Dan Bigham has confirmed that he will resign from his role at Ineos Grenadiers after the Paris 2024 Olympics, where he is competing for Great Britain in the team pursuit.
The former Hour Record holder expressed frustration with the team’s management structure as he neared his exit, saying “it’s clear as day the team should be doing things a lot better.”
Bigham joined Ineos as a performance engineer in 2022, having previously worked as an aerodynamicist in Formula 1 and served as a consultant for the Danish cycling federation and Jumbo-Visma. During his time with Ineos, Bigham briefly held the Hour Record and he helped guide Filippo Ganna to break that mark later in 2022.
Speaking to the Telegraph ahead of his participation at the Paris Olympics, Bigham announced his imminent departure from Ineos, expressing criticism of the team’s approach and questioning its management structure in the aftermath of Dave Brailsford’s exit.
Brailsford formally gave up his title as team principal of the cycling set-up last winter, having already moved to a position working across Ineos’ various sporting interests. Rod Ellingworth departed as deputy team principal at the end of last year, with Scott Drawer taking over the team’s performance director as part of major senior management changes.
“It’s not particularly a me versus Scott thing at all,” Bigham said of his decision to quit Ineos.
“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.
“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. Let’s be honest, Ineos are not where they want to be, not where they need to be and the gap is not small.”
As a rider, Bigham won a team pursuit world title with Great Britain in 2022 and he claimed the European individual pursuit crown earlier this year as he built towards the Olympics.
On joining Ineos’ staff in 2022, Bigham had reportedly been promised support for his own Olympic ambitions, but he said that ultimately amounted to three months of unpaid leave.
“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?’” Bigham said.
“[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.”
Bigham added that he would work for one more week with Ineos after the Olympics “to do a bit of a handover,” but he did not divulge what his next role in cycling would be.
He dismissed the idea that Ineos’ investment in other sports, most notably its stake in Manchester United, had been a distraction from its involvement in cycling.
Although Brailsford’s involvement with the cycling team had been significantly scaled back by he first joined the team, Bigham suggested that Ineos had been lacking a figurehead.
“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,” Bigham said.
“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.”
Bigham’s departure and robust public criticism will come as another blow to Ineos, whose standing has diminished in recent seasons.
The British team won the Tour de France seven times in eight years between 2012 and 2019, but they have been surpassed by teams such as Visma-Lease a Bike and UAE Team Emirates. Ineos’ best finisher at this year’s Tour was Carlos Rodríguez, who placed seventh.
When Jhonathan Narváez confirmed his own imminent departure from Ineos on Thursday, he pointedly described his new squad UAE Team Emirates as “the best team in the world.”
A spokesperson for Ineos, meanwhile, defended the team’s support for Bigham’s Olympic ambitions: “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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