Ellingworth: ‘Ineos has a different edge to when I left’
British superteam’s new director of racing tells Vern Pitt why he left Bahrain-mclaren
Ex-bahrain-mclaren boss Rod Ellingworth has said he wouldn’t have returned to Ineos Grenadiers, the squad he spent 10 years with while it was Sky, if the team had remained the same.
Elingworth rejoined the team last month as director of racing after just a season and a half at Bahrain-mclaren.
Speaking to Cycling Weekly, the British coach said: “I wouldn’t have gone back to this team if it had just been as it was when I left. It has a different edge to it at the minute, it’s got a new direction. I feel like I’m challenged every day.”
Ellingworth left Sky just as Ineos came on board as main sponsor in 2019. Later that year it was confirmed he was joining Bahrainmclaren as team principal, the first time he’d stepped into the top job.
The Brit was instrumental in restructuring the team’s operations and bringing on board new signings including Mikel Landa, with whom he’d worked during his time at Sky in 2016 and 2017, and Mark Cavendish, whom Ellingworth has known since the Manxman’s time on the British Cycling Academy Programme.
The truncated 2020 season brought victories in the Saudi Tour, Parisnice and the Giro d’italia. However, the pandemic caused difficulties for the team’s parent companies and management and riders deferred 75 per cent of their pay while the supercar manufacturing sponsor laid off 25 per cent of its workforce.
In August Mclaren announced it would be leaving the sport at the end of the season. The team’s managing director John Allert, who was instrumental in convincing Ellingworth to join the team in 2019, would later decide to leave at the end of the year.
“The whole reason for me to go there was because of Mclaren and John Allert,” said Ellingworth. “That was the exciting part, because I felt like that was the performance side. Bringing Mclaren into our sport felt like, wow, that’s something to be able to say you’ve done. I love this sport, and thinking of bringing a huge brand like that into the sport and helping them to manoeuvre could have been quite interesting – that was the main drive for going [in the first place].”
He added: “What I went into wasn’t going to be the same in 2021. I don’t think that has anything to do with my lack of work or lack of direction. I think it was purely, and obviously, totally out my hands.
“It wasn’t like the moment Mclaren stepped out, that was it, I was done. I certainly wasn’t. But over time, I thought actually I’m not sure this is the direction I want to go in.”
Ellingworth wasn’t in it just to run a
regular team, he wanted to do something different and bigger, so when the opportunity to return to Ineos came up he took it.
He was hired alongside Dan Hunt, Ineos’s new director of performance, as part of a restructure at the top of the squad. Ellingworth will look after the day-to-day racing and performance side while Hunt will be tasked with taking a longer-term strategic view.
That will allow team principal Dave Brailsford to “do bigger-picture stuff” though Ellingworth said he still expected him to be involved in the performance management as “he loves it”.
When asked if that had resulted in Brailsford setting some big and ambitious targets for the squad that will begin its first season without four-time Tour de France winner Chris Froome this year, Ellingworth said: “We have. I’ll let Dave be the person to put that out there though.”
He said it was a bigger challenge to keep winning now and the squad’s boosted roster, which for 2021 includes new signings Adam Yates, Dani Martínez
and young Brit Tom Pidcock, reflected that. “There’s a whole set of world-class GC riders out there now in other teams, and racing looks like it’s only getting better for it,” said Ellingworth.
“Now, every single race counts. Every single race, every rider is searching for that win. Every team is searching for the wins and looking at each other.”
He added that in the Grand Tours, Ineos are no longer the out and out favourites as over the past decade and that was “quite a new feeling for the team” that they were adapting to.