Cast your mind back to the advent of Jim Ratcliffe and his billions to the professional peloton in early 2019, and it becomes clear that even from the outset he had no care, or knack, for public relations.
At the launch of the revamped Team Ineos at the Tour de Yorkshire, the true dawn of Ratcliffe's sporting empire after he'd teamed up with Ben Ainslie's America's Cup squad the year before, the race was beset by protests against Ratcliffe, who held extensive and publicly unpopular licences to frack for shale gas across Yorkshire, as well as having lobbied the UK Government to lessen the restrictions in order to do so and weaken green taxes.
Ten thousand masks were made of Ratcliffe's face made up with devil horns as well as roadside art protesting a man who at the time was touted as owning the biggest company you'd never heard of. But that was about to change.
The calculated bluntness of his moves since his step into the spotlight makes a lot of sense for a man who built his fortune buying up "unfashionable" businesses that were being run sub-optimally and tightening them up to profitability. Outcome was the only thing that mattered, and Ratcliffe's track record so far showed that he got results. The only problem was Ratcliffe now dealt in a deeply human business, where comparatively darker arts like psychology were king compared to the simpler rules of chemistry and economics that he'd mastered previously.
Did we do a good job with this story?
