Poor tactics and lack of risk-taking sum up how it has gone badly wrong for Dave Brailsford’s Ineos Grenadiers
In sport, failure can be relative. If Team Ineos were to conclude their 2021 season on Sunday, when the Tour de
France ends in
Paris, they would be entitled to look back with some pride at a string of stage race wins in May and June that included the Giro d’Italia and the Tours of Romandie, Switzerland and
Catalonia, and the Criterium du Dauphiné, the prime warm-up race for the Tour de France. Dave Brailsford’s team dominated those races, taking the Giro in straightforward style and scoring a 1-2-3 at Catalonia.
The problem is that in modern-day cycling, success or failure relates largely to one single event: the Tour de France. It has been that way since the sport globalised in the mid-1980s, and audiences and sponsors began to devote disproportionate attention to one race, the one that circumnavigates France in July. That has been to the detriment of the rest of the cycling calendar – imagine if
Tennis players were judged only on how they performed at
Wimbledon – but argue it all you want, that’s how the sport has been for almost 40 years.