Velon CEO Graham Bartlett has said that Tinkoff Team owner Oleg Tinkov’s decision to leave cycling is bad for cycling, no matter how he is viewed by people.

Tinkov, whose team were one of Velon’s founding members, has often divided opinion amongst fans, with some loving his crazy antics and others calling him disrespectful.

“However you view Oleg Tinkov as a person, you cannot see [his departure] as anything but bad for cycling,” Bartlett told Cycling Weekly. “Here’s somebody who’s made an enormous amount of investment in cycling who’s now leaving the sport. How could anybody view that other than that’s bad?”

“Personally, I’m very sorry to see [him pull his investment] and I think the sport needs to look long and hard at itself and say, ‘why is that happening?’ 

Tinkov is pulling out as he claims he has tried to help cycling change and no one has really attempted to help him. He has seen the recession turn his fortune of $1.4 billion to “just” $500million and he can no longer sustain his investment in cycling. Bartlett agrees with the Russian that cycling must change.

“I think it’s incredibly difficult to have a sporting business model whereby you rely upon somebody to constantly put money in and not give them any opportunity to [work on it as] a long-term investment,” he says.

“That needs to change and I completely agree with the comments Oleg has made about that. They are essential to why Velon was created – to change that business model and [I believe] we can. I think it will come too late for Mr Tinkov but we’ve got to carry on that work because we’ve got to believe that eventually, one day, we will fix it.”