![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Zoulfia-Zabirova.jpg\"\/)
Photo Credit: Imago\/Rene Schulz<\/p>\n
The early Bigla years laid the foundations<\/p>\n
The earliest version of the team was already significant because it showed what a serious women\u2019s structure could look like before the market had really caught up. The 2005 and 2006 line-ups included riders such as Zulfiya Zabirova, Nicole Br\u00e4ndli and Noemi Cantele, which immediately gave the project weight. Those were not symbolic names. They were major riders in an era when women\u2019s teams often had to fight much harder for visibility, resources and continuity.<\/p>\n
That early credibility matters in hindsight. Bigla did not suddenly become ambitious when Cerv\u00e9lo arrived. It already had a base, a culture and a presence in the sport. Cerv\u00e9lo sharpened the identity later, but the project\u2019s seriousness was older than the branding.<\/p>\n
Bigla Cycling Team became a home for strong riders and second acts<\/p>\n
Through the later 2000s and early 2010s, the team kept adapting rather than disappearing. Emma Pooley joined for 2013 after originally contemplating a step away from the sport, which said a lot about Bigla\u2019s place in the peloton at the time. It could attract a rider of that stature and offer a meaningful competitive home.<\/p>\n
By 2015, the roster had taken on a more recognisable modern shape. Bigla lined up with Annemiek van Vleuten, Ashleigh Moolman-Pasio, Iris Slappendel, Jo\u00eblle Numainville, Lotta Lepist\u00f6 and Lisa Klein for the Tour of Flanders, which gives a good sense of the team\u2019s strength and range at that moment. Results backed that up too. Van Vleuten was 2nd and Moolman-Pasio 4th at La Fl\u00e8che Wallonne F\u00e9minine in 2015, underlining that Bigla was already capable of placing multiple riders near the front in the biggest races before the Cerv\u00e9lo title-sponsor years began.<\/p>\n
That 2015 period is easy to overlook because it sits on the edge of the better-known Cerv\u00e9lo era. In reality, it was the bridge that made the next phase possible.<\/p>\n
![\"Ashleigh](\"https:\/\/procyclinguk.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Ashleigh-Moolman-Pasio-cervelo-bigla-team.avif\"\/)
<\/p>\n
Why the Cerv\u00e9lo years changed the team\u2019s place in the sport<\/p>\n
When Cerv\u00e9lo moved from bike supplier to title sponsor for 2016, the team gained more than a new name. It gained a much clearer place in the sport\u2019s conversation. From then on, Cerv\u00e9lo-Bigla looked less like a sturdy long-term project and more like one of the teams actively helping define what a modern professional women\u2019s team could be.<\/p>\n
That was visible in the roster. Moolman-Pasio remained a central figure. Lepist\u00f6 gave the team elite sprinting speed. Klein and Clara Koppenburg were part of a younger wave. Cecilie Uttrup Ludwig also came through the team in those years. The team mixed established names with riders who were still on the way up, which is one reason it felt important. It was not only trying to win the next race. It was also shaping careers.<\/p>\n
On the road, the team showed real depth rather than isolated flashes. It won across different terrains and could also function collectively, shown by bronze medals in the World Championships team time trial in both 2016 and 2017. Those were not decorative results. They signalled organisation, coherence and a standard of performance that placed Cerv\u00e9lo-Bigla among the more serious teams in the sport.<\/p>\n
The team helped build careers, not just results sheets<\/p>\n
This is a big part of why the project still matters. Cervelo-Bigla and its later versions became a ladder for riders who would go on to shape the sport more broadly. Klein, Koppenburg and Uttrup Ludwig all fit that description. So do later names such as Emma Norsgaard, Leah Thomas, Elise Chabbey, Mikayla Harvey, Daria Pikulik and Marlen Reusser.<\/p>\n
That role is easy to underrate when looking back at team history. A team does not need to dominate the sport to change it. Sometimes it changes the sport by giving ambitious riders structure, opportunity and belief at the right moment. Cervelo-Bigla did that repeatedly.<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/a-message-from-bigla-katusha-ceo-co-owner-priska-doppmann-campana.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\n
Big results, but never just a results machine<\/p>\n
The team\u2019s racing identity was distinctive because it was built around range. Lepist\u00f6\u2019s Gent-Wevelgem win in 2017 remains one of the obvious highlights, but the project was rarely defined by a single type of race. It could sprint, it could climb, and it could race aggressively enough to influence one-day tactics without needing to dominate outright.<\/p>\n
That variety helped the team punch above its budget. In the best seasons, Cervelo-Bigla felt like the sort of team other squads had to keep accounting for. It might not have controlled the whole sport, but it was very capable of altering how races were ridden.<\/p>\n
For a wider race context from that era, ProCyclingUK\u2019s A brief history of La Fl\u00e8che Wallonne F\u00e9minine<\/a> and A brief history of Li\u00e8ge-Bastogne-Li\u00e8ge Femmes<\/a> help show the kind of calendar this team was trying to influence.<\/p>\n 2019 Bigla Pro Cycling was one of the project\u2019s most interesting years<\/p>\n The 2019 season deserves more attention than it usually gets. By then, the team name had become Bigla Pro Cycling, and it was still producing important stories and results. Lizzy Banks won stage 8 of the Giro Rosa, with teammate Leah Thomas finishing 2nd on the stage, a result that captured both the team\u2019s climbing strength and its tactical reach.<\/p>\n That same year also produced one of the strangest and most memorable episodes in modern women\u2019s racing. At Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, Nicole Hanselmann attacked late, built a gap, and almost caught the tail end of the earlier-started men\u2019s race on the same roads. Organisers neutralised the women\u2019s race and asked her to stop by the roadside to restore separation between the events. It was a bizarre moment, but also an unintentionally revealing one. Hanselmann\u2019s move exposed the organisational assumptions that still shaped women\u2019s racing in 2019, including the limited margin in event planning when the women\u2019s race became more dynamic than expected.<\/p>\n That incident has lasted in the memory because it was absurd, but it also reflected something more serious. Women\u2019s cycling was getting stronger, deeper and faster, yet parts of the sport\u2019s organisation were still catching up.<\/p>\n Bigla-Katusha and \u00c9quipe Paule Ka in 2020 were not footnotes, they were the final chapter<\/p>\n The 2020 season is often compressed into a collapse story, but it is worth separating the phases properly. The team began the year as Bigla-Katusha, then after the funding crisis and sponsor withdrawals, it was rebranded in mid-2020 as \u00c9quipe Paule Ka. That sequence matters because it shows both the project\u2019s fragility and its resilience. Even under enormous financial pressure, it still tried to keep racing and keep itself alive.<\/p>\n There were still real riders and real results in that final stretch. Reusser had signed for 2020 as one of the most exciting time trial and road talents in the peloton, bringing another high-level name into the structure. Emma Norsgaard was still part of the set-up, as were Banks and other riders who would later move on to strong careers elsewhere. Banks then won stage 4 of the 2020 Giro Rosa in \u00c9quipe Paule Ka colours, giving the final version of the team a major result even as its future was disintegrating.<\/p>\n That is part of what makes the ending so stark. This was not a dead team limping to the line. It was still capable of attracting talent and winning races.<\/p>\n The contradiction at the heart of the project<\/p>\n Any honest history also has to deal with the abuse allegations that reshaped how many people viewed the team. In 2018, former riders accused team owner Thomas Campana of bullying, intimidation and fat-shaming. Campana denied the allegations, but the accusations altered the team\u2019s place in the women\u2019s cycling story. A project that had often been presented as ambitious and professional was now also caught up in the wider reckoning over rider welfare, power and the gap between image and lived experience.<\/p>\n That episode matters historically because it forced a broader question. What does professionalism actually mean in women\u2019s cycling? Not just better bikes, better branding and better results, but better care, better structures and better accountability too. Cervelo-Bigla became part of that conversation for the wrong reasons, but still part of it.<\/p>\n Why this team helped reshape modern women\u2019s cycling<\/p>\n Cervelo-Bigla, and the wider Bigla project around it, mattered because it captured so many of the sport\u2019s shifts in one team. It began in 2005, long before the current Women\u2019s WorldTour landscape existed. It carried important riders in its earliest years. It became a credible home for top-level names and second acts. It was professionalised further in the Cerv\u00e9lo period. It developed riders who would go on to shape the peloton elsewhere. It produced major moments in 2019 and still won in 2020 under \u00c9quipe Paule Ka, even as the finances collapsed beneath it. And it became part of the sport\u2019s uncomfortable but necessary conversation about welfare and abuse.<\/p>\n That is why this history should be told as more than a sponsor timeline. Bigla Pro Team, Bigla Cycling Team, Cerv\u00e9lo-Bigla Pro Cycling, Bigla Pro Cycling, Bigla-Katusha and \u00c9quipe Paule Ka were all versions of the same underlying idea, that women\u2019s cycling could support a serious, ambitious, internationally relevant team outside the very biggest budgets. The project did not end neatly, and it was not free of contradiction. But it helped move the sport forward anyway.<\/p>\n It also belongs alongside other major strands of the modern women\u2019s cycling story, including A brief history of Paris-Roubaix Femmes<\/a>, A brief history of the Tour de France Femmes<\/a> and the wider Women\u2019s cycling history, races, riders and teams hub<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Cervelo-Bigla is easiest to remember through its most visible years, but the fuller story starts much earlier. The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":598768,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[569],"tags":[64,63,7105,291987,291988,291989,221370,784,79612,291990,67759,291991,291992,291993,291994,291995,291996,291997,291998,291999,292000,85,107087,292001,292002,23293,292003],"class_list":{"0":"post-598767","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cycling","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-banks","11":"tag-brandli","12":"tag-campana","13":"tag-cantele","14":"tag-chabbey","15":"tag-cycling","16":"tag-geraint-thomas","17":"tag-hanselmann","18":"tag-harvey","19":"tag-klein","20":"tag-koppenburg","21":"tag-lepisto","22":"tag-moolman-pasio","23":"tag-norsgaard","24":"tag-numainville","25":"tag-pikulik","26":"tag-pooley","27":"tag-reusser","28":"tag-slappendel","29":"tag-sports","30":"tag-team-history","31":"tag-uttrup-ludwig","32":"tag-van-vleuten","33":"tag-womens-cycling","34":"tag-zabirova"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/598767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=598767"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/598767\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/598768"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=598767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=598767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=598767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/equipe-paule-kas-memorable-giro-rosa-8-scaled.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\n