Ineos Grenadiers reach the second week of the Tour de France with a very strong general classification showing to their credit, a showing that could have been even better had Dani Martínez not fallen ill last weekend. Yet the team remain ambitious for much more, says lead sports director Steve Cummings.
As the Tour moves into its main trio of Alpine stages this week, Geraint Thomas is lying third overall at 1:17, Adam Yates is fourth at 1:25, and Tom Pidcock is seventh at 1:46.
It’s the strongest collective positioning of any squad in the Tour at this point and they have the yellow helmets as leaders of the teams classification to show for it.
“The plan is to use the same approach we’ve had in many races where we’re trying to use the numbers – race intelligently off one another,” Cummings tells Cyclingnews.
“At some stage, if we want to win, we have to take risks and we’re in that mindset.”
Cummings points out that, had the team not lost Martínez, winner of this year’s Itzulia Basque Country, as a contender so recently, the British squad’s situation would have been even stronger.
“I’m sorry we lost Dani Martínez off the GC too because I know he’s been really thinking and working hard and dreaming about this race and he was coming here with a completely blank piece of paper, a ‘you-write-the-script’ situation, to see what happened,” Cummings said.
“It’s brutal, really. He hadn’t had the best preparation, not through any fault of his own, just through little niggles and little sicknesses. Things were starting to turn around and all of a sudden – Bam! – he gets sick. So to lose him off the GC is quite hard.
“But having said that, I think it’s kind of exceptional to have had four riders after eight stages in the top 10. You don’t often see that and if you look at the broader picture of not just this race but the whole team, we must be doing things really well to get to that point.”
However, rather than dwell overly on what can’t be changed following Martínez’s misfortune, Cummings says the team have to build on what has gone well for bigger ambitions.
“We’re here to try and win and we haven’t managed to win yet. But on Sunday we were close [with Jonathan Castroviejo, second – Ed.] so we just need to keep doing what we’ve been doing, whether we end up winning the overall, or whether we win stages or whether it’s both.”
In either case, Cummings…
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