One month until the Tour de France: can anybody challenge Ineos?
Movistar and Jumbo-Visma hope to upset the apple cart
Even though the Giro d’Italia had a surprise winner in Richard Carapaz, the first Grand Tour of the year isn’t getting rave reviews, with some citing Week 1 as too long and boring and others lamenting too few riders vying for the title. One analyst suggested that a lackluster Ineos performance, largely due to Egan Bernal’s absence from injury “completely undermined the notion that pro-cycling would be a far more interesting place were it not for the suffocating presence of a juggernaut team like Sky/Ineos.”
Well, the juggernaut is back in spades for the Tour de France, which kicks off on July 6 in Brussels.
Ineos will send its own version of the “Trident”, Movistar’s largely ineffective trio of heavy hitters last season. Bernal will be a super mountain domestique for four time champion Chris Froome and current title holder Geraint Thomas. At least this is the plan until Bernal proves stronger than both and then we get an awkward situation like last year when Thomas went better than Froome and eventually Sky had to put its weight behind the Welshman.
For good measure, Ineos will send Wout Poels, Kenny Elissonde, Michal Kwiatkowski and other IneosBots, which doesn’t sound half as good as SkyBots.
No doubt this will create another stranglehold, lock down, stifling . . . choose any phrase that conveys the domination we’ve come to expect over the last seven years (except 2014 when Froome crashed out) in cycling’s showpiece, the Tour de France. And if you disliked this smothering situation with Sky, you’ll loathe it under even-richer Ineos and keep on loathing it until there’s some kind of salary cap to level the playing field.
Can anybody stop the IneosBots in this year’s Tour de France? AG2R had moments when it took the fight to Sky in the 2017 edition, and last season Primož Roglič’s Jumbo-Visma (Lotto-Jumbo at that point) challenged Thomas and Froome’s team. Although Jumbo-Visma surely should have sent a stronger team to support Roglič in the Giro–just one bit of absurdity for the Dutch team in Italy–perhaps black and yellow Jumbo-Visma can stand against the black and red of Ineos.
Penciled in for Jumbo-Visma right now are Steven Kruijswijk, fifth in last year’s edition; George Bennett; Robert Gesink, who missed the Giro through injury; and Roglič himself, fresh from the Giro podium after missing the 2018 Tour podium by one spot to Froome, which gave Sky two chaps on the final steps in Paris, the second time the team accomplished that.
A more obvious choice is Movistar, which is putting the old Trident band back together for what might be its last Tour. Alejandro Valverde, Mikel Landa and Nairo Quintana are scheduled to receive help from Marc Soler, Giro rider Andrey Amador and Winner Anacona. Looks pretty solid. But Carapaz’s Giro victory might have had the unintended consequence of unsettling the team’s stars, having set off a plethora of transfer rumours, with Carapaz seduced by the Dark Side, er, Ineos, Quintana flirting with Arkea-Samsic for some reason (or possibly joining UAE-Emirates), and Landa off to Bahrain-Merida. Movistar was the strongest team in Italy, can it mount a similar campaign in France?
