It was perhaps inevitable that Ineos Grenadiers would come after Oscar Onley. After the Scot’s Tour de France performance in July, when he finished fourth and at times seemed not so far off the likes of Tadej Pogacar and Jonas Vingegaard in the mountains, Britain’s sole World Tour cycling team must have started figuring out immediately how they could get the man from Kelso out of his two-year contract with the Dutch team Picnic-PostNL.
And when Onley didn’t turn up to Picnic’s training camp in Calpe, Spain, this month, any smoke there had been about a possible move became a full-blown fire. The deal hadn’t been done at that point, though, despite reports; Picnic were protecting their rider from the media and other pressures while conversations continued, allowing the 23-year-old to return home for a few days after racing in Australia at the Tour of Bright.
Picnic did not want Onley to leave — he brought significant value and attention to the small team — but after multiple offers were declined, the deal was finally done. “The proposal was not one Oscar or the team could refuse,” Picnic said.
Ultimately, there was little Picnic could do to keep Onley after their World Tour licence was renewed for only one year instead of the standard three, as they didn’t meet the UCI’s “financial criterion”, suggesting money issues at the Dutch team and therefore uncertainty for a rider on the rise. And so Ineos bought out Onley’s contract and got their British Tour de France hope on a long-term contract.
“The opportunity to represent the team of my home country was one I could not refuse and I’m happy a solution was found,” Onley said in a statement.
It was madness that the talented climber wasn’t already with the Sir Jim Ratcliffe-owned Ineos, a team once made up of the best British riders. Madness, also, that they missed Matthew Brennan and lost Tom Pidcock and that young riders such as the junior world champion Harry Hudson wanted to ride for Lidl-Trek’s development team over any other option on the table.
But then the downfall of Ineos can go some way to explaining that. The team have one purpose and that is to win grand tours, specifically the Tour de France. And yet their most recent grand tour victory was in 2021, at the Giro d’Italia, and their most recent Tour de France win was in 2019, both with Egan Bernal. The last time they won a grand tour with a British rider was in 2020 at the Giro with Tao Geoghegan Hart (now lost to Lidl-Trek). Since then they’ve relied on Team Sky stalwart Geraint Thomas, the winner of the 2018 Tour, to keep them at the table by taking third at the 2022 Tour and second at the Giro in 2023.
They had a few stage wins in 2025, at La Vuelta, the Tour and the Giro, but the team that changed cycling as we know it with marginal gains, mountain trains and a reliance on data have looked a shadow of their dominant former selves. They have been unable to mount any serious attempt at the Tour since Bernal’s terrible training crash after which he was given a 95 per cent chance of death or paralysis.
Add to that the controversies around David Rozman, Team Sky and Ineos’s long-term soigneur, who has been subject to an investigation by the International Testing Agency for alleged messages exchanged with Mark Schmidt, a known German doping doctor, in 2012, on top of the lingering whiff of the “jiffy bag” scandal from Bradley Wiggins’s 2012 Tour win, and suddenly Ineos are not the bright attraction they once were for young British riders with aspirations of wearing yellow.
As Thomas retires from racing this year and moves into the director of racing position, the team are looking for a fresh start and signing Onley is a clear statement of this new horizon. They also have a new jersey sponsor in TotalEnergies to complete the renewal, even if Sir Dave Brailsford has returned to the team in a role that has yet to be defined.
On top of this, the squad recently announced a new under-23 development team called Ineos Grenadiers Racing Academy, made up of 12 young riders (five of whom are British), suggesting a commitment to the future of the sport and a determination to match other top teams in the hunt for the next big thing. A long-term plan is one important step, but the cycling transfer market moves faster than it once did and riders are increasingly bought out of contracts in a system now closer to that of football in the quest to beat Pogacar sooner rather than later. Paying for ready-made talent has become increasingly important.
When Onley stuck to the wheels of Pogacar and Vingegaard at the Tour de France this year on the Col de la Loze on stage 18, the cycling world woke up. He’d had a good Tour already by that point, but being the only man to hold on that day was exceptional — few would have expected his overall fourth place before July.
To put it into perspective, Onley was riding for Picnic, a team with an estimated budget of €25million (£21.8million), while UAE and Visma-Lease a Bike have estimated budgets of €60million and €45million respectively. What this means in real terms is less access to the sort of high-quality data, equipment and training as those teams, but also, and more starkly, fewer strong team-mates around him. While Vingegaard is surrounded by grand tour winners Simon Yates and Sepp Kuss, Onley had to fight mostly by himself.
This is not to be unfair to Picnic. They are a team competing way out of their league and had fine races this year. But the financial playing field is uneven and against them. The truth is, in modern cycling you need a strong team around you to win the grand tours. Ineos have a strong team and an estimated €40million budget. They have the experience of Thomas in a management role and other riders such as the multiple grand tour stage winner Thymen Arensman and the Italian powerhouse Filippo Ganna. They have Bernal, Magnus Sheffield and Josh Tarling, and have recently bolstered their ranks with Kévin Vauquelin. All fine riders but none of them with that special something Onley seems to have.
According to Onley “probably 15 teams” reached out to his manager. Ineos, though, make the most sense. Unlike at other big teams such as Lidl-Trek, Red Bull or UAE, Onley won’t have to fight for leadership; he will have the full backing of the team in the races he wants and he may give the team a centre around which to revolve.
However, a move to Ineos comes with far more pressure. When a team pay a lot of money and rest their hopes on you, that is a lot for anyone to take, let alone a 23-year-old — albeit a very talented one. Onley is a quiet and polite young man but he is ambitious and confident, and is not scared of taking the fight to Pogacar, telling me earlier this year: “The whole Tour gave me a lot of motivation for the future because going in I also questioned whether I could actually ride GC [general classification] for three weeks. So it gave me a lot of confirmation and more of a clear idea of what I need to do.”
Ineos are a totally different beast to Picnic. But if Onley will feel the pressure, so too should Ineos. If they cannot find their way again and give Onley the team he needs to try to win a grand tour, then they will find that they are barely considered one of cycling’s super teams at all. Onley needed a strong team to match his ambitions, Ineos needed a strong rider to match theirs — now they both have those missing parts.
