Ned Boulting
and Ineos’s strategy change
If you live in Dubai, and happen to be a billionaire property magnate, chances are you almost certainly want to own the tallest skyscraper of them all. It goes, literally, with the territory. Almost the entire point in the grotesque architectural race to the clouds is to get there first. There is a rapidly diminishing scale of reward in having the second biggest building. After all, K2 might be the hipster’s choice of a very high Himalayan peak. But it ain’t Mount Everest, is it? It’s not The Biggest.
Put it another way, you could own 150 of the tallest skyscrapers in Dubai, which, if stacked up one on top of the other would stretch halfway to the moon, but it would matter not a jot if the Burj Khalifa still towered over the tallest towers in your arsenal. No one would give yours a second look, as their eyes followed the sharp lines of the former tallest building in the world skywards (it lost its title in 2009 to Taipei 101, which must be a body blow to its sense of self-importance).
What has this got to do with cycling, as you are probably tired of asking when reading my columns. Well, plenty. Specifically, this principle of skyscraperenvy relates to Team Ineos and its Tour de France selection dilemmas. It is unique in the WorldTour by having a grand total of four Grand Tour winners on its roster. Most teams can’t muster one. Ineos has greedily assembled so many that there simply aren’t enough currently riding to be spread equitably around the peloton. And it even gave one away (Chris Froome) because he was a bit broken and it couldn’t find a use for him any longer.
But it’s not just Richard Carapaz (Giro 2019), Geraint Thomas (Tour de France 2018), Egan Bernal (Tour de France 2019) and Tao Geoghegan Hart (Giro 2020) who it has at its disposal. It also boasts potential Grand Tourwinning talent in the shapes of Pavel Sivakov, Adam Yates, Iván Sosa and, yes, Tom Pidcock. And, in Richie Porte, it has added the rider who finished third at last year’s Tour de France, for good measure. So far, so awe inspiring. Yet, there are two riders it doesn’t have: Primož Roglic and Tadej Pogacar, winners of last year’s Tour de France and Vuelta. These riders are to Team Ineos a pair of mighty Burj Khalifas, standing a fair few metres taller than its assembly of General Classification (GC) towers. What good does it do you if, on paper, you have truly outstanding talent, but it’s not quite the best? The Tour de France course favours the Slovenians too this year, especially Roglic with his time-trialling ability on the flat.
Answering this conundrum could prove to be the making of Team Ineos as a racing force, as it will potentially require a radical overhaul of its tactics. For the first time since it started winning the race in 2012, it will almost certainly go to the Tour de France without one of the out-and-out favourites in its ranks. This will necessitate Ineos approaching every day with a totally different mindset. It will have to keep a collection of riders high and threatening in the GC, and it will have to deploy that threat, over and over again. It will have to become a really effective version of Movistar; the Movistar that Movistar always wanted to be. Or better still, it will need to become Deceuninck Quick-Step in a one-day race, but adhere to the same devastatingly effective tactics it deploys over the three weeks of a Grand Tour. It will have to swarm all over the opposition, picking at them like big cats might harry a wildebeest. It’s probably incontestable that individually Kasper Asgreen, Zdenek Štybar or Florian Sénéchal are actually better than Mathieu van der Poel. But collectively they are. And that is how he was beaten in the recent E3 semi-Classic.
These conclusions are drawn on the scant evidence of a handful of early-season stage races, and not much more. If Ineos adopts those tactics at the Tour, everything would change. If it makes it work for them, it might precipitate a welcome rethinking of the whole racing dynamic in the peloton. The days of the tall poppies might, after all, be numbered.