This article was produced in association with Hansgrohe and published in Rouleur 130
Earlier this year, I stood on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice with Ralph Denk, the Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe team manager, who was in buoyant spirits. It was the morning of the final stage of Paris-Nice, and the team were flush with the success of Alexandr Vlasov in the previous day’s stage to La Madone d’Utelle above the city. Denk was looking and sounding fairly optimistic, even if the team’s new leader Primož Roglič had been a little off form during the week and was sitting in sixth place over- all, 1:21 behind leader Matteo Jorgensen. (I didn’t see Denk that afternoon after the stage finish; he might have been a little less cheerful after Roglič shipped four minutes and slipped to 10th.) Denk suggested that Roglič was focused entirely on the Tour de France and that being a few percentage points below full fitness in a miserably wet stage race in March was nothing to worry about; also Roglič and Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe were still getting to know each other following the Slovenian’s transfer from Visma-Lease a Bike at the end of 2023.
Which brings me to standing just off the Promenade des Anglais with Ralph Denk at the end of the Tour de France, four months further down the line. The weather was a lot better this time – the weather at Paris-Nice was terrible, while the Côte d’Azur basked in summer heat when it hosted the Grande Boucle. The atmosphere was celebratory – a combination of the good weather and the novelty of the final stages of the Tour de France taking place in Nice gave the whole day a buzz that was neither better nor worse than the buzz of the traditional Champs-Élysées finish but was definitely different.
Around the Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe team bus, the atmosphere is... not as bad as I feared it might be. A sunny day in Nice will do that to you – people come to the Côte d’Azur to have a good time, and those kinds of vibes are contagious. There is a table set up with a stack of pizza boxes, the post-Tour staple, and beers chilling in buckets of iced water. Alexandr Vlasov didn’t make it as far as Nice on his bike, having pulled out of the Tour after a crash on the gravel stage to Troyes at the end of the first week. But he’s made it here on his crutches, and Denk directs him to the liquid refreshments. Soigneurs and mechanics have an easy day – just six riders left for the TT, so as they come in, their bikes are stowed, and nobody’s bothering with massage today. Jai Hindley is enjoying a reunion with his girlfriend, maybe enjoying it a bit too much, but hey, this is Nice.
But it wasn’t a good Tour for Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe. The team looked on paper like a force to be reckoned with. In three-time Vuelta a España winner and Giro d’Italia champion Roglič, they had one of the ‘big four’ of Grand Tour racing in 2024. He was less fancied than defending champion and ex-Visma-teammate Jonas Vingegaard and compatriot Tadej Pogačar, but was either level or slightly ahead of Remco Evenepoel for pre-race punditry. The Tour de France has had a habit of punching Roglič in the face, but his Grand Tour record is formidable nonetheless, and as the principal leader of Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe, he had none of the cohabitation issues he experienced in his previous team. The back-up looked perhaps less formidable than UAE Emirates and Visma-Lease a Bike, but the team have embraced the modern strategic method of signing high Grand Tour finishers and even winners as deputies and mountain support. Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe started the race with previous Giro d’Italia winner Hindley and Alexandr Vlasov, who has come fifth in the Tour and fourth at the Giro.
Also with road captain Bob Jungels, who has won Liège-Bastogne-Liège in his time, and twice finished in the top 10 at the Giro. However, Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe’s Tour unravelled, to paraphrase Mike Campbell in The Sun Also Rises, in two ways: slowly, then all at once. In the first crossing of the Alps on stage four and on the middle mountain stage to Le Lioran in the Massif Central in the second week, which turned out to be surprisingly decisive for the general classification, Roglič was about par. He couldn’t match Pogačar or Vingegaard, but was around or slightly below the level of Evenepoel, and sat in fourth place overall both before and after the stage to Le Lioran. But Roglič’s ongoing travails at the Tour manifested themselves in familiar form on stage 12 to Villeneuve-sur-Lot and he crashed heavily, conceding 2:27 before pulling out the next morning.
Building a Tour de France team is a complicated process, and it goes beyond selecting personnel. The team riders train not just to maximise their talent, but to do a job, and the job of team riders is to ride in a way that helps their leader express their own talent. Climbing domestiques, for example, often train for diesel, pace-setting efforts, rather than focusing on the explosive short bursts of power which tend to be what make the difference in bike races.
I remember Dave Brailsford telling me this as far back as 2014, when Team Sky had endured a terrible Tour after their leader and defending champion Chris Froome crashed out. The problem was, Brailsford said, was that the rest of the team hadn’t trained to lead the team, they’d trained to ride for the guy who had trained to lead the team, and even 10 years ago, that was enough to prevent them ever really being in the running to win a stage. And so it was with Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe in 2024 – the team was in decent shape to ride for Roglič, less so to ride for themselves. The final disappointments were Vlasov crashing and retiring, and Hindley himself being short on form. There were slim pickings for climbers who were not Pogačar and Vingegaard in the 2024 Tour de France, and when breaks did go, Hindley was in good enough shape to go with them, but not good enough either to hold off the GC group, nor to live with riders like EF Education-EasyPost’s Richard Carapaz, also a former Giro winner, who did at least manage to win a stage.
The facts of the Tour were brutal. Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe came last in the prize money list, and struggled to make an impact anywhere. They were not one of the 12 teams to win a stage. Four other teams not to have done so at least got some podium time, through combativity awards or temporarily wearing a jersey. They achieved one solitary top three – courtesy of Roglič in the Burgundy time trial, and on this measure only Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale and Cofidis did worse. And so, the celebratory atmosphere around the team bus in Nice seems surprising, but maybe they are just happy it was all over.
“I’m fine,” Denk reassures me. “Definitely the output from the results were not what we were expecting, but we have reasons for that. The reasons were a crash for Vlasov, and a crash for Primož. These are why we are more or less here with empty hands.
“It feels much better for me and for the whole team because we had reasons. If we were here, for example, with ninth place without those reasons, that would be the worst case for us. It’s not nice to have more or less nothing, but hopefully the luck will come back and then the performance and results will come back. Our performance was quite good until the crash of Primož.” Denk explains that it was complicated to switch to a Plan B, because without a GC deputy in the race, and with the GC and sprinters’ teams shutting down the race on most of the stages, there simply wasn’t enough to go around.
“To win a stage was the next goal, but to be honest, it was not easy. A lot of breaks were caught back by the strong team, UAE Emirates, and in the sprinters’ stages we don’t have a sprinter here. We had some medium mountain stages where we just weren’t good enough. The stage where Carapaz won would have been a good stage to achieve a win, but in the end we were not on a high enough level. Especially Jai. He was far off, I think you can see that, and we have to figure out the reasons. He had some health problems during the whole year; maybe this was the issue, but we have to analyse this. “I don’t blame the whole team because everybody put in an effort to win and we were riding with accuracy and passion, but in the end you also need super strong legs to win here. For example, Carapaz was really good – he was smart, aggressive and he had the legs.”
The 2024 Tour was Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe’s biggest ever attempt at the race; no doubt there will be an examination of what went wrong, but for Denk there were still silver linings.
“We spent more time at altitude than previous years. We took some measures in recovery as well. We never invested so much in Tour preparation as this year, but sometimes it’s similar to normal life. You want to do something very good, and sometimes the outcome is very bad. In every Grand Tour you take learnings and make small adjustments. You build up the team, build up staff. And in difficult moments you see if the team is really a team. What I saw here of the staff and riders was really, really good. You saw in the last few days how hard the team tried. The opportunities were not big, and in the small amount of opportunities there were, we were also not good enough. But we will figure out the next goals. The Tour is the biggest event in our calendar and we will come back stronger.”
The Tour de France exerts a huge gravitational force on cycling, which is why Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe’s challenge at the 2024 edition looks initially like an objective failure. They have had better Tours, and they will no doubt have better Tours in the future. But there is still mitigation for Denk to reflect on. A team leader crashing out can have a huge destabilising effect on that team. But it’s also not been a bad year for the German outfit. They already came second in the Giro d’Italia, with Dani Martínez, and Roglič did, after all, win the Critérium du Dauphiné. As this edition of the magazine went to press, Roglič was in second place overall in the Vuelta, the Grand Tour that has historically been the kindest to him (Roglič went on to win the 2024 edition of the Vuelta). Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe may yet end the season as one of the happier teams in the WorldTour, and if not, there’s always 2025.
