Ineos Grenadiers began their first full-scale 2024 team training camp in Mallorca on Monday, with riders and staff gathering on the Spanish island for a lengthy pre-Christmas get-together.
Given the name “Sign On 2024” inside the team, the camp is taking place on the northern side of the island in Port d’Alcudia, a location frequently used by the team in the past.
Amongst those present is new sports director Imanol Erviti, who recently brought his long pro career spent working as a domestique at Movistar to an end. Erviti was pictured recently in Ineos Grenadiers staff kit along with some of his co-workers, including sports director Xabier Zandio, who like Erviti hails from the Navarre region in NE Spain.
The first round of training camps is a hectic one and usually sees squads both getting in early rounds of team-building as well as a first series of team photos. However, contractually riders joining the team for 2024 need to remain in their previous team kit when training until December 31st, making photo opportunities limited in scope this side of the New Year.
Their new jersey for 2024 may have already been leaked accidentally, however, by Egan Bernal in an Instagram story, with the team set to swap kit suppliers from Bioracer to Gobik.
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Ineos Grenadiers have seen some significant changes in the staff line-up over the last few months, with team principal Rod Ellingworth and sports directors Roger Hammond and Matteo Tosatto all leaving the team. Tosatto is set to join the Tudor Pro Cycling squad in a managerial post, but the future destinations of Ellingworth and Hammond remain unclear.
The turnover of riders has been equally important: former World Champion Tobias Foss and 18-year-old US rider Andrew 'AJ' August are two of the riders joining the team for 2024, while Tao Geoghegan Hart, Luke Plapp, Dani Martínez and Pavel Sivakov are amongst those moving on.
Probably the key element of interest in December training camps consists of thrashing out race programs for the following season. These are then generally firmed up in a second post-Christmas training camp in January.
Other WorldTour training camps already underway include EF Education-EasyPost in Girona, whilst Bahrain Victorious, Lidl-Trek (men's and women’s teams), Israel-Premier Tech and UAE Team Emirates are set to get underway shortly elsewhere in Spain.
At Ineos riders like Geraint Thomas have already travelled much further abroad than Spain for their training program. In November Thomas and fellow teammate Cam Wurf shared Instagram posts from their three-week training in California. The Briton is due to make his 2024 debut in the Tour Down Under in Australia.
Other Ineos Grenadiers riders are mixing up other disciplines as well as spending time on the road in December.
Tom Pidcock recently confirmed his cyclocross calendar and four-race Christmas clash with Mathieu van der Poel and Wout Van Aert.
According to La Gazzetta dello Sport, Elia Viviani’s Olympic Games targets mean that after the Mallorca training camp, he will be racing on the velodrome in Grenchen, Switzerland on December 15-16 and in Denmark on December 27-28.
Like teammates Thomas and Filippo Ganna, Viviani then heads to the Tour Down Under - where he has won stages in 2018 and 2019 - before taking part in the Track Nations Cup in Adelaide at the start of February.
