Once the most dominant team in professional cycling, Ineos Grenadiers have struggled to match the pace of their rivals, trailing behind powerful squads like UAE Team Emirates, Visma-Lease a Bike, Soudal-Quickstep and Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe.
After finishing the 2024 season as the seventh-best team also behind Lidl-Trek and Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale, the British squad announce sweeping changes to its staff for 2025.
Performance director Scott Drawer said he "spent six months listening, observing, and working with the team to determine what's needed to set ourselves up for excellence for 2025 and beyond" according to the team's press release. "I've been looking at every element of how we race, how we train and how we support our riders in the changing landscape of professional cycling."
Following the review, Drawer restructured the team into three areas of performance - Grand Tours and Stage Racing, Classics and One Day Racing, and Future Talent and will be adding more emphasis on coaching for time trials, sprint and power development, endurance training science, race strategy, aerodynamics and technology development.
Toward that end, the team has brought on Dr. Mehdi Kordi, the track and sprint specialist coach who delivered numerous gold medals for the Dutch national team in his tenure. Kordi will be Ineos' new Head of Performance Support and Innovation.
The team also hired sports scientist and coach Tom Helleman from DSM-Firmenich-Postnl as Lead Performance Coach. Former rider Kurt Asle Arvesen joins as lead directeur sportif and another former rider Leonardo Basso as DS.
Having lost aerodynamics specialist Dan Bigham to Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe, Ineos will elevate Dr. Luca Oggiano, who helped engineer Filippo Ganna's successful hour record, as Director of Research and Development.
The team is still looking for a Head of Engineering and Technology and other staff for the 2025 season.
"We have a highly motivated, hungry and ambitious team of coaches, sports directors and performance specialists who want to create an environment that allows our riders to fulfil their potential," Drawer said.
That collective energy and desire will set us up for the challenges and opportunities that await in 2025.
"We are going to spend the rest of this year making further positive changes: setting the team's performance plans and goals, executing some key training camps and getting the whole team ready to race hard in January. We want to set the right tone from the start and will be working closely with our riders to establish the culture which will facilitate success and be fundamental to our future."
After winning seven of eight Tours de France between 2012 and 2019, Ineos have not won a Grand Tour since Egan Bernal's Giro d'Italia victory in 2021, and have steadily dropped in the rankings after Bernal suffered a near-fatal accident in training before the 2022 season.
They have not found a new Grand Tour contender to replace those who have retired or left the team, leaving 38-year-old Geraint Thomas holding up the team's hopes with podiums in the Giro and Tour in recent years.
Ineos have also underperformed in the Classics and were recently reportedly looking to offload Tom Pidcock to free up some of the budget, although a deal to buy out the Olympic MTB champion's estimated €3.5 million contract reportedly has fallen through.
The team's CEO John Allert described Drawer's initiative as, "a clear plan and the decisive changes needed to set us up for success in the coming years.
"This is a team with a proud legacy of success, and we are all determined to get back to the top step of the podium. Our new performance structure and approach are key to building the next chapter for the team."
