ANALYSIS: HOW TO BEAT INEOS
Ineos have won the Tour six times and will start this year’s race with three race favourites. So how do you take on the decade’s most dominant team?
They’ve won six of the past seven Tours, but can rivals get the better of the British team?
How to beat Ineos? It’s a question that none of their rivals have managed to answer yet. It’s not by luck that the squad formerly known as Sky has won six of the last seven Tours de France. Team Ineos has consistently featured the best rider in the race leading its general classification charge, with the best supporting cast in the sport. Four-time winner Chris Froome’s versatility, a trait the defending champion Geraint Thomas shares, allows Ineos to gain time on rivals in both the time trials and the mountains, before relying on a powerful cast of domestiques to choke out any challenges from rivals. Barring a crash, like the one that left the door open for Vincenzo Nibali to win the Tour in 2014, Sky, now Ineos, has been unbeatable in July since 2012.
So far, that is. Bernard Hinault was unbeatable as well, for a time. So was Miguel Indurain. Even Eddy Merckx stopped winning bike races eventually. Despite the dominance of Team Sky, recent years have seen chinks in the armour. Chris Froome appeared vulnerable at times during the 2017 Tour. Although Thomas took up the slack at the 2018 race, the Welshman is no up-and-comer just hitting his stride—he’s only one year younger than Froome, who would join Cadel Evans as the oldest rider to win the Tour since the 1920s if he can pull it off this summer. Ineos does have youngsters waiting in the wings, like the ascendant Egan Bernal, but they are untested and inexperienced. In short, Ineos’s rivals should keep hunting for answers to that question, hard as it may be. Sooner or later, someone will find it.
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A solution to the Team Ineos problem may lie in the form of a grand alliance of GC rivals. Ineos’s stable of war horse domestiques is famously formidable, but a never-ending volley of attacks from other contenders could conceivably see one or two lucky moves stick - if those contenders could just coordinate their actions.
That’s easier said than done, of course. Race politics are complex. Different teams have different goals. Pacts are made all the time on the road, but sustained commitments to an alliance of attackers are hard to come by.
“Everyone at the Tour de France is afraid to lose even a placing,” says EF Education First sports director Charly Wegelius. “That amplifies that defensiveness of people’s decision-making.”
In other words, a team with a rider sitting eighth overall will often chip in to help Ineos chase down a move if the rider in ninth is up the road – that can make it even harder for attacks to stick.
“I can say, ‘Let’s give up that eighth place and not work now’,” says Sunweb sports director Aike Visbeek. “But if that is the main goal for a team, and their sponsor is happy with that, then who am I to judge that?”
For an alliance to work, teams have to agree on who is a friend or foe on the road. Even then, when the goal of toppling Ineos is shared, directors have little reason to believe that their counterparts on rival teams will follow through based solely on a wink and nod from the team car. As powerful as a coalition of riders like Tom Dumoulin, Nairo Quintana and Richie Porte might be if they worked together, it would be difficult to blame the individual riders and teams if they began to wondering how to take advantage of the situation, for example, by skipping pulls in a break. “I wouldn’t trust [other directors],” Wegelius says. “And if you hesitate a bit, and another team does it [the work] for you, that’s even better.”
Those political and strategic challenges are great, but so is the potential reward, as Robert Millar discovered to his cost at the 1985 Vuelta a España when his Spanish rivals decided to put their differences aside to knock him out of the race lead.
It will take trust between rivals to conspire against Ineos. There are opportunities to build that trust in the race’s early stages; it could be there that Dumoulin and company prove to each other they’re willing to follow through on an alliance, unspoken or otherwise. Perhaps, if the non-Ineos GC hopefuls commit to attacking on the lumpy fifth or eighth stages – and don’t chase each other’s moves – they’ll be more comfortable doing it again when it comes to the high mountains.
Three areas stand out as great places to look, three potential pathways to victory for the Dumoulins and the Quintanas. Each comes with serious challenges of its own, but all three seem possible.
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If Ineos’s challengers are to have any hope, they’ll need to make the most of every available opportunity. That means staying aggressive regardless of the terrain.
There’s a reason most GC challenges are mounted on steep gradients or against the clock, where an edge in watts per kilo really stands out. But flat stages can still be treacherous, and Ineos can’t expect to police all of the many hundreds of flat or rolling kilometres that run between Brussels and Paris. If they’re smart, Sunweb, Movistar, et al will test Froome and Thomas at every hint of a crosswind, every tricky corner, every punchy ascent.
“If you wait till the mountain stages to hit them, they’ll put their big engines to work and then they’re hard to beat,” Visbeek says. “You have to hit them where they are weak, and that is normally more in the flat stages.”
This, too, is easier said than done. Froome has proven dangerous on flat stages in the past. He used crosswinds to put time into Nairo Quintana in 2015, before making more crosswind gains in 2016. But the Ineos advantage is far less obvious on the flat stages, and chance plays a greater role in forcing splits. If Ineos’s challengers stay attentive, they might be able to catch them out of position - not even Froome and Thomas spend the entire Tour at the very front of the peloton.
Should rivals notice either of the team’s leaders midway down the bunch as the wind picks up, or as the peloton approaches a tricky stretch of road, they can’t hold back. As difficult as it is to force a split it is more than possible; it just takes a bit of gall and a lot of luck.
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Rivals can also look to force splits within Ineos itself. As outwardly committed as Froome, Thomas, Bernal, and the rest are to toeing the team line, there’s no guarantee things will remain cordial should enough pressure be applied.
The challenge here is clear. Ineos has successfully juggled the ambitions of multiple superstar talents for years. For all the coverage surrounding potential drama between Bradley Wiggins and Froome, the pair managed to go one-two at the 2012 Tour, though not without friction. Six years later, Thomas played the loyal domestique in his comments to the media throughout the Tour right up until it was clear that he was Sky’s leader and Froome graciously acquiesced. But Froome won’t have a Giro victory to fall back on this summer, as he did last year. Will he really go down quietly if Thomas pulls ahead mid-race? As for Thomas, he has proven his loyalty as a lieutenant for years - but now he’s the reigning champ. And don’t forget Bernal. He was supposed to lead the team at the Giro and has exceeded expectations at almost every race he has done.
The trick here is to try to amplify any potential intra-team clashes by splitting up Ineos’s stars whenever possible. That means pushing the pace on the steep stuff if Thomas – even if it’s just Thomas alone – starts to struggle. It means hammering the pace on the flat stages if the diminutive Bernal looks wobbly in the crosswinds. And most of all, it means staying focused on the four-time winner, Froome.
Thomas and Bernal seem more likely to remain loyal to the team’s objectives if things go haywire. Froome, who is racing for a fifth Tour title as he also races Father Time at the age 34, might not want to play domestique to his team-mates, even if he does lose time to them.
“If you want to beat Sky you have to ride to win,” says Visbeek.
If every other team really does roll into the Tour thinking that it’s possible to triumph this year, and they prepare to race accordingly so, they might stand a chance of toppling Team Ineos’s longstanding reign in France. It’s not easy to have that belief, but it is worth trying.
“Nothing ever lasts for ever,” Wegelius says. “Even Rome crumbled. Kind of.”