these wins we've had this year. It looks great on paper. That's not where we are. We've batted above our weight. We've got lucky. We've had some very opportunist wins.’ They're like, ‘We've won this, but that's not actually where we are,' I really bought into that.”