Dave Brailsford has stepped down as team principal at Ineos Grenadiers, officially bringing to a close an era in which he helped British riders win the biggest races in the world.
Brailsford, who had also been working in a key post in Ineos Sport in recent years, will now focus on a role at Manchester United. He was appointed to the board last month when Ineos owner, Jim Ratcliffe, acquired a 29 per cent of the club.
The Telegraph has broken the story of his departure, reporting Brailsford told the Ineos Grenadiers riders and staff at its winter training camp in Mallorca he was stepping down.
Working to Sky, the broadcasting company, Brailsford launched Team Sky for the 2010 season in a bid to replicate on the road the success Great Britain had achieved on the track under his stewardship.
Advertisement
The team wanted to win the Tour de France with a British rider within five years and achieved that goal with Bradley Wiggins in 2012.
While Wiggins would never get close to challenging at a Grand Tour again, his place as leader of the team was taken by Chris Froome, who went on to win four Tours, the Giro and two Vueltas.
Undermined by controversy
While Team GB and Sky/Ineos enjoyed great success under Brailsford, the era was also marked by a number of controversies.
Last August, Dr Richard Freeman, who worked for both Team Sky and British Cycling, was banned from sport for four years for possession of a banned substance at Britain’s National Cycling Centre in Manchester and also for “tampering” with an anti-doping investigation.
Related News
The ban was backdated to the start of Freeman’s provisional suspension, which commenced on December 22nd, 2020.
UK Anti-Doping said it had banned Freeman because he violated its rules by “taking possession of an order of 30 sachets of Testogel (testosterone gel) at the National Cycling Centre in Manchester, in May 2011” and also by subsequently “lying to UKAD in respect of that order”.
The four-year ban imposed on Freeman relates to all sports and came just over two years after he was struck off as a doctor in Britain following the ruling against him that he ordered Testogel sachets knowing or believing they would be used for performance enhancement.
During Brailsford's time, a Russian-backed cyber hacking gang also obtained and published documents showing Bradley Wiggins availing of therapeutic use exemptions that some people in the sport were concerned with. While Wiggins broke no rules, both his and the team's reputations were damaged.
In June of 2011, June 2012 and April 2013 - before two Tours and a Giro - he secured a TUE to use Triamcinolone acetonide. Some in the sport said using the medicines - which Wiggins said he used to treat allergies - would aid a rider's power to weight ratio.
A UK Anti Doping (UKAD) investigation into a ‘jiffy bag’ containing a medical product delivered to Team Sky in 2011 concluded the team had no records to prove its claim the bag contained an over the counter medication.
While no evidence was ever found of anything untoward in the bag, and some of the claims were hysterical and based on conspiracies often spread online, the episode was another damaging blow for the team.
Chris Froome was also found with twice the legal limit of asthma drug salbutamol in his system towards the end of the Vuelta in 2017. While Froome was cleared of any wrongdoing in his salbutamol case, it was another unwelcome chapter for the team.
