When Netcompany joined Ineos as title sponsors of the British WorldTour team just a couple of months ago, it came with a stated ambition of winning the Tour de France within the next five years. 18 stages into the first edition of this new era, and the AI systems powering this new era for the team may well be forced into some recalculations.
Ineos have had a rotten Tour so far, and time is rapidly running out to salvage anything from it.
The problems started well before the race began in Barcelona three weeks ago as the team’s leader, Oscar Onley, was sidelined through injury. With Carlos Rodríguez surprisingly non-selected and Kévin Vauquelin short of his top form, the GC leadership trio that was spoken about earlier in the year was non-existent.
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Instead, Ineos would chase stages, calling in their GC duo from the Giro d’Italia, Egan Bernal and Thymen Arensman, with Dorion Godon to try his hand in the sprints and Vauquelin to get up the road just about everywhere else. Add in the horsepower of Filippo Ganna and Josh Tarling, the experience of Michal Kwiatkowski, and the underlying quality of Tobias Foss, and there was no reason to be pessimistic.
However, the opening team time trial was thrown off by a puncture, and things have hardly improved from there – in fact, punctures have been a recurring theme. Filippo Ganna’s fifth place on stage 9 is Ineos’ best individual result of the race so far, and Arensman’s farcical late-show to the stage 16 time trial seemed to say something about their Tour as a whole.
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“Even when I was a rider, I had some tough moments, but I wasn’t the type to just go home and wallow in my own sorrow and cry about it,” Geraint Thomas, the team’s Director of Racing told Cyclingnews in Voiron at the start of stage 18.
“You get up and you get a plan together and you go again.”
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He was speaking in the context of this Tour but also the season as a whole.
After he did so, Bernal and Arensman made the break but would go on to finish in 47th and 48th place. That leaves three stages, with a double-header up at Alpe d’Huez followed by the punchy finale in Paris on Sunday.
“The boys are still upbeat and positive and looking to get after it,” Thomas said. “We started on the back foot, and you’re up against it anyway at the Tour when you’re trying to go for stages, and you know there are only a few days when the breakaway is going to succeed anyway.
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“It’s tough when you don’t have an out-and-out sprinter, and you have Pogačar going for these mountain days. But all the boys are motivated, they want to try and get something for themselves and for the team. They’re ready to go after it and that’s all you can ask for really.”
(Image credit: Getty Images)
Thomas has been putting on this sort of brave face for many days now at this Tour de France, and while he knows it’s been a rough run, he insists the team is moving in the right direction when you zoom out.
“For me, you can see it as like pressure and like ‘what if we don’t do this or that’, but we’re privileged to be involved in this sport. It’s sport at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter, you know, we’re in the real world. We’re super lucky to be in this position, we’re ambitious, and we want to keep pushing forward.
“If anything, this spurs us on to continue to improve because we have improved a lot since last year. Obviously this Tour has been a bit of a struggle at times, but I think when you look back at the season as whole, we’re definitely moving in the right direction. There are a lot of positives, it’s exciting. I just want to keep going now.”
There’s a sense that Thomas is finding his stride now, nearly seven months after stepping into this management role following the conclusion of his illustrious racing career.
“Since I’ve started I’ve been across a lot of things, just to get an understanding of how the team works. It’s all part of the process, and if I was to go back, I’d still do that because you still need that overview,” he said.
“But now I can start to zone in, prioritise things, and spend more time on certain aspects. I think things will be better that way.”
Whether Thomas can help steer Netcompany Ineos back towards somewhere approaching the sort of glories they enjoyed when he was a rider remains to be seen. In the meantime, a bad Tour can become a good Tour in a flash, so it’s not over until it’s over.
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