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"

Geraint Thomas and Luke Rowe spoke again in their podcast and this time they tried to justify the difficult season of INEOS Grenadiers wanting to make clear that UAE Team Emirates' budget is much bigger than theirs and talking about Egan Bernal as the cause (unintentionally) of the team's bad sporting situation.

"We definitely don't have the biggest budget in this peloton," Thomas said during the latest episode of Watts Occuring. The Welshman makes it very clear that UAE has much more money than the rest of the peloton and hints that it is difficult to compete like this:

"I'm not going to go into details, but I know what the team's budget is for the cyclists and I know what the Tour de France UAE team's budget was, and it's not far off. Which is unrealistic. The total for 30 riders and then the UAE... it's a good.... I don't know off the top of my head, but a good 80% of our budget was spent on eight UAE riders. There's a lot of talk about budget, but in UAE it's unlimited."

It's rumoured that UAE has a budget of around €60 million and INEOS €50 million per season, but it is very possible that UAE attributes a larger percentage of it's budget to rider salaries whereas INEOS focuses on other aspects of the sport. The losses of riders such as Adam Yates, Richard Carapaz, Tao Geoghegan Hart, Richie Porte, Daniel Martínez and Dylan van Baarle has seen the results come down overall. Egan Bernal was the team's big bet but right after signing a large contract he suffered a life-threatening crash.

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Rowe, for his part, explained that part of INEOS' problems lie in the fact that just as he was beginning to collect his high contract as star rider Egan Bernal had the serious accident, which makes it complicated for them to qualify for another great leader:

"What a lot of people forget is that with every team you have your big leader and you build it around that rider. So Alpecin backs and pays Mathieu van der Poel well, UAE has Pogi, and builds it around him, Visma builds it around a couple of guys like van Aert and Vingegaard."

"At the time, our guy was Egan Bernal. It was Froomey (Chris Froome, ed.), it was you (Rowe refers to Thomas, ed.), and then it was you and Egan, but he was the guy who had just won the Tour de France, two years later the Giro and then signed his big-money contract that took up a huge amount of budget - and justified every penny - and then he got on the back of a bus and had this horrible crash."

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Ever since, Bernal has returned to a high level and even finished on the podium of a few big races this year, but has not been anywhere near the same results in the Grand Tours and a big part of that is also because in recent years the level has increased amongst the climbers and Bernal's hasn't.

"So 'they have a huge budget, where does it all go?' Well, you back your horse, right? You pick your rider and you pay him well and you say that's the guy that's going to be successful and you build the team around him. In January of the first year of a four-year contract, he had a horrible injury. So it's easy to oversee things and say they have a big budget and they don't perform, but unfortunately one guy is injured and he's still on his way back, but...fuck it," Rowe explained.

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ANALYSIS: Does Mathieu van der Poel have a chance of beating Tadej Pogacar and retaining Rainbow Jersey?

Watts Occurring

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These two were actually in the same room for tonight's pod record. In your ears tomorrow morning. Cheers to that 🥂🤝

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