Bjarne Riis Net Worth

Background and career

Bjarne Lykkegård Riis (Danish pronunciation: [ˈpjɑːnə ˈʁiˀs]; born 3 April 1964), nicknamed The Eagle from Herning (Danish: Ørnen fra Herning), is a Danish former professional road bicycle racer and cycling team manager. Noted for his victory in the 1996 Tour de France, where he dethroned five‑time defending champion Miguel Indurain.

Riis's other major victories include the Amstel Gold Race in 1997 and multiple Danish national road race titles, and he took stage wins at the Tour de France and Giro d'Italia. After retiring in 2000, he founded and managed Team CSC, which competed under successive sponsors as Saxo Bank, Saxo Bank–SunGard and Tinkoff-Saxo and was one of the leading squads of the 2000s and early 2010s. Following the team's sale to Russian businessman Oleg Tinkov in late 2013, Riis continued as manager until he was dismissed in March 2015 after a dispute with Tinkov.

On 25 May 2007, Riis admitted he had used EPO, growth hormone and cortisone between 1993 and 1998, including during his Tour de France victory. The Tour's organisers, ASO, initially removed him from the list of winners, but in July 2008 reinstated his 1996 result with a footnote acknowledging his doping confession, after the UCI determined that the WADA Code's then-applicable eight-year statute of limitations had expired. Speaking at a cycling conference in Copenhagen in June 2025, Riis said he was not ashamed of his doping past, calling it "part of that period and a system that we all silently accepted".