The Ineos Grenadiers are bidding farewell to perhaps their biggest star of the moment as the long-rumored departure of Tom Pidcock is, finally, a reality. His four-year tenure with the team will come to a close at the end of the year.
As of yet, we don’t know which team he is joining, although rumors have connected him with Q36.5. What we do know is that the Ineos Grenadiers will look very different next year now that such a big star is moving on – and we don’t need to know where Pidcock is headed to wonder how his departure might impact them.
The long and short of it is this: Pidcock’s transfer will have major ramifications across the board – and throughout the calendar – for the once-mighty team formerly known as Sky.
Goodbye one-day firepower
Let’s start with what Ineos is losing in Pidcock, focusing on the road while acknowledging that he is a mountain bike superstar. For all the hype around him as a potential Grand Tour contender for the future, Pidcock has hardly done much in the past few seasons to suggest that that is a likely outcome for him any time soon. What he has done, in addition to his impressive off-road exploits, is establish himself as one of the top (hilly) Classics riders in the world.
He gave Ineos a legitimate contender for Monuments like Milan-San Remo and Liège-Bastogne-Liège and other big races like Strade Bianche and the Amstel Gold Race, both of which he has won (he’s yet to race Il Lombardia, thanks partly to that controversial DNS). He even made his Paris-Roubaix debut this year, and some of the cobbled races would seem to suit his skillset.
For all the Grand Tour focus over the years at Ineos, Pidcock’s star has shone brightest in single-day flashes, in those aforementioned Classics or in the stages of stage races. And while Filippo Ganna and a handful of others look like potential contenders for Ineos in the less climber-friendly of those events, there is no one on this team even close to being able to replace Pidcock’s firepower on the terrain where he shines brightest. UAE Team Emirates can afford to bid a rider with a similar skillset (Marc Hirschi) goodbye given that Tadej Pogačar is in the team but the Ineos Grenadiers simply won’t be replicating Pidcock’s results in, say, the Ardennes Classics.
When former MSR, Amstel, and Strade winner Michal Kwiatkowski started to age out of contention in those events, Pidcock was there to step in to lead the way. Now that Pidcock is heading out the door, however, no one seems likely to step into his shoes. Jhonatan Narvaez is also departing (to UAE Team Emirates), and while there are some promising young riders like former Brabantse Pijl winner Magnus Sheffield, there’s no clear replacement for Pidcock for the hillier Classics.
That might not have seemed like a big deal for the Tour de France-dominating Team Sky of old, but it’s a huge part of what constituted success at the current iteration of Ineos. It’s hard to imagine the team having as much success in 2025 as they did in 2024 … which was already their worst year ever.
Hello Grand Tour opportunity
The Grand Tours have not gone the way that Ineos would have liked recently, but the team still has money invested in talented support riders, with climbers like Laurens De Plus and big engines like Josh Tarling and Filippo Ganna that any GC hopeful would appreciate having on staff. Theoretically, there should be some institutional knowledge there too. In other words, Ineos has the foundations in place to support a Grand Tour contender, they just don’t really have the rider to lead the way right now.
With Pidcock on the team, it felt like Ineos always had one foot in the let’s-turn-Pidcock-into-a-Tour-winner camp, even though it was looking increasingly less likely that such a thing could happen. In a way, his departure frees the team up in a way that could be beneficial in the long term. For starters, there are GC talents on this team that will no longer need to worry about the outsize influence of Pidcock’s ambitions on their own career.
Carlos Rodríguez is the obvious one; his 2024 Tour campaign was a bit of a letdown after 2023, but he is still quite young. He will head into 2025 with more clarity as to his role in the team. Egan Bernal, too, will have a bit more of an opening to (re)step up. Perhaps more importantly, the Ineos Grenadiers can now go looking to spend all the money they would have spent on Pidcock on that next Grand Tour hopeful to build around. There was a time when Ineos was the team gobbling up all of the young talent in the sport, but they have long since been surpassed in that department by the likes of UAE Team Emirates and Visma-Lease a Bike.
Now, they can focus more squarely on finding the next big thing, although losing a specifically British rider of such talents will sting all the more for the fans that follow this team as the British WorldTour squad.
In any case, it could take time for a talent search to bear fruit – but Pidcock’s departure probably kickstarts a process that needed to happen for this team to get back to being competitive in the stage races.
The vibes are … uncertain
Pros and cons, that’s where we are so far – and that’s sort of where things stand in the vibes department too. The relationship between Pidcock and his team had become so frayed that having him on the team for 2025 might not necessarily have been the best decision for the proverbial locker room. Pidcock’s presence caused tensions that nobody was going to be able to ignore, and now, those tensions should ease.
Then again, the abrupt and high-profile departure of such a key rider (remember: Pidcock hasn’t yet signed with another team) probably isn’t doing much for morale either – especially not without a superstar replacement waiting in the wings to carry this team to success next year. What the Ineos Grenadiers need after a disappointing, underwhelming, drama-filled 2024 is a bounce-back year in 2025, and who is really going to lead them to that sort of turnaround?
The team may be better off in the long term as it bids farewell to the media circus surrounding every minor Pidcock-related news item, and as it finds new ways to spend the money that would have otherwise spent on Pidcock, but losing someone so talented is not going to help turn things around in the short term. That seems like it could be bad for morale at a team where expectations are through the roof.
A few years from now, if the Ineos Grenadiers have indeed found and developed some new star with the time, energy, and money they might have still been investing Pidcock, this week’s news will feel like a distant memory, but that’s a big if. What’s more, there could be some down years ahead – even more so than their already unprecedentedly quiet 2024 campaign – before they get there.
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