STRENGTH & DEPTH

For the first time Ineos Grenadiers are taking three Grand Tour winners to the Tour de France. CW asks, despite having won seven of the last 11 Tours, is this the British squad’s strongest Tour team ever?

- Vern Pitt

If the Tour de France was a computer game, Sir Dave Brailsford would be in possession of the cheat codes. Or at least one of them: the one that comes with having Britain’s richest man as your sponsor – unlimited funds.

The result is that, yet again, the Ineos Grenadiers go into the world’s biggest annual sporting event with the best team. Their eight-man squad boasts a previous Tour winner plus two recent winners of the Giro d’Italia to comprise three Grand Tour winners in total.

These aren’t yesterday’s men, either. Geraint Thomas, Tour champ in 2018, was third overall in the Critérium du Dauphiné. Richard Carapaz, Giro victor in 2019, won the Tour de Suisse. Tao Geoghegan Hart, the winner of the 2020 Giro, finished 10th overall in the Dauphiné in support of Thomas and Richie Porte. That Aussie veteran may be Ineos’s joker in the pack but he’s got the best form of the lot: a career-best third overall in the Tour last season, backed up by his recent overall victory at the 2021 Dauphiné.

“I think it’s the strongest team we’ve ever had,” says Gabriel Rasch, Ineos’s lead directeur sportif for the Tour. For a team that has taken seven yellow jerseys with four different riders over nine years, that’s quite a statement.