When Logan Roy came face to face with Lukas Matsson in season four of Succession, the direction of travel was clear. The old-school patriarch was forced to confront both his own demise and the inevitability of the future. He clearly wasn’t it: instead, it was younger, cooler, disruptive and Scandinavian.
Jim Ratcliffe may have experienced a similar frisson when the Danish tech bros from AI specialists Netcompany breezed into London recently and swooped on the opportunity to share title sponsorship of his Ineos Grenadiers cycling team for the next five years.
The deal brings an estimated extra €20m-a-year into the British outfit and will lift them into the higher echelon of the world’s wealthiest teams. Even then though, in the era of super-talents such as Tadej Pogačar, Jonas Vingegaard and Paul Seixas, it may not be enough.
The first test, this month’s Giro d’Italia, has not borne fruit. With Vingegaard set to complete a solid win in Rome on Sunday, Ratcliffe’s new-look team – aside from the now-customary time-trial stage win from Filippo Ganna – have failed to challenge the Dane and his Visma–Lease a Bike team.
When Ratcliffe first ventured into professional cycling in 2019, it must have seemed easy pickings. Multiple Grand Tour winner Chris Froome was still the sport’s marquee name and Egan Bernal and Geraint Thomas placed first and second in that year’s Tour de France. In fact, the team’s performance was tapering, and was soon to be eclipsed by newer, younger rivals, such as Pogačar and Vingegaard.
The once-dominant British team have been diminished in influence, with UAE Team Emirates and Visma–Lease a Bike exerting a stranglehold over Europe’s Grand Tours. Wins in the Tour Down Under, Volta ao Algarve and indeed the Giro d’Italia are worth having, but they’re not the Tour de France.
Ratcliffe, who according to team principal Dave Brailsford remains passionate about cycling, didn’t get into sponsorship to come 12th overall in the Tour, his team’s best placing in last year’s edition of the French race. A quantum leap is now required if his investment is to reap further dividends.
While Michael Carrick seems to have steadied the ship at Old Trafford, Ratcliffe’s cycling team, faced by the firepower of outfits such as UAE Team Emirates, Red Bull–Bora–Hansgrohe and Visma–Lease a Bike, remains becalmed in World Tour racing.
A Ratcliffe-owned team last won one of Europe’s Grand Tours in 2021, through Egan Bernal at the Giro, but despite valiant performances from Thomas and Richard Carapaz, an Ineos rider has not looked likely to win the Tour de France since 2019.
The return of Dave Brailsford to the team’s top management role, following his exit from Old Trafford a year ago, and the appointment of the newly retired Thomas as director of racing, might have been expected to fuel a renaissance, but there was little evidence of that at the Giro.
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Brailsford will now be hoping that fully embracing AI will give his team an uplift. But he will also be hoping that the boost in funding may enable him to lure the teenage Seixas, now established as the hottest talent in the sport, to his team.
The use of AI in cycling is nothing new, but Netcompany’s PULSE software may help to make sense of a tsunami of performance data, on everything from nutrition and recovery to aerodynamics and breathing, that Brailsford says it is in danger of obscuring valuable insights.
“It’s becoming more difficult with the blizzard of specialists and information,” he said.
Netcompany recently signed a lucrative deal with London’s Heathrow Airport, to become the airport’s primary digital operations partner. Now they are bringing their learnings from prior projects in AI to bear in elite sport.
“When you marry an IT company with the most winning cycling team in the world, you achieve a mean winning machine,” Netcompany CEO André Rogaczewski enthused, while also claiming that the new alliance would win the Tour de France “in the next five years”.
But it might not be that simple. Shadowing the team is the ongoing International Testing Agency investigation into its head carer, David Rozman, who left last year’s Tour de France after being linked to the Operation Aderlass doping scandal in Germany.
It’s a story that Brailsford has studiously refused to comment on. Netcompany’s AI software may be fuelling efficiencies at London Heathrow, but Rogaczewski didn’t seem interested in the team’s baggage, stating that he didn’t have “any reason” for concerns.
Asked if Netcompany were aware of the Rozman investigation, he was dismissive. “We are investing into a very professional team, and I think they will behave according to what is accepted,” Rogaczewski said.
“I’m just interested in whether the politics and behaviour of the professional cycling team are within the boundaries of what you can expect. I’m certain they are, in this case.”
Much will depend on Seixas, currently with the French team Decathlon CMA CGM. Widely seen as Pogačar’s successor, he can now pick and choose where his future lies. Brailsford hopes that the 19-year-old French prodigy can be lured to the British team.
The reality though, understood both by Brailsford and Thomas, is that the team still has a significant amount of ground to make up – and that no matter how smart your AI platform may be, you still need to have talent.
“It’s always been science and art,” Thomas said, “and I think there’s still a need for the art. Getting that clarity on all the data and stuff is one thing, but bike racing isn’t just about numbers. It’s not as simple as a partnership with an AI thing.”
Photograph by Jasper Jacobs / Getty Images