Skyfall: The inside story of Ineos Grenadiers' decline

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Escape Collective

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4.9 • 960 Ratings

🗓️ 13 November 2024

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

From its incarnation as Team Sky in 2010, the team swiftly rose in the sport's ranks, winning seven Tours de France in eight years. But after billionaire Jim Ratcliffe purchased the team and rebranded it as the Ineos Grenadiers, its position atop the sport has eroded – slowly at first but with increasing speed. In just a few years, cycling's once-dominant stage racing team has transformed from an innovative powerhouse into a rudderless corporation, haemorrhaging talent and results despite its massive budget.

To dissect this empire’s collapse, Escape Collective spoke with more than a dozen sources in and around Ineos – former riders and staff, agents, and other well-connected people in pro cycling – to learn what took the team from winning seven Tours de France in eight years to struggling to hold onto talent both on and off the bike.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, welcome to this Escape Collective podcast special on our latest investigative
0:11.3	piece, Skyfall, the inside story of Inios Grenadiers's decline.
0:15.9	My name's Johnny Long, I co-wrote this exclusive story you're about to hear with one of our
0:19.8	regular contributors,
0:23.8	Chris Marshall Bell, as well as my colleague, Rona McLaughlin.
0:26.4	And to give everyone their proper credit, as they deserve,
0:30.7	Joe Lindsay was the adult in the editing room, making sure everything was buttoned up and proper.
0:34.6	Okay, now how this is going to work is I'm just going to read the story out for you,
0:37.8	for those who prefer podcast articles. And if you're listening to this on a free podcast feed, then it's going to cut off about halfway through. So you need to sign up and
0:42.2	become a member at escapcollective.com forward slash join to get the full access to this story, as well as all of the
0:48.3	other great coverage we have on our site. As well as this episode, we're also going to follow it up with a bit of a roundtable discussion expanding on what's going on at INEOS.
0:57.2	Bring you some tidbits we didn't get into the published article and also bring you some behind the scenes reporting with some extra insight on maybe stuff that didn't quite fit in a proper published, polished thing.
1:13.3	So here we go. After speaking to a dozen team insiders who told us what's gone wrong for cycling's once dominant team this is
1:17.4	Skyfall the inside story of vinyas grenadiers's decline the higher you climb, the harder you fall.
1:34.6	In just three years, the Inios Grenadiers, cycling's most dominant team, transformed from
1:39.2	an innovative powerhouse into a rudderless corporation, hemorrhage in talent and results despite its massive budget.
1:45.9	To dissect this empire's collapse, Escape Collectives spoke with more than a dozen sources
1:50.4	in and around Ineos, former riders and staff, agents and other well-connected people in pro-cycling,
1:56.4	to learn what took the team from winning seven tours in eight seasons to struggling to hold
2:00.8	on to talent both on and off the bike. The dividing line between the team's old Grand
2:05.4	Tours conquering era and its new scrappier self is difficult to pinpoint. Perhaps it was the
2:10.5	upheaval of the pandemic scrambled 2020 season or its 2021 sequel, which saw the emergence of
	...

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