With a cash injection from Red Bull and the signing of Primož Roglič, Bora-Hansgrohe’s team manager Ralph Denk is in a confident mood. He tells Cyclist about the rising costs of running a team, the secrets of leadership and the Sagan effect
Words James Witts Photography Tornanti.cc
Ralph Denk leans back in his office chair at Bora-Hansgrohe’s headquarters in south Germany.
Around him is a collection of Specialized bikes once used by his team.
‘I’ve collected one of these each year since forming the road team in 2007.
That’s a long time leading a squad at this level but I’m super-motivated,’ he says. ‘Cycling – it’s 24/7.
I’m 50 years old now but I’m driven by pushing things forward, by winning the Tour de France with Primož Roglič and Red Bull.
Well, let’s see how far we can go.’
We’re going to need a bigger budget Denk is founder and team manager of Germany’s only WorldTour team and, as the years have rolled by, has increasingly become the money man, charged with attracting much-needed sponsorship in a professional sport that lives and dies by sponsorship money.
‘Over 95% of our income comes from sponsors,’ Denk says. ‘The rest is participation fees and some merchandising, but that’s not a lot. Simply, you need ever greater budgets to compete.
If you look back to strong German teams like Gerolsteiner and Team Milram, they were operating on €7 to €8 million a year.
Now, with the likes of Ineos and Middle Eastern money entering the sport, you need a minimum of €20 million, but better €25, €30, €35, €40…’
The last time Cyclist spoke to Denk was at the 2018 Tour de France where he lamented cycling’s broken business model of short-term sponsorships, saying, ‘If I have a 10-year project, I can invest more into that.
It’s partly why Team Sky have been so successful.’
Six years later, Denk’s dreams look set to become reality with the news that he has been in negotiations with energy drink giant Red Bull about something bigger than sponsorship: acquisition.
‘We’d been in talks since the autumn and agreed we were on the same page and had the same philosophy for a cool new project,’ Denk says.
‘We asked for government authorisation to approve the “liaison” between BoraHansgrohe and Red Bull and they gave us the green light at the start of the year.
Red Bull now owns 51% of the team.’
More precisely, Red Bull has a 51% stake in RD Pro Cycling GmbH & Co KG and RD Beteiligungs GmbH, the two companies that own the Bora-Hansgrohe team, which are owned in turn by Denk, his family and other partners.
Red Bull, whose revenue topped €10 billion for the first time in 2023, has forged a reputation for disrupting sports and targeting a younger audience.
Its entry into WorldTour cycling is seen as a coup not only for Bora-Hansgrohe but the sport as a whole.
‘There’s been so much speculation about what this means, including the team name that we can’t announce yet,’ says Denk.
‘But that underlines the exciting reach of Red Bull. It will be great to engage with a new audience.’
A Bull market
Red Bull is known for its high-octane approach to marketing, from Danny MacAskill’s trials bike wizardry to Felix Baumgartner’s 39km skydive from the edge of space.
But the company has also invested in a number of more conventional sports, including four football teams in Austria, Germany, Brazil and the US, two Formula 1 teams, ice hockey teams in Germany and Austria, and an America’s Cup sailing team.
It begs the question, what does this all mean for Bora-Hansgrohe? ‘Performance co-operation and knowledge sharing could be a benefit,’ says Denk.
‘Red Bull has athletic performance centres in both Salzburg and Los Angeles that are really the benchmark in sport, science and performance.
All the Red Bull teams and riders can use this infrastructure.’
That includes Red Bull-sponsored – and non-Bora – riders Tom Pidcock and Wout van Aert.
How the buyout will affect these sponsorships remains to be seen.
The F1 teams show Red Bull isn’t afraid of intra-competition if it drives innovation, but how Ineos’s Sir Jim Ratcliffe and Visma-Lease a Bike’s Richard Plugge feel about Red Bull lifting the physiological lid on their assets is another matter.
The Red Bull performance centres offer hi-tech gizmos such as alt-G treadmills for recovery, cryosaunas and even something called transcranial magnetic stimulation for improving reaction times.
‘There will also be technical co-operation, especially when it comes to leaning on the Formula 1 side and aerodynamics,’ says Denk.
But perhaps the biggest win could be the development of young riders.
A specialty of Red Bull’s football scouting system has been in early talent ID, signing players to the Red Bull group before they’re 18, with an especially strong presence in Africa, which is recognised as having the potential to be the next great cycling continent.
‘Whatever happens, a bullet point in our brainstorming paper is the rookies,’ says Denk. ‘It feels so much more empowering for a team when you nurture talent and they start winning.
We almost care more for the likes of Emil Herzog, who’s twice finished on the podium at the under-19 Worlds.
This new funding could open up possibilities to build on our Red Bull Junior Brothers programme, which we’ve been running for a couple of years to find the best young riders.’
Follow the leader
Of course, it’s not all about the youngsters.
At 34, Primož Roglič has 80 wins to his name, including one Giro d’Italia and three Vuelta a España titles, and represents the team’s best chance of winning the Tour de France to date.
‘We announced Primož’s arrival a day before Lombardia and I never expected such a reaction, but I guess that’s how high in opinion he’s held,’ says Denk. ‘He has a strong mind and is totally performance-driven.
His attitude is incredible and we’ve been impressed over the past few months at how he’s acted as such a good role model for the younger riders.
‘Clearly he has the physical attributes, but he has real leadership qualities too. He’s calm and not too outspoken.
What is good leadership? To me, it’s many things but, as an example, it’s how you might present your ideas.
There are some who might moan in front of the whole team. This is not Primož. He’ll ask for face-to-face meetings with the right guys.
We close the door and we talk. This is a big difference between leadership and simply complaining.’
Roglič is pencilled in to race the 2024 Tour de France, and this time he’ll be up against his old teammate and current champion, Jonas Vingegaard.
With Tadej Pogačar and Remco Evenepoel also scheduled to race, it’s set to be a Tour for the ages.
So has Denk spotted any weaknesses that might help his new signing to win the one Grand Tour absent from his palmarès? ‘Obviously we can’t say,’ says Denk, ‘but of course those three riders will be strong contenders.
And you certainly can’t ignore riders like Carlos Rodríguez at Ineos.
But, for sure, we will be in contention, which will be new for us.
‘In 2019, Emanuel Buchmann finished fourth, which was fantastic but wasn’t on the agenda at the time. It’s just something that opened up during the race. Now the situation is different.
That brings different expectations and pressures, and that’s something we have to deal with.
But it’s also something that should drive us and make us work hard every day. That is our goal.’
The Sagan effect
With Roglič on board, Denk hopes to move Bora-Hansgrohe onto the next phase by emulating the impact that a certain Peter Sagan had on the team seven years ago.
‘We remain super-thankful to Peter because he trusted in our project and signed for us [in 2017] when we were a second division team at ProConti level, despite him being the World Champion.
He started winning straight away [12 times in his debut season including retaining his world title], which took the pressure off other riders and, in a similar way to how we hope Primož settles in, helped us to develop young talent like Pascal Ackermann and Patrick Konrad.’
They’ve been successful but they have a lot to thank Peter for as he was the rudder of the team, the front man.’
Are there similarities between the Slovak and the Slovenian? ‘No, they’re very different,’ says Denk, ‘but that’s to be expected as there are always differences between the Classics and GC riders.
A GC rider is really focused on high performance; they throw themselves into the science, asking for exact measurements and data.
A Classics rider is a bit more freestyle. Peter was definitely more freestyle.’
Both riders highlight the team’s evolution – a team that started off in mountain biking in 2005.
Denk’s Giant Racing team won silver at the 2005 World Championships and the overall 2006 World Cup.
He stopped the team at the end of 2006 and started a junior road team in 2007 with sponsorship from a German federation reeling from several doping scandals.
Soon after, Denk brought US IT company NetApp into the fold and the increased resources saw the now-senior team race Continental in 2010, moving to ProContinental a year later.
In 2012 Team NetApp completed their first Grand Tour, the Giro d’Italia, and won a stage of the Tour of Britain thanks to Leopold König.
He repeated the feat at the 2013 Vuelta a España. By now, cycling apparel manufacturer Endura was on board.
‘But it was 2015 when things moved on a lot thanks to Bora replacing NetApp,’ says Denk.
‘Then in 2017 Hansgrohe [a German plumbing appliances company] joined our project.
That gave us the resources to achieve WorldTour status.’
Denk expresses his gratitude to both Bora and Hansgrohe, without whom the team wouldn’t exist.
Both will remain as headline sponsors, whatever the Red Bull-incorporated moniker will eventually be. Which brings us back round to the topic of money.
Money talks
There has been a lot of speculation about Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund getting involved in cycling to create a LIV Golf-style super-league.
At present, it looks as though negotiations have stalled, but Denk is only too aware that options are limited for teams that require evergreater funding but have few ways of obtaining it.
‘We will see what the future brings,’ he says, ‘but what we do know is that ASO, who run the Tour de France and many other races, are super-strong organisers.
But it’s hard to create many revenue streams without, say, a stadium.
Merchandising’s also tricky as your name changes depending on sponsor – we’ve had four in our time as a road team. Despite that, budgets continue to grow.’
One option, Denk suggests, might be for the governing body to bring in cost controls to ensure greater parity between teams and potentially help the sport as a spectacle.
‘They did it in Formula 1, where some teams’ operating costs were upwards of $300 million a year.
Now it’s under $150 million. From a fan’s perspective, interest is lost when one or two teams dominate.’
(Which is rather ironic, in that Red Bull and Max Verstappen continue to dominate Formula 1 like never before. The Red Bull team were also fined for breaching F1’s 2021 cost cap.)
What the future holds for RB Bora-Hansgrohe, Bora-Hansgrohe Red Bull, Bora-Hansgrohe Fuelled by RB… only time will tell.
What’s clear is that a team that has quietly gone about its business for 17 years is set for a performance and image makeover.
If that ends up leading to Tour de France victory, the German team and road cycling in general could be on the verge of a surge in youthful popularity. Watch this space.
Denk’s road to glory
A timeline of Ralph Denk’s pro team development
2005 Former Bavarian mountain bike champion Ralph Denk starts a mountain bike team. Giant Racing enjoy a couple of seasons of success.
2007 Founds project for young road talent. Previously called Quest-Ralph-Denk-Team, the under-19 team continues to this day as Team Grenke-Auto Eder.
2010 Creates senior squad, Team NetApp, that enters at Continental level. Austrian Daniel Schorn records their first victory, winning Stage 3 of the Tour de Normandie.
2013 Team NetApp and British-based Endura Racing merge to form NetApp-Endura.
2014 NetApp-Endura debut at Tour de France. They’ll have to wait three years for their first Tour stage victory, taken by Peter Sagan. Kitchen appliance specialist Bora announces on the eve of the Tour it will take over headline sponsorship from 2015.
2017 Shower manufacturer Hansgrohe takes on joint headline sponsorship, helping the team secure Sagan from the remnants of Tinkoff-Saxo. The Slovak takes 11 wins including the World Championships. Ireland’s Sam Bennett adds a further nine victories to the team’s season tally of 33.
2018 Sagan wins the points jersey at the Tour, which he’ll retain the following year. He also records the team’s biggest victory to date at Paris-Roubaix.
2019 Bora-Hansgrohe rack up 47 wins to finish the season ranked second. To this day, it’s their highest tally. Emanuel Buchmann surprises all with fourth at the Tour.
2021 Wilco Kelderman’s fifth at the Tour plus Felix Grosschartner’s 10th at the Vuelta a España highlights an increasing focus on the Grand Tours.
2022 Perth’s Jai Hindley wins the team’s first GC title with victory at the Giro d’Italia. Aleksandr Vlasov’s fifth in France signals their full transition to a GC team.
2024 Red Bull acquires 51% of the team. Primož Roglič will lead their strongest assault yet on the Tour de France.
Denk on…
…starting a women’s team
‘We’re always looking into the development of women’s cycling and it’s great to see its growth. We’ve had positive conversations with our sponsors about the women’s side but, for now, what with the Red Bull acquisition, there’s no women’s team on the agenda, certainly not for 2025.’
…road cycling in Germany
‘It has been at a similar level for a few years but not to the level when Jan Ullrich was fighting for the Tour de France. Arguably the sport needs greater governmental support in Germany. If we’re looking to build Olympic champions – which is always nice for a country – we need more help.’
…the importance of hosting races
‘It’s so important that your country features a WorldTour race. We didn’t have a high-profile multi-stage race in Germany for many years because of the doping of the past. Now we do. Young riders must have an event to aspire to.’
