After it was announced that Red Bull would be conducting a takeover of BORA - hansgrohe earlier this month, the Austrian energy drink brand’s majority stake acquisition of the team’s parent company (RD pro cycling GmbH & Co KG and RD Beteiligungs GmbH) has now been officially ratified by the Austrian Federal Competition Authority.
In the team’s official announcement, general manager Ralph Denk stated that “with today’s decision, we have cleared an important hurdle. The foundations of our partnership with Red Bull are now officially in place. This is the green light we’ve been waiting for to go ahead with the formalities and many specific parts of the collaboration”.
This deal marks a massive step forward in Red Bull’s involvement in road cycling. Their previous involvement only went as far as individual rider sponsorship with the likes of Wout van Aert and Tom Pidcock, with their most recent addition being Canyon-SRAM’s Zoe Bäckstedt. Now they own a UCI WorldTeam and fund the Red Bull Junior Brothers talent identification programme, which provides junior riders for BORA - hansgrohe’s GRENKE-Auto Eder development team.