Late in the evening of the last Sunday of May 2021, when Egan Bernal and a small host of friends, team staff and admirers filed into the press room in central Milan's plush Palazzo dei Giureconsulti as the winner of that year's Giro d'Italia, it felt like the almost inevitable continuation of what had already been a decade of Sky/Ineos Grenadiers Grand Tour dominance.
Things are never as simple as they sometimes look in cycling, though, and seven Tour de France victories from 2012 to 2019 and three other Grand Tour wins in the same period had already seen challenges to that particular narrative – major ones, too.
For one thing, Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates-XRG) had put an abrupt stop to Sky/Ineos domination of the Tour in 2020, and almost equally significantly, neither of the riders alongside the Slovenian in Paris that autumn were Ineos riders, either. The second big development was that although Bernal's victory was Ineos' second straight Giro title after Tao Geoghegan Hart in 2020, and the team's third in four years, he made it very sound like anything but business as usual for himself or his squad.
Rather, the Colombian himself was keen to talk about how the 2021 Giro had acted as a conduit for him to regain his enjoyment in the sport after conquering the Tour de France 'too soon'. That was because, at 22 in 2019, Bernal had been the youngest Tour champion since 1909 – and rather than drive him on, getting to cycling's pinnacle had left him suddenly feeling purposeless.
Or as he said in his Milan press conference: "Handling what it felt like after winning the Tour was really hard, it was harder than to win it. So winning this [2021] Giro is a marvellous thing, an explosion of so many emotions.
"I have found again what was lost," he added, referring to a rediscovery of new motivation that would enable him to move on with his career again and succeed. Or as he put it, "I'm back in the game."
And as for Ineos? The 2021 Giro d'Italia, it turned out, ended up being – at least for now – the end of a seemingly unstoppable Grand Tour victory factory production line.
After 12 Grand Tour wins in 11 years, there have been three podium finishes in the Giro and two in the Tour, three of those thanks to the now-retired Geraint Thomas and two courtesy of Richard Carapaz (now EF Education-EasyPost). But UAE Team Emirates, Visma-Lease a Bike and Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe suddenly combined to put the uppermost step of the Grand Tours out of reach completely.
By 2023, when Visma became the first squad ever to win all three Grand Tours in a single year, something long desired by Sky back in the day, it felt like there was little chance of a turning back of the clock.
And yet. It may be that five years have come and gone since Bernal's last Giro win, but Bernal is back in Italy, co-leading a GC Ineos challenge and in what he told reporters in the Tour of his Alps was better condition, too, than when he started the Giro last year, when he finished seventh overall.
On the personal front, to say there have been alterations to the nature to Bernal's Giro candidature compared to 2021 is an understatement of major proportions, though. Since that emotive press conference in the hallowed halls of the Palazzo dei Giureconsulti, his near-fatal accident in January 2022 and the 20 different fractures he suffered that day all pushed him back to a radically different starting point regarding Grand Tour participations from then on, let alone contending for victory.
Enter Netcompany
While Bernal has slowly but surely risen back through the ranks to the point of taking a seventh place overall last year in Rome – his best post-accident GC result to date in any Grand Tour – there's still a refreshingly unpredictable level of uncertainty as to how close to his former level he can actually get. Equally, and echoing the fact that his upper limit is still yet to be discovered (or rediscovered) in Grand Tours, the same goes, for the team, following the arrival of Netcompany as co-sponsor Ineos.
Certainly, any team gaining such a massive new backer is bound to gain a major injection of motivation. Furthermore – and just like Bernal himself – the question of just how high the team will now bounce, could easily become one of the sport's most interesting plotlines of the years to come.
It all begins, of course, at the Giro d'Italia, the first race where Netcompany officially get their allotted place on the team kit, vehicles and equipment.
At the rebranded team announcement in London last week, it was interesting that, rather than the Giro, that revived momentum was used for even loftier goals and hitting the highest of the heights in the biggest cycling game in town: the Tour de France. It seems they mean serious business, and yet as my colleague James Moultrie pointed out in his in-depth analysis of the implications of the Netcompany co-sponsorship, "We will win the Tour de France within the next five years" would be an ambitious statement for anyone not called Tadej Pogačar or UAE Team Emirates-XRG to make in 2026.
No matter: that phrase was among the striking words uttered by the CEO of Ineos' new co-title sponsor, Andrej Rogaczewski, on Tuesday, and as if to make sure nobody missed his point, he followed it up with a "I think we can really prevail here."
Yet if the five-year time frame on winning the Tour is both ambitious and a tacit admission that the odds of that happening overnight remain low, this July it should be remembered that for all they'll be riding with Netcompany-Ineos jerseys from this May onwards, this is a brand new joint venture. So whatever the team's much-vaunted benefits of AI and future research into the micro-individualisation of rider response to training may end up to be in reality, its full benefits well only take effect beyond the 2026 Tour de France.
It's also perhaps worth noting 2024 Olympic champion Kristen Faulkner (EF Education-Oatly) already seems to have found out a huge and very beneficial effect to using AI, while several other men's WorldTour teams have quietly been using it as well. So it's perhaps not as groundbreaking an innovation as Netcompany-Ineos' focus on AI at their launch seemed keen to suggest.
Yet in any case, when it comes to this year's Giro d'Italia, for all this is the first Grand Tour in the brave new Netcompany-Ineos world in terms of kit and branding this year's Grand Tour could act as a bridging chapter of whatever the previous version of Ineos was, too.
Which brings us neatly to what Geraint Thomas, one of the elements in Ineos upper management viewed as resolutely 'old-school' – witness his joke at the Netcompany launch about only having had a laptop for the last six months – has to say about the Giro d'Italia.
Ineos' most recent podium finisher on a Grand Tour, back when he finished third in the Giro in 2024, Thomas delivered a very positive review of the Netcompany-Ineos line-up. He pointed, logically, to Bernal's very encouraging second place in the Tour of the Alps, with Thymen Arensman's third place also cementing his status as co-leader for the squad in Italy, as well as lots of options for stage wins.
The Geraint Thomas angle
"[It's looking] really good," Thomas told reporters at the Netcompany launch. "I think for a start Egan got a bit injured at the start of this season. But then to see him come back as he has, and he was at his first race in Alps, we were second, and then in Liège he was fifth. He's just on a nice trajectory."
Arensman's two summit finish stage wins in the 2025 Tour de France represented another step forward in the Grand Tour arena for the Dutchman as well, Thomas pointed out.
"He definitely went up a level. I wouldn't say breakthrough – he's already had numerous top 10s in Grand Tours – but I think those two leading the team is super exciting. But then underneath that [at the Giro], I think there's plenty of opportunities for stages, Pippo [Filippo Ganna], and Ben Turner and Magnus [Sheffield] and all the boys potentially can go for stages as well.
"So it's an exciting time, a two-pronged attack, with stages and GC, and we've got that good momentum in the team.
"It's just continuing that and continuing to grow and so I think the Giro is gonna be exciting. It's strange not being there [racing], though, to be honest, sat on the bus just watching."
Thomas' keenness to be part of the squad remained palpable, with the Welshman saying he found it hard to adapt to not being on the rollercoaster of emotions that racing can bring. But it is notable that since he came on board last December as a member of staff after retiring, the squad has begun picking up a significant number of victories in any case.
At the time of writing, Ineos Grenadiers had 17 wins on their 2026 results, 11 of them WorldTour. They wouldn't reach that same total in 2025 until a good two months further on, during the National Championships, and with only six of them at WorldTour level.
What's encouraging for Netcompany-Ineos is not just that the team already seem to have turned a corner in 2026. It's the variety and novelty of the 2026 success as well, like Filippo Ganna taking the first Classics win of his career at Dwars door Vlaanderen ahead of Wout van Aert (Visma-Lease a Bike).
That's even while retaining his usual consummate time trialling skills, which will almost certainly come on show at the Giro's one individual race against the clock on stage 10 in Tuscany this May.
But if Ganna's six previous TT Giro stage wins (as well as one from a memorably tough first-week road stage breakaway in 2020) make him a surefire option for more success, the much hyped GC mid-term goals for Ineos will come in for their first test of 2026 here as well. And if Oscar Onley, Kévin Vauquelin, and Carlos Rodríguez will be the main points of reference for July, in Italy it's Bernal's GC bid that will likely centre most of the media interest.
As Thomas said, second place in the Tour of the Alps and fifth in Liège were encouraging in the short term and since last year he also had his first post-accident Grand Tour stage win to celebrate, at the 2025 Vuelta a España. That victory on a stage curtailed by protests and at a point where it seemed more than unlikely that the race would make it to Madrid was a strange one – as were most of the wins in the second half of the tumultuous Vuelta.
But like all the other contenders in this year's Giro, for Bernal the first setpiece crunch point will come on stage 7 of the race, on the relentlessly steady and steep slopes of the Blockhaus, the Giro's first major summit finish.
In the Tour of the Alps, Bernal's winning the sprint on the toughest final stage of the race behind lone winner Giulio Pellizzari (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe) bodes almost as well as his second place overall. It also confirms that his knee injury which kept him out of the running for most of the spring is thankfully no longer an issue.
As Bernal put it back in 2021, can what was once lost back in 2021 really be found again, both for himself and for the team?
Possibly the biggest card that Bernal now can use is something only time can bring: experience, vastly increased knowledge of his own strengths and weaknesses, and an ability to read races that can only have improved in the five years since then.
That's particularly true in Italy, the country where he cut his teeth as a young pro before joining Sky. In an event like the Giro, which can sometimes turn on a dime, learning when and how to take the initiative at the right moment can be absolutely critical. That's exactly how Simon Yates won the race outright on the Colle delle Finestre last year after all, and where the ultra-young previous leader Isaac del Toro (UAE Team Emirates-XRG), lacking in those kinds of Giro street smarts, found himself spinning out of control, and out of pink, too.
But if much is made about how the Giro is always a race where anything can happen, nothing can be taken for granted for Bernal this May, either. Certainly we're light years from the 2021 post-Giro press conference scenario, where Bernal's position as a top GC favourite was so clear that – showing a well-embedded tendency amongst even the most experienced sports reporters in Italy to underestimate the Vuelta a España – one patronisingly suggested Bernal could automatically snap up a win in the Spanish Grand Tour that autumn, as if just turning up on the start line guaranteed the Colombian the victory.
The reality is that at this point, given Jonas Vingegaard's locked-in favourite status, despite their brand-new backing, the Danish rider is the biggest reference point for Ineos.
Bernal and Netcompany-Ineos have exactly the same mission as Ineos Grenadiers did up until this week in Grand Tours. Which is? Focus on their own game, but with the awareness that the league they're operating in will not, at least initially, be of their making.
However, of all the three Grand Tours, the Giro is often the most likely to abruptly veer in a different direction, and that could provide exactly the opening Netcompany-Ineos are looking for to regain momentum. Even as soon as this May.
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