{"id":466271,"date":"2026-03-09T17:23:09","date_gmt":"2026-03-09T17:23:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/466271\/"},"modified":"2026-03-09T17:23:09","modified_gmt":"2026-03-09T17:23:09","slug":"its-a-desperate-move-by-the-ineos-grenadiers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/466271\/","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s a desperate move by the INEOS Grenadiers"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

Beween altitude camps and the Criterium du Dauphin\u00e9, most Tour de France contenders arrived to the start already with almost two months straight away from home last summer, as an example. Then the demands of the race – where media duties heavily weight on the stars – make for a consistent search for as much recovery as possible, physical and mental.<\/p>\n

This takes a big toll on the riders, specially those at the top. “What did Pogacar say at the Tour de France? He\u2019s not doing the Vuelta, and there was talk of one word: burnout. They\u2019re racing 80 days a year \u2013 in my day we raced 120. But there\u2019s no place to hide now. I can totally understand it,” Smith adds.<\/p>\n

“The teams are abusing these athletes, it\u2019s abuse. They\u2019re looking at riders as Formula One cars. Any tweaks they can do to help performance, they\u2019ll do it irreverent of whether the car crashes, is it going to save the life of the driver? They\u2019re probably not thinking about that. They\u2019re just thinking about performance and speeds”.<\/p>\n

Oscar Onley’s departure from Picnic PostNL was premature<\/p>\n

In a separate point, there is the market race, in which teams now have to play years ahead. The signing of riders straight from the juniors is no longer crossing a line; and the signing of under-23 riders straight into a millionaire pro contract is also not unheard of. There has never been so much money in the sport, which is being used by the top teams to make dramatic moves.<\/p>\n

One such as INEOS Grenadiers’ signing of Oscar Onley this winter, buying out his existing contract with Team Picnic PostNL and reportedly paying a sum of several million euros<\/a>. This sees him now as a new British leader in a British team.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was led to believe that this was so late in the day this happened that Oscar\u2019s flight to the Tour Down Under was already paid for, that\u2019s how late it went. Okay, it\u2019s big money. But I think it\u2019s a desperate move by the INEOS Grenadiers, because they\u2019re under severe pressure to deliver in grand tours, especially at the Tour de France. If the figures I\u2019ve seen published are true, it\u2019s a huge amount of money to buy a rider out of their contract”.<\/p>\n

This is because the British team no longer had someone able to fight for a top result in a Grand Tour, whilst most riders capable of doing so are under long-term contracts. It is hard to obtain new leaders, but with Onley growing out of the more modest Picnic PostNL, there was space to buy his contract.<\/p>\n

But that won’t come without its downsides: \u201cPressure. Pressure\u2019s the word. If I was giving him a bit of advice before he made that move, I\u2019d have suggested that he should stay at Picnic-PostNL. And the team could have invested in two or three riders, which they did with James Knox”.<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel as if Picnic-PostNL developed him and it\u2019s a group he enjoyed being part of, more of a family team who were there to support him, asking him to do the best he can”. At INEOS, certainly the ambitions are higher, but so is the potential to achieve better results with a supporting team that is significantly improved.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd now he\u2019s been taken out of that environment, to an environment where it\u2019s \u2018we have to deliver\u2019. And there\u2019ll be huge pressure on him to deliver a big performance. Can he do it? I hope he does. But he\u2019s up against some anomalies in cycling, probably the best ever era of grand tour riders”.<\/p>\n

But the ambitions are sky-high, and Onley is a long-term investment for the team. \u201cCan Oscar Onley beat Pogacar, Vingegaard, and Evenepoel? That\u2019s the big question,” he adds. “I think he\u2019s better looking at a Giro or a Vuelta if he wants to win a grand tour for them. And the big thing he\u2019ll have, which I don\u2019t think he would have had with Picnic, is the pressure.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Beween altitude camps and the Criterium du Dauphin\u00e9, most Tour de France contenders arrived to the start…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":466272,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[150114,4985,52999,37460,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-466271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cycling","tag-brian-smith","tag-cycling","tag-ineos-grenadiers","tag-oscar-onley","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=466271"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466271\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/466272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=466271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=466271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=466271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}