Sport Big bang in cycling
Red Bull before joining Bora-hansgrohe
As of: 5:44 p.m. | Reading time: 2 minutes
More than just the helmet: Red Bull wants to take over the majority of the Bora-hansgrohe racing team
Source: dpa/Hendrik Schmidt
With Primoz Roglic, Bora-hansgrohe had already signed a cycling star for the new season. Now there are further opportunities for the German racing team. Thanks to Red Bull’s commitment, the team is rising to the top of the world.
This news is likely to change cycling forever. Red Bull wants to join the German racing team Bora-hansgrohe. The Salzburg corporation wants to take over 51 percent of team boss Ralph Denk’s WorldTour team. A corresponding merger application was received by the Austrian Federal Competition Authority (BWB) at the end of December, as it announced on its homepage on Tuesday.
The Bora team confirmed the desired partnership in a statement on Wednesday. As a partner of Denk’s operating company, Red Bull will “complement the portfolio of the existing long-term main sponsors who continue to be committed to the team in the long term,” it said. The team did not want to comment further on the deal, as the application deadline for acquiring the majority shares in the Bora racing team to the Federal Competition Authority does not end until January 26th.
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Bora-hansgrohe has been working for years to build a strong team for the big tours. In the future, the Bora-hansgrohe team may then be on a par with the industry leaders, who previously had an estimated budget of around 50 million euros per year, twice as much as the German team.
It would be the next step in a journey that began in 2010 in the depths of cycling. The Australian Jai Hindley also won the Giro in 2022, but he missed the podium in the Tour this year. That could be possible with Roglic. The Slovenian had to forgo taking part in the Tour of France in 2023 because everything at Jumbo was geared towards the two-time Danish winner Jonas Vingegaard.
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Roglic, a former ski jumper, won the Vuelta three times and the Giro for the first time last year. At the Tour de France in 2020, Roglic was very close to overall victory before compatriot Tadej Pogacar narrowly snatched the yellow jersey from him in the last individual time trial.
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For the German team, the collaboration would be another coup. With the entry of the financially strong sponsor, Denk may also be able to close the gap to the top teams such as Visma-Lease a Bike, UAE or Ineos, which have dominated cycling in recent years.
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Red Bull, which is particularly successful in Formula 1, football and extreme sports, has not previously appeared as a team sponsor in cycling. However, the Austrian company supports individual cyclists such as Bora professional Anton Palzer, who was once a successful ski mountaineer, the Belgian star Wout van Aert and mountain bike Olympic champion Tom Pidcock.
