Egan Bernal starting contract with 'horrible injury' key factor in Ineos Grenadiers' budget woes says Luke Rowe

Published 20/09/2024 at 18:08 GMT

Ineos Grenadiers have taken 14 wins in the 2024 season, lower than all but three World Tour teams, though stalwart Luke Rowe believes their underperformance compared to budget can be explained by Egan Bernal's horrific 2022 injury. Bernal had just signed a bumper four-year contract as a multiple Grand Tour winner but Ineos have struggled to recapture their former glories in the seasons since.

'You can't sugarcoat it' – Ineos are 'underperforming', admits Rowe

Departing Ineos Grenadiers road captain Luke Rowe pointed to Egan Bernal's injury one month into a four-year contract when talking about their budget problems.

Bernal is the latest rider to win a Grand Tour for Ineos and also claimed their most recent Tour de France victory in 2019 - their only yellow jersey under the current ownership after six as Team Sky.

Bernal was well-placed in the top 10 of his title defence in 2020 until Stage 15, where he cracked on the unforgiving slopes of the Grand Colombier and later abandoned the race due to back pain.

UCI Road World Championships

'I'm feeling a bit greedy' - Brown on leading Australia to more glory ahead of retirement

18 hours ago

And his 2021 Giro d'Italia win notwithstanding, the Colombian has barely featured in Grand Tours since largely due to a high-speed training crash in January 2022 that left not just Bernal's career, but his life and mobility in jeopardy as the then-25-year-old stated he had a "95% chance of becoming paraplegic".

Bernal looked set to continue seven years of almost complete Tour de France dominance when he beat Geraint Thomas and Chris Froome to the yellow jersey aged 22 and was paid as such by Ineos ahead of 2022, but he has not taken a single victory since signing that contract.

"So 'they have a huge budget, where does it all go?' Well, you back your horse, right?" Rowe said on the Watts Occurring podcast. "You pick your rider and you pay him well and you say that's the guy that's going to be successful and you build the team around him.

"In January of the first year of a four-year contract, he had a horrible injury. So it is easy to oversee things and say they have a big budget and they do not perform, but unfortunately one guy is injured and he's still on his way back, but...f*** it.

"What a lot of people forget is that with every team you have your big leader and you build it around that rider. So Alpecin backs and pays Mathieu van der Poel well, UAE has Pogi [Tadej Pogacar], and builds it around him, Visma builds it around a couple of guys like [Wout] van Aert and [Jonas] Vingegaard.

"At the time, our guy was Egan Bernal. It was Froomey, it was you [Geraint Thomas], and then it was you and Egan, but he was the guy who had just won the Tour de France, two years later the Giro and then signed his big-money contract that took up a huge amount of budget - and justified every penny - and then he got on the back of a bus and had this horrible crash."

Bernal has told AS Colombia that he took plenty of positives from 2024, including his third place at the Volta Ciclista a Catalunya behind Tadej Pogacar, however he has not contributed to Ineos' tally of 14 wins across the season.

Amstel Gold Race final kilometre: Pidcock edges thrilling four-man showdown

Rowe rubbishes UAE TEAM EMIRATES COMPARISON

Jhonatan Narvaez - who took arguably Ineos' best win of 2024 by outsprinting Pogacar on Stage 1 of the Giro d'Italia and taking the pink jersey - will join forces with the Slovenian in 2025 at UAE Team Emirates, and Ethan Hayter is another high-profile departure as he heads to Soudal Quick-Step.

Rowe is retiring after 13 seasons in which the team were the dominant GC power in the peloton before being usurped by UAE and Visma-Lease a Bike, though the Welshman hit back at comparisons of the two squads in their current iterations.

"We definitely do not have the biggest budget in this peloton," Rowe added. "I am not going to go into details, but I know what the team's budget is for the cyclists and I know what the Tour de France UAE team's budget was, and it is not far off.

"Which is unrealistic. The total for 30 riders and then the UAE... it's a good.... I do not know off the top of my head, but a good 80% of our budget was spent on eight UAE riders. There is a lot of talk about budget, but in UAE it is unlimited."

- - -

Stream the 2024 World Cycling Championships live and on-demand on discovery+

UCI Road World Championships