INEOS GRENADIERS

Team Sky was built around Bradley Wiggins, who came on board after finishing fourth in the 2009 Tour, but in 2010 he suffered from bad form and in 2011 he crashed and broke his collarbone in the stage from Le Mans to Châteauroux. It did not show the makings of a great Tour de France team in its first two starts, in which its best overall performances were Thomas Löfkvist's 17th place in 2010 and Rigoberto Urán's 24th in 2011. Its maiden Tour in 2010 had got off to an auspicious start, though, with Geraint Thomas finishing second in the cobblestone stage in the Nord department and rookie Edvald Boasson Hagen claiming third in the following two stages, foreshadowing the Norwegian's two stage wins in 2011, which saved Dave Brailsford from going home empty-handed a second time.

However, the outcome changed radically in 2012, with a one-two in the final general classification with Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome, along with three stage victories by Mark Cavendish, who in the end felt too hemmed-in in a team set up mainly to win the yellow jersey. Before being knighted by the Queen of the United Kingdom, the multi-medal holder in track events struck the gong to inaugurate the Olympic Games in London, wearing a highly symbolic yellow jersey one week after his Tour de France victory.

Froome took over as leader in 2013 and extended the team's dominance, winning more stage races than anyone else, with the sole exception of the 101st Tour de France, which started from Britain in no small part thanks to Team Sky's huge effort to promote cycling in the country. The defending champion had to withdraw after crashing in stages 4 and 5 and Richie Porte proved unable to fill his boots despite making it to the Alps in second place overall. There was no plan B for the British team that year, but it got back to its winning ways with Chris Froome's second triumph in 2015, which he followed up with a third in 2016 and a fourth in 2017.

The Kenyan went on to add the Vuelta and Giro to his tally and finish third in the 2018 Tour de France, where he stood on the podium next to teammate Geraint Thomas, the third British rider to win the Tour de France in the span of six years. Even Froome's hair-raising crash in the 2019 Tour did not stop the team, now known as Ineos, from claiming its seventh Tour de France in eight editions, this time with Egan Bernal, who became the first ever Colombian to win the Tour at the tender age of 22. Geraint Thomas made it a one-two for the British outfit.

Hamstrung by Egan Bernal's back problems, the undisputed hegemon of the Tour de France in the 2010s had trouble getting off the ground in 2020, but it recovered in spectacular fashion in the third week as Michał Kwiatkowski and Richard Carapaz scored a poignant 1-2 in La Roche-sur-Foron, dedicated to Nicolas Portal, the team's sport manager who had died unexpectedly in March that year. The British squad got back to its Grand-Tour winning ways after this short blip, taking the Giro with Tao Geoghegan Hart in 2020 and Egan Bernal in 2021.

Those were its last Grand Tour victories to date, making it nine failures in a row for the squad with the deepest pockets in the peloton, which had won six out of nine between 2017 and 2020. Jumbo–Visma and UAE Team Emirates are now a cut above Ineos. Egan Bernal's serious training crash in January 2022 piled the pressure on Geraint Thomas, third in the 2022 Tour and second and third in the 2023 and 2024 editions of the Giro. The 38-year-old Welshman is eager to step back into the breach at the Tour de France, in part because he wants to serve as a mentor to rising stars such as Tom Pidcock, who claimed the Alpe d'Huez stage in his debut in 2022, and Carlos Rodríguez, who raised his arms in triumph in Morzine and came in fifth overall in his first Grande Boucle in 2023