“It sucks... There’s no dressing that up” – Geraint Thomas confronts Netcompany INEOS’ Tour de France failure

Geraint Thomas has refused to hide behind Netcompany INEOS’ disrupted preparation after the team left the 2026 Tour de France without a stage victory, an individual podium or a rider inside the top 19 overall.

The failure arrived in the middle of an otherwise encouraging season for the British team. INEOS had won regularly across the opening seven months, celebrated Filippo Ganna’s victory at Dwars door Vlaanderen and placed Thymen Arensman and Egan Bernal fourth and 10th respectively at the Giro d’Italia.

July offered a much harsher verdict. INEOS finished second in the opening team time trial but never returned to the podium, with Ganna’s fifth place on Stage 9 standing as their best individual result across the entire Tour. Bernal eventually finished 20th overall, one place ahead of Arensman.

“We wanted to win the team time trial and we wanted to win another stage,” Thomas said on the latest episode of the Watts Occurring podcast. “At the end of the day, professional sport is about winning and we didn’t. There’s no dressing that up.”

The squad that arrived at the Tour bore little resemblance to the one INEOS had envisaged during their winter planning. Oscar Onley was expected to spearhead the team’s general classification challenge after finishing fourth in the 2025 Tour, but injuries suffered in a crash shortly before the race ruled him out. Carlos Rodriguez was also absent after needing what Thomas called a “reset”, while Kevin Vauquelin reached the start following a disrupted May and June.

“We lost our leader in Oscar Onley. Carlos Rodriguez needed a reset. Kevin Vauquelin had his issues through May and June,” Thomas explained. “In December, we sat down and we were worrying about how we were going to get all three leaders to work together. In the end, two weren’t there and the other one wasn’t even right for GC.”

A winter dilemma over how to accommodate three leaders had become a shortage by the time the race began. INEOS instead leaned on Bernal and Arensman, despite both having already completed the Giro.

Arensman had ridden for the podium in Italy before finishing fourth, while Bernal secured his first Grand Tour top 10 since the crash that threatened his career in 2022. Neither had been prepared to carry the team’s Tour challenge immediately afterwards. “If you were sitting at the December camp, you would never have said the two guys riding GC at the Giro would be the ones backing up at the end of the Tour,” Thomas said.

Bernal nevertheless remained close to the top 10 through much of the first two weeks. Thomas highlighted the Colombian’s willingness to continue fighting for a minor overall position despite previously winning both the Tour and Giro. “He doesn’t wake up in the morning dreaming of pulling his ring out for 11th on GC, does he?” Thomas said. “He needs a big chapeau just for doing that.”

Once his own GC hopes had faded, Bernal entered breakaways on Stages 17 and 18 to support teammates before the Giro-Tour workload finally caught up with him. “He still gave it a good crack the next few days,” Thomas added. “He was in the break on 17 and 18 to help the boys, even though they weren’t necessarily for him. Then on 19 and 20, he was just a bit cooked and he was done.”

The absence of a recognised GC leader gave INEOS greater freedom to chase stages, but the route offered fewer obvious breakaway opportunities than their final selection required.

Thomas estimated that only around five stages were genuinely suited to a break succeeding. Several were then won by some of the strongest riders in the race, including Mathieu van der Poel and Mads Pedersen, while UAE Team Emirates – XRG and Remco Evenepoel claimed many of the mountain and time-trial opportunities.

“When you look at the stages, I think there were about five that were actually breakaway days,” Thomas said. “When the likes of Van der Poel and Mads are winning them, they’re pretty good riders getting them. UAE ended up with about six stages, then you’ve got the sprints. Remco won a mountain stage and a time trial, and there was the TTT. Your chances are limited anyway.”

INEOS remained visible in attacks but rarely placed a rider in the decisive move with the strength to finish the job. Their pursuit for Ganna on Stage 9 came within six seconds of bringing the race back together, while the team’s collection of time-trial specialists could not build on the narrow opening-day defeat.

The absence of a victory was therefore not simply the result of passivity. It exposed the gap between repeatedly entering the race and possessing a rider capable of deciding it.

Luke Rowe, who spent more than a decade with the team before becoming a sports director at Decathlon CMA CGM Team, argued that INEOS’ previous dominance ensured their failures attracted greater scrutiny. “Because the team has been so successful, because the team has won so many Tours de France and because they’ve gone there and dominated, they’re quite easy to bash,” Rowe said. “Once you’ve been there, anything but there is a massive fail.”

Rowe did not dispute the lack of finishing power, but rejected the idea that the riders had accepted their fate once the original plan collapsed. “Did they have the legs to finish it off? No,” he said. “They were getting in the breaks, but they couldn’t quite finish it off. Did they stop trying? No, and I think that deserves some credit.”

Thomas similarly praised the squad for continuing to commit to the team’s plans, but stopped well short of presenting effort and development as adequate compensation.

“We just wanted to see the boys committing to the plan and giving it everything, learning and getting better through it,” he said. “That’s what they did, so that was a good improvement. But at the end of the day, we don’t want to be in that position again because it sucks.”

INEOS’ Tour stood apart from much of their earlier racing in 2026. Ganna had won across both the cobbles and time trials, Dorian Godon collected several WorldTour stage victories and the team had built greater depth through Arensman, Bernal, Tobias Foss, Vauquelin and a group of emerging riders.

The breadth of those results suggested INEOS were moving forward after several seasons in which their old Tour-winning identity had steadily faded. Their performance in France showed that becoming a stronger WorldTour team and becoming a Tour-winning force remain two very different challenges.

“The season overall has been positive,” Thomas said. “It’s just this last month, for everything we’ve said, definitely wasn’t. That’s when you’ve got the most people watching and it’s the biggest event, so that’s why it hits harder.”

No team carries the weight of its Tour history quite like INEOS. The organisation won seven editions between 2012 and 2019, first as Team Sky and later under the INEOS name, with Thomas himself taking the yellow jersey in 2018.

Those victories were built around clearly defined leadership, deep mountain support and a level of control that has since been overtaken by Pogacar’s UAE squad and the sport’s increasingly aggressive style of racing.

“We’ve had a lot of success in this race and we know how to do it,” Thomas said. “We’ve done it seven times before. Obviously things evolve and change, but we’ve stood in Paris with that yellow jersey. We know generally how to do it, and that’s what we want to do again.”

The Tour also forced Thomas to reassess the scope of his first season as Director of Racing. His responsibilities had spread across recruitment, the academy, commercial discussions, nutrition, coaching and race performance. After experiencing the Tour from management rather than the peloton, Thomas intends to work more closely with INEOS’ sports directors and establish a more consistent racing structure.

“It highlighted where I need to focus more of my energy and prioritise things over others,” he said. “At the start of this year, I was having a big overview of the whole team and involved in calls about everything from recruitment to the academy, commercial stuff, nutrition, a bit of coaching and the racing side. There was just a lot going on. Now it’s good to work a lot more closely with the DSs and how we actually want the DSs to work.”

Thomas emerged from his first Tour in the role with fewer tangible results than INEOS had wanted, but a sharper view of where his influence is required. The team’s response will begin long before its next eight-rider selection is announced.

“It makes me more hungry because you don’t want to be there again,” Thomas said. “A bit of suffering makes you even more motivated not to go back and repeat it.”

INEOS completed the Tour with all eight riders, but without the stage win, GC challenge or defining performance needed to carry their wider 2026 revival onto cycling’s largest stage.