Ethan Hayter, the British road race champion, has joined the growing ranks of Ineos Grenadiers riders to speak against the team, saying he did not know what was going on inside it and was looking forward to moving to pastures new.
He joins Geraint Thomas and Tom Pidcock in questioning management, while departing rider Luke Rowe was critical of the team's under performance. The outgoing Ineos Grenadiers performance engineer, Dan Bigham, said the team was not being managed properly.
After Rod Ellingworth exited his post as deputy team principal last year, Scott Drawer became performance director; one of several management changes. In July, eyebrows were raised when director of racing, Steve Cummings, was left at home during the Tour de France, a situation that persisted through the second half of the season.
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Hayter has just finished representing Great Britain at the World Track Championships in Denmark and is moving on from Ineos Grenadiers to join Soudal QuickStep, saying this past year was "tricky" for him at the British team.
“It’s going to be nice,” he said of joining Soudal QuickStep after the Worlds, where he won silver in the team pursuit. “I’ve had five years at Ineos, and I think it’s time for a change.
"It’s exciting, the team really has passion for racing and I’m excited to get started," he said, before responding when asked why Ineos Grenadiers was having issues in recent years.
“I don’t know what’s really going on to be honest. I’ve not had… Yeah, I’ve had a tricky year working with them. And once I was leaving, it was even trickier. I don’t know. I wish them all the best for next year, but they could do with a couple of changes.”
Tom Pidcock, Geraint Thomas
The weekend before last, Tom Pidcock complained of being "deselected" for Il Lombardia. Geraint Thomas weighed in and questioned how the team and its "highest paid" rider had reached the point where Pidcock was omitted from a key race selection for "management", rather than "performance", reasons.
Thomas also suggested the "people around" Pidcock, he suspected, did not help his situation in the team. And Pidcock made it clear he was shocked to be dropped for Il Lombardia, especially when he was going so well.
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 this 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 the 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 Giro just last year and holding the race lead until the penultimate stage.
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“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 the Tour. “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 the Tour of Britain, before his stage 6 crash, and said the dynamic within his team was distracting him from reaching peak performance in races.
“Yes, it’s true that there are a number of things within the team that I have to deal with at the moment. And to be honest, they don’t help me to perform optimally,” he said.
“I have to think about a lot more than just performance-related things at the moment. And that means that the focus on the things that are really important, namely racing, is not ideal.”
Asked if the problems were about the structure of the team he replied: “I think I’d better not say anything more about this.” And when he was put to him he might leave, he said: “I have a contract until the end of 2027. I can’t say more.”
Dan Bigham engineer, Luke Rowe
Bigham, who has just retired from track cycling after winning bronze in the individual pursuit at the Worlds, is departing his performance engineer role at Ineos Grenadiers. He is leaving to head 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 has also just left Ineos Grenadiers, 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."
