Caleb Ewan (Ineos Grenadiers) is hoping that a new environment and some training on the track will help him return to his best after several seasons that didn't live up to expectations.
The 30-year-old Australian is a few weeks into his tenure at Ineos after leaving Jayco AlUla, ending his second stint there earlier than his contract had initially stipulated. In a video posted to the Ineos team YouTube channel, Ewan and his new coach, Ineos Grenadiers head of performance Mehdi Kordi, reflected on their expectations for 2025 and how they plan to get there.
"The last few years haven't been great so I hope this year that I can come back to where my best was and win the races that I was winning when I was at my best," Ewan said.
Ewan counts 11 Grand Tour stage wins – including victories across all three events – on his palmares, but his last several seasons have failed to produce results to match those of his early career. Although he has managed to take wins in smaller races here and there, he has not won a Grand Tour stage since 2021, early on in his tenure at Lotto Soudal. At the end of the 2023 season, he left Lotto to join Jayco.
With Ewan back at the organization where he turned pro, hopes were high for a turnaround, but 2024 was another year that saw him achieve only a few lower-tier victories without any WorldTour wins. The bounceback he was hoping for never really came to fruition, and now he has moved on yet again.
He and his new team are hoping that a change of scenery and a new training approach will help flip the script in 2025.
"What I'm looking to do differently with Caleb is try to introduce the track again back to him," Kordi said. "It was something that he was very good at as a junior, hasn't done it since, but I want to introduce that back and try to give him that edge."
Ewan was indeed "very good" as a junior, winning a junior world title in the omnium, but he has been a full-time road pro for more than a decade now.
"Before I turned pro I kind of grew up on the track doing track and road all the way through juniors," he said. "[Once] I'm junior world champion and after that it was all focus on the road. Definitely racing on the track was a passion of mine but since I've turned pro it was always hard to mix them both."
Ewan is in good company at Ineos, where Kordi, teammates like Geraint Thomas and Josh Tarling, and other riders and staff come from a track background as well. Kordi sees the potential for track training to benefit Ewan in a variety of ways, bolstering both his strength and his endurance.
Whatever the outcome of the new approach, Ewan will be kicking off his 2025 racing campaign considerably later than normal after he got a late start building into form amid a tumultuous offseason.
"The first few months will be about building," Ewan said. "Similar to what guys were doing in December, I'll be doing now, so I'll start the season a little bit later, which is a little bit different for me. Usually I start kind of early in the Tour Down Under. It will change my season a bit starting later but it can be beneficial as well."
Ewan will make his debut in Ineos kit in a month and a half at the Settimana Internazionale Coppi e Bartali in Italy. From there, it's anyone's guess how this season will pan out for a rider so far removed from his "best," although Ewan and Ineos don't have much to lose trying to find that form again. It was clear at the end of last year that Jayco no longer wanted Ewan's services, leaving him to find a new team that might take a chance on him, and it made sense that Ineos would want to roll the dice given their unprecedented dearth of wins in 2024.
In other words, not much changes for Ewan or Ineos if he can't manage to bounce back – but if he does, the rewards could be great for both rider and team.
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