Dave Brailsford has denied that Team Ineos have a growing disciplinary problem after his team’s tactics were questioned and, for the second year running, one of his riders was kicked off the Tour for violent conduct.
Luke Rowe’s eviction from the race after the stage to Gap followed on from the disqualification of his teammate Gianni Moscon from the 2018 Tour after he swung a punch at the French rider Élie Gesbert in the final stages.
Asked directly if his riders were ill‑disciplined, Brailsford said: “No, not in the slightest.”
But further cracks within the team appeared within hours of those words when the leadership issues that have hounded Brailsford in past Tours came to a head again as the defending champion, Geraint Thomas, chased his teammate Egan Bernal after he attacked near the summit of the Col du Galibier.
Both riders defended their tactics after the stage with Bernal saying: “I’m second in general classification, Thomas is third but just five seconds from me. We’re in a really, really good position.”
In a testing 48 hours for the British team, they were also visited at their hotel in Gap early in the morning by anti-doping control, as were Julian Alaphilippe’s Deceuninck-Quick-Step team and the Jumbo-Visma team, who endured a further blow when one of team leader Steven Kruijswijk’s key helpers in the mountains, George Bennett, crashed heavily on the descent of the Col du Galibier.
Asked to explain the significance of the dawn anti-doping visits, the UCI responded: “Any rider can be subject to morning doping control at any place and time. Contenders for general classification are regularly tested by the Cycling Anti-Doping Foundation.”
The loss of Rowe may cause a bigger headache than an early morning wakeup call. With two leaders in Thomas and Bernal, and only one designated mountain helper in Wout Poels, Ineos again felt the strain at times on stage 18. Meanwhile, Brailsford remains aggrieved over the loss of a rider who was crucial to Thomas’s victory a year ago.
“Having really looked at the rules, having really looked at the incident, I think collectively everybody feels it was a harsh decision,” Brailsford said of the disqualification. “There’s the spirit of the law and then the actual application of the law – sometimes a little bit of context wouldn’t go amiss.”
While there are clear precedents, such as Moscon’s, for disqualification over violent conduct during the race, Brailsford was right to point to a lack of consistency from race commissaires in Europe’s grand tours. In this year’s Giro d’Italia, the Colombian rider Miguel Ángel López repeatedly slapped a spectator after he caused López to crash, but his assault on the fan went unpunished and was deemed by the race jury to be a “human reaction”.
Of Rowe and Tony Martin, who issued a joint statement after the incident, Brailsford said: “Normally when there’s an incident, one of the two parties is unhappy, somebody’s said ‘he tried to hit me’, or ‘he tried to push me’, and isn’t happy about the situation. Nobody’s unhappy here.”
But he may now have more pressing problems. Brailsford has been in the middle of internecine rivalries before. In 2012, Chris Froome and Bradley Wiggins’s relationship collapsed towards the end of the Tour, while in 2018 it was final winner Thomas who drew the short straw as Froome’s needs were preferred.
Will he play poker again with Bernal and Thomas and their ambition in the coming 48 hours? Preferably not, according to the Ineos sports director, Nicolas Portal, who said this week: “When you play poker you take a big, big risk.”
Meanwhile Alaphilippe, the limpet who simply will not budge, clings on. There are two more days to unseat the yellow jersey holder who is now riding a rising wave of goodwill that as yet shows little sign of breaking.
“I’m aware I’m getting a lot of attention but I don’t feel pressure,” Alaphilippe said. “I am used to having pressure and that motivates me but I’m aware that something is happening with all the eyes of the public on the Tour at the moment. I see it in the peloton and by the roads and with the press – the messages that I get and the craziness.
“I hope it lasts to the end. We all dream of that. But I’m still a realist – today was a big step, but there is still tomorrow and the next day but my approach is not changing. I’m proud of what I’ve done. I’ve given everything.”
Alaphilippe, the roadrunner who has dodged every carefully planned ambush, is just two tough stages from one of the most unexpected and surprising victories in the long history of the Tour. Brailsford, Thomas and Bernal, lacking the engine room nous of Rowe and the talismanic leadership of Froome, must now make sure they are not his fall guys.