Late in the evening of the last Sunday of May 2021, when Egan Bernal and a small host of friends, team staff and admirers filed into the press room in central Milan’s plush Palazzo dei Giureconsulti as the winner of that year’s Giro d’Italia, it felt like the almost inevitable continuation of what had already been a decade of Sky/Ineos Grenadiers Grand Tour dominance.
Things are never as simple as they sometimes look in cycling, though, and seven Tour de France victories from 2012 to 2019 and three other Grand Tour wins in the same period had already seen challenges to that particular narrative – major ones, too.
For one thing, Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates-XRG) had put an abrupt stop to Sky/Ineos domination of the Tour in 2020, and almost equally significantly, neither of the riders alongside the Slovenian in Paris that autumn were Ineos riders, either. The second big development was that although Bernal’s victory was Ineos’ second straight Giro title after Tao Geoghegan Hart in 2020, and the team’s third in four years, he made it very sound like anything but business as usual for himself or his squad.
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Rather, the Colombian himself was keen to talk about how the 2021 Giro had acted as a conduit for him to regain his enjoyment in the sport after conquering the Tour de France ‘too soon’. That was because, at 22 in 2019, Bernal had been the youngest Tour champion since 1909 – and rather than drive him on, getting to cycling’s pinnacle had left him suddenly feeling purposeless.
And as for Ineos? The 2021 Giro d’Italia, it turned out, ended up being – at least for now – the end of a seemingly unstoppable Grand Tour victory factory production line.
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