Let’s get this party started
Until this year, Team Sky/ineos were frequently accused of suffocating the big races with a robotic show of strength. But in 2020 we saw a new, exciting, fun Ineos – a style of racing that team boss Dave Brailsford says is here to stay
In the frenetic minutes after Tao Geoghegan Hart clinched the Giro d’italia, doing enough in the time-trial into Milan to take the pink jersey for the first time on the final day, the former Team Sky rider Bernhard Eisel spotted his old boss, Dave Brailsford, in the shadows of the Duomo.
Eisel, now working as a Eurosport presenter, was live on air when he intercepted the Team Ineos Grenadiers principal. ‘We have Dave B here now,’ said Eisel. ‘Would you have a second?’
Brailsford, clearly giddy with the excitement of what he’d just witnessed, gave Eisel a bear hug, ruffled his hair, then invited him to tell a story about Geoghegan Hart’s initiation at Team
Sky as a 20-year-old stagiaire in 2015.
Back then Eisel was in his final year with the team and the story involved shoes – Eisel was understandably reluctant to go into the details on live television (‘He put me to bed and took my shoes off,’ was all he would reveal).
But Brailsford’s reaction spoke volumes about the mood of a man who has been known to celebrate victory at the Tour de France by slipping away from the party for a solitary bike ride up and down the Champs-elysées. If he was already high on his team’s seven stage wins, Brailsford was now in a state of euphoria. He needed only the slightest prompt from Eisel to begin a gushing commentary on a remarkable three weeks for Ineos Grenadiers. ‘Filippo [Ganna] set the scene. Coming here in the rainbow bands, first day, got the TT sorted, got the pink jersey. Then massive disappointment – Geraint [Thomas] going home. Then when Filippo won that road stage in the hills it was an incredible performance, and that inspired everybody. And we thought, you know what guys, let’s open the race up, race for stages, give everybody an opportunity.’
And that’s what happened: Ganna won two more TTS, Geoghegan Hart won two stages and Jhonatan Narváez one. Salvatore Puccio, Rohan Dennis and Jonathan Castroviejo all had second places. Ben Swift had three top fives.
‘What I liked about this,’ Brailsford continued to Eisel, ‘is that we’ve done the train, we’ve done the defensive style of riding, and won a lot doing that, but it’s not as much fun, really, compared to this, is it? All the guys here have raced. At the end of the day, sport is about racing, it’s about emotion and the exhilarating moments of racing, and that’s what we want to be. We’re Grenadiers now.’
Don’t stop me now
From Milan, Brailsford went to the Vuelta a España, where Richard Carapaz put up a mighty challenge to finish up second, and in doing so put considerable gloss on a poor team performance. From an Ineos Grenadiers perspective there wasn’t much exhilaration in Spain.
Yet that didn’t dampen Brailsford’s mood, or alter his determination to take his team in a new direction, because
‘Winning was the goal and there was a process behind it. But the experience we’ve just had at the Giro, it’s about style and the way you win’
when we speak in late November he still appears to be buzzing from the Giro.
Brailsford chuckles when reminded of the interview with Eisel. But he insists that it is to be taken not only seriously, but literally. From a team that made its reputation, and won seven Tours de France, by riding defensively in a block on the front and choking the life out of races, a ‘pivot’ is on the cards for 2021.
‘I think we’ve got to use this, we’ve got to capitalise on this, and more fool us if we don’t capture this moment and pivot,’ Brailsford says. ‘We’re making a conscious effort now to say, actually, we’ve done winning as our main goal – certainly from my perspective.
‘Winning was the goal and there was a process behind it. But the experience we’ve just had at the Giro, it’s about style and the way you win. Winning is important, I’m not saying we don’t have to win, but I think a performance, not just performing, is different. The style of racing is massively important. It’s something that has given everyone so much pleasure on our team it would be hard to turn our backs on that. We want to embrace it.’
How easy will it be to pivot, though? ‘It’s not a revolution,’ Brailsford corrects himself slightly. ‘It’s an evolution.’
One factor is clearly the experience at the Giro, with a collective performance Brailsford describes as ‘effervescent’. But it is not the only factor. Another is a wider phenomenon in the sport: the sudden flowering of young talents such as Geoghegan Hart (25), second-placed Jai Hindley (24), Tour de France winner Tadej Pogačar (22), Remco Evenepoel (20), Marc Hirschi (22), João Almeida (22) and Ganna (24), not to forget Ineos’s 2019 Tour winner, Egan Bernal (23).
‘In the last 10 years Geraint and Chris learned how to shoulder responsibility and pressure, and learned how to ride a race meticulously with a group of riders to support them,’ says Brailsford. ‘But now we have these young guys.
‘Geraint or Chris wouldn’t have been able to do that at 22 or 23 – to walk into our team bus and see their team, some of the best riders in the world, who are all there for you. And when all the world expects you to win, that’s a tough thing.’
It’s a pressure and a responsibility that, Brailsford suggests, can sit more easily on the shoulders of a 30-year-old than a 23-year-old. ‘I think now it’s more appropriate for the younger generation that we have to race more openly and to go out there and be bike racers first. We want them to race to win, but it’s about being racers rather than winners – that’s where we’re trying to go next.’
The French connection
You can’t help but wonder how much this philosophy, or this ambition, has been influenced not only by the Giro but also by the Tour de France. Bernal went as defending champion before withdrawing with a back injury that is still troubling him. But as well as the injury, Brailsford acknowledged that the pressure on Bernal, Colombia’s first Tour winner, did not help.
With Bernal out, the Ineos team was reborn with Carapaz as its spearhead. While Carapaz seemed to be on the attack every time the road went uphill, it was Stage 18, from Méribel to La Roche-sur-foron, that seemed to be a significant, galvanising moment.
It wasn’t just the stage win, it was the manner of it – a one-two, with Michał Kwiatkowski and Carapaz coming to the finish together. It was emotional, allowing the whole team to pay tribute to Nicolas Portal, their sports director who died in February aged just 40. And it seemed to act as a spark, igniting a flame that Brailsford thinks was still burning when the team arrived in Italy.
‘I felt that when the Tour didn’t work out as we’d wanted it to, there was a subtle shift in mindset to, “OK, let’s get out there to race.” It was contagious, and I would say the Carapaz and Kwiato performance at the Tour was inspiring. Then [at the Giro] Ganna’s road stage win was inspiring. And then the attitude became: let’s have some fun.
‘Tao eked his way through the race. He quietly managed himself while the other guys were all performing well, getting in breaks every day. Salva was second, Castro was second.
They couldn’t remember the last time they had tried to win a stage.
‘There was an effervescent mood, and that mood in the bus at the Giro went into the Vuelta. Richard, dare I say it, with a couple of other riders in form, with a bit more support in the mountains, may have pulled it off. But what I liked was that you’ve never seen anybody so happy with his own performance. He was proud. He raced every day and he was up for it every day. It was a joy to see. And it reminded us, the entire team, what racing is all about.’
Born racer
Hearing Brailsford return so often to Carapaz, it’s tempting to conclude that the Ecuadorian’s attitude, aggression and sheer dynamism has been as important as the Giro success in setting Brailsford on this new path.
‘He seems like quite a quiet, meek character, but you start to engage with him, chat to him, he’s quite an
‘I felt that when the Tour didn’t work out as we’d wanted it to there was a subtle shift in mindset to, “OK, let’s get out there to race”’
unbelievable guy,’ says Brailsford of Carapaz. ‘He’s got this brilliant attitude, one of the best attitudes I’ve come across. Not arrogant but self-assured. And he loves racing his bike. That’s extremely contagious.’
Carapaz’s effect – the Carapaz contagion, we might call it, with the qualifier that it’s a benign contagion – has been profound and could change the way the team approaches next year’s Tour de France. It owes rather a lot to the type of rider he is, which isn’t a leader in the mould of Froome or Bradley Wiggins. Backing him up could be one, two or three Grand Tour winners – Bernal, Thomas and Geoghegan Hart: an ensemble rather than a virtuoso.
Brailsford says the Carapaz contagion and Giro experience have allowed him to reconnect with his own roots.
‘It feels like I’ve been transported back to when I first left home, when I left Wales, because this year I’ve been thinking, what on earth pulled me away from home, family, long-term girlfriend, job: what was the pull?
‘When I thought back, a lot of it was the racing, and how exciting it was. The pros were cool guys. You know, you’d watch the World Championships and wait for the big riders to make their move late in the race and it was, like, wow! I was so respectful of their training and the sacrifices they made. That’s what pulled me out of Wales to France
– I wanted to be one of them.
‘That all came flooding back for me with these guys this year.’
When boos turn to cheers
It has been a year of the unfamiliar. An unfamiliar calendar, with races at unfamiliar times, and unfamiliar names winning. For Brailsford, too, there was the unfamiliarity of popularity.
One Italian journalist, one of Brailsford’s fiercest critics, went to see Brailsford at the conclusion to the Giro. ‘He said, “I never thought I’d say this but
I loved the way your team raced at this Giro. How on earth you were involved with it, I don’t know.”’
Brailsford laughs and continues, ‘He was one of these people who has told me, “You damaged this sport, you killed this sport,” but it was interesting to see how people responded to the team, especially at the Giro. The fans’ reaction and the media’s reaction – partly it was because people loved Tao, they loved Ganna – was something we haven’t experienced. It was night and day to what we usually get.
‘I’m not going to carry on forever,’ Brailsford adds. ‘I’ll be stepping away at some point soon, and I’d like to leave a team that I’d have loved to be part of when I was 19 and left home. And it’s maybe not the team we’ve been.’
This is all just talk, of course. There was a moment at the Vuelta, when Carapaz wore the race leader’s red jersey, when the Ineos Grenadiers rode en masse on the front, controlling the race in the familiar way.
There is also the reality that Brailsford’s team were found wanting when they tried to compete with JumboVisma in 2020. Trying a new way of riding instead of controlling the race, and steamrolling the opposition – well, is it a convenient way of avoiding going toeto-toe with the mighty Jumbo-visma?
‘You’ve got to be flexible,’ Brailsford says. ‘At times you have to defend and I’m not sure there are a million and one ways of doing that. But you’ve also got to be willing to put riders in breaks. A bit like Movistar, who are always prepared to do that.’
Ineos as the new Movistar? It sounds far-fetched, yet Brailsford is adamant that in approach, outlook and even in appearance – staff will no longer be dressed in uniforms, he says; it will no longer be all about the team; individuality will be encouraged – they will be different in 2021.
‘Without a doubt this year has altered my thinking,’ he says. ‘At the Tour we went from defending champions to challengers up against a very strong Jumbo-visma. We had to think about how we were going to race. But it was liberating, because it can become – and maybe had become for us – about not losing rather than having the freedom to try to win.’ Richard Moore is a cycling journalist and author, former racer and co-founder of The Cycling Podcast
‘I’ll be stepping away at some point soon, and I’d like to leave a team that I’d have loved to be part of when I was 19 and left home. And it’s maybe not the team we’ve been’