Crashes, punctures and injuries ensured that the 2026 Tour de France campaign was one of the worst ever for the beleaguered Netcompany Ineos team. From the first stage on, when Dave Brailsford’s team came close to winning the team time trial in Montjuic, the 2026 Tour was, in the words of their director of racing, Geraint Thomas, “tough going”.
“I’m happy to not be racing any more, because I suffered way too much,” said Thomas, who has taken Brailsford’s place as the team’s frontman. “But it’s good to still be involved in the nitty-gritty of it.”
It was a baptism of fire for Thomas in his first Tour managing his riders, as he had to hastily reimagine his lineup after Oscar Onley, the leader, was ruled out by injury. That led to a rapid realignment of the team’s goals.
The optimism fuelled by Ineos’s acquisition of Onley, who finished fourth overall in 2025, and the arrival of a new co-sponsor, Netcompany, has dissipated quickly. The Scot was injured in June and forced to miss the Tour, which scuppered Thomas’s best-laid plans.
“We were there or thereabouts,” Thomas said of his riders. “The team time trial everyone wanted to win and believed we could win. We were close, and we’ve been there, but just not quite clicked.”
More galling, perhaps, were the serial punctures and the sight of Remco Evenepoel, of the Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe team, riding to his best-ever Tour finish in second place. The Olympic road race and time-trial champion, a friend of Thomas, had long been connected to a move to Brailsford’s team but the deal for him to join fell through.
“With all the changes going on in that team, there were delays and I couldn’t really wait any more,” Evenepoel said last winter, but added: “It was close to being done.”
Instead, Ineos opted to sign Onley, but his 2026 season has never really got started. With the Tour over, his next goal is likely to be the Vuelta a España.
Without Onley as a podium contender, the emphasis shifted and Egan Bernal, the Tour winner in 2019, was brought in to boost the team’s climbing skills. The French signing Kevin Vauquelin failed to repeat the successes of the previous summer, leaving Thomas and his riders targeting stage wins. But the chances of achieving them were reduced by the domination of Tadej Pogacar and his UAE Emirates team, allied to a tougher course and higher average speeds.
Thomas admitted that there had been “a lot of learning on the job” for him. “It’s easy to talk about [winning] stages but there are so few anyway, that it is tough. But it’s the Tour, it’s not supposed to be easy.”
By the time Thomas and his riders got to the foot of the double-header of finishes on Alpe d’Huez, their race was about survival. “Without being defeatist, you’re not exactly racing ‘Pog’ on days like that,” the 2018 Tour winner said. “Racing evolves and you need to adapt with it. Everyone’s been looking for opportunities because they’re few and far between.”
A decade ago, as Team Sky, Chris Froome led the team to an emphatic overall win in Paris, while British riders, spearheaded by Mark Cavendish, took seven stage wins. That success now seems a different era, with Froome retired, record climbing speeds being set on a regular basis and Pogacar dominating almost every race he starts.
Of the Slovene, Thomas agreed that challenging the five-time winner was a daunting task. “I think everyone, if they’re realistic, knew that he was on another level. It was only Jonas [Vingegaard] who really believed he could do it.
“Racing is all mental, it’s all in the head. If you go off it, it’s so hard to switch it back on. As soon as you’re not doing everything right, you lose that couple of per cent. Everyone is so good now that you can’t afford to do that.”
