Sixteen Wins In: Ineos Grenadiers' Quiet 2026 Revival Is the Story Nobody Is Writing
Axel Laurance raised his arms above his head on the Basauri finish line of Itzulia Basque Country stage 3 on Wednesday afternoon, and buried somewhere in the three-line race report that the wire services pushed out of the press room over the following ten minutes was a number that has been creeping into the margins of the sport all spring. Sixteen. This is now the number of victories that INEOS Grenadiers have won in the 2026 season. Only UAE Team Emirates-XRG have more. And of the teams that nobody wrote about in the winter because nobody thought there was anything to write about, Ineos — the team once known as the untouchable Sky dynasty, then as the reliably average second-tier super-rich outfit, then as the team so lost in its own identity that its most talented rider spent most of 2025 openly complaining about what it had become — is now the form team of the road cycling season.
This is not, to be clear, the Froome-era Ineos. No riders on the current roster are within arm's length of a Grand Tour general classification. The team's best 2026 GC performance to date is Carlos Rodriguez's second place at the Tour de la Provence — a February stage race won by a teammate. Ineos have not won a WorldTour GC this season and are not obviously favoured to win one in the coming weeks either. But the broad, granular work of professional cycling — breakaways, punchy sprints, stages, one-day wildcards, classics top-tens, strong time-trial performances — is the work Ineos has now quietly mastered. The team is second on the UCI world calendar table behind UAE. It is first on the UCI European table. It has at least one rider in at least the top twenty of every race it has lined up for in 2026, a statistic the team has not produced since 2019.
The reinvention has not come from a splashy transfer window. The biggest signings the team made for the 2026 season were the modest additions of Axel Laurance from Alpecin-Deceuninck (cheap, young, already an opportunist) and the 24-year-old Dutch sprinter Casper van Uden from Team DSM (cheap, young, in form). Neither transfer set the cycling press alight at the time. Ineos' big-name riders — Rodriguez, Tom Pidcock, Filippo Ganna, Geraint Thomas in his new role as Director of Racing — are the same riders who underperformed together last year. What has changed is what the team is doing with them.
The central decision of the winter was to hand road-captaincy of the men's team to Filippo Ganna. It is a simple move. It is also, when you spend any time talking to the sports directors in the paddock, almost certainly the move that has re-oriented the entire squad. Ganna is the team's oldest rider (29), its best time-triallist, its loudest presence in the bus and — since the Jumbo days of the late 2010s when he was a Roubaix apprentice behind Van Baarle — its most tactically intelligent road racer. He has spent the off-season telling the team's directeurs sportifs, in blunt Italian, that the team spent most of 2024 and 2025 trying to race like Sky and losing its identity doing it. "Sky is finished," he said at the pre-season camp in Mallorca. "We are INEOS. We should race like INEOS." Whatever INEOS actually means, Ganna has been telling everybody around him all winter that it should look more like a team that races hard, attacks early, and trusts its second-tier riders with the license to go.
That philosophy was visible in Laurance's win on Wednesday. The instruction — confirmed by Ineos sports director Matteo Tosatto in the Basauri mixed zone — was for Laurance to get into any breakaway of more than ten riders, conserve for the final 40 kilometres, and then go. "We do not tell him how to win," Tosatto said. "We tell him that we believe it is worth trying." It is the kind of sentence Ineos did not say out loud in 2024 or 2025. The result is a team that has stopped trying to be an all-or-nothing GC machine and has started being the most consistent opportunist squad in the peloton, piling up stage wins and one-day results like Alpecin used to in 2023.
The numbers tell the story. Sixteen wins by 8 April. Three of them are Laurance's four-win tally (he took a stage at Coppi e Bartali last month before the Itzulia stage today, plus his earlier Provence victory). Five are Van Uden's — the Dutchman has become the team's most reliable bunch sprinter since Van Uden spoke Dutch with an Italian accent in Ponteareas. Ganna himself has won the time trial at Paris-Nice and the opening time trial at Volta a Catalunya. Carlos Rodriguez has a stage at the Tour de la Provence. Rival Etxeberri, the 23-year-old Basque puncheur who joined Ineos on a minimum wage contract over the winter, has won a punchy day at the O Gran Camino. Josh Tarling has won a British time-trial championship and a shock opening GC day at the Tour du Var. The wins are spread across nine different riders and eight different races. This is the shape of a team that no longer depends on one rider for its identity.
There are two caveats. The first is that Ineos' most expensive rider, Tom Pidcock, has contributed exactly zero of those sixteen wins and has spent most of the spring injured. The second is that Ineos still does not have a Monument podium in 2026 — something the team has not achieved since Michał Kwiatkowski at Milan-San Remo in 2022. That may change on Sunday, when Filippo Ganna lines up as Ineos' leader at Paris-Roubaix in what is, for the Italian, the biggest one-day race of his life. A podium in Roubaix on Sunday would not only be the team's first Monument top-three in almost four years. It would also be the crowning result of a six-month rebuilding project that has, for the first time in a long time, made Ineos a team anybody wants to talk about again.
What the team does not want to talk about, yet, is what all of this means for the Grand Tours. Jonas Vingegaard and Tadej Pogačar do not appear to be losing sleep over an Ineos GC revival. Rodriguez is still only 25 and his Tour de France target for 2026 is an honest top-five, not a podium. But in a season where the big two will split the Giro and the Tour between them, and in which UAE's Ardennes leadership plan is unravelling in real time, the number of points that Ineos is quietly stacking up might just matter at the end of the year. The UCI team rankings will be decided on consistency, not on glamour. And as of 8 April, there is nobody stacking wins more quietly — and more broadly — than the team everybody wrote off last winter.
"We are just doing the work," Matteo Tosatto said, pushing off the Basauri mixed-zone barrier on Wednesday afternoon with a grin. "Nobody is paying attention. That is fine. Maybe they should." He ducked back into the team bus before anyone could ask him whether he really meant that. And on the team car behind him, Filippo Ganna — the 29-year-old Italian road captain who pulled the new Ineos into existence one training ride at a time — simply tapped his sunglasses and said nothing at all.