Luke Rowe points toward Egan Bernal as big reason for INEOS' lack of rider budget: "In January of the first year of a four-year contract, he had a horrible injury"

OMG...does this bloke have a axe to grind, it's only his British buds that matter. A real slimmy ars**ole, him and Thomas make a fine pair of pussies.

I think Bernal is only 10% of the rider budget/performance problem at Ineos. I don't think he should be blamed too heavily. But it's also quite possible that the writer of this article misrepresents what Rowe truly meant by his statement.

Such a slimy little excrement stirrer

Apart from the fact that INEOS have recruted shockingly bad causing most of their problems of not being competetive, the other fact is more worrying for cycling as a whole. UAE have endless money and can more or less buy who they want as they become available. Even generation Zen development team proably has a budget bigger than some WT teams. They have won nearly double the number of races as the next best teams Visma, Lotto , Bora and Soudal. This cannot be good for the WT from a competetive standpoint.

Why don't teams pay their riders heavier on the results side, and lighter on a flat base rate, especially their star riders? Look at Premier Tech's situation with Froome, and now Bernal. I'm aware that the value of a domestique can't be properly reconciled with finish line results, but...???

Money matters.
I think it's fair to say Sky had the biggest budget when they were repeatedly winning the Tour ?

Ineos have massively under performed this year and that's not down to Bernal.

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4 million for Pidcock and 2 million for Foss, riders who are not GC will exhaust the budget pretty fast, Overpaying domestiques without a good leader is stupid. Tom Pidcock, Egan Bernal, and Carlos Rodríguez and G are in the same salary range. To pin it all their budget woes on Bernal's Salary is just gross