Zero Days

Team Ineos

How do you protect an elite sports team in a pandemic?

Team Ineos (previously Team Sky and most recently Ineos Grenadiers) is the world’s greatest professional cycling team with seven Tour de France wins in its twelve year history. Fieldwork Facility joined a team of Performance Directors, Hygiene Experts and Behavioural Psychologists, together our challenge was to deliver a team-wide behaviour-change programme with an aim of losing Zero Days to avoidable illness throughout the pandemic and beyond.

Team Ineos was already light years ahead of the field in terms of looking forensically at the role of hygiene in performance and how to control and prevent infection. Zero Days is a long established dogma within the team that riders missing training days due to infection can be the marginal difference in being able to medal on race day. Special focus is given to Zero Days around performance peaking for the grand tours (Tour de France, Giro d'Italia and La Vuelta a España).

  • communication: Brand identity / Campaign / Research
  • experience: Behaviour change / Location specific communication / Activations
The ’Zero’ perimeter — a graphic device that defends

Rewind to Summer 2020, the entire world is in Lockdown and yet some sporting events are beginning to happen again, including the Tour de France. The stakes were incredibly high, in 2020 if two members of the team (including the caravan of performance directors, drivers, chefs, carers and mechanics) tested positive; then the whole team automatically had to abandon the race.

Our brand campaign’s language turned the Zero from Zero Days into a graphic perimeter that protects the team and team members. We developed communications to build awareness and promote compliance of behaviours that prevent the transmission of Covid–19. Our approach was informed by the latest research around Covid-19 prevention and behavourial psychology principles.

Typography and the Perimeter device
Icon style and Zero roundel

We launched the campaign internally creating communication touchpoints for all environments within training camps and race environments. We also worked closely with the team creating protocol documents shared in print and bitesize versions via WhatsApp.

We also developed a 2D version of the Zero Days perimeter so that we could highlight risks both pictorially and spatially
Behaviour change nudges
The campaign was immediatly adopted by Team Ineos and also utilised across the rest of the Ineos Sports portfolio which includes the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team, Ineos Team UK (sailing) and OGC Nice. In the Autumn of 2020 Zero Days was also adapted by the 1851 trust as ‘Zero Days: Back to school’, a free resource for schools welcoming back students afteer lockdown.