Ineos Grenadiers lose Head of Performance to QPR Football Club as major overhaul continues

Ineos Grenadiers’ transition continues with the cycling team set to lose, or having lost, several key members of staff, including Ben Williams, who until recently had been the Head of Performance and Support.

Williams has taken up a new role at Queen’s Park Rangers Football Club as the director of performance but GCN understands that several more senior members of staff are set to leave at the end of the season, with two experienced sports directors and a coach among the changes.

The team currently have fewer than 15 riders signed for next season, although a number of athletes including Geraint Thomas and Carlos Rodríguez are set to stay. However, Dani Martínez, Tao Geoghegan Hart, Pavel Sivakov and Ben Tulett form part of an exodus of stage racing talent. The team are also heavily linked with AJ August, a highly promising 17-year-old from the United States.

• Read more: US sensation AJ August linked to Ineos: ‘He’s Remco, but probably with more power’

However, the departure of Williams also leaves a significant hole in the team’s staff structure, with no senior science practitioner at the top level.

“I’ve accepted a role at Queen’s Park Rangers Football Club as the director of performance. The last couple of weeks I’ve been transitioning out and doing handovers,” Williams told GCN in a phone interview on Wednesday.

Williams joined the cycling arm of Ineos Grenadiers in 2021, having previously been part of the Ineos sailing operation. Recruited by Dave Brailsford, Williams linked up several departments such as medical and performance, and was in charge of engineers, nutrition and data scientists.

“I really enjoyed my time with the Grenadiers and I learned a lot from Dave Brailsford. As you know, he’s a prolific leader and one of the smartest minds in cycling and elite sport. It was a great journey for me, cycling was my sixth sport, and I got to do some pretty cool stuff like lead the Hour Record,” he added.

“My brief coming in was to look at what needed to change and what could be disrupted in a positive way. We achieved a lot of what we wanted to do, especially around data science. Kevin Yen is a leading force in that area. Dan Bigham was instrumental in our time trialing performance, but there were some areas where I would have liked to have contributed more.”

A state of transition

© Velo Collection (TDW) / Getty Images

Egan Bernal's injuries have left Ineos on the back foot

Williams was approached after Bigham and then Filippo Ganna broke the Hour Record last year, with offers from football and other sports. During the summer, QPR made a concerted approach, with Williams stepping back from Ineos on a full-time basis towards the end of the Tour de France, with his role in sailing winding down in August.

The entire Ineos Grenadiers team appears to be in a state of transition at the moment. During the Vuelta a España, team leader Geraint Thomas told GCN that the British team were no longer the dominant force in Grand Tours and that, although the organisation were working hard to return to their best level, it would take time before they could compete with the very best.

• Read more: Ineos Grenadiers has been in transition for a couple of years, says Geraint Thomas

Williams echoed Thomas’ sentiments but stressed that his departure was mostly down to the opportunity of being handed more responsibility within QPR, and the chance to be based in the UK more often with a young family now a major part of his life. Last year he was on the road for 175 days.

“I still have a very good relationship with everyone at Ineos. I’m a cyclist, I race, and I’m a fan. Before I moved to the Grenadiers I’d have ridden up a mountain and sat by the side of the road for hours just to see someone ride past me for a few seconds. First and foremost I’m a fan of cycling and I really hope that the team continues to transition successfully,” Williams said.

“The team are in transition and they are looking at recruitment,” Williams added, pointing to the near-fatal crash that dented the current ambitions of Egan Bernal and forced the team to alter their transfer approach.

“There is a recruitment policy to look at emerging talent and I hope we’ll see more signings in that space. I say that as a huge fan, and I’m still a Grenadier at heart. Once that’s sorted the team will, I’m sure, start working on the performance gaps.”

'Brailsford is world class'

© Velo Collection (TDW) / Getty Images

Rod Ellingworth (left) has been largely running the team but Dave Brailsford is said to be regaining more influence

With no job postings to replace Williams, the likelihood means that there will be further reshuffles within the team. One outcome could be that Dave Brailsford retakes more responsibility - an aspect that Geraint Thomas said he would welcome last week.

Reports have circulated for some time that Brailsford had taken more day-to-day influence and that he had been responsible for switching the team’s plans around specific rider transfers.

Williams was not part of the recruitment drive but he did acknowledge that Brailsford had the personality and knowledge to have a positive impact on the team.

• Read more: Geraint Thomas supportive of Rod Ellingworth but would welcome Dave Brailsford return

“When people like Dave are around, everyone is two per cent better. I would imagine that if Dave spent a day at GCN then everyone would be that much better. He has that presence and he’s world-class in everything that he does,” Williams said.

“I’d be foolish to say that him being across all of Ineos sport didn’t leave a small gap but equally he wasn’t too far away. I spoke to him regularly and if a sport is reliant on one person then you’ve probably got something a bit wrong. They didn’t win all those Grand Tours because of Dave, they did it because they curated a population that was the right fit for the right type of racing at the right time.

“I still think that, from a logistics and performance point of view, we’re still one of the best in the peloton. There’s a young performance coordinator in Clement and he’s one of the best in his job that I’ve ever worked with. They’re world-class and there’s not an absence of talent. I think a lot of it comes down to recruitment and harvesting that talent.”

GCN has reached out to Ineos Grenadiers to ask if they were seeking a direct replacement for Williams. They have yet to comment.