Chaos at INEOS Grenadiers as key staff member Dan Bigham quits - "It’s clear as day we should be doing things a lot better"
Cycling
It is no secret that INEOS Grenadiers are not at the level they hoped for, but this is not only what is said from the outside, but from within the team itself. Dan Bigham joined the team in 2022 and became a key part of the team's time-trial development for the likes of Filippo Ganna and Joshua Tarling but is quitting the team as he believes the team is taking the wrong decisions regarding performance.
“It’s not particularly a me versus Scott (Scott Drawer, performance manager, ed.) thing at all. 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," Bigham said in words to The Telepraph.
Bigham directly says the team is making the wrong decisions that are leaving them far behind the likes of UAE Team Emirates and Team Visma | Lease a Bike, despite the high budget: “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.”
The Briton is a pro track rider and has even held the track record whilst working for INEOS as an aerodynamics expert. Despite his big feats, his main job at the team was to help with time-trial development, the one field where the British team has kept up with it's rival teams, featuring big leaders such as Filippo Ganna and Joshua Tarling who continue to take big wins nowadays against the clock. However, with his own ambitions, Bigham was disappointed for the lack of support the team provided for his goals at the Olympic Games.
“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?’ 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," he admits.
Safe to say that throughout 2024 Bigham has grown frustrated of how the team behaved with him and ultimately decided to qut. "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.
Currently, Bigham is at the Olympics where he will soon participate in several Track events, and in the week after he will fulfill his final days with the team before focusing on new goals. “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.”
He blames the lack of a clear vision on Dave Brailsford's departure from a full leading role within the team, the man who guided the team through most of the 2010's. Despite it's large budget, the team has in recent years lost leaders such as Dylan van Baarle, Richard Carapaz, Adam Yates, Daniel Martínez, Tao Geoghegan Hart and will at the end of this season lose Jhonatan Narváez; whilst failing to sign a big leader who can replace these losses.
“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," Bigham concludes. "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.”
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A founding contributor to CyclingUpToDate since its launch in January 2022, Ruben Silva has played a central role in shaping the site’s editorial direction and long-term growth. Before joining the project, he built his experience through independent blogging at Echelons Hub and by producing race previews for Ciclismo Internacional, developing a strong analytical voice rooted in daily engagement with professional cycling.
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