Chris Froome and Geraint Thomas gently axed from Ineos's Tour de France 2020 team

Sign up to our free sport newsletter for all the latest news on everything from cycling to boxing Sign up to our free sport email for all the latest news Sign up to our free sport email for all the latest news SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Froome “deserves the opportunity to go into a Grand Tour as a leader as well,” Brailsford explained, and so he was being packed off to the Vuelta a Espana, every rider’s third favourite Grand Tour. The Dutch outfit Jumbo-Visma have been quietly assembling something special for a couple of years now: in 2019 they signed time-trialist and fierce domestique Tony Martin, the prodigious Wout van Aert and the supreme young climber Laurens De Plus; this season they added former Giro winner Tom Dumoulin to former Vuelta winner Primoz Roglic as the spearheads of their assault on the Tour, and allied with last year’s Tour runner-up Steven Kruijswijk they will have a strong team geared to winning the race. There is already something of a compelling rivalry brewing between Ineos and Jumbo-Visma, fuelled by last year’s close battle and the mid-race punch-up that saw their two road captains Luke Rowe and Tony Martin disqualified and forced to issue grovelling apologies containing words like “racing incident” and “respect” and “it’s hot out there”. Ineos will have to find a different road to victory, under a new plan, one in which neither of Brailsford’s former lynchpins Froome or Thomas quite fit.