INEOS Grenadiers "hell-bent on developing our own talent" in search for Geraint Thomas replacement Grand Tour leader of the future
Cycling
With the INEOS Grenadiers' main Grand Tour leader, Geraint Thomas now nearing the end of his career, the team's Performance Director Scott Drawer insists they won't replace the Welshman with another expensive and ready made Grand Tour contender.
Instead, the INEOS Grenadiers will target the youth of the sport and attempt to mould the next generation of Giro d'Italia, Tour de France and Vuelta a Espana challengers from within their own ranks.
“Our owners are hell-bent on developing our own talent. We're not going to buy the top guys in, we’re going to develop our own. That's more exciting for coaches. That's more exciting for riders. If we're going to win Grand Tours again, our investment and work has to be on young talent,” Drawer explains of the team's plan in conversation with Cycling News. “We're not thinking about next year, we're thinking about what are the demands of the sport in 2030. If you think about next year, everyone else will be ahead of us. So we're certainly trying to be a bit more creative and rebuild."
With youthful riders such as Andrew August and Peter Oxenberg having joined the British based outfit over the last year, the plan is already coming to fruition for the INEOS Grenadiers. Somewhat curiously however, INEOS do not currently have a development team and according to Drawer, there are no plans to form one either.
“We already have a small development programme called ‘Ascent’ and we’re going to scale that up,” Drawer explains. “The traditional pathways of becoming a WorldTour cyclist have changed. It all starts at a younger age. We're thinking deeply about how to get that right. Rider development will be a big part of the team in the future. We want the best young British talent, and any young talent, to look at what we're doing and then want to develop with us.”
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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