Dan Bigham, who is preparing to compete for Team GB in next week’s track cycling events at Paris 2024, has revealed he is quitting his role at Ineos Grenadiers once the Olympics are over due to his “frustrations” over the current setup.
In what will come as a blow to the beleaguered British outfit, who have just come off a difficult Tour de France and have questions piling up, Bigham criticised Ineos’s approach, saying it was “clear as day the team should be doing things a lot better”. He suggested the team perhaps “lacked clarity”
post-Dave Brailsford’s departure.
Bigham, 32, famously began his career as an aerodynamicist for Mercedes F1, doing a bit of amateur riding on the side. His scientific approach saw him set up his own trade team, Huub-Wattbike, which regularly beat nations - including Great Britain - at track World Cups, with Bigham both riding and masterminding the R&D side.
After failing to integrate into the British Track Cycling Team, who he felt were dismissive of his ideas, Bigham took his knowledge to Denmark in the run-up to Tokyo 2020, helping to coach them to claim Olympic silver. He also briefly claimed the hour record himself.
Bigham joined Ineos Grenadiers as a performance engineer in 2022, working in the R&D department, and was viewed as a key cog in the team’s rebuild under new performance director Scott Drawer, who joined late last year following the departure of Rod Ellingworth. However, speaking ahead of his Olympic bid, Bigham admitted he had become increasingly disillusioned in recent months.
“It’s not particularly a me versus Scott thing at all,” Bigham said. “It’s more just how I see performance. How I want to do performance is not particularly aligned with how Ineos wanted to go about it. I wanted more autonomy, more ability to action my ideas. And I wasn’t really getting that at Ineos.”
Asked whether it was similar to the situation at British Cycling a few years ago, Bigham agreed there were “quite a lot of parallels”.
“I feel that a lot of performance we’re leaving on the table and that frustrates me because it’s clear as day we should be doing things a lot better.,” he said “Let’s be honest, Ineos are not where they want to be, not where they need to be and the gap is not small.”
Bigham admitted he was also frustrated when promised support for his Olympic campaign failed to materialise. He was eventually offered unpaid leave by the team this summer.
“They always said they’d support me for the Olympics and it got to about February and I’m like, ‘Guys, I’ve been knocking on the door. What is the support?’
“[Eventually] Scott came back and said, ‘our offer is you can take three months off as unpaid leave from May through to the Games’ which was, I guess, okay in a way, it put me on a UK Sport APA and I can arguably say I’m a professional athlete which is a nice box to tick. But at the same time it didn’t feel like a great amount of support. And with everything else building as frustration within the team it just felt if that’s the way they want to approach it then with everything else, my frustrations, I would hand in my notice.
“They agreed I’d do a week after the Olympics to do a bit of a handover, get everybody up to speed and then I’m out of there.”
Bigham’s comments will pile further pressure on a team who are already fending off speculation in the wake of a Tour which began with rumours of a falling out between star rider Tom Pidcock and director of racing Steve Cummings, who was left at home. Ineos then failed to win a stage of the race for the first time since 2014. Their top general classification rider, Spaniard Carlos Rodriguez, finished seventh, 25 minutes down on Tadej Pogacar. At one stage senior rider Geraint Thomas admitted he found the new management structure at the team “challenging”, likening it to a “coalition government”.
While there has been some good news - young up-and-coming riders such as Josh Tarling and Thymen Arensman have signed new contracts, while both Pidcock and Pauline Ferrand-Prevot won Olympic mountain bike gold in Paris - there has been further speculation only this week about Pidcock’s future. It was also announced this week that Ecuadorian Jhonaton Narvaez would be leaving to join UAE Team Emirates.
Bigham would not say where he was going, only that it was to “pastures new”. He said he could see what Thomas had meant by a “coalition government” but denied that Ineos’ wider sporting portfolio was a distraction.
“Dave [Brailsford, Ineos’ director of sport] hasn’t particularly been involved since I joined,” he said. “I see the media say stuff about Manchester United and a distraction but I don’t believe that is the case. Manchester United being somewhat acquired [by Ineos] has no bearing on Ineos Grenadiers as far as I can see.
“Ineos are primarily a sponsor but they also connect us up with other sport groups and the bigger the group is the more knowledge is contained within it. To have Manchester United in there, the All Blacks, Britannia, Mercedes F1, it’s not a small group.
“Dave had a very clear vision and a way of actioning it and a plan in his head. Maybe to some degree maybe that’s been lacking. We know what it takes to win but how do you get there? What are the processes? That’s the bit lacking clarity. That’s the bit frustrating me as well because I feel like I’ve got a very clear idea on the energy outside equation, the drag and where we need to go and we were not committing to some of the things I felt could bring some fairly significant performance.”
A spokesperson for Ineos Grenadiers said: “We’re very proud of the support we’ve given Dan, the access we’ve provided to our performance network and the freedom, time and encouragement we’ve given him to pursue a number of his personal athletic goals.
“Our performance support team is world class, and although we’ll miss Dan, the strength and depth we have in that area across a number of talented individuals means our programme should be unaffected.”
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