Onley Abandons The Tour de Romandie On Stage 1 With Illness — Difficult INEOS Start Continues As McKenzie Also Pulls Out
Oscar Onley has abandoned the 2026 Tour de Romandie on Stage 1, with INEOS Grenadiers confirming the 23-year-old British rider was forced out of the race due to illness. Team-mate Hamish McKenzie pulled out of the stage in the same window, leaving the British squad two riders down before the GC opens up on Saturday at the Anzère summit.
Onley had lined up at the start in Martigny as a 10/1 outsider for the overall, the kind of price the bookmakers reserve for a rider with podium pedigree but no obvious early-season form yet. The pre-race feeling was that the Ovronnaz climb on Stage 1 — 8.9 kilometres at an average gradient of 9.8 per cent — could give him the platform he needed for a long-range attack, given his combination of pure climbing ability and his early-season test with the new Netcompany-INEOS-branded operation. Instead, the Scot was distanced inside the opening kilometres of the climb and quietly abandoned shortly after, climbing into the team car on the long valley descent.
It is the second mid-race illness withdrawal of his 2026 season. Onley had been ill on the team's altitude camp in Tenerife in February, abandoned Paris-Nice in March with a throat infection that the team described at the time as "viral", and most recently finished 12th overall at the Volta a Catalunya — a result that, with the benefit of hindsight, looks more like a rider grinding through under-form symptoms than a rider holding back. INEOS team doctor Richard Usher told Cyclingnews at the line that Onley had presented with "fatigue, mild fever and the start of a respiratory infection" overnight and that the decision to start had been a "marginal call."
The abandonment is a blow for INEOS Grenadiers, who arrived at Romandie with two clear GC cards in Onley and Magnus Sheffield and have lost both an outright contender and a key climbing domestique within a single afternoon. McKenzie's withdrawal — the team has not yet specified a cause — leaves the squad down to six riders for the four remaining stages, with Sheffield, Filippo Ganna, Connor Swift, Bob Jungels, Jhonatan Narváez and the Colombian climber Brandon Rivera the riders staying in the race.
Sports director Steve Cummings, speaking briefly to ITV's commentary team in the finish enclosure at Martigny, called Onley's abandonment "really frustrating, both for him and for us" and said the team would now look to "give Magnus a free hand" on Saturday's Anzère stage. Sheffield is expected to be the team's GC leader for the remainder of the race, with Ganna ostensibly riding in service but with a clear interest of his own in Sunday's closing 19-kilometre Lausanne time trial.
For Onley, the timing could not be worse. The British rider's 2026 season had already been described in the British cycling press as the "fragmented" beginning to a long-term project — INEOS signed him from DSM-Firmenich-PostNL on a four-year deal in October on the explicit understanding that he would lead the team at the Tour de France within two seasons — and his first individual win for the Grenadiers, expected by the team's senior management to come in the spring stage races, has now slipped beyond Romandie.
Whether Onley returns to racing in time for the Critérium du Dauphiné in June will depend on how quickly the infection clears. INEOS confirmed in a brief statement that he would return to his Andorra base for medical assessment, with no further race targets revealed before the team's June Tour de France build. The Grenadiers' Giro d'Italia line-up — Egan Bernal and Thymen Arensman as joint leaders — was confirmed at the Netcompany unveiling in London on Tuesday and is unaffected by today's news.
Stage 1 of Romandie was won by world champion Tadej Pogačar from a select group of four after his Ovronnaz attack, with Pogačar moving into the yellow jersey by seven seconds over Florian Lipowitz. With Onley out, the Stage 4 Anzère mountain finale on Saturday becomes a straight battle between Pogačar, Lipowitz, Lenny Martinez and Visma-Lease a Bike's Jørgen Nordhagen — a quartet that, on this evidence, looks set to settle the GC between them.