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INEOS confident that team can win Grand Tour once again: "Last year we were close to overpowering Roglic"
CyclingWednesday, 01 May 2024 at 20:30
INEOS Grenadiers were, last decade, the dominant team in pro cycling's Grand Tours. That is not the case anymore, but the British team has not let their guards down and is working on developing future winners of the three-week races.
"Pogacar is one of the big boys in lap work within our sport, just like Jonas Vingegaard, Remco Evenepoel and Primoz Roglic. If you can compete against those men, the very best of their generation, then that is a very inspiring challenge," team DS Zak Dempster told Wielerflits ahead of the Giro d'Italia. "Last year we were close to overpowering Roglic. We should not be afraid of that or step away from our ambitions. It is important to be realistic and develop a good strategy.”
INEOS rode to second last year with Geraint Thomas at the Giro d'Italia and look to improve that this year. It will be a much more difficult task, but the Welshman rediscovered his form in recent years and looks set to lead a strong and experienced team alongside Thymen Arensman. Arensman, Carlos Rodríguez and sevral other upcoming riders are a big target of the team, who look to build from it's young base to match the likes of UAE Team Emirates and Team Visma - Lease a Bike.
“Owner Jim Radcliffe has already said that clearly. Every team wants to discover and retain those super talents. We want to become the best talent factory there is," he says. "That is the focus in our team and a responsibility in my job, the other team leaders and the coaches. Finding someone and helping them discover their potential should be our main goal."
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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