INEOS'S NEW LEADERS

The British superteam is on a road to reinvention and it’s these young talents who will carry its banner over the next decade, writes Chris Marshall-Bell

- Chris Marshall-Bell

There is a race before the actual races in cycling these days. It involves a frantic fight to secure the best young talent ahead of rivals, every WorldTour outfit conscious that teenagers and twentysomethings are winners not just of the future, but of today.

Ineos Grenadiers, the richest team around, are at the front of that contest, eager to be seen as the destination for riders. Tellingly, only DSM have more riders under the age of 26, 17 to Ineos’s 15. Seven of those are 22 and under, including cyclo-cross world champion Tom Pidcock.

This winter, they recruited five of those, and Dario Cioni, one of the team’s lead sports directors, admits that the environment has forced them into signing ever younger.

“The team has needed to sign some of these riders because otherwise, they’d have gone to other teams, and maybe we’d never get the chance to sign them again,” Cioni reasons.

Arguably Ineos needed that youth injection more than most. This year’s Tour de France leader Geraint Thomas will be 36 when the race rolls out of Copenhagen in July, MichaÅ‚ Kwiatkowski and Luke Rowe are past 30; Filippo Ganna is unquestionably the best in his discipline but is very much a specialist; and while Richard Carapaz, Tao Geoghegan Hart, Adam Yates, and Dani Martínez are all in their prime, it’s far from certain they can replicate the dominance the team enjoyed in the 2010s. The recent indefinite sidelining of the team’s most surefire hope for the future, Egan Bernal, through a terrible crash only serves to emphasise that this is a squad that had it not frantically signed young riders in the last couple of years could have found itself in real trouble.