Ethan Hayter has hit out at what he sees as the overly corporate way Ineos Grenadiers is run, saying if a cycling team is managed like a conventional business it should be no surprise the riders' passion starts to wane.
Hayter, who was tipped for greatness when signed by the British World Tour team, has now left for Soudal-QuickStep.
His remarks, now that he has exited the British squad, are the latest in a long time of comments from current and former staff and riders at Ineos Grenadiers about shortcomings at the team.
"When you run a cycling team like a business, the riders and staff lose their passion. That was the case at Ineos in recent years. Racing felt more and more like a job," Hayter said.
The reigning British road race champion, who won 20 races as an Ineos Grenadiers rider, described being in the Soudal-QuickStep set-up as a "breath of fresh air" compared to his former team, speaking in an interview with Belgian broadcaster Sporza.
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"To make the selection for a Grand Tour at Ineos, you either had to be a leader or a domestique. I was somewhere in between. That's why I always just missed out," Hayter said.
"In addition, the team sometimes changed my program, which meant that I missed a series of nice races," he said of the knock-on impact of missing Grand Tour selection, citing the example of last year's Giro d'Italia.
"I was scheduled for the Giro and would ride a series of (warm-up) races with the Giro group, such as the Tour of the Algarve and then Tirreno.
"But just before my first day of racing, I disappeared from the Giro group. As a result, I also missed the Algarve and the Tirreno and had to make do with the leftovers."
Hayter was with Ineos Grenadiers for five years but only rode one Grand Tour; La Vuelta in 2022, which he was forced to abandon after stage 9 due to Covid-19.
This year he said he is not riding the Giro - as Mikel Landa and Paul Magnier get the nod. At the Tour de France, Remco Evenepoel and Tim Merlier are picked, with Hayter missing out as a result.
But Hayter said he would like to ride the Vuelta, even if fellow sprinter Merlier is also on the team.
"In the flat sprints, I would be a good lead-out. In stages where sprinters have been dropped, I would then have a chance myself," he said of La Vuelta.
Hayter's exit from Ineos Grenadiers was well-flagged and he already spoke of not knowing "what's going on" at Ineos Grenadiers while still riding for the team during last year's Tour of Britain.
Around the same time, Tom Pidcock complained of being “deselected” for Il Lombardia, and has now since departed for Q36.5 Pro Cycling Team, saying his and his former team's aims were no longer compatible.
Geraint Thomas weighed in after the Il Lombardia de-selection and questioned how the team's “highest paid” rider had reached the point he was omitted from a key race selection for “management”, rather than “performance”, reasons.
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It was not the first time both Thomas and Pidcock had spoken about the team, clearly questioning management and the direction of the World Tour outfit.
Earlier last season, 2018 Tour winner Thomas said Ineos Grenadiers had undergone management changes in the post-Dave Brailsford era that he found “challenging”.
“Before, it was a lot more straightforward with Dave at the top. There was clarity with everything. There was a simple process whereas now it’s got a lot more complicated,” he told William Fortheringham in The Guardian.
“It’s like a coalition government. You need a majority. Even if you didn’t agree with stuff (under Brailsford) at least there was a clear ‘boom, boom, boom’ – that’s it, move on – rather than this grey area.”
And as he rode last year's Tour de France, it was clear Thomas felt his role was one well below what he could achieve. That was something that brought about a sense of drift, despite finishing 2nd in the 2023 Giro, holding the race lead until the penultimate stage.
“In the past, I’ve come here and known exactly where I’m at and there’s been a minimum standard every day,” he said during Tour 2024. “I can still do that, meet minimum expectation, but how I feel doing it, is just so up and down at the minute.”
For his part, Pidcock spoke to Het Laatste Nieuws at last October's Tour of Britain, before his stage 6 crash, and said the dynamic within Ineos Grenadiers had been distracting him from reaching peak performance in races.
Dan Bigham engineer, Luke Rowe
Dan Bigham, who retired from track cycling last season after winning bronze in the individual pursuit at the Worlds, also departed his performance engineer role at Ineos Grenadiers. He now heads up a performance unit within Red Bull-Bora-hansgrohe. He too was critical of Ineos Grenadiers as he was leaving.
“It’s more just how I see performance,” he said of why he was exiting. “How I want to do performance is not particularly aligned with how Ineos wanted to go about it. I wanted more autonomy, more ability to action my ideas. And I wasn’t really getting that at Ineos.
“I feel that a lot of performance we’re leaving on the table and that frustrates me because it’s clear as day we should be doing things a lot better. Let’s be honest, Ineos are not where they want to be, not where they need to be and the gap is not small.
“Dave (Brailsford) had a very clear vision and a way of actioning it and a plan in his head. Maybe to some degree maybe that’s been lacking. We know what it takes to win but how do you get there? What are the processes? That’s the bit lacking clarity.
“That’s the bit frustrating me as well because I feel like I’ve got a very clear idea on the energy outside equation, the drag and where we need to go and we were not committing to some of the things I felt could bring some fairly significant performance.”
Luke Rowe also left Ineos Grenadiers last season, cutting his contract short by a year, in favour of a sports director’s job at Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale. Though he was not as critical of the team as the others, he clearly believed it was falling well short of where it should be.
“It’s a million-dollar question really,” Rowe replied when asked by Eurosport about the issues in the team just before he left. “You can’t really sugarcoat it, it’s a high-budget team with some very well-paid riders, guys who are paid to win, and it’s just not happening. We’d be silly and naïve to suger-coat that.
“It’s time to look in the mirror and realise, we are under-performing, we’re not delivering to expectations. I don’t think it falls on one person’s shoulders. For a long period of time, the team was the best in the world by a distance, and that’s not being arrogant.
“To be at the top is one thing, to stay at the top is another. You’re either the hunted or you’re doing the hunting. We were hunted by a lot of teams for a long time and they were playing catch-up and now it’s role reversal and we’re on the back foot a bit and having to chase the top teams.”
