Tour de France 2020: Chris Froome and Geraint Thomas left out of Ineos team

Thomas will lead the team at the upcoming Giro, while Froome will front their assault on the Vuelta a Espana in what could be his farewell race

Chris Froome and Geraint Thomas will play no part in the 2020 Tour de France after being omitted from the Ineos team. Instead the reigning champion Egan Bernal will lead their attempt alongside Richard Carapaz, the 27-year-old signed from Movistar this season who won last year’s Giro d’Italia.

Thomas has been handed leadership duties at the upcoming Giro, while Froome will front their assault on the Vuelta a Espana in what could be his farewell race before departing for Israel Start-Up Nation in 2021.

Team manager Sir Dave Brailsford laid out the plans on Wednesday, insisting the Giro was “an opportunity” for Thomas to win another Grand Tour, while explaining Froome needed longer to return to full fitness following his horrific crash at the Criterium du Dauphine last year.

“The decision we’ve come to, which we’re very excited about actually, is we’re going to get Egan and Richard to target yellow, to go after the yellow jersey once again,” said Brailsford.

“Then we’re going to take Geraint – Geraint’s won the Tour, finished second at the Tour, this guy needs a big chance, a big platform, so we’ve decided to give Geraint the opportunity of focusing and going for the Giro. A Welshman’s never won the Giro. It’s a big race. He’s won the Tour and if he could double that up with the Tour it would be terrific. Three time trials, the mountains suit him, so it’s a pretty good Grand Tour for him.

“Which leaves the Vuelta. Everyone must admire Chris’s return to racing. He’s come back with grit and determination, but I think he needs that little bit longer to get to the highest level. He’s a champion, he’s one of the legends of the sport, and he deserves the opportunity to go into a Grand Tour as a leader as well.”

Froome will be bitterly disappointed not be challenging for his fifth yellow jersey, but the writing was on the wall for both he and Thomas after a disappointing return to racing, culminating at last week’s Dauphine where both riders struggled and their directeur sportif Gabriel Rasch said they had “not been good enough”.

Bernal pulled out of the race as a precautionary measure after suffering a minor back injury in an effort to preserve his body for the Tour, which begins on 29 August. He has been the team’s in-form rider having won Route d’Occitanie earlier this month, and will no doubt breathe a sigh of relief at winning the leadership battle, particularly now there is no prospect of having to race alongside Froome with whom tensions have simmered in recent months, in part causing Froome’s scheduled departure to Israel Start-Up Nation next year.

Yet the 23-year-old Colombian will not have it all his own way. Carapaz is a Grand Tour winner in his own right and looks in good shape having won a stage at the Tour de Pologne and finished sixth at the Vuelta a Burgos since racing returned.

Richard Carapaz lifts the trophy after winning the general classification (AFP)

And Bernal will also have Ineos’s next big thing by his side, Pavel Sivakov. The 23-year-old Russian is only a few months younger than Bernal but this will be his first Tour de France, and he has been widely tipped as a future winner of the yellow jersey after winning last year’s Tour of the Alps and Tour de Pologne.

Sivakov finished second to Bernal at Route d’Occitanie, and Bernal will know all too well about precocious young riders upsetting a team’s leadership dynamic after he himself quickly asserted his position during his first two Tours.

“Egan’s come into this race block and he’s done tremendously well,” said Brailsford. ”He’s won the first race, so he’s deserved his position as the outright leader for the Tour. And we’ve brought Richard in because there’s a combination there which we think works, and we want to use those guys together.

“And of course we’ve got young Pavel, who’s going to come into his first Tour de France. He’s a big, big talent, he’s got to go step by step obviously, but on the other hand we’ve seen some performances from him since his return to racing which have been really impressive, so we want to give him the opportunity, give him the experience and take him to the Tour at the front end of the race.”

It is still a strong team on paper, even without the experience of Froome and Thomas and their cumulative five Tour victories. Road captain Luke Rowe – the only Briton in the eight-man selection – will be joined by last year’s impressive support act Dylan van Baarle and long-time Ineos lieutenant Michal Kwiatkowski, alongside the vast experience and character of Andrey Amador and Jonathan Castroviejo.

Ineos, who will go by the new name Ineos Grenadiers, will face stiff competition from Dutch team Jumbo-Visma, led by former Vuelta champion Primoz Roglic and Giro winner Tom Dumoulin, and Brailsford hinted that, much like last year, Ineos may not be able to deploy the line-to-line domination of previous Tours.

“We’ve put that team together and we’ve been looking at how we think we can win this race, and we’ve got some ideas about maybe a slightly different approach that we’ve taken in the past,” added Brailsford. ”But we’ve got a good gameplan, and I think these are the guys to deliver on that.”

Ineos Grenadiers for Tour de France 2020

Andrey Amador

Egan Bernal

Richard Carapaz

Jonathan Castroviejo

Michal Kwiatkowski

Luke Rowe

Pavel Sivakov

Dylan van Baarle