In 2019, when Ineos annexed their seventh Tour de France win in eight years, they occupied the top two steps of the podium in Paris with Egan Bernal and Geraint Thomas. On that evening in Paris, Bernal's youth suggested that one decade's dominance would bleed into the next, but cycling is rarely as straightforward as all that.
In the five years since, the baton has passed firmly to other teams, with UAE Team Emirates and Visma-Lease a Bike now dictating the terms of engagement in July and beyond. It hasn't helped, of course, that Ineos' internal succession plan was interrupted by the life-threatening training crash Bernal suffered in January 2022.
