Cyclist
What does Red Bull’s takeover of Bora-Hansgrohe mean for cycling?
At the end of 2023 the big news in cycling was a possible merger of Grand Tour powerhouse Jumbo-Visma with peloton perennial Soudal Quick-Step. That fell through, but to start off a new year and a new season there’s another merger on the cards – and this time it’s for real.
Red Bull have acquired a 51% controlling interest in German team Bora-Hansgrohe after buying shares in parent companies RD Pro Cycling KG and RD Beteiligungs, both owned by Bora-Hansgrohe founder and longtime team manager Ralph Denk.
The news was confirmed late last week by Austria’s Federal Competition Authority (Red Bull are registered in Austria) after the period for objections passed by without drama. The move is a done deal, but plenty of questions remain. So what does the Red Bull takeover mean for cycling?
What is Red Bull?
Better known for its dominant Formula 1 team, the energy drink giant already has a history of sports sponsorships, including several football teams – RB Leipzig, RB Salzburg and New York Red Bulls – and two motorsports outfits. It’s been a presence in extreme sports – from cliff diving to downhill biking and BMX – since the 1990s.
So it’s no stranger to cycling, but the new stake in Bora-Hansgrohe shows a shift in strategy from investing in the individual brand of well-known riders towards having a more visible and hefty presence in the peloton. It currently sponsors several individual athletes who have already achieved success, most prominently Visma-Lease a Bike’s Wout van Aert.
But its existing focus is on off-road disciplines, sponsoring Tom Pidcock in cyclocross and mountain biking, Blanka Vas in cyclocross, and Evie Richards in MTB. It’s also title sponsor to the Red Bull Rampage and Wales’ iconic Red Bull Hardline, one of the toughest downhill mountain bike races in the world. A recent addition to the portfolio is CX, mountain bike, track and road star Zoë Backstedt, who currently leads this year’s U23 classification at the UCI World Cup ‘cross series.
Elsewhere, it sponsors big names like Chinese skier Eileen Gu, cricket’s Ben Stokes, and it has partnered with football superstar Neymar on a global five-a-side tournament.
Why Bora-Hansgrohe?
In some ways it’s not a surprising development. Red Bull already sponsors ski mountaineer-turned-cyclist Anton Palzer, who has been with Bora-Hansgrohe for three seasons. And they collaborated with Bora’s development team Grenke-Auto Eder last year on the ‘Red Bull Junior Brothers’ programme, recruiting junior cyclists and drawing parallels to their existing F1 feeder system.
Bora have significantly strengthened their squad in recent seasons, with their 2024 lineup including Grand Tour hopefuls Aleksandr Vlasov and Dani Martínez, sprinter Sam Welsford, Lennard Kämna, Bob Jungels, and Giro d’Italia winner Jai Hindley. They were the beneficiary of arguably the biggest move of the 2023 transfer window, snapping up four-time Grand Tour champion Primoz Roglič after eight years at rivals Jumbo-Visma.
Roglič’s move naturally begs the question of how long the Red Bull deal was in the works for. The Slovenian switched teams for a better chance at Grand Tour success, with Visma focusing on his younger teammate Jonas Vingegaard. Did the promise of Red Bull’s bigger budgets seal the deal?
Bora manager Ralph Denk has denied this, insisting at the time of Roglič’s transfer that ‘We have no budget increase. It’s not that a new sponsor arrives. We paid this with our money.’ But Roglič was sighted at the Red Bull Performance Centre in Salzburg when contract negotiations were taking place, and it’s alleged that they played a significant role in recruiting him.
The Tour de France is the one top-level prize that has eluded Roglič so far in his career. Rumours suggest that Red Bull’s sports sponsorship managing director Oliver Mintzlaff intends to strengthen and restructure the team to laser-focus on the maillot jaune in 2025 – behind, if this year is anything to go by, Roglič.
How will it work?
To establish how Red Bull is likely to build up Bora-Hansgrohe, let’s take a look at the company’s investment in other sports. Red Bull’s F1 team debuted in 2005, but took a while to achieve success, only winning its first world championship in 2010 with Sebastian Vettel.
Vettel then won four in a row, before another gap of eight years without a title until Max Verstappen’s dominant run over the past three seasons. Verstappen is under contract until 2028 and the team has also secured several constructors’ championship wins, so Red Bull’s strategy of patiently waiting for results has paid off. It seems likely that it will go for a similar approach in cycling – call it the anti-Todd Boehly vision of success.
Team principal Christian Horner has been in charge since 2005 and said last year, ‘We were just over 400 people when Red Bull acquired Jaguar, now we’re upwards of 1,600 people across the entire group.’ It seems realistic to expect an influx of personnel – although likely not quite that much – as well as cash into Bora-Hansgrohe.
The F1 outfit has also been ruthless. Drivers have been dropped at the first sign of weakness, kept on their toes by a junior squad waiting in the wings to snatch up their spots. Sebastian Vettel, Daniel Ricciardo and Daniil Kyvat all came out of this development programme.
Cycling feeder team Grenke-Auto Eder could become a serious talent farm if that’s anything to base it off, but we might also see it become a more cutthroat environment than elsewhere in modern cycling. Especially as more teams adopt lengthy contracts for increasingly younger riders, that might be an element of F1 that’s here to stay.
It will also be interesting to see how much Red Bull gets involved with the team’s tech side. Parent company Red Bull Technology Limited designs, engineers, and builds its F1 cars under ‘Red Bull Advanced Technologies’, which has a ‘long-term’ partnership with bike manufacturer BMC, which – as of this winter – doesn’t sponsor a WorldTour team.
The conglomerate’s football teams might also be sources of inspiration, with RB Salzburg top of the Austrian Bundesliga as of writing and Leipzig cementing themselves in the Bundesliga’s top five as well as enjoying a couple of DFB-Pokal cup wins in recent years. In both those cases, Red Bull bought smaller teams, rebranded them, and has seen them rise up the rankings.
Perhaps the biggest difference we’ll see is in the company’s approach to social media. Each of its brands are massive on social media and public-facing projects, using stunts, big-name celebrities, and sleek marketing to attract a younger generation of fans to the sport.
It’s likely we’ll see a more image-conscious, innovative use of social media from the rebranded team, which will make waves across a sport that can’t really be said to use it to its full effect at the moment.
Where does this place Red Bull’s other athletes?
Speculation will no doubt intensify over the future of riders like Wout van Aert, who is already a Red Bull athlete. Will we see more alignment between Red Bull’s athletes in other teams, and how would that work?
Remco Evenepoel has his own personal deal with bike manufacturer Specialized, which currently sponsors Bora-Hansgrohe. Rumours of moves for both riders have been denied but will continue to whir in the background, especially as they fit the mould of existing Red Bull riders.
Will Red Bull even be allowed to sponsor rival athletes? UCI rules state that members of WorldTour teams can’t be linked to another, or the organiser of a WorldTour event, ‘likely to influence the sporting course of events.’
The wording of this is unhelpfully vague. Would Red Bull’s fingers in different pies within the peloton constitute a conflict of interest? Red Bull does of course already sponsor athletes from competing teams, but that’s a different scenario to backing an entire separate team. We’ve yet to hear from the UCI.
What does it mean for the team?
The short version is, they’re likely to become challengers on all fronts across the whole season, like Grand Tour triple threats Jumbo-Visma were last year. The resources that Red Bull will inject mean they’re likely to move up the WorldTour pecking order and compete with superteams Visma-Lease a Bike, UAE Team Emirates and Ineos. The corporation made profits of €1.56 billion ($1.64 billion) in 2022, freeing up cash for bigger investments, better equipment and gear, higher rider salaries and big-money transfers.
Ralph Denk certainly hopes so. He said, ‘In the last few years cycling has changed a lot and Arabian countries have more influence. If you look at the budgets of the teams, the average grows and grows every year, so we have to react.
‘My goal is to run a team that is really competitive. The arrival of Red Bull looks like it could be the next step forward for us.’
It certainly looks like they’ll be more of a competitive outfit at this year’s Tour – good news for Roglič, then.
Money and squad depth don’t necessarily translate into race wins, but as we’ve established Bora have spent much of the past few seasons shoring up their team roster. That bargaining power will attract talent in the future who are keen to be part of a winning formula, in much the same way that Cian Uijtdebroeks jumped ship for Jumbo-Visma at the end of last year.
In terms of the actual structure of the team, the takeover leaves question marks hanging over who will call the shots. Bora-Hansgrohe has been owner and manager Denk’s pet project for years, so it’ll be interesting to see how much of the day-to-day management and strategy remains under his control. He is expected to remain as team manager.
Likewise with the team’s existing title sponsors, raising questions over if a kit redesign will be in the works too. Bora’s first statement on the news said, ‘Red Bull strives to complement the team’s portfolio of existing long-term main sponsors, who will remain on a long-term basis.’
But even if they stay part of the project, it might not be as we know it. Red Bull has come under a lot of flack in the past for renaming every outfit it has taken over to – you guessed it – ‘Red Bull’. (F1’s Scuderia AlphaTauri, which typically works as a feeder team for the main Red Bull outfit, used to be called and has recently reverted to being Scuderia Toro Rosso. No prizes for what Toro Rosso translates to…)
So will Bora-Hansgrohe be consigned to the dustbin of history? Rebrand as RB Bora-Hansgrohe, perhaps?
What does it mean for cycling as a whole?
It seems likely that the gap between the lower-budget WorldTour teams and the superteams at the top will continue to widen. In a sport where cash is already unevenly distributed, with event operators and rights deals hoarding most of it, it’s probably safe to expect to see more open discontent about the financial status quo.
We might see a pivot towards attracting a younger fanbase to cycling and making the sport more accessible, but also more commercialised. The way cycling is marketed is already changing with more social media-savvy operators in charge, including Netflix documentary series Tour de France: Unchained, which focussed less on the racing and more on individual personalities and team drama.
The injection of Red Bull cash might also go in a different direction: possibly into creating a women’s team, considering it already sponsors the likes of Backstedt, Richards and Vas. These riders are currently affiliated with other teams, but there’s no shortage of talent in the women’s peloton and developing a team would be one area where the new owners could be a real force for good.
For cycling fans, greater competition at races can only be a good thing – especially after the Jumbo-Visma Grand Tour whitewash of 2023 – but the takeover may also have wider repercussions. It shows cycling is firmly on the map for major conglomerates, so we might see a transition away from typical cycling sponsors like insurance and building materials companies towards huge multinationals.
That’s probably helped by the turmoil within cycling at the moment, with the OneCycling breakaway tour still in the pipeline and the potential of Saudi Arabian involvement an ever-hanging cloud over discussions of cycling’s financial model. All this shows that major movers and shakers are keeping an eye on the sport and looking to make their mark in some way – and that’s unlikely to change anytime soon.
Ralph Denk again: ‘We have to wait and see the evolution of cycling. For sure Red Bull has shown that in some other sports, they can make the difference but it’s far too early to talk about it.’
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