Re:
On the flip side, many of the most talented riders that Sky have brought in, as in those who had the most success pre-Sky, have not been able to improve or benefit from Sky's tutelage. Thomas Löfkvist, Edvald Boasson Hagen, Rigoberto Uran, and so on. That appears to be changing somewhat, but we should also be clear that Sky dropping both Uran AND Henao back to pull Wiggins when he lost his nerve descending in the 2013 Giro is one of the most obvious messages you could ever give that the team did not have faith in these riders; both were up in the top 10-15 overall and Uran eventually finished on the podium, losing 1'36" for no real reason there as Wiggins already had plenty of help. Obviously they let him off the leash once it became clear Wiggins was a lost cause in that race, but the message that the team didn't care about Uran or Henao, only Wiggins, has lingered on. Similarly, the way that Mikel Landa was abandoned to his fate while the rest of the team circled around Geraint Thomas after the motorbike crash in the 2017 Giro when, on the face of it, they were supposed to be co-leaders, left a taste in the mouth that Thomas was the "true" leader, and Landa was being fobbed off. Of course, in an echo of the 2013 Giro, Thomas later abandoned and Landa went on to salvage the race for the team, winning a stage and the GPM as he hit form in the final week. The wasting of the potential of riders like Leopold König, who went from 9th in the Vuelta and 7th in the Tour with precious little support to 6th in the Giro with Sky, before being slotted into a middle-of-the-train mountain helper role and was never heard from again, can also be pointed to. To an extent Beñat Intxausti too, though his case was almost entirely the product of mononucleosis and it's hard to criticise Sky/Ineos for his fall from prominence.
The thing with these are that while it certainly gives the outward impression that the team cares more about the British riders than its overseas names, it's difficult to ascertain how much is a myopic focus on British riders (remember, at the outset of the team they said their goal was to win the Tour with a British rider, and the British pseudo-national team status of Sky was a large part of their branding, much the same as Astana or Katyusha), and how much of it is a case of Dave Brailsford's loyalty to his charges, since Thomas and Wiggins are both 'his boys', so to speak, everything they've achieved has been under him, they're his pet projects, which Uran, Henao, Landa or Kwiatkowski never could have been (as an aside, I always wonder what might have happened had Telefonica jumped in earlier, or Caisse d'Epargne renewed, because Kwiatkowski was always meant to go to Abarcá in 2011, that was why he was with the then-Continental Caja Rural team which was a semi-feeder after stepping up from amateur), at least not going back as far. Because while Froome has become like a patron in time, at first the team also hamstrung him in favour of Wiggins (although they've got away with that in the long run, with Cobo's result being taken away, they did pay for this in 2011, though I thought it entirely reasonable that they were backing a proven commodity over a complete wildcard seeing as Froome's form took the team by surprise as much as anybody else). Perhaps riders they've brought in sufficiently young as pros since the road team began, like Moscon or Bernal, can be that in time, but until now, realistically the only riders who could justifiably be called Brailsford lifers are Britons.
But it's not like the 'being British' card has automatically worked either. I mean, at the outset of the team, when people were discussing who might actually be that British TDF-winning prospect they were thinking of, most people gravitated towards Peter Kennaugh, who had been 3rd in the Girobio and demonstrated some pretty decent climbing talent. However, while Kennaugh managed some useful wins here and there - Coppi e Bartali, Österreich Rundfahrt, a stage of the Dauphiné - he never kicked on to become a worthwhile threat, and never even really graduated above third in the mountain train. The team has not been the ideal development place for a number of British talents - Josh Edmondson of course saw his career completely hit the wall, and is now best known for talking about tramadol and the team's poor treatment of him; Alex Dowsett felt he ws being given no chance to develop and fled the nest early on, and there were of course a number of British journeyman pros who were taken on in the early years of the team who were realistically there to make up helper numbers and feed the British identity of the team. The team does still have a good line in British youngsters coming up through the system - Tao Geogeghan Hart, Christopher Lawless, Owain Doull, and if we stretch the definition to include the Irish (seeing as in Britain much of cycling's coverage relies on the Irish because of their longer heritage in the sport, with Stephen Roche, Sean Kelly, Phil Deignan and others major features in the punditry), Eddie Dunbar - but there's also an increasing number that are looking elsewhere for their development - Hugh Carthy, the Yates twins, Andy Fenn (though he did end up back at Sky for a while), Scott Thwaites, Adam Blythe, Harry Tanfield, Connor Swift and Dan Whitehouse all going through different routes. Their biggest mis-step was Jonathan Tiernan-Locke, because it seemed they were all doe-eyed at the prospect of a British talent to fill the hilly classics, at that time the one big gap on their résumé, and got caught out in their excitement not doing the requisite background checks.
And it's far too early for them to start prioritising Geogeghan Hart or Doull over their other young prospects they've signed, such as Bernal, Sivakov, Ivan Sosa or Kristoffer Halvorsen. If they do, then the theory gains new life; and what's more, if they do this, then they ought to be pilloried for it too. The one thing that Sky/Ineos have done better than any big budget team that's come before them is that they've done the scouting. They've thrown a lot of money at unproven riders, because they've got that money to offer them, and they've profited off other people's development schemes to the extent where the second highest budget team in the péloton pulled its development team because they couldn't stop Sky/Ineos from pilfering their talent, because the money that BMC spent on their development team, Sky didn't spend, then used it as a fund for offering increased salaries and skimming off the cream from the top of the development pile. It is another reason the team may be unpopular, but they learnt from the mistakes of teams like BMC and Katyusha, and didn't overspend on ageing superstars, instead they bought the next generation of superstars. It's quite likely that once this current generation of GC stars retires, we may be left with a GC battle that is contested between Ineos riders, and riders who didn't pass the Ineos test, or weren't considered good enough for them in the first place, because every top U23 is being put through the Ineos paces. They were only able to do that because they were so confident of the results from their current stars that they could afford to build their signing policy around younger riders, rather than having to shore up their results with a bigger and more established name. And these young guys who've turned pro with Ineos and only known Ineos within the pro ranks, they could become the Brailsford lifers of tomorrow, and it's then that we really discover whether there's a British rider bias or not. We should also remember that Sky built a large part of its branding around the British identity of the team at the outset, so while Sky were the title sponsor, that feeling of residual pseudo-national status may have remained in a way that it won't with Ineos, who have bought into an international team at a point where the team is already well-established, rather than having to try to build it an identity and fanbase.
I think this is born from the fact that the riders who have taken the greatest leaps in their level, or demonstrated the biggest changes in their style, have been the Britons; somebody like Froome will have been well down the totem pole before making his sudden change in style, Wiggins' 2010 and 2009 being the other way round would make more sense from a development point of view, and some are justifiably scratching their head as to how Thomas and not Kwiatkowski became the one that transitioned across from the Classics to GT contention, given while Thomas was not the scrub he is sometimes made out to have been in the mountains, Kwiatkowski had much more capabilities over hilly races and, crucially, was four years younger. The exception to the formula is Porte, who in his second year at Saxo looked like a flash-in-the-pan, and who grew into a world class domestique and a one-week threat. I do think, however, that Richie Porte is the most overrated racer in the current péloton for GTs, since he really hasn't shown any capabilities for them and always struggles to hold it together over three weeks - in a GT he's basically Wout Poels, but with pretensions of being more.barmaher said:
On the flip side, many of the most talented riders that Sky have brought in, as in those who had the most success pre-Sky, have not been able to improve or benefit from Sky's tutelage. Thomas Löfkvist, Edvald Boasson Hagen, Rigoberto Uran, and so on. That appears to be changing somewhat, but we should also be clear that Sky dropping both Uran AND Henao back to pull Wiggins when he lost his nerve descending in the 2013 Giro is one of the most obvious messages you could ever give that the team did not have faith in these riders; both were up in the top 10-15 overall and Uran eventually finished on the podium, losing 1'36" for no real reason there as Wiggins already had plenty of help. Obviously they let him off the leash once it became clear Wiggins was a lost cause in that race, but the message that the team didn't care about Uran or Henao, only Wiggins, has lingered on. Similarly, the way that Mikel Landa was abandoned to his fate while the rest of the team circled around Geraint Thomas after the motorbike crash in the 2017 Giro when, on the face of it, they were supposed to be co-leaders, left a taste in the mouth that Thomas was the "true" leader, and Landa was being fobbed off. Of course, in an echo of the 2013 Giro, Thomas later abandoned and Landa went on to salvage the race for the team, winning a stage and the GPM as he hit form in the final week. The wasting of the potential of riders like Leopold König, who went from 9th in the Vuelta and 7th in the Tour with precious little support to 6th in the Giro with Sky, before being slotted into a middle-of-the-train mountain helper role and was never heard from again, can also be pointed to. To an extent Beñat Intxausti too, though his case was almost entirely the product of mononucleosis and it's hard to criticise Sky/Ineos for his fall from prominence.
The thing with these are that while it certainly gives the outward impression that the team cares more about the British riders than its overseas names, it's difficult to ascertain how much is a myopic focus on British riders (remember, at the outset of the team they said their goal was to win the Tour with a British rider, and the British pseudo-national team status of Sky was a large part of their branding, much the same as Astana or Katyusha), and how much of it is a case of Dave Brailsford's loyalty to his charges, since Thomas and Wiggins are both 'his boys', so to speak, everything they've achieved has been under him, they're his pet projects, which Uran, Henao, Landa or Kwiatkowski never could have been (as an aside, I always wonder what might have happened had Telefonica jumped in earlier, or Caisse d'Epargne renewed, because Kwiatkowski was always meant to go to Abarcá in 2011, that was why he was with the then-Continental Caja Rural team which was a semi-feeder after stepping up from amateur), at least not going back as far. Because while Froome has become like a patron in time, at first the team also hamstrung him in favour of Wiggins (although they've got away with that in the long run, with Cobo's result being taken away, they did pay for this in 2011, though I thought it entirely reasonable that they were backing a proven commodity over a complete wildcard seeing as Froome's form took the team by surprise as much as anybody else). Perhaps riders they've brought in sufficiently young as pros since the road team began, like Moscon or Bernal, can be that in time, but until now, realistically the only riders who could justifiably be called Brailsford lifers are Britons.
But it's not like the 'being British' card has automatically worked either. I mean, at the outset of the team, when people were discussing who might actually be that British TDF-winning prospect they were thinking of, most people gravitated towards Peter Kennaugh, who had been 3rd in the Girobio and demonstrated some pretty decent climbing talent. However, while Kennaugh managed some useful wins here and there - Coppi e Bartali, Österreich Rundfahrt, a stage of the Dauphiné - he never kicked on to become a worthwhile threat, and never even really graduated above third in the mountain train. The team has not been the ideal development place for a number of British talents - Josh Edmondson of course saw his career completely hit the wall, and is now best known for talking about tramadol and the team's poor treatment of him; Alex Dowsett felt he ws being given no chance to develop and fled the nest early on, and there were of course a number of British journeyman pros who were taken on in the early years of the team who were realistically there to make up helper numbers and feed the British identity of the team. The team does still have a good line in British youngsters coming up through the system - Tao Geogeghan Hart, Christopher Lawless, Owain Doull, and if we stretch the definition to include the Irish (seeing as in Britain much of cycling's coverage relies on the Irish because of their longer heritage in the sport, with Stephen Roche, Sean Kelly, Phil Deignan and others major features in the punditry), Eddie Dunbar - but there's also an increasing number that are looking elsewhere for their development - Hugh Carthy, the Yates twins, Andy Fenn (though he did end up back at Sky for a while), Scott Thwaites, Adam Blythe, Harry Tanfield, Connor Swift and Dan Whitehouse all going through different routes. Their biggest mis-step was Jonathan Tiernan-Locke, because it seemed they were all doe-eyed at the prospect of a British talent to fill the hilly classics, at that time the one big gap on their résumé, and got caught out in their excitement not doing the requisite background checks.
And it's far too early for them to start prioritising Geogeghan Hart or Doull over their other young prospects they've signed, such as Bernal, Sivakov, Ivan Sosa or Kristoffer Halvorsen. If they do, then the theory gains new life; and what's more, if they do this, then they ought to be pilloried for it too. The one thing that Sky/Ineos have done better than any big budget team that's come before them is that they've done the scouting. They've thrown a lot of money at unproven riders, because they've got that money to offer them, and they've profited off other people's development schemes to the extent where the second highest budget team in the péloton pulled its development team because they couldn't stop Sky/Ineos from pilfering their talent, because the money that BMC spent on their development team, Sky didn't spend, then used it as a fund for offering increased salaries and skimming off the cream from the top of the development pile. It is another reason the team may be unpopular, but they learnt from the mistakes of teams like BMC and Katyusha, and didn't overspend on ageing superstars, instead they bought the next generation of superstars. It's quite likely that once this current generation of GC stars retires, we may be left with a GC battle that is contested between Ineos riders, and riders who didn't pass the Ineos test, or weren't considered good enough for them in the first place, because every top U23 is being put through the Ineos paces. They were only able to do that because they were so confident of the results from their current stars that they could afford to build their signing policy around younger riders, rather than having to shore up their results with a bigger and more established name. And these young guys who've turned pro with Ineos and only known Ineos within the pro ranks, they could become the Brailsford lifers of tomorrow, and it's then that we really discover whether there's a British rider bias or not. We should also remember that Sky built a large part of its branding around the British identity of the team at the outset, so while Sky were the title sponsor, that feeling of residual pseudo-national status may have remained in a way that it won't with Ineos, who have bought into an international team at a point where the team is already well-established, rather than having to try to build it an identity and fanbase.
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