As most of you know, earlier this year, I published The Peloton Economy, a 14,000-word investigation into the racing, economics, fandom, and governance of professional cycling. The piece was inspired by the 2019 Rapha Roadmap - a document I find myself both strongly agreeing, and strongly disagreeing with. At some point during my writing process, I found myself asking: who would write the modern version of that document? I realised I was probably better placed than most to try.

The timing turned out to be fortunate. While writing, the UCI launched a formal consultation on the future of professional road cycling, acknowledging that media coverage and revenues don’t yet reflect the sport’s potential. It was, in plain terms, an admission that pro-cycling needs help.

At this time, I was in close contact with one of the Roadmap’s authors, Joe Harris - and he introduced me to his co-author, Steve Maxwell. This led to further conversations, and when it recently became clear that Rapha intended to republish their Roadmap document in line with the UCI’s consultation window, we were all asked to co-author a new opening that reflects the modern day.

What follows in this article are the new opening pages to that Roadmap. I want to make abundantly clear that I do not currently have, nor have I ever had a personal connection to Rapha. I was *not* paid to write this..

I agreed to be a part of this because I believe professional cycling can be much, much better - and I want to be in the room that makes it happen.

- Joe

These are the new opening chapters of the re-released Roadmap.

Professional cycling has never suffered from a lack of ideas, only a lack of courage to act on them. There are few sports as effortlessly beautiful as professional cycling, embodying movement, landscape, beauty, and suffering all wrapped into a single visceral experience. It sells a kind of romance that other modern sports fail to inspire or deliver. And that is what makes the current reality in professional cycling so frustrating – the business, economics, governance and the long-term vision for the sport often feels distant and disconnected from the very things that make the sport so compelling.

The need for reform is no longer a matter of opinion. In January, 2026, the UCI launched a formal request and consultation on the future of professional road cycling across both the men’s and women’s pelotons, acknowledging that media coverage and revenues “do not yet fully reflect its potential,” and that there remains “considerable potential for development.” The UCI asking for help is not just unusual, it is an acknowledgement that cycling badly needs new ideas and a new approach if it is to survive in the modern world of sports and entertainment.

In 2017, then-Rapha Chairman Simon Mottram and his U.S. operations chief Brendan Quirk approached us (Joe Harris and Steve Maxwell) and our colleague Professor Daam Van Reeth of KU Leuven University to prepare a broad-based review and analysis of the state of professional cycling. Rapha’s objective was not to dictate the future of racing, but to provide detailed background information and a platform to facilitate more informed debate about how to strengthen the sport.

We conducted in-depth analysis through research and interviews with a wide range of experts, and assembled a comprehensive set of recommendations to transform and modernize the sport of cycling. This effort resulted in the Rapha Roadmap report, published in 2019.

The Rapha Roadmap paved the way for Rapha’s relationship with EF Pro Cycling, and the birth of the by now well-known “Alternative Calendar” project. The original Roadmap stated that “Rapha will seek to engage millions of new fans by creating and publishing the most innovative portrayal of pro cycling. The approach will see riders race beyond the traditional confines of World Tour events, exploring the outskirts of the sport as it currently exists to expand its horizons.”

However, professional cycling has unfortunately regressed further since the publication of the Rapha Roadmap. Viewership numbers are down, financial inequality between teams is up, and we are seeing consolidation in key areas rather than expansion or diversification. While there are glimmers of light, especially with the boom of women’s racing, fundamental change is still badly needed.

In the Spring of 2026, Joe Laverick reviewed and updated several of the key suggestions and recommendations within the Rapha Roadmap in a complementary document entitled The Peloton Economy. The 25-year-old British racer and writer brings a next-generation perspective shaped by experience racing across multiple disciplines, media, and team management.

Unfortunately – and similar to virtually every other effort to strengthen, modernise or revitalise professional cycling – the original Rapha Roadmap had little success in moving the sport’s governance, leadership and management. Such studies, reports or recommendations are often debated within cycling’s circles, but rarely is there any focus on implementation. For this reason, cycling as a sporting enterprise is characterised today by a sense of despair or resignation – that nothing will ever, or can ever change.

However, out of adversity comes opportunity – and thus we are reissuing the original Rapha Roadmap with the same goal as before. We start with a simple and inarguable premise: there simply can not be a sport of professional cycling without a dedicated and expanding fan base.

Despite the sport’s broad spectrum of opinions, we believe there is one thing we can all agree on: we should all try to do whatever we can to make the sport more popular and accessible to a wider and more diverse audience. Many other sports – most recently, Formula One – have successfully demonstrated that growth, profitability, and the preservation of tradition can occur simultaneously.

Expanding a sport’s fanbase starts with content accessibility and affordability. This is one of the most important issues that we addressed in the original Roadmap: the need for the sport to build a consolidated broadcast portfolio covering all of its key events, and making that programming easily accessible, reasonably inexpensive, and with minimal geographic restrictions.

The distribution of other sports around the world, especially international soccer, has clearly demonstrated the power of globalisation. If anything, the accessibility and ease of watching pro cycling has gone backwards over the last few years. Figuring out where races are broadcast, or simply paying for the multitude of subscription services needed to view all the major events have discouraged or driven away even some of the most dedicated fans.

The most significant change in professional cycling since the Roadmap’s original publication has been the explosion in the popularity of women’s professional sport. There is a great opportunity today to put greater resources behind developing a new model for women’s racing - rather than blindly following the problematic men’s WorldTour model.

Across a wide spectrum of women’s sports, levels of both fan interest and investment dollars have boomed. Women’s cycling stands on the precipice of huge growth and much wider popularity. We must work collaboratively to ensure that this opportunity is not lost.

We suggest moving the Women’s World Tour (WWT) to a franchise (closed-league) model. At the time of writing, there are 15 World Tour licenses available and only 14 World Tour teams. This alone demonstrates that the sport is not big enough to contemplate a promotion-relegation system. A closed league would allow teams to hold licences that provide economic predictability and therefore long-term stability. It would also create the first step toward a wider league system, and hopefully, the eventual opportunity for revenue sharing. Once participation in the top tier of the sport is guaranteed, teams and sponsors can plan beyond currently short sponsorship cycles.

Stronger financial controls will concurrently be needed with the implementation of this system. While growth of women’s racing is nothing but positive, growth at a rate that outstrips the commercial realities of the sport risks creating a bubble. Spending controls would help ensure that competition remains balanced, costs do not escalate uncontrollably, and encourages talent development investment. At the moment, teams operate in an environment where they do not know whether costs will rise by five percent or twenty five percent from one season to the next. That level of uncertainty is unsustainable.

A closed WWT does not signal the end of ambition for teams outside it. With economic stability guaranteed at the top, investment will flow more deliberately downwards. Teams will have no choice but to spend their budget on developing talent and supporting grassroots pathways - case studies like the F1 Academy have proven this. It has the added benefit that teams outside the league would have a clear goal to work towards, a league can always expand, and gives development riders a clear pathway to the top. Financial stability at the summit creates opportunity throughout the sport.

Women’s professional cycling is succeeding – we must now ensure a deep pool of talent comes through the next generation by investing resources in grass-roots development, while also equitably controlling team finances and spending.

Another key development over the last few years has been the gradual emergence of a handful of men’s “super-teams.” These are often backed by parastatal (government-funded) sponsors or ultra-high net worth individual patrons. The financial backing of these teams far outstrips almost all of the competition. This has led to competitive imbalance, where a small number of teams and riders tend to dominate the competition. In turn, this leads to less uncertainty or excitement in the outcome of races, and many fans claim that the sport is becoming too predictable or boring.

As suggested for the WWT, this situation demands that the sport finally considers equitable financial guardrails like a spending cap or other means to ensure a more level playing field between teams. While rarely popular with the biggest teams, almost all other sports have experienced surging popularity, market expansion, and greater value creation after instituting a system of budget caps leading to greater competitive parity. Cycling must seriously consider a system that does the same.

Cycling has fragile dependence upon external financial sponsors whose interests are often fickle. We emphasised both the need for cycling to strengthen its value proposition to sponsors, and to begin to better develop other supporting sources of revenue like merchandising, ticketing fees where appropriate, and mass participation events. In the intervening years, a handful of major new sponsors have entered the sport but most teams continue to run on a “break-even” or loss model, as opposed to a value-creation model. The recommendations in the Roadmap remain as relevant today as they were then: one of pro cycling’s most immediate and pressing needs must be to develop a stronger and more sustainable economic business model.

While high net-worth individuals undoubtedly have a positive impact on the sport, it does create questions about longer-term financial stability, and future growth. Long-term team owner Gerry Ryan recently indicated that he would be scaling back the funding for his team, saying that his family is tired of “watching their inheritance go out the door.” Teams are not assets that grow in value, and with the overall sport not growing in commercial terms, the situation has created an over-reliance on such wealthy benefactors, most of whom eventually leave the sport.

While there is significant financial investment currently happening in the sport, it has almost exclusively focused on human and technological performance rather than positioning and promoting cycling as a form of entertainment. The objective of elite sporting competition may be to win, but the business of elite sport is to entertain and inspire. We must make these goals co-exist to make pro cycling a more compelling, financially successful, and globally expansive sport.

The crowded and overlapping nature of pro cycling’s schedule is demonstrably counterproductive to the sport’s greater interests. Our original report called for a revised calendar. The implied scarcity value of a tighter and more exclusive calendar has been widely debated, but the clear lesson and experience from other sports is that event quality is more important than quantity. While traditionalists often consider these types of calendar changes to be blasphemy, it is time that cycling takes a harder look at this challenge and develops a more compelling and logical calendar. In the report, we suggest very specific ways of adopting a more logical and compelling season-long narrative.

Despite the UCI’s serious efforts to construct a points and rating scheme to more accurately rank and reward both teams and riders, the systems that have been put in place since the publication of the Roadmap have unfortunately created almost as many problems as they solved. The current system of promotion and relegation unintendedly causes teams to send their best riders to smaller races, maintaining or improving their WorldTour ranking by hoarding critical UCI points. This robs fans of the opportunity to see the best riders competing head-to-head as frequently as possible, diluting the competitive product and creating other unintended consequences. This is a complicated task, but the entire system needs to be carefully redesigned.

The growth of gravel riding and racing across the world has created an interesting juxtaposition to the situation on the road. Gravel racing is underpinned by a mass-participation business model that we see in marathon running or triathlon and the biggest gravel events not only exist, but are thriving – and without any input from the UCI.

It is telling that the discipline with the least regulation is seeing the largest growth in terms of participation and endemic financial investment. The lower barriers to entry in gravel racing – the fact that simply finishing a race is used as a yardstick – has only aided in its accessibility and growth. Perhaps most telling: many within the sport see the UCI’s own World Gravel Series as the weakest offering in the sport. There is a fear that the UCI will over-regulate the emerging discipline for its own gain in the same way that it pushed mountain bike racing – cycling’s fastest growing segment in the 1990s and early 2000s – into a long recession.

Finally, the pipeline of new talent development and new events needs to be strengthened and diversified. Grassroots development programs are still lacking, in terms of financial and community support, which severely limits talent identification. It is more expensive than ever to start a new elite or professional team, from the perspective of entry fees, equipment costs, rider salaries, and registration fees. Virtual or e-racing, which took off during COVID, has declined in relevance, although it does represent a positive path for riders entering the sport, though at later ages than typical in high-performance athlete programs.

It has become prohibitively expensive to sustain new events, as costs outpace funding. Lower tiers of UCI racing below the WorldTour and ProTour have declined. Even if some of the challenges at the elite level of the sport can be effectively addressed, there is still a fundamental requirement for the underlying levels of talent and competition to be strengthened – to ensure that the sport can evolve and continue stronger into the future.

These are just a few of the challenges that the original report addressed but which still hinder cycling’s long-term growth and diversification. Unfortunately, and is by now very well-known to all observers, virtually all efforts to implement significant change collide into the two powerful entities which effectively control modern cycling: the UCI, and Amaury Sports Organisation – the private family company that owns the Tour de France and many of the other top cycling events. Both of these organisations have a questionable record when it comes to bringing the sport into the modern era, understanding what the modern fan wants, and how to compete in today’s cut-throat sports and entertainment marketplace.

For example, the ASO has had several recent public spats with the Unibet Rose Rockets, a team whose ethos is fan interaction and introducing new people to the sport. It is telling that the sport’s most powerful body apparently feels threatened by a team which dares to think differently – indeed, a team that many in the sport credit as a model for the future. And the UCI – comprised of administrative officials and closed-door committees – is often at odds with team owners, who understandably question how it can effectively govern a sport in which it is also a competitive event organizer (in the form of the World Championships) and license holder.

It has long been accepted that any serious reform in pro cycling must run through the boardrooms of the ASO and UCI, and try to incorporate their respective interests. We recognise that both have valid historical and current incentives, and that the sport has to work within those parameters. It does, however, often feel as though these two organizations prioritize self-preserving narrow interests over the broader growth and diversification of the sport they serve.

In parallel, the sport has a distinct shortage of management and executive level talent professionally trained in business, economic, and organisational change. As in many sports, former pro riders often transition into leadership roles. However, if the sport is to thrive, it must recognise that success on the road does not equate to success in a boardroom, and find ways of attracting or developing new leaders.

Cycling has always tilted towards tradition – a characteristic which contributes to the unique charm and alluring nature of the sport in many ways. However, that fixation with legacy and history also tends to make the sport intransigent to change and hinders meaningful progress. The 2025 Tour de France showed what can happen when tradition is thrown to the wind; the final stage was moved away from traditional Champs Elysees sprint-finish to favour passage of Montmartre, heavily inspired by the Olympic Road Race course. While some riders were originally against it, it created an engaging TV product, and an incredible in-person spectacle for fans. It showed what can happen when the ASO dares to embrace change – and the potential of putting fan entertainment at the front of mind. Tradition should inform, but not dictate the future.

We understand that there are those who believe that cycling is just fine as it stands, that it should not necessarily try to follow the models employed in other sports, that tradition is part of its charm. The numbers paint a different reality: the sport’s demographics are skewing older, broadcast viewership is declining, and recreational cycling participants and the bicycle economy are diminishing. It is our belief that cycling must also welcome and embrace change if it is to survive in the modern sports-as-entertainment era.

A repetitive theme in the sport is to default to a “not invented here” mentality, and bicker internally about what, when, who and how to change cycling. Almost all past and formalised efforts to introduce actionable reforms have been met by a chorus of negativity from within the sport as well as from the media, particularly from those whose perceived economic or political prominence would be diluted by change. This kind of mutually destructive bickering over the size of their slice of the pie rather than building a larger and more profitable pie always sets the sport back further.

Although we acknowledge these differing points of view, we believe everyone ends up on the same page if we remain focused on the central question we began with in 2017: how can we bring all of cycling’s parties together to make the sport more popular and accessible to a broader range of both participants and fans? We implore the stakeholders and supporters of the sport to not just discuss and debate meaningful ways we might strengthen pro cycling, but to actually begin to enact and implement key changes for the greater good.

The time for endlessly debating over different proposals has passed. Stakeholders must stop focusing on their own narrow objectives or protecting perceived traditions and instead start building the sport for the future. Professional road racing has spent a decade talking in circles while inadvertently drifting backwards. This is not a call for overnight revolution, but for a commitment to start implementing straightforward and deliberate changes that can legitimately move the sport to a better place.

April 30, 2026

Steve Maxwell, The Outer Line - Boulder, Colorado

Joe Harris, The Outer Line - Portland, Oregon

Joe Laverick, Pullwood Consulting (Athlete and Writer) - Grimsby, Great Britain

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To read the full 2019 Rapha Roadmap, click here.

Can we dare to dream about American professional road racing? Levi’s GranFondo was back for its second big prize money year, with $156,000 on the line across two pro races. It’s quietly becoming one of the most interesting experiments in US cycling.

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1. This is the model.

Mass participation underpins the future business model of road racing in the US. It’s a business model that’s been proven in triathlon and gravel. Thousands of amateur riders pay their entry fees, a pro race runs at the front, brands pay to be at the expo, and suddenly you have a self-sustaining ecosystem.

External sponsorship is still needed to fund the prize money, but that’s not a weakness, it’s just how sport works.

2. The juxtaposition of safety.

The elephant in the room is safety. It’s hard to justify billing something as the world’s richest one-day road racing pot when cars are passing in the opposite direction. Full road closures are expensive and logistically complicated in the US, and that’s a real constraint, but at minimum, a rolling closure around the main race bubble should be non-negotiable.

For the Fondo itself, open roads are a reasonable compromise. Participants aren’t racing at pro speeds and the risk calculation is entirely different without big money on the line.

Safety should always come first.

I have a theory that road closures - or lack of them - is one of the reasons pro-gravel racing has taken off so much in the US. Just today I noticed a trend that every race takeaways article I’ve written that isn’t under USAC/UCI legislation has safety in it. At Redlands, we had fully closed circuits every day and cars were never even a thought in my head. Sometimes, legislation is a good thing. I’ll probably write something on this another day.

3. The course is epic.

The course is special. 221 kilometres and 4,200 metres of elevation. Alexey Vermeulen’s Strava title said it best: “Levi’s is hard if you were wondering.” The Growler lives up to its name, and the whole thing is brutally, unapologetically tough in the best possible way.

My only wish is that the final climb ‘Geysers’ was closer to the finish-line, but some things we cannot change. Oh, and that California spends some of its tax revenue on making the roads a bit smoother.

4. The organisation is great.

The organisation deserves genuine credit. The course was well marked, aid stations were plentiful, neutral bottle hand-ups were available. Six distances ranging from 8 to 138 miles means there’s genuinely something for everyone - pros, amateurs, first-timers, and the family members dragged along for the ride. Add a decent expo with live music and you have a proper festival of cycling. It’s worth noting that the comms and media was great too.

You do pay for it though. $400(!!) for the longest distance is a lot by any measure

5. $156,000 is a lot of money.

For the second year in a row, $156,000 was on the line across the two pro races, with the top ten paying out and $25,000 going to the winner. It attracts big names, because bike racers will always be mercenaries who chase cash.

Money talks, and right now Levi’s is talking louder than almost anywhere else in American racing.

6. Calendar clashes.

The pro peloton was noticeably smaller this year, and the April calendar is largely to blame. The beauty of Levi’s is that it attracts roadies, mountain bikers, and gravel racers alike - but that also means competing against multiple calendars simultaneously.

Geographically, slotting in the week after Sea Otter makes perfect sense, but with brands pouring resources into the Traka, many gravel privateers opted to head to Girona early. Meanwhile, with the Tour of Gila starting just three days later, many roadies chose altitude instead.

The deeper issue is prestige. However much prize money is on offer, winning Levi’s doesn’t yet move the needle significantly for a rider’s sponsors. As one put it: “I wish winning this race meant something bigger.” That may come with time, and nobody gets to simply decide which races matter most - it just happens.

7. Specialized have a target on their back.

Whether racing on the gravel or road, Specialized Off-Road Racing are a marked team. Talking about the men’s race as that’s what I experienced first-hand, Keegan Swenson and Matt Beers were marked men.

It makes sense - Keegan has won this two-years on the trot, and Matt Beers was the most powerful man in the race. It created an interesting race dynamic, as the two are probably self-admittedly not the best road-race tacticians, and everyone else watched their every move.

Ultimately, the group of favourites finished in a small group rounding out the minor placings.

8. No UCI, and no USA Cycling.

It’s telling that an event this big, and with this much investment has zero relationship with the UCI or USA Cycling. It kinda creates a bandit style road race. Super-tucking is back on the cards and you’re responsible for your own mechanicals. You better not cross that yellow line, though.

Levi’s, like the Life Time Grand Prix, is a compelling case study in what American cycling can look like when it builds on its own terms rather than borrowing a governance model that has consistently failed the sport elsewhere.

9. But, the US does need a flagship road race.

Just how Australia has the Tour Down Under, and Canada has Québec and Montréal, events that mix great racing with culture, cities, and a festival atmosphere that extends well beyond the race itself. The US deserves the same. The roads are extraordinary, the cycling communities are vast and passionate, and the appetite is clearly there.

It would need to be built around a heartland of American cycling - California or Colorado - with fondos and community events wrapping around a true World Tour race to give it real draw. There is potential there, somebody needs to dare to dream.

10. You never know what’s coming next.

Two years ago, a one-day road race with $25,000 for the win would have raised eyebrows. A year ago, a US ProConti team with a $6 million annual budget would have been met with skepticism. This time last year, my theory was that Levi’s Fondo might inspire Hincapie to launch a similar event. He launched a team instead. Nobody saw that coming.

Gravel still has enormous room to grow, but dismissing road is naive. The people are there, and while the US has unique car-culture roadblocks, momentum is building in ways that would have seemed far-fetched just a few years ago.

I’m bullish - but sod’s law dictates it will happen big just as soon as my racing career finishes!

Footnote:

I stole a few bits of this article from what I wrote last year here. Last year, I also included this footnote, I feel it is needed again:

It would be disingenuous not to mention that Leipheimer is a contentious figure in US bike racing. He was one of the best cyclists in the world in an era we now look back on as the doping era. He confessed, cooperated, and has since helped rebuild the sport in his own way.

While there will always be skepticism of that era, there are many ex-dopers who have made an effort to bring the sport back to its former glory. Levi is one of them. I take my hat off to what he’s doing to try and reform road racing, and can only thank him for that.

What’s next for me?

I’m back in Europe, and writing this from my adopted home town of Girona. To be specific, I’m currently sitting in Idle Hands cafe trying to fight off my jet lag.

Levi’s, like my whole US block, was a race of mixed emotions. I made the front split on the first climb, and then got dropped from that front group on the second major climb. This was extra frustrating considering it was a crazy long valley to the race deciding climb. Make it over the place I got dropped and you get a ‘free ride’ to the final test.

I don’t think I’m at the physical level I have been in year’s past. I’m not too sure why, it’s probably because I’m doing everything and bike racing isn’t my one and only priority in life. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again - in this modern era it’s impossible to compete at the top if you’re not ‘all in’. I don’t do myself any favours with all the racing and travel I do across disciplines, but that’s a huge part of who I am too.

I had a long chat after Sea Otter with a friend I inherently trust. He took me to the side and advised I drop some of my commitments and narrow my focus. He’s right, and my time at home is going to form a lot of that thinking.

Being back in Girona is funny too. I’ve landed straight into Traka week and it feels like Sea Otter 2.0. I’m not a huge Traka fan, so I’m keeping my head low, and just doing the events I’ve been asked to attend. After seven weeks on the road, and the last three weekends of back-to-back-to-back racing, I need a mental break!! Though, it is nice to bump into all the same people I’ve just spent the last month racing in my local coffee shop

I’m excited to get back to training on home roads, and we’ll probably head to Andorra next week. Keep an eye out this Thursday for an article that I’ve co-written. That one has been fun.

Cheers,

Joe

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This past week, the bike world descended on Monterey, California for the world’s biggest bike show. A melting pot of disciplines, people, and products. For a few days, everything in cycling passes through this one place.

As is tradition, here are my takeaways.

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1. The Grand Prix is getting faster - again.

The level is higher, the speed is up, gravel has once again taken a big step. There’s not just strength, there is depth too.

It’s professionalising, fast. There are more team jerseys, support staff, and bigger budgets. There are at least two seven-figure budget teams in gravel now, and it shows. Life Time putting up big series prize money means that everyone is throwing their hat in the ring.

Gravel racing is legit.

2. Gravel needs to focus on fans.

The only way a sport grows is if people are watching it. There are tens of thousands of people on-site, yet the biggest race of the week went off on Thursday morning, before most had arrived. If you’re going to bring that many people into one place, the race has to be built for them, as well as the athletes.

Shorter laps with multiple viewing points. Proper fan zones where spectators can see the race more than once, grab a drink, understand what’s happening, and actually feel part of it. Too much of the race happens out of sight and out of mind.

This isn’t just about improving the spectator experience, it’s about the future of gravel. More eyes on the race means more value for sponsors, better storytelling, and a stronger case to attract those elusive non-endemic brands.

If people aren’t watching, the whole model falls apart.

3. We’re talking safety, again.

Even on a fully closed circuit, a car found its way into the middle of the peloton at the start of the men’s race.

I understand the desire to integrate sponsor vehicles, but there’s a line.

4. Sea Otter is so much more than bike racing.

There’s a pretty strong case that pro racing is the least important part of the whole weekend. The real pull is everything happening around it.

It’s the only time of year where the entire ecosystem shows up. Brand managers, sales teams, product people, CEOs, athletes, journalists, coaches, fans, consumers, family. You can’t walk five metres without stopping for a conversation. It’s the annual reunion for all the people you forgot you knew.

Deals get done, partnerships start, ideas get floated over coffee and beer. Riders build relationships that matter just as much as results. In an increasingly online world, it’s a reminder that in person connection is vital.

5. Asian brands are coming big.

One of the main stories in the product world was the noticeable increase in well resourced, and even better priced Asian brands.

As mid-market cycling is getting more expensive, it’s not hard to see how this ends. These brands won’t win overnight, but they’ll quietly chip away at market share for the next decade. Before we know it, we’ll wake up and their major players.

6. It’s hard to stand out.

Walking around the expo is overwhelming, and it’s difficult to stand out. Few brands focus on having something that pulls people in. Having a fancy bike out front is cool, but if everyone has a fancy bike out front then they become old fast.

Brands need to focus on a way of pulling people in. Coffee, athlete appearances, live events, something interactive. It doesn’t need to be big, just have something.

Attention is the currency and many brands are spending a lot to be ignored.

7. Life Time are making a killing.

To race the crit, a one-hour race on an already closed circuit, Life Time had the cheek to charge $125. That’s $2.08 per minute - before fees. That’s an extreme example, and while some events were at least competitively priced, others pushed well beyond the line.

With more than 500 individual vendor booths, sponsorships, events, and general entry fees, the Life Time Events division are making serious money.

Which, to be clear, is the point. This is a business - and a very good one. If Life Time make money, they invest in the sport. Everyone wins.

8. It’s sensory overload.

The beauty of the Sea Otter Classic is the same reason you leave needing a holiday. You’re in the sun all day, your social battery’s drained, and everything outside the Laguna Seca bubble starts to pile up.

You try to squeeze in meetings, events, work, and still find time to ride 17-Mile Drive, one of the best roads in the world.

It’s brilliant, but it takes a lot out of you.

9. The new reality in gravel.

If you want to race gravel at the top now, you have to be all in. No split focus. No half-commitment to racing and media or other disciplines.

I went round to a few partners to apologise for my DNF, and no one made it a big deal. That’s the reality of this world. We’re living the dream on paper, but it’s a tightrope. Travelling, racing, training, creating, all on a shoestring.

In some ways, it’s more impressive that it works as often as it does. In others, this week made something clear. The game has changed.

What’s next for me?

I’m up in Marin as I write this, just north of San Francisco. I looked at a map and see I’m staying a stone’s throw from a small town called Sleepy Hollow. That’s how I feel right now, sleepy and hollow.

The Redlands to Sea Otter double header took a lot out of me. I bit off more than I could chew. I have so much to write - still all those words from Redlands. My training is suffering, my racing is suffering, and I need a rest.

Somebody commented on my Instagram: “If you bite off more than you can chew you’ll never go hungry”. While, that is true, I feel I have learned a valuable lesson, and I need to let something go.

Maggie lands in San Francisco on Monday, we have a few days together before I go to Levi’s Fondo. Then, it’s time to go back to Europe.

I love the buzz of the States, but when you’re constantly on the move, you start to crave the routine of home. It’s always the same on these trips. At first, I don’t miss home at all, just the people…and then, almost out of nowhere, I miss everything about it.

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I’ve been quiet on Substack recently. I’ve been deep in the weeds with this piece. Professional road racing is one of the most compelling sports in the world, it’s also riddled with economic dysfunction and paralysed by its own resistance to change.

I wanted to educate myself to properly understand the power structures and financial realities that shape our sport. Fourteen thousand words later, and heavily inspired by the Rapha Roadmap, ‘The Peloton Economy’, was born.

Today, I’m releasing the full seven-chapter series. Each chapter will also be published as a standalone piece here on my Substack in the coming weeks. At the end of April, a limited run of physical copies will be made available as a ‘Zine’.

To receive each chapter directly to your inbox, please do Subscribe.

-Joe

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Professional cycling has never suffered from a lack of ideas, only a lack of courage to implement them.

Seven years ago, Rapha published a 128-page document that diagnosed almost everything wrong with the sport: unstable finances, weak storytelling, fragmented governance, and a product increasingly disconnected from fans.

The Roadmap was a uniquely serious piece of work for professional cycling. While I don’t agree with every recommendation, its proposals were peer-reviewed, data-backed, and ahead of their time. Written in the aftermath of Rapha’s Team Sky sponsorship, it helped shape the partnership with EF Pro Cycling that would go on to redefine how a WorldTour team could present itself to the world.

Reading it in 2026 feels less like discovering a bold vision for the future and more like opening a time capsule filled with warnings the sport chose to ignore. More importantly, it may be the clearest starting point for understanding where the sport needs to go next, and why it will probably never get there. The sport is not short of intelligence, just allergic to change.

It all ties back to the central disconnect around the money models which have been haphazardly applied to the sport. Professional cycling has long struggled to function as a coherent business. Too many stakeholders pull in different directions. The ASO, RCS, the UCI, teams, brands, riders, fans - it’s a mess of self-interest and misaligned incentives.

Riders are pushing the limits of human performance and the races are faster than ever. Yet evolution stays on the bike, the structures that govern the sport remain static.

That’s the Roadmap’s overarching theme: professional cycling cannot thrive without fundamental change.

Few of its criticisms were new, but the Roadmap wasn’t just blunt about its problems, it laid out a series of proposals too. Written in 2018 and 2019, it was a period before the sport’s economic and competitive arms race had fully revealed itself.

Over eight years of racing bikes at a somewhat professional level, I’ve worn a lot of hats. Pro roadie, gravel privateer, team manager, and media person. Each has offered a different window into the sport.

But the more perspectives I gained, the more one question returned: why does the business of professional road racing seem so dysfunctional?

I set out on this writing project with a simple goal: to educate myself. Writing has always been how I make sense of things. One short article, written mostly out of curiosity, slowly grew into something much bigger. It became a multi-part series that took me deeper into the machinery of professional cycling.

Riders, agents, team owners, journalists, consultants, and industry figures. I spoke to as many people as I could. I spent hours reading research papers, strategy documents, and even war-gaming a takeover bid for the sport.

What follows, over the next 14,000 words or so, is the result of that process. Not a definitive answer, but an attempt to understand how the sport works, why it struggles, and what its future might look like.

1. The Rapha Roadmap, a blueprint ignored.

Professional sport is entertainment, and professional cycling needs to put that above all else.

Professional cycling is anchored in tradition and every discussion of reform is rapidly quashed. Against this, many questioned what authority Rapha, a kit manufacturer, had to dictate the sport’s next steps.

The Rapha Roadmap has been referred to as “Simon’s pet project”, from those within the brand. Simon Mottram, the brand’s founder and then-CEO, is a man with a passion for cycling and an instinct for branding. I asked him whether it was marketing rhetoric or genuine ambition. His reply was clear:

“We wanted to start and influence a debate about how the sport could reform and improve to make it more popular and successful. It was altruistic and came from our love of the sport.”

Rapha could try to spark debate, but even the most ambitious initiatives face the reality of cycling’s entrenched institutions. No matter how bold the Roadmap, the sport’s governing bodies, led by the UCI — and ultimately the omnipotent ASO (Tour de France owners) — continue to control the levers that decide what’s possible.

Halfway through writing this series, the UCI issued a press release outlining what it calls “a consultation on the future of the organisational model for men’s and women’s professional road cycling.” It invited stakeholders to the table:

“Stakeholders are invited to submit their views and proposals on key topics - including the economic model, the calendar and participation rules, fan engagement, safety and the credibility of sporting results.”

The UCI needs to first look in the mirror. They have a rulebook that’s inconsistently enforced and many of their regulations call into question whether the authors have ever watched a bike race. The UCI Points system is equally flawed, easily gamed by sending the biggest riders to smaller races. For every consultation the UCI calls, they remain spectators scared of change.

A large part of this problem comes from the fact that the UCI lacks direct accountability to teams. The President is elected by national federations rather than WorldTour stakeholders. Add in the financial power of the ASO, there is a structural imbalance in both revenue and decision-making.

At the election of the current UCI President, David Lappartient in 2018, there were whispers that he would act in the ASO’s best interests. He defended himself: “I have a good relationship, but I am not a soldier of ASO.”

Whether fair or not, the suspicion speaks to a deeper truth about the sport’s governance. The political power does not sit at the UCI headquarters with Lappartient, but with the ASO who control the most valuable assets: the races.

Among the UCI’s continued ineffectiveness and the ASO’s reluctance to embrace reform, Rapha proposed a Roadmap that set aside self-interest and put the sport itself first.

The Foundations of the Roadmap:

The Roadmap laid out a vision for the sport, a dose of idealism mixed with hard analysis. The following extract contains the twelve central findings from the 2019 document:

1. Professional cycling must fundamentally reform and shorten its calendar to create a season-long series of linked races that reward individual triumphs throughout the year

2. It must find new ways to judge riders’ success, revolutionising traditional models of racing and winning to promote combative and aggressive racing across the season in new locations and formats

3. It must promote team structures that elevate rider stories, rewarding riders as much for their roles as ambassadors as athletes and moving beyond performance as the sole motivation

4. It must become the most transparent, media-friendly sport in the world, creating content that champions the human stories of the sport at every conceivable opportunity and building communities out of fans

5. The production and distribution of entertainment must be integrated into the heart of the sport, giving fans more access, creating more content and evaluating success by engagement

6. Teams, events and stakeholders must pursue solid links with wider participation in cycling, integrating with clubs, infrastructure lobbyists and broader fitness initiatives and taking on leadership roles on safety and environmentalism

7. Coverage of the sport must be enhanced with the adoption of cutting-edge direct-to-audience broadcast models and episodic, free-to-view content creation on a variety of platforms.

8. Women’s racing must be promoted as aggressively as men’s, with greater emphasis on building and promoting characters and commitments to parity to capitalise on a huge untapped opportunity.

9. Events and teams must urgently pursue diverse revenue streams, monetising opportunities around gate fees, marketing opportunities, merchandise, public rides, tiered-access content, fan access and more.

10. The sport must better monitor and develop its sponsorship proposition locally and globally, and the main costs associated with the sport - team budget, event organisation, television broadcast - must be reduced through shared resources and modernisation.

11. The UCI’s role must be reconsidered in relation to the friction with events organisers as leaders in reform of the sport.

12. Long-term plans for youth development, including a radical approach to talent programmes that promote careers in the sport beyond riding must be developed.

As a result of their Roadmap, Rapha dramatically shifted their approach to team and athlete sponsorship. For a brand that was seen as safe, even a little boring, during its Team Sky era, what came next was far bolder.

The Roadmap laid out an ambitious vision: to “create a new model for a professional cycling team that fundamentally changes fan expectations and ultimately the sport itself.” It aimed to engage millions of new fans, prioritise storytelling, and push for meaningful financial reform. Most strikingly, it called for its riders to “race beyond the traditional confines of WorldTour events, exploring the outskirts of the sport as it currently exists to expand its horizons.”

Did anything change?

The Roadmap defined a moment in the sport. It shaped Rapha’s involvement with EF Pro Cycling, gave us Lachlan Morton and the Alternative Calendar. It brought some of the most creative storytelling professional cycling had ever seen.

But reading it in 2026, feels less like a blueprint and more like a crossroads. The ideas were there. The warnings were there. What never arrived was a collective will to act on them. That’s why this still matters. Not because it fixed all that much, but because it captured the frustration of a sport that has always resisted the future.

Many of cycling’s issues are insolvable without a multi-billion-dollar buyout of the sport’s biggest organisation, the ASO. It sounds absurd, but remember: Liberty Media bought the entire Formula One ecosystem for $8 billion in 2016. That series faced the same structural problems as cycling: fragmented interests, entrenched legacy thinking, and an audience desperate for more.

However, as much as I dream about it, I don’t yet have access to a private equity fund that will let me lead a multi-billion-dollar bid for the whole sport. Even if I did, later in this series, I will explain why the undertaking would remain far from straightforward.

Nevertheless, two lines in the Roadmap stand out for me:

• An overwhelming focus on traditional models of performance and sponsor return on investment has too often had a negative effect on fan engagement.

• Cycling must be revitalised to become more widespread and more popular, and it must prioritise meaningful engagement with the audience above all else.

My Suggestions

There are a few key things I come back to as foundational suggestions that I would want to keep the energy that Rapha started. While not the full list, here are some of my core suggestions:

• Sport is entertainment, and cycling must put fans at the forefront of any reform. Without fans, there are no economics.

• Financial regulation is essential for both economic sustainability and maintaining a level playing field that protects the overall health of racing. A consultation period is needed.

• The Women’s WorldTour offers a unique opportunity and should ignore the male WorldTour model in favour of forging their own path.

• The UCI’s broad mandate creates unavoidable conflicts of interest in governing professional road racing.

• WorldTour squads should be reduced to a maximum of 20 riders, with an accompanying development roster of up to 15 riders, in order to encourage less racing and therefore a healthier, more competitive calendar.

• The WorldTour calendar must be shortened and create a season-long narrative.

• New forms of racing must be trialled to appeal to the modern sports fan, ensuring the sport evolves with changing consumption habits while preserving tradition.

Both the two takeaways from the Roadmap and what I want to see change, return to the same thing.

Cycling must both create new fans and care more about its existing fans.

2. EF and Rapha: Could storytelling matter more than the Tour de France?

A partnership that redefined pro-cycling, and proved that you don’t have to win the Tour de France to matter.

Part One of this series ended with a simple premise: Cycling must both create new fans and care more about its existing fans.

That principle was at the heart of the Roadmap and guided Rapha’s next step: the partnership with EF Pro Cycling. The collaboration gave us the Alternative Calendar and shaped the modern EF Pro Cycling team. More than a sponsorship, it captured imaginations and felt like a genuine attempt to break from tradition.

Rapha wanted to escape their ‘boring’ Sky years, while EF Pro Cycling was looking to redefine itself after years of turbulent existence. It set the stage for a partnership built as much on culture and storytelling as on racing results.

Then at the end of 2025, the relationship ended. Rumours suggest Rapha considered switching to Visma-Lease A Bike, though that never materialised. For EF Pro Cycling their focus is back towards performance, to the acquisition of talent capable of winning the sport’s biggest prize, the Tour de France. They’re about to walk a tightrope:

Can they chase the Tour de France without losing the cultural identity that made them matter?

Lightning in a bottle: Lachlan, and the Alt Calendar.

In 2019, EF Pro Cycling and Rapha lit a fuse that nobody could have predicted. It was a year that redefined not just the team, but arguably cycling itself. Alongside their new bright pink kit, and ‘EF Gone Racing’ YouTube series, there was an idea: The Alternative Calendar.

The Alternative Calendar helped define a moment in time. It was a series that was first pitched by Rapha. As James Fairbank, Head of Brand Marketing at the time, writes in an Escape Collective comments section:

“Just to set the record straight: The Alternative Calendar, along with Lachlan’s signing to EF, were both pitched to Philip Hult (then JV’s boss) by Rapha. The concept, direction, and execution of the original content series came entirely from the Rapha team.

“It was Oil Duggan, Sam Craven, and Jevi Repponen who led the thinking, creative direction, and production. They deserve full credit for bringing the idea to life, not post-hoc narratives that downplay the role of the team who created it.”

Welcome to Kansas

The race now known as Unbound Gravel (then Dirty Kanza 200), was never supposed to be a WorldTour team’s playground. Through the modern lens of this article, it is seen as a mainstream race, back in 2019, few had heard of it. It’s deeply American, and culturally miles from what we’d seen in Europe.

The comments under this first video are telling:

“Breath of fresh air, viewing pros outside the peloton. Real credit to the sport. EF hands down the most exciting WorldTour team.”

“EF have become my No. 1 bike team to follow. They have now have credibility in real cycling that goes well beyond the WorldTour results sheet.“

“Love this team so much more now, nice to see a human side to the pro peloton!”

The videos humanised the WorldTour. Coming at the end of the robotic Team Sky generation, the ‘Gone Racing’ series showed that pro-cyclists were more than machines. They created a reality show on two-wheels, fans connected to the characters — the riders — in a way that few had managed to do before.

Credit shouldn’t just go to the riders, but to people like Harry Dowdney and Sam Craven too. Dowdney, the series presenter, is a cycling fan, and his role translated the team’s culture to a wider audience. Craven, the series filmmaker, was a complete outsider to the sport and brought a new creative perspective. This blend of legitimacy and creative freedom worked.

Neither EF nor Rapha invented this playbook. In many ways, they built upon what Orica-GreenEDGE first demonstrated with their Backstage Pass series. Fans want access to personalities inside the peloton. Now, the Unibet Rose Rockets are pushing the concept even further, blurring the line between media company and cycling team.

This is how sport evolves: not through revolution, but evolution. One team opens a door, and the next walks further through it.

At its core, the Alternative Calendar was a marketing project, let’s not pretend otherwise, but it also became a proof of concept. A team could build attention, loyalty, and cultural relevance without road racing dominating the narrative.

For decades, the equation in professional cycling had been simple. Winning races equals value. The Alternate Calendar challenged that - it was storytelling that equaled value. It became a rare win-win. For Rapha, the story equaled sales. For EF Pro Cycling, their brand exploded and they became one of the WorldTour’s most loved teams. It was a clean, self-reinforcing loop.

Lightning rarely strikes twice

The problem is that lightning rarely strikes twice. The Alternative Calendar was extraordinary because it was unexpected. That 2019 Dirty Kanza video was likely many people’s first exposure to gravel racing.

Over time, the project narrowed. What began with multiple riders: Taylor Phinney, Alex Howes, and Lachlan Morton, gradually became synonymous with Lachlan. It started to feel less like an EF Pro Cycling project and more a Lachlan Morton project. Apart from the kit he wore and the bike he rode, there were few, if any, links to the European road team.

The series began to orbit Morton’s strengths, every challenge had to be more epic than the last. That can only continue for so long. Alternative only stays alternative if it keeps evolving. They needed crits, hill-climbs, and whatever else more. None of this diminishes what the Alternative Calendar achieved. If anything, it confirms how impressive it was in the first place.

All that said, the Roadmap, somewhat eerily, appeared to predict the ending before the partnership had even started. It argued that WorldTour teams are structurally unstable and lack the long-term asset value that defines more mature sports.

The end of the Rapha-EF partnership is just the sport behaving how the sport always has done. A cycling team moving to a new clothing partner is hardly earth-shattering, but this felt different. For years, Rapha and EF had built more than a kit deal, they had co-created a culture project.

Jon Twigg, a consultant with a history in cycling sponsorships, and a background in tech start-ups, questions whether there was something deeper at play:

“Their challenge might be that they built cultural capital they couldn’t fully monetise, partly because Rapha captured the commercial upside, and partly because cycling’s data infrastructure for proving sponsor ROI remains primitive.

What’s the strategy for building first-party data assets that let a team tell a sponsor: ‘We have 80,000 people who have actively opted in, here’s their demographic profile, here’s their purchase intent data’? That’s a fundamentally different conversation from saying: ‘We have two million YouTube views.”

Few collaborations in cycling’s history have reshaped how teams present themselves. One comment from Christoph Millotat beneath an Escape Collective article, liked dozens of times, captured the mood perfectly:

“They’re closing a chapter in pro cycling’s rebel era. It’s a triple loss: the team loses its iconic look, Rapha loses its boldest canvas, and the sport loses a rare kind of authenticity.”

Authenticity is an overused word in modern sport, but throughout those golden years of the EF-Rapha relationship, it fits.

Storytelling doesn’t win the Tour

The Tour de France is the sun in the professional cycling solar system and while EF briefly wore the yellow jersey with Richard Carapaz in 2024, Stage 10 of the 2025 Tour de France is a lot more important.

EF’s talisman, Irishman Ben Healy, found his way into one of his now-trademark breakaways and finished 3rd on the stage. Crucially, he finished the stage over four minutes faster than Tadej Pogačar, putting him into the yellow jersey. It was a calculated race tactic by Pogačar, but a golden moment for EF Pro Cycling.

Signed straight out of the U23 ranks in 2022, Healy has developed exactly as team manager Jonathan Vaughters envisioned: a rider capable of delivering results on the sport’s biggest stage. Later in 2025, he would finish 3rd at the World Championships. Vaughters has long said that he cannot afford to match the mega-money salaries that the sports stars are paid, and instead takes risks on talented younger riders.

In January 2026, EF announced a ‘unique and unprecedented’ opportunity: a plan to increase its budget by around €20m, taking it into the top five WorldTour teams. Vaughters pitched the idea to Escape Collective like this:

“They (team owner, Hult family) love being the first name of the team, but they love winning more. We still want to be the goofball team - we just want to be the goofball team that wins the Tour de France.”

For almost a decade, EF Pro Cycling grew in popularity as much, if not more, because of Lachlan Morton’s exploits as they did their race wins. There’s no doubt in my mind that this generation of the team helped to take them to new audiences, new markets, and new partners.

Yet, arguably, the thing that made EF Pro Cycling culturally relevant is incompatible with the financial gravity of becoming a Tour de France challenging team. The Alternative Calendar videos do not win the Tour de France. The budget does. With it comes greater resources, a deeper, more talented squad, and more educated staff. At some point, every romantic project collides with the mathematics of elite sport.

EF Pro Cycling proved you can matter without winning the Tour. Now, they face the greater challenge: winning the Tour without losing what made them matter.

3. The rise of the superteams: Is $50m enough?

The economics of winning the Tour de France have become political.

This article is influenced by Daam Van Reeth’s research, when not specifically recognised, text directly informed by his work is noted with an asterisk. (*)

The economics of professional cycling mean it’s one of the few sports in the world where winning does not guarantee financial security.

In 2023, Jumbo-Visma won sixty-nine races, including all three Grand Tours with three different riders. Three years later, the team is called Visma-Lease A Bike, and in search of a reported €30m. Sporting dominance did not translate to money in the bank. That is the central paradox.

When human performance is the only metric that matters and there’s no limit on investment, the decision is simple: outspend your rival. Most other global sports have recognised this tension and introduced cost caps, financial fair play regulations, or revenue sharing models. The intention never to suppress ambition, but to protect the ecosystem from itself.

In professional cycling, all of those arguments are complicated. It’s not as simple as copy-pasting regulation from another sport. However, something must change. Professional cycling is currently on a path of self-regulation, and with no economic guardrails, the result has been an arms race.

Daam Van Reeth is a senior professor of economics at KU Leuven whose research focuses on professional cycling. He often alludes to how a lack of financial transparency in the sport obscures so many truths.

“It is staggering to see that while the whole world of sports evolved at a lightning speed, cycling’s governing body has remained silent about the team’s finances for already a decade now.”

What economic model?

The budgets of professional cycling teams are almost entirely underpinned by sponsorship. Van Reeth’s research shows that a title sponsor typically accounts for 70-80% of the total budget, and smaller sponsors around 10-20%. Other financial income is from participation allowances, merchandising, and sale of assets such as team bikes.*

This exposes a fundamental weakness that without diversified income streams or shared financial mechanisms, stability is dictated by the willingness of sponsors to continue funding the model.

Again, using Van Reeth’s research, we can see that the cost to be a top team has gradually increased over the past three decades.

“Overall, the evolution from €3.9 million in 1992 to €24.0 million in 2021 for the best performing teams and from 7.3 million in 2007 to €17.3 million in 2021 for the Tour de France teams both represent an average annual budget increase of 6-6.5%. This is significantly higher than the long-term inflation average of 2-3% in Western countries in recent decades.”

This increase does not correlate with the sport’s growth in terms of TV figures, or any other commercial comparison. Instead, they represent pure cost inflation to the teams.

The 2010 introduction of Team Sky (now Ineos Grenadiers) was the turning point in the budget discussion. Throughout the 2010s, Team Sky had the largest budget and used it to attract both rider and staff talent. Between 2012-2019, they won seven Tour de France and proved, unsurprisingly, that money wins.

In the same era, a whole host of wealthy team benefactors were active in cycling. In 2015, one-third of WorldTour teams had a high net-worth backer. Wealthy benefactors not only caused budgets to rise, they also, quoting Van Reeth’s research, created “a resilience of the cycling sector to external [financial] shocks.”*

While high net-worth individuals undoubtedly have a positive impact on the sport, it does create questions on both long-term financial stability, and future growth. Teams are not assets that grow in value, and with the sport not growing in commercial terms, it creates an over reliance on these individuals.

In the course of just three seasons this was put to the test as four wealthy benefactors left cycling: Oleg Tinkov (Tinkoff) and Michel Thétaz (IAM Cycling) at the end of 2016, Andy Rihs (BMC Racing Team) after the 2018 season, and Igor Makarov (Katusha) in 2019.*

The sport of professional cycling did not implode, instead it looked to a new generation of backers.

The arrival of the nation states

It’s 2017 and Paris Saint-Germain F.C. have just signed Neymar for a world record €222 million. It was a historically abnormal jump from the previous €105 million record held by Paul Pogba. The transfer is widely regarded as the inflection point of the modern transfer market.

Jose Mourinho, then manager of Manchester United explained the shift:

“After Neymar, everything changed - and changed for the worse in terms of prices. People look at the £200m figure now. Now the players of £20m became £40m, the players of £40m became £60m and everything changed.”

The Neymar transfer has been described as the moment that “broke all barriers”. In its wake, a ripple occurred, and clubs began pricing players relative to that new benchmark. Transfers above €100m became the norm.

The Neymar transfer was only possible because PSG are owned by Qatar Sports Investments. The deal demonstrated how state-backed capital could push transfer spending beyond the previous market limits. In the same year, two new title-sponsors entered professional cycling: Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.

Little did professional cycling know, but a similar shift to the one seen in football was about to unfold.

The arms race

Once capital that does not need to justify itself through commercial return enters a sport, the logic becomes simple. If more money improves the probability of winning, more money will come. The result is an arms race across the WorldTour.

This changes the financial ceiling of the sport. When one team is willing to increase spending significantly, others are forced to respond to remain competitive. Salaries rise, organisations expand, and R&D becomes more elaborate.

The difference lies not just in the amount of money available, but in the wider economic consequences of that spending. When one team can significantly outbid rivals for talent, the market responds. This is a form of inflation. As budgets increase, the price of top talent adjusts upward. A rider who might once have commanded €500,000 per year may now expect €800,000 or more.

Traditionally funded teams are forced to respond. To remain competitive they must either increase spending or accept a diminished chance of success. This is the arms race in full force, a cycle of escalation where each investment by one team prompts counter-investment by others.

For sovereign states, the value of a cycling team is not in commercial return. Global visibility, soft power, and national prestige all justify spending that a traditional boardroom would struggle to justify.

With the cost of budgets outstripping the commercial size of the sport, why would a commercially minded boardroom spend €25 million on a cycling team when the same budget could buy deeper reach elsewhere?

Inflation in this context therefore reshapes the competitive landscape. It raises the financial threshold for success and concentrates power among teams with access to the largest resources. Winning remains the objective, but the price of winning continues to climb.

Is a budget cap possible?

The issue with an unregulated system is in the name, there’s no regulation. In most sports, huge wages are backed by broadcasting deals, ticketing income, global merchandising, and revenue sharing. Sponsorship deals are just one piece of a huge pie.

With professional cycling budgets overly relying on sponsorship, salaries rising faster than the sport’s underlying economics is good for the riders at the top today, but risks destabilising the system tomorrow.

We’ve already seen this in play. One of the lower ranked WorldTour teams, Picnic-Post NL, reportedly lost €19.5 million between 2022-2024. In 2024, their personnel costs sat at 134.5% of their revenue with auditors issuing a ‘going concern’ warning and in turn they ‘sold’ their biggest star, Oscar Onley for a rumoured €6 million. This is the impact on the market, a mid-low tier team has been financially crippled trying to compete.

The UCI have historically prioritised sporting, not economic regulation. The assumption has been that the market will self-correct. Teams come and go, sporting dominance cycles will always shift. Yet, over successive cycles, the financial baseline rises while the underlying commercial structure of the sport remains unchanged.

The traditional response to runaway spending is financial regulation. Most major sports use some form of control that’s designed to encourage stability and create a more competitive environment.

Professional cycling presents a unique problem: how do you introduce or govern a meaningful cost cap in a sport without centralised revenue and with teams reliant on external sponsorship? Or, as Van Reeth notes: “Why even cap a “poor” sport that is so desperately in need of sponsorship money.”

Cost cap systems only work if the rules are enforceable and the punishment meaningful. They require financial transparency and auditing, which themself brings significant costs that someone must fund. Outside of cycling, caps are often paired with redistribution mechanisms to balance competition, a model that is difficult within the pro-peloton due to the absence of a central revenue pool.

There are also legal and practical complications. Teams could theoretically use shell companies to pay riders off the books or structure ‘personal’ sponsorships with partners that blur the line between individual and team funding. Furthermore, teams are registered in different countries, each with their own set of employment laws.

Finally, regulation is only as strong as its enforcement. If wealthy teams are simply fined as punishment, then it just comes as the cost of doing business, the system fails to deliver genuine financial discipline.

So, what can change?

While I strongly believe financial regulation should at least be consulted as a tool to address runaway budgets, the reality is that meaningful regulation within professional cycling is likely to prove extremely difficult to introduce. With that in mind, it leaves us to ask what else could be done.

The make-up of teams and squad sizes is one suggestion worth considering. Reducing WorldTour teams to a maximum of 20 riders would force teams to attend fewer races and, by extension, prioritise the biggest events.

The intent here is twofold: to improve fan entertainment by concentrating the best riders at the biggest races, and to discourage talent-hoarding that inflates payrolls and weakens competitive distribution.

This would be coupled with teams being allowed a 15 rider development squad. Development riders would be used like a reserve team, with rules and regulations allowing them to move up and down accordingly

At the same time, drastic reform across the calendar is essential. There are too many races for even the most dedicated fan to follow. A clearer hierarchy of events would help, with the UCI reconsidering many race’s classification, and in-turn, banning WorldTour teams from attending UCI.1 races.

The objective is not to devalue smaller races, but to reposition them as platforms for ProTour, Continental and development teams. This would create a more logical progression for athletes and while I hesitate to use the word ‘league’, the goal is to make a clearer structure.

Top-tier events should showcase the sport’s elite and command global attention. Lower-tier races would focus on development competition, offering value to emerging riders and fans without overloading the calendar.

Of course, reform is not without sacrifice. Smaller WorldTour squads would inevitably displace riders and staff. Removing WorldTour participation from UCI.1 races could reduce funding for certain events. And there will be unintended consequences: perhaps smaller squad sizes exacerbate budget disparities, or salaries for top riders get even bigger. These risks do not invalidate reform, but they demand careful design and honest acknowledgement.

Change is rarely perfect. The question is whether the status quo, an expanding arms race of budgets and an overcrowded calendar, remains sustainable. If it is not, we must at least consider alternatives.

Teams are not assets

Superteams are not the problem in isolation. In fact, they are often the most professional and compelling sporting projects. However, the system which superteams exist in is causing major issues.

For a title sponsor, the entry cost to compete at the top of the WorldTour now resembles that of a far larger sport. But cycling’s global audience, digital footprint, and commercial return do not justify that number.

Sponsors are asked to fund escalating salaries and performance arms races, often against teams backed by para-statal or oil-funded entities. The return on investment for traditional sponsors, however, remains largely unchanged from a far cheaper era. In a global economy characterised by volatility, this is a difficult equation to defend

To quote Van Reeth:

For a sponsor it is worrying to find out that to remain competitive, any budget agreed upon today needs to be increased by over 6% per year to just cover wage inflation, without real evidence of an equivalent extra return or productivity.”

The pie has not grown at the same rate as the slices being demanded.

In the current model, it’s impossible for a team to predict what it will need tomorrow to win. Presuming today’s maths, funding a Tour de France winning team will cost more than €750 million euros over ten-years.

When one team scales up, everyone else has to follow. Sponsors pay more not because the sport has grown, but because the arms race demands it. At some point this reaches breaking point. Money does not grow on trees.

Perhaps the greatest irony of the superteam era is that Tadej Pogačar, reportedly earning €6-8 million per year, is both the highest-paid rider in the world and, at the same time, undervalued. By almost any economic measure - revenue generated for sponsors, replacement cost, or competitive advantage, he is a category-defining asset whose dominance creates tens of millions in value. Yet the structural realities of cycling’s labour market mean most of that value is captured elsewhere, leaving his salary far below his true economic impact.

If cycling wants to become financially sustainable, and entertaining to new fans, then the era of unchecked escalation cannot continue. The superteam has long-since arrived. The question now is whether governance will catch up.

4. You can’t buy the Tour de France: money, power, and the ASO’s grip on pro cycling

The development of professional cycling sits in the hands of one Parisian family.

To understand the business of professional cycling teams, you must first understand one simple truth. Professional cycling does not revolve around the teams, but a single event: the Tour de France.

To understand the business of professional cycling itself, you have to understand the Tour de France’s owner, the Amaury Sports Organisation (ASO). The ASO are God.

The organisation traces its roots back to wartime France, when Emilien Amaury used his position within the Vichy government to secure paper for the Resistance printing press. When Paris was liberated in 1944, he launched Le Parisien Libéré and found himself perfectly positioned at the birth of France’s free press.

Over the next three decades, Amaury quietly assembled a media empire. Through acquisition and consolidation, the family secured control of what is now known as ‘L’Equipe’ newspaper, and with it, the Tour de France. That Amaury owned office proved to be one of the most influential forces in sporting history. It can also be credited with the creation of the ‘European Cup’ football competition, now known as the Champions League.

Today, the Amaury family owns not just L’Equipe, but, de facto, professional cycling itself. Their balance sheet includes the Tour de France, Paris-Roubaix, Liège-Bastogne-Liège, and the Vuelta a España, alongside global events like the Dakar Rally and the Paris Marathon. It’s a whale of a business, with 2023 revenues nearing €600 million

If you own the races, then you own cycling.

In almost every other sporting example, the teams are the product and therefore hold the most value. They possess infrastructure, loyal fanbases, and tangible assets that grow over time. Conversely, professional cycling teams have almost no inherent value. If a title sponsor walks away, all that remains are a fleet of vehicles, some bikes, and a service course. There is no stadium. No franchise slot protected by a league. No appreciating assets. A multi-decade WorldTour team can disappear in a single contract negotiation.

Just the fact that we haven’t seen an influx of private equity into cycling teams is telling. Team ownership is not an investment.

Without control of the marquee events that are owned by the ASO, teams are powerless. Remove the Tour de France from a calendar, and a team’s commercial value collapses overnight. Sponsorship income lives and dies with a variable the teams do not control.

History shows what happens when sports teams have power. In 1992, England’s top football clubs broke away from the Football League to form what became the Premier League. They could do this because they held the cards. The stadiums were theirs. The players were theirs. The games were theirs. If they walked away, they took the product with them. Their goal was simple: maximise bargaining power ahead of the next television deal.

A similar move happened in Formula One, too; Bernie Ecclestone united the teams to negotiate better deals. And, in 1973, a player strike at Wimbledon, including the reigning champion Stan Smith, ultimately led to improved conditions and freedom for the players.

Cycling has never dared, or being capable, of doing this. Teams operate inside an ecosystem they cannot control, negotiating from a position of permanent weakness. Dare to go against the ASO, and you risk the house of cards collapsing.

This is why professional cycling teams have no solid economic model. For all of the talk that you’ll see online, it really is this simple.

How do we change this?

Okay, so let’s buy the ASO for a few billion…

Over the past three decades, the sport has produced no shortage of reform proposals. Nearly all arrived at the same diagnosis: the calendar is chaotic, the product fragmented, and the sport structurally difficult to grow.

Investor groups have circled, but none have made it past the immovable object that is the ASO.

From the recent Saudi-backed One Cycling project to the reform outlined in the Rapha Roadmap, modern cycling has hardly lacked for would-be architects. Wouter Vandenhaute, the founder of Flanders Classics, once partnered with CVC Capital Partners, Lance Armstrong (unofficially), and a €100 million initial investment. Its ambition was straightforward: restructure the sport and centralise its value. It failed.

In the early 2010s, the Rothschild Group itself (yes, the same Rothschilds who funded the British war against Napoleon) explored the creation of a World Cycling Series, attracting tentative interest from Sky, a broadcaster that understood better than most how centralised media rights can transform a sport. That too, went nowhere.

Every road led back to the same conclusion. Meaningful reform is almost impossible when the sport’s most valuable assets sit in the hands of a single organisation.

ASO doesn’t just own the Tour de France; it owns the keys to professional cycling.

Now, here’s where it gets interesting. The Tour de France isn’t merely a commercial asset. It is a French institution as recognisable as the Eiffel Tower or as culturally important as the baguette. One line from Le Fric captures the hierarchy perfectly:

“In the sport of professional cycling, the only person who wields more power than the race’s matriarch and her children is the president of the French Republic.”

Suppose, hypothetically, I tabled a more-than-fair bid for ASO. I convinced the Amaury family to let me buy them out, and therefore assume control of the sport’s crown jewels. The reforms would appear obvious.

I’d restructure the calendar so the best riders face each other more than a handful of times each season. I’d eliminate the dilution that allows teams to attend multiple races on the same day. Can you imagine Manchester United playing four football matches on one day with completely different teams? It’s absurd.

Equity could be shared with teams. Commercial rights centralised. Media packaged properly. A system designed not just to protect the ASO, but to expand the sport’s global relevance. Formula One followed this blueprint. A rising tide lifts all boats.

However, it’s not that simple. Firstly, profit sharing wouldn’t make that much of a difference to teams. Recently writing for Escape Collective, journalist Chris Marshall-Bell looked into a hypothetical world of cycling’s three major race organisers: ASO, RCS, and Flanders Classics, splitting their revenues.

“As a thought experiment, if the roughly €125 million in annual dividends from pro cycling’s major promoters were to be split equally between the main stakeholders in the sport – the 18 WorldTeams and three top ProTeams that get automatic invites to all WorldTour events, the three largest organisers and the UCI – each would receive around €5 million per year.

“That is far more than what teams achieve nowadays where they essentially pay to race, but it wouldn’t make a really meaningful contribution to a team’s financial sustainability, and at an average budget of over €31 million per year, they would still be significantly reliant on sponsorship revenues.”

Even the quoted €5 million per year number is unrealistically high. The company shareholders would never vote to reduce their profits by such a vast percentage. This also misses the fact that many smaller race organisers do not make any money from TV rights at all, and have to pay for air-time.

And secondly, can you actually sell the Tour de France?

You cannot buy the Tour de France

The Tour de France requires French roads, French infrastructure, and crucially, French political goodwill. Each July, it becomes a rolling advertisement for the nation itself, broadcasting its landscapes, villages, and mountains to a global audience while generating vast returns for the tourism economy.

A huge part of the Tour’s economic power lies in this alignment with the state. Policing costs are largely absorbed, and roads are closed with efficiency. The race operates with unusually low structural costs and extraordinary political reach because it serves a national purpose.

If you try to buy the Tour from the ASO, you are not merely negotiating with a business; you are negotiating with France, as Le Fric observes:

“To defend its prize asset, the family leans on the state and a Gallic distrust of foreign intervention.”

If the Tour de France can only ever be owned by a French company, it’s worth briefly playing a game of ‘what if’ . The only logical suitor to buy the ASO seems to be the luxury goods conglomerate, LVMH. The Arnault family is one of the richest in the world, with a net worth measured in the hundreds of billions. They have both the financial capability, and the French passport to be a buyer.

But, being successful in luxury goods does not mean you can run a sporting empire. In an idealistic world, LVMH would be the face of the bid in partnership with a party similar to Liberty Media, the owners of Formula One. It would need the political power of a French super-power, coupled with an organisation who can turn a sport around.

It’s a game of hypotheticals, and it’s presuming that ASO would even want to sell. For the ASO, professional cycling is not broken. The system works perfectly, not for the teams, the sponsors, or the global audience, but for those who hold power. Their one wish is simple, a French winner.

The Tour works as intended.

You now understand how important the ASO is in the world of professional cycling. They are God. If they want something to happen, it does. If they don’t, it doesn’t. Once again, quoting Le Fric:

“Cycling has stayed true to a feudal business model formulated a century ago and, for more than half a century, controlled by the same Parisian family.”

When you hold the keys to the biggest event in the sport, backed by national pride and state support, you are borderline unbeatable. Why would the ASO relinquish control? They have the assets, the leverage, and the money. It is not the problem of the Amaury family that teams lack security.

Many have questioned why the ASO won’t embrace change. But the real question is: why would they? They dabble with just enough reform to tease. The 2025 Tour de France moved away from traditional Champs Elysees sprint-finish to favour passage of Montmartre, heavily inspired by the Olympic Road Race course.

While some riders were originally against it, it created an engaging TV product, and an incredible in-person spectacle for fans. It showed what happens when the ASO dares to embrace change, and the potential of putting fan entertainment at the front of mind. It showed what happens when tradition is thrown to the wind. Tradition should inform, but not dictate the future.

In his analysis of Le Fric, Steve Maxwell, one of the Rapha Roadmap’s co-writers, sums it up perfectly:

“In his interview with Duff, Jean-Etienne Amaury seems to belittle the fact that ‘Americans think everything is for sale.’ One comes away with the conclusion that ownership and control of the Tour is not likely to change. And it’s not about the number.

The family’s unwavering stance may be predicated on protecting and growing its own wealth, or, as Jean-Etienne claims, it may be based more on protecting a cultural icon for the French people. Either way, for the rest of pro cycling, it doesn’t much matter.

All the evidence suggests that ASO will continue its cautious and conservative head-in-the-sand strategy, and will likely drag its feet in terms of coordinating with other stakeholders to implement any kind of substantial change or restructuring within the sport.

Any plans to reform the sport are going to have to deal with – or find a way around – this fact of life.”

This piece was informed by Alex Duff’s book ‘Le Fric - Family, Power, and Money: The Business of the Tour de France’.

5. Red Hook Crit: a blueprint hiding in plain sight

Did a fixed-gear criterium series hold the cards to taking the sport mainstream?

It’s a summer night in the early 2010s. Thousands of people line the streets of Brooklyn, leaning over barriers. Bike messengers. Former road pros. All with a beer in hand. Riders on fixed-gear bikes — one gear, no brakes — lap the course at high-speed. It’s loud, a bit reckless, but it’s impossible to look away from.

ESPN described it as: “Maybe the greatest bicycle race in America. Or the hippest. Or the strangest. Or the strangest, hippest, greatest bicycle race in America.”

This is Red Hook Crit, a series that could have been cycling’s golden ticket to the mainstream.

In the previous section, I wrote ‘ASO are God’, an immovable force. Unless we buy the ASO, a multi-billion dollar endeavour, and overcome the unique challenge of the Tour de France being a French cultural icon, professional road cycling is impossible to change.

Yet other sports have shown that tradition and innovation can coexist. Cricket gave us the T20 Series, a fast version of a game that once took five days. Formula One introduced the Sprint Race and mountain biking has embraced Short Track.

I am not arguing we should do away with the Tour de France, or the drama of 260km classics. After all, those final 20km of Milano - San Remo are the best thirty minutes of the year, but those thirty minutes need the six-hours of context that come before.

So how do you introduce something new without losing the soul of the sport? How do you create a format that’s compelling enough to capture mainstream attention, while respecting the history that defines cycling?

The question is simple, but equally radical: can you build something so good that the sport has to take notice?

For all its internal debate about fixing the business model, professional cycling seldom turns its attention to the product itself: racing. It debates everything around the edges while protecting the races themselves.

Criterium (crit) racing is nothing new. At its simplest, a crit is a short, city-centre race. The circuit is usually a kilometre, and the event lasts an hour. It’s simple, and easy to understand as a spectator.

The Roadmap states:

Professional cycling should develop and expand criterium racing to revitalise the sport and broaden the fan exposure…Shorter events fit the modern entertainment model. Criteriums and circuit races in downtown urban settings could provide spectators a live first-time or drop-in experience far more engaging than 200 kilometer point-to-point road races. In addition, city centre lap race venues, and also cyclocross courses, are tailor-made for television production teams, closely linking the broadcast and human resources to deliver content more cost-effectively.”

“The strangest, hippest, greatest bicycle race in America”, may have been the perfect case study.

Enter David Trimble

In 2008, David Trimble organised a race to celebrate his birthday. That sentence alone should tell you everything that you need to know. The series that later became the Red Hook Crits, didn’t start as a boardroom masterplan, it started as fun.

Trimble is an American who grew up in a cycling-family that plied their trade as framebuilders. He raced go-karts in his youth to the semi-professional level, and then on to working within motorsport. From there, he moved to New York City, working for his uncle’s architect firm.

Little did he know, these experiences were quietly building a world class event organiser. He understood life as a racer and what a course demands. He grasped the potential of an event from his motorsport years. New York taught him that to stand out, you need a strong brand and design. Architecture trained him to obsess over details.

One thing led to another, and over the years, the Red Hook Crit series expanded from New York to Milan, to Barcelona, and then London. Trimble was taking bike racing to the centre of world culture, he was creating a fashion week for bike racing. Perhaps, most importantly, he wasn’t doing it with traditional road bikes.

There’s one question that has always bugged me: why did Red Hook stop?

They had an international calendar, multiple revenue streams that pulled in six-figures per race, and cultural relevance. They even had Rockstar Games as a title sponsor. Looking back, it seemed the series was just waiting for the next chapter.

The Rockstar years: Why Red Hook worked

In a 2016 article, David Trimble was asked how the Red Hook crit accomplished what every bicycle race in the world sets out to do: entice regular people to come and watch.

“It’s pretty simple. We put on a spectator-friendly race and do it in a major urban center. People show up.”

I could leave it at that, and of course, true mastery lies in making something difficult look effortless. The Red Hook Crit is a beautiful blueprint, the design behind it literally sits in the Smithsonian archives. It pulled new people into cycling and never pretended it was anything other than fun. David Trimble built Red Hook around a principle that many forget: sport is meant to entertain.

Not only was the event fun to attend, the racing worked because the circuits appealed to each level of rider. The qualifiers throughout the day pitched pros against amateurs, all culminating in the final race under the lights. The spectacle of the final race was only part of what made Red Hook work. Behind the scenes, Trimble was obsessing over details most people would never notice.

“If there was a gate that would cost me $10,000 to move, but make the course half a metre wider and the race safer, I would spend that $10,000 every time.”

While it might seem financially reckless to spend $10,000 to gain a half-metre it was that architect’s eye for detail and uncompromising standard to safety is what built the Red Hook’s reputation. Investing in something with no commercial benefit, purely for quality and rider welfare, is why it worked.

The $50-million risk

Red Hook worked because every detail was designed to engage, entertain, and delight. Brilliance, however, doesn’t necessarily scale.

By the end, the series was pulling six-figure revenues per race, attracting major sponsors, and running internationally. It wasn’t enough. To take it to the next level - make it a fixture of mainstream sport - it would have required something on the order of $50 million over five years.

David tells me that to become legitimate, the series would have had to become ten-races long with high-level TV coverage. That creates a chain reaction with costs, everything scales up. There’s a bigger crew who come with a larger salary bill. The broadcast has to be done right to be worth it, which costs money. Everything has to level up. In a ten-series race, a $5 million annual budget only works out at $500,000 per race - all of a sudden it doesn’t seem that crazy.

They had reached an awkward middle ground. Too big to stay small, yet not big enough to attract the investment needed to scale. Rockstar Games didn’t want to continue to pick up the bill that the cycling industry was continually benefiting from. Red Hook reportedly ran off $2m per year for four races by the end, and though the series was always profitable, David himself wasn’t making any meaningful money relative to his workload and stress.

Fifty million is a number that sounds frightening, but when you consider it in context of the average male WorldTour team budget of €32m, it quickly pales. It is worth noting these figures are quoted through a 2018 lens. Both general inflation and the costs of organising events in a post-pandemic world will have increased them significantly.

For Red Hook to truly scale, perhaps something would have had to change. Cycling prefers clean economic equations. X leads to Y. Recently brands have been selling lots of gravel bikes, and therefore invested heavily in gravel racing. Simple. Red Hook never quite solved that equation for them.

Yet not appealing directly to the cycling industry was exactly why the series worked. The fixed-gear bikes weren’t catering to “fixie culture”, they were the defining trait of the event. The single-speed-no-brakes-bikes dictated race tactics and lowered the financial barrier to entry. Anyone could turn up and compete.

Red Hook wasn’t popular despite breaking cycling norms. It was popular because it broke them.

What if it had grown?

It is worth pausing to consider the ‘what if’. What if someone had written the cheque, taken the risk, and allowed the series to scale? It isn’t difficult to imagine a different version of cycling today.

Perhaps there would be a global urban race calendar built explicitly for spectators. One-hour races designed for broadcast, staged in the centre of the world’s biggest cities. The foundations were already there: New York, Milan, Barcelona, London. It is hardly a leap to picture Copenhagen, Sydney, Tokyo or Los Angeles joining the list.

The calendar would have been coherent, and held a storyline leading up to a final showdown. Not too dissimilar at all to the world of Formula One. The broadcasting is clean, and simple. Same production, presenters, and graphics at every race.

A younger audience would discover the sport not through tradition passed down from parents, but through atmosphere, proximity, and excitement. The commercial signals were already flashing. Rockstar Games—the creators of one of the most successful video game franchises in history—saw enough value to put their name on the event. Even accounting for a cycling-friendly executive in the boardroom, that kind of corporate interest usually signals something bigger is stirring.

If you have a series that is going to the cultural heart of major world cities and broadcasting to millions of people across the year, you have a global sports property. Could it have grown big enough for the wider sport to take notice? Maybe. Maybe not. But it’s easy to imagine a world where its success made WorldTour teams and their sponsors sit up and take notice. Would that have been the point when it becomes a threat to ASO?

That said, taking on the traditional race scene was never necessarily the goal. Red Hook Crit could have happily co-existed in a bike racing world just like IndyCar and Formula One do in motorsport. David raises a simple question “What should success look like?”. For him, it’s creating events that are fun, entertaining, and that inspire kids to want to ride. Red Hook Crit was never designed to take on the Tour de France- it was designed to make cycling fun.

But, what ifs are hypothetical…

There’s a temptation to frame Red Hook as a missed opportunity. Cycling’s golden ticket to relevance that slipped through the cracks. The series no longer exists, but the real lesson is sharp. Cycling does not just struggle to invent the future. It struggles to recognise it.

David Trimble now works as an event consultant. Alongside his wife, he runs events for some of the world’s biggest brands, Nike among them. Somewhat ironically, the Red Hook Crit 5k was his entry point into this world. The five-lap, one-kilometre circuit was designed to be “highly competitive yet fun for athletes of all ability levels.” Its multi-lap format was deliberately spectator-friendly, drawing crowds of over 10,000.

His blueprint for creating culture through sport is still being applied, just no longer by cycling.

Innovation requires risk, and cycling has never been particularly comfortable with risk. Yet a sport can honour its traditions while still building something new. Expansion does not have to mean sacrifice.

The Red Hook Criterium felt like a blueprint for that coexistence. It showed that you could build a spectacle that was commercially viable and culturally relevant, without ever trying to replace traditional racing.

What Red Hook achieved was rare, perhaps unprecedented. It didn’t make bike racing about tradition; it made the bicycle a vehicle for culture. The next time the sport gathers in a conference room to brainstorm how to create a new model, it might be worth remembering that a blueprint once existed, and it was, for a decade, in plain sight.

I ask David if he’d ever bring Red Hook back. He lights up as we talk about the make-up of a corner, about the rush of racing. Yet, Red Hook is one of those things that may be best left how it is, a happy memory. It’s one of those rare things that benefits from an untouched legacy. The race never lost money. Everyone got paid. It exited intact. All that remains are happy memories.

6. The Women’s WorldTour: Growth, Fragility, and Opportunity

The Women’s World Tour has the opportunity to change the sport for the better. However, it must NOT follow the path of the men’s World Tour.

The Women’s WorldTour (WWT) is at a fork in the road. Not because it’s failing, but because it’s succeeding. After decades of underinvestment, the sport is growing fast, many argue too fast.

The WWT is a shining light of what professional cycling should look like. The racing is exciting, with (at the time of writing) neither the Tour de France Femmes, nor Paris-Roubaix ever having a repeat winner. The calendar is shorter, and easier to follow. The teams are smaller, which means the best riders face each other more often.

This is precisely why this moment matters, and why the WWT faces a choice. Equality says mirror the men’s WorldTour, and with it begin a long, but gradual suicide. Equity asks a different question: what structure gives this ecosystem the best chance of thriving long term?

The Tour-ning Point

The arrival of the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift in 2021 was not just another race added to the WWT calendar. It altered the economics, visibility, and the expectations of the whole sport.

For the first time since 1989, when the ASO closed down the race as a cost cutting measure, women were to have their own multi-day Tour de France. The return of the race was a reminder of a broader truth: the Tour de France remains the most powerful force in cycling.

When the Tour de France stamps its mark, the sport follows. The race has always set the terms of the sport. Not just in prestige, but in what is considered worth watching, funding, and building around. The women’s race is now starting to do the same.

As much as ASO’s press release stated: “After having enriched its calendar with prestigious women’s events over the last few years, A.S.O. will accentuate its development in women’s cycling.” The return of the Tour de France Femmes was not them acting out of goodwill. A defining accelerant was the COVID-19 pandemic. With the road calendar suspended in 2020, racing moved to the online platform, Zwift.

Kate Veronneau, the Director of Women’s Strategy at Zwift explained her perspective of the race’s inception in an interview with ENVE Composites:

“We were forced to think differently during the pandemic. Everyone was on Zwift and everyone was hungry for racing so we put our heads together with ASO. It was simple to us: we’re doing it on Zwift, so we’re doing it by Zwift rules. That’s equal opportunities for men and women.

The shorter format of Zwift racing suited a lot of the female pros and they took full advantage of the opportunity. The women brought their best, and the racing was dynamic and exciting. That kicked off the conversation of bringing it into the real world. The proof of concept was there.”

Context is important and while there had been pressure on the ASO for years to hold a true Tour de France Femmes, there hadn’t been action. The pandemic altered the equation. Suddenly there was proof of concept and a committed financial backer in Zwift. It was an open goal for the ASO.

The packaging of the event tells the real story, Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift shows who did a lot of the commercial heavy lifting and the “Watch the Femmes” campaign that drove global attention was conceived and funded by Zwift.

It took decades of lobbying, a global pandemic and ultimately the funding of Zwift to alter the ASO’s policy of maintaining the status-quo. While understanding how the race came about adds context, the important truth is simple: the race exists.

Rapid growth: a good problem to have?

The Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift has gone from strength-to-strength. Across the board, attention is growing. Four different winners in four years just adds to the positivity. It has also brought the Women’s WorldTour to an inflection point: it’s growing too fast.

“It truly did exceed all expectations - and I had high expectations.”, said Veronneau, “I thought it would take us longer to get to where we’re at right now. It’s incredibly exciting. At the same time, with that kind of rapid growth, it exposes some pains that need to be addressed.”

This is the tension at the heart of the Women’s WorldTour. Growth has always been the objective, but it has been delivered faster than anyone expected. The sport is more credible than ever before, but growth without structure is volatile. The ecosystem hasn’t had time to stabilise before being asked to scale.

As the commercial side of the sport tries to catch up to sporting ambition, teams are being pulled forward by rising costs. Rider salaries are up, there’s a deeper race calendar, and higher expectations, but there has not been the same acceleration in finances.

In an article for CyclingNews article, freelance journalist, Emma Magnus, analysed the financial problems of the WWT:

“[FDJ-Suez] are understood to have a budget of around €5 million, compared to the €7 to €8 million budgets of the richest teams. For over a decade, manager-owner Stephen Delcourt has factored in an annual budget increase of between 5 and 10 per cent – but in the last year alone, his costs have increased by 29 per cent.

“We are like a start-up without funds,” he says. “We play with money that we don’t have in our pockets. That’s dangerous. The consequence is that we have 15 WorldTour spots, and only 14 [teams] apply. We need to analyse that. We go too fast because we have no rules. There is space for the big teams, but for the others, there is no place.”

“There is a budget decision and a sports decision,” he said. “I really feel that if [costs] continue to increase at 29 per cent, I need to be calm and not go too fast. And with the new UCI rules, I want to be careful.”

If costs continue to grow at the rate Delacourt claims, team budgets will double every 2.7-years. If this rate of growth continued for a decade, something that is unreasonable to expect due to the law of compounding, but adds valid context, then FDJ-Suez’s €5m budget would be €63.8m by 2036.

It’s a basic business equation: if costs increase faster than revenue, you will go bankrupt. It’s not if, it’s when.

Also mentioned in Magnus’ article is an interview with the owner, Claude Sun, of the now defunct Ceratizit Pro Cycling team. “I can imagine that the UCI wanted to achieve the same level [as men] for women: teams, culture, budget.”, said Sun, “But they forgot one thing: the sponsor.”

In February 2025, the UCI announced a new regulation for the 2026 season. Women’s WorldTour teams may only miss one WorldTour race per season. The intention is to move closer to parity with the men’s regulations, but the impact has been significant, stretching both budgets and squad depth.

It’s widely believed that this rule has been implemented three-to-five years too early. The intent is understandable and broadly supported, however a lack of appreciation for the bigger picture by the UCI has caused widespread frustration. This is one of many cases where gradual evolution rather than sudden upheaval was needed.

Big-prize money or contracts get the headlines, but constructive reform is often quieter. I propose two sets of reform, one creating a closed league, with financial guardrails in place at the top of the sport, and another focussing on building pathways.

Natascha Knaven-den Ouden is one of the most qualified names in women’s professional cycling. A former pro rider, an ex-WWT Team Manager, a mother to four-professional riders, the wife of a Paris-Roubaix winner, and the founder of NXTG, a development programme that has had so many high profile names there are too many to mention.

She is an advocate for youth development, and wary of rapid professionalisation.

“The UCI have skipped too many steps. Artificially pushing for financial equality does not work. Emphasis needs to be on building the systems around the sport. When you see that Women’s WorldTour teams can go up to twenty-two riders, but the average is sixteen riders. There are fifteen WWT spots, but only fourteen teams. It doesn’t make sense - it is currently better to be a ProConti team because the costs are lower and you can still race every race.”

The analogy often used is one of a pyramid. Too much time spent on growing the top of the pyramid without focussing on the base, creates an uneven structure, that at some point, topples over.

This was prevalent in ‘Clasica Almeria,’ a Spanish 1.Pro race (second level) demonstrated this; only 46 riders started the race. If the sport cannot assemble a full peloton, something must change. A focus has to be placed on stabilising the bottom of the pyramid too. A higher quality of riders entering the professional ranks will benefit everyone.

“We should not be advocating for a minimum salary through the whole pyramid, instead we should focus on development. When I was manager of NXTG in 2020, 40% of our €200,000 cash budget went towards rider remuneration. We couldn’t spend it on professional staff, training camps, or expenses for other races. That’s not development.”, said Knaven-den Ouden, “With the folding of smaller races, and the increasing salaries in the WWT, we’ve seen development teams get squeezed. Teams go back down to sixteen riders, development teams are around eight or nine riders.

They are then put in with the WorldTour team to gain UCI Points or fill out rosters. Riders are not gaining experience in smaller races against the same level of rider, they are missing so many steps. There are only a few teams doing it right, who see the goal of their development team as developing riders, not filling out their WorldTour roster.”

Knaven-den Ouden is planning at the possibility of building a development league across multiple countries. Her goal is to use lower level UCI races to create a pathway to the WorldTour. In turn, WorldTour teams benefit from a deeper talent pool and the whole sport rises together.

But, structural reform at the development level still leaves a larger question unanswered: what should the top of the sport actually look like?

What about a closed league?

After generations of fighting for financial equality, it feels amiss to suggest measures that slow down the financial progress of the WWT. However, the men’s WorldTour offers a cautionary tale, a blueprint of how not to do business. Chasing equality with a system that has a clear economic weakness should not be a goal.

“I do think we should consider budget caps. Without clear financial guardrails, the sport risks becoming unsustainable, with a handful of teams outspending the rest and creating a competitive imbalance. Nobody wants that.”, said Veronneau, “We should absolutely be discussing what new measures need to be in place to build stability and protect the long-term health of the peloton.

​​This is the moment we should be taking a really hard look at the structures, the rulings in place, and if that works for this modern age. We understand the landscape better, how fans are engaging with the sport. We have the opportunity to learn from other women’s sports that are thriving right now.”

I believe the WWT should evolve into a closed, franchise-style league. Such a move would require reform of the UCI Points system as well as the introduction of financial regulation, but the benefits are significant. Cycling teams should become investable assets rather than disposable marketing vehicles.

A closed league would allow teams to hold licences that provide economic predictability and therefore long-term stability. Once participation in the top tier of the sport is guaranteed, teams and sponsors can plan beyond sponsorship cycles.

In this context, financial regulation becomes essential. Spending controls help ensure that competition remains balanced, and that costs do not escalate uncontrollably. At the moment, teams operate in an environment where they do not know whether costs will rise by five percent or twenty five percent from one season to the next. That level of uncertainty is unsustainable.

The goal of such regulation would not be to suppress the salaries of the sport’s top riders. Safeguards and salary protections could ensure that the best athletes continue to be rewarded appropriately. Instead, the aim is to encourage and stabilise investment.

As discussed in the ‘Superteams’ section, financial regulation is always contentious. However, in the Women’s WorldTour it is a necessary step. A closed system would be the first move towards making teams themselves assets, while carefully designed financial rules could provide the stability needed for the sport to grow sustainably.

Yet, for a franchise to become a true asset, it cannot rely solely on participation in a league. Predictable income streams are what gives a license its value. Financial regulation restricts the spending from getting out of control, but cycling’s lack of revenue sharing remains the underlying issue here.

With the teams not owning the races, a league is still dependent on someone else’s product. The ASO owning the biggest races once again is a huge problem. If the sport wants long-term stability, it must start building structures where teams themselves hold lasting value.

Teams must do better

Being a professional sports team in the modern day is not just about finishing first, it’s about the bigger picture: fan engagement, cultural relevance, and long-term growth. The women’s market is widely recognised as one of the most exciting growth arenas in sport, yet most in the WWT operate with an ancient mindset: results first, everything else somewhere down the list.

FDJ Suez United have shown what’s possible when a team treats itself both as a world leading race team and a media brand. Their team ride-outs, consistent media output, and an active YouTube presence give fans reasons to care beyond race results. They are investing across the board in experience and visibility, and it shows.

Contrast that with a team like Canyon–SRAM Zondacrypto, which at its peak had huge cultural appeal and an identity that transcended results. It was a team fans felt attached to, not just because of results but because of character and narrative. Over time that energy has felt diluted. Their social media following remains large, but engagement and relevance has dwindled.

If a pro sports team is not winning, and not appealing to fans, then what is it doing? It takes financial investment, being a brand requires strategy and resources. But the results are clear: teams that embrace this approach see positive impacts on sponsor appeal, fan engagement, and long-term relevance. A strong media brand signals professionalism and ambition, it becomes a self-fulfilling recruiting tool when signing riders too.

Reform: Now or never.

If the goal is parity for parity’s sake, then the WWT can copy the men’s model and accept the fragility. If the goal is financial strength and longevity, then this is the moment to be brave.

Not all change can happen at once. In fact, the worst mistake that the WWT could make is trying to do everything simultaneously. Rapid regulation can be put in place to stop unchecked escalation and market distortion before they become structural problems. This allows stability to be protected while reform is phased and deliberate.

Burying heads in the sand is not an option. Paradoxically, teams and riders hold more power in the WWT than the male equivalent. The teams, sponsors, riders, journalists, and the brightest minds all must work together. This is not a rejection of the UCI or ASO as a form of protest, but an acknowledgment that meaningful structural change rarely emerges from the same bodies that benefit from the status quo.

“Reform of women’s cycling has the potential to outshine men’s and change the sport’s business model in the process.” - Rapha Roadmap.

7. Is it time for a new Roadmap?

Change is needed, but can change really happen?

Seven years on from the original Rapha Roadmap, and in the seventh article of this series, the question feels inevitable: is it time for another?

Riders are getting faster and WorldTour budgets are rising. The result is an inflation of the rider market and a collapsing bottom half of the peloton where multiple teams are publicly searching for tens of millions of sponsorship dollars.

It is a vicious cycle: if everybody has a €50 million superteam budget, then nobody has a €50 million superteam budget and the goalposts will continue to move up. How many years until we have a €100m budget team? While the sport has focused heavily on investment in performance, there has been a lack of investment in the structures that make it an attractive product for fans, or financially stable,

Many other sports take a dual perspective on management. One side focuses on performance, the other on commercial viability and long-term growth. There is no clearer example than the model at Formula 1 World Champions, McLaren Racing. Leadership is split: Zak Brown drives commercial strategy and partnerships as CEO, while Andreas Stella oversees performance on track as Team Principal.

When discussing the acquisition of Formula 1 by Liberty Media in an interview, Brown observed: “I think what Formula One has learned, and is continuing to learn, is that sport is entertainment.”

This is where professional cycling has misunderstood itself. It treats the sport primarily as a contest of human performance, rather than recognising that sustainable sport must balance performance with entertainment and commercial reality.

My suggestions

After months of researching this article, interviewing and reading across the sport, I have come with a series of suggestions. The list is far from exhaustive, but can be the start of reform.

1. Sport is entertainment, and cycling must put fans at the forefront of any reform. Without fans, there are no economics.

2. Financial regulation is essential for both economic sustainability and maintaining a level playing field that protects the overall health of racing. A consultation period is needed.

3. The Women’s WorldTour offers a unique opportunity and should ignore the male WorldTour model in favour of forging their own path.

4. The UCI’s broad mandate creates unavoidable conflicts of interest in governing professional road racing.

5. WorldTour squads should be reduced to a maximum of 20 riders, with an accompanying development roster of up to 15 riders, in order to encourage less racing and therefore a healthier, more competitive calendar.

6. The WorldTour calendar must be shortened and create a season-long narrative.

7. New forms of racing must be trialled to appeal to the modern sports fan, ensuring the sport evolves with changing consumption habits while preserving tradition.

What’s reality?

The goal of this piece was to educate myself on the sport, and it became this project you are reading today. The underlying systems in the sport make it difficult to push for reform. Each party will act with self-interest.

Without embracing entertainment, professional cycling risks growing faster in speed but shrinking in relevance. The sport must ask itself how it intends to appeal to a new generation, just like Formula 1 or cricket. Reform will ruffle feathers, it always does. But “it’s always been done this way” is the favourite defence of the old guard, and tradition alone has never kept a sport relevant.

Any meaningful change would need the ASO onboard, an organisation whose motto may as well be ‘maintain the status quo’. The Amaury family aren’t just heirs to a multi-billion dollar sporting legacy, but an integral part of French culture.

Bar the difficult task of buying them out, I do not have a solution for the ASO. It is one of the rare times that I am resigned to agree with the UCI President, David Lappartient:

“If you don’t work together [with the ASO] there is no solution, so I don’t want that…a fight with ASO would be suicide for cycling.”

Is there a situation where the teams band together for the collective good? In the WWT, possibly, we’ve seen the #1 ranked team speaking out about the unsustainable rising costs. I am confident that we could see unity in the WWT. However, in the male WorldTour it is unlikely that reform would happen as a form of self-determination. The most successful teams in the sport are the richest, and they would not propose any motion that destroys their advantage.

The UCI could bring reform overnight if they wanted. Smaller teams, financial regulation, and a reform of the UCI Points system, all could pave ways to make the sport more sustainable. Even creating a rulebook that is enforceable would be a good start. However, the UCI also benefit from maintaining the status quo.

Professional cycling operates as an old boy’s club. From the Omertà of the doping era to quiet backroom agreements that protect the status quo, change has rarely come from within. Reform in this sport always follows crises.

What does it mean for me?

In the fourteen thousand plus words that this series will come to, I’ve learned more about the economics and governance of professional cycling than ever before.

I will not race my bike forever, and now more than ever, I am asking myself: what’s next? I am passionate about this sport, and one day I want to step into a role that helps me be a part of positive change. There are two key elements that must change: fan engagement and financial reform.

Last summer I wrote an article titled: ‘The $350,000 blueprint: Why I want to start another team.’ It was an article written about my ambition to build a multi-discipline team that focussed on fans and entertainment. I wanted to take everything I’d learned from running Ribble Rebellion and bring it to the next step. Of course, you need to win, but more importantly, you need to make people care.

This series has altered my perspective, and I cannot unsee what I now understand. I once believed teams themselves could drive change, now I am less certain. In the current structure, teams are constrained by the commercial pressures of sponsorship and performance.

That’s not saying teams cannot play a role. That’s not saying I don’t want to start another team. The more direct access you have to your fans, the less replaceable you become to sponsors and organisers. Attention becomes a form of leverage. In a system where teams own no media rights and depend on annual sponsorship renewals, narrative is perhaps the only asset they have.

The Unibet Rose Rockets are attempting exactly this. They have positioned themselves as more than a sum of their results, building a distinct identity, leaning into storytelling, and engaging directly with a fanbase. The early indications suggest that there is appetite for a team that actually feels like a team. Yet their model has not been frictionless. There has already been tension between the Rockets and the ASO, an inevitability when a team seeks to build influence in a system where power sits elsewhere.

I am more convinced than ever before that fan engagement matters. The sport must grow its fanbase and it must look to new territories. Take the West Coast of America, a place full of cycling fans, culture, and money but a place nobody in cycling is taking it seriously.

I am more convinced that cycling cannot continue escalating costs without addressing structural imbalance. What I am less certain about is where meaningful change begins, and who is actually capable of driving it. Currently, the wrong people are in the positions that matter.

Every structural weakness has roots, every proposed reform has trade-offs and every ambition sits inside a constraint. Beneath all the romance of professional cycling sits reality.

It is one big game of power and money.

“Professional cycling must be made more accessible and more engaging.” The final line of the Rapha Roadmap says. “In reaching that destination, we will have to take the road less travelled.”

Following the release of this series, I am working alongside the two authors of the Rapha Roadmap, Joe Harris and Steve Maxwell of The Outer Line, to bring a set of meaningful reforms to the table. We will release a ten-page report, documenting our findings by the end of April.

My email address is jtlcycling@gmail.com if you would like to raise any points, or engage in conversation.

Thank you…

This piece has been a long process, and thank you to everyone who has helped and guided me through it.

Logan Jones-Wilkins for helping with the edit, and turning this from a series of unrelated thoughts to a full article. Jon Twigg for the hours we’ve spent talking on this topic in the last few years. Rob Lydic for reading through my original draft and bringing a non-cycling perspective. Alec Levy-O’Brien for the guidance. Joe Harris and Steve Maxwell for the original writing of the Rapha Roadmap, and challenging my perspectives. David Trimble for the inspiration behind many of the thinking points, and to all the people who took their time to be interviewed. Thank you.

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Based in Stillwater, Oklahoma, the just-over-100-mile race is gravel’s Opening Weekend. There are races before it, of course, but once Mid South rolls around the season suddenly feels real.

As is becoming tradition, here are my takeaways.

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1. All pro races should be on Friday.

Professional sport is entertainment. That’s the game Mid South understands.

Rolling out with thousands of people cheering, finishing with the final few hundred metres lined multiple people deep. Fans are what make bike racing special. The pros love racing in front of crowds, and the crowds love watching the pros. It’s a win-win.

The course is safer with fewer riders on it, and it gives organisers another major moment to advertise. Every major gravel event built around mass participation should do this.

It was also nice rolling down to the start the next morning with a group of riders who had raced the night before, drinking coffee and cheering on the amateur event. Everyone wins with this format.

2. It’s the best bike event in America.

Mid South is for the people. It’s about fun. Critically, this is not an event designed for pros. Notice I say event, not race. From live music to the event village, shake-out rides, and multiple course options, the entire weekend is unapologetically built for the people.

Yes, the front of the race will always race. We love that part too. But the goal of this weekend is to appeal to the many, not the few. It’s one of those I, ironically, struggle to put into words. Just come and experience it for yourself next year, and thank me later.

3. The course is class.

The Mid South course is a reminder that you don’t need craziness to make a good race.

It feels like a Belgian or Dutch spring classic. Endless small moments that gradually wear the field down until the strongest riders remain. No crazy single-track. No questionable corners. Just a proper racing course.

Too many organisers design courses to challenge pros and then make everyone else ride them regardless of skill level (side-eyeing a race in Girona here.) Mid South does the opposite. Whether you’re a seasoned pro or a first-timer, the course is safe and fun.

That doesn’t mean it’s easy either. We’ll all attest that it’s one of the hardest races of the year. A good course encourages good racing.

4. We gotta talk safety - again.

I write this in every recap. Safety is non-negotiable.

In the pro-women’s race, a media buggy made a major error and almost crashed out the two lead women.

With the push for livestreams and media coverage, there are more vehicles on course than ever. They encourage drafting, throw huge amounts of dust into the race, and sometimes make dangerous moves.

Safety should always come first. Even one ‘dodgy’ moment is too many.

We are racing fast, and there’s serious money on the line with contracts and sponsorships. Organisers need to talk to riders. If something is unsafe, they have to listen. I’d love to open a dialogue with LifeTime and Klassmark about this, because they are two of the biggest offenders.

That said, credit where it’s due. The Mid South crew owned the mistake immediately, issuing an apology and saying: “We will learn from this and do the work required to make it better.”

5. The Euro-US pro pendulum is swinging

Perhaps the pendulum in the Euro vs US gravel debate is starting to swing.

Mid South is one of the American classics, but it’s fair to say that in both the men’s and women’s races, the start list lacked depth this year.

I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe budgets are tighter and riders are becoming more selective with their travel. Maybe Mid South simply isn’t one of the new-age gravel pro-races. Or perhaps riders are focusing their early season around Sea Otter.

It could also be positioning: US gravel races tend to present themselves as events, while European races are unapologetically races. Semantics, but important.

The US will always have strong gravel pros, and certainly the best funded ones. But European races are starting to show more depth. Santa Vall, is a much smaller event with none of the cultural pull of Mid South, but the pro field is significantly deeper.

The only real explanation is convenience. Santa Vall sits on the doorstep of Girona, where a huge portion of the pro peloton trains. Riders can show up, race, and be home the same evening.

Mid South should arguably have one of the deepest fields outside of Unbound. It’s one of the most enjoyable weekends on the calendar and a race that riders genuinely love attending. Maybe depth isn’t always about prestige, but logistical convenience.

6. Gravel has no race rules, and that’s okay.

I had a mechanical out of the lead group which left me in no-man’s land with one other rider who had been dropped. We caught the front group when they were held-up by a train crossing.

One older rider in the lead group insisted we had to wait two minutes before restarting. I asked what about the group behind us, who obviously wouldn’t wait. No reply.

The lead group rode off, and fifteen seconds later, the organiser buggy exclaimed, “this race has no rules, just go.” Situations like this are messy.

It’s frustrating for the lead group. But with me having mechanicalled and the other rider already dropped, we were hardly a threat. Add in the fact the group behind wouldn’t wait either, and there wasn’t really a clean solution.

Sometimes racing incidents just happen, and some riders need to remember it can’t be one set of rules for the front group and another for everyone else.

7. Bobby f**king Wintle.

The man that started the whole thing, the lead organiser, the guy that will hug over two-thousand people across the weekend. Bobby is the guy that remembers my name and thanks me for coming to his event even though we’ve only met a handful of times. He’s the life of the party, and has turned Stillwater, Oklahoma, into the most fun weekend in the gravel calendar.

Bobby, thank you.

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How did my race go?

After a nightmare travel - I arrived Wednesday night after a Monday morning flight cancellation - I was praying the racing God’s would smile on me. The race started fast. The first 50km was a tailwind and oh boy, we RACED.

I checked my shoulder after thirty minutes thinking, ‘fuck this is hard’, there were only fifteen of us left. We rode, and rode, and rode. It was one of those flow-state moments, no thinking, just pedalling.

After an hour, I had a rear derailleur mechanical and bid farewell to the lead group as I hopped off to fix it. Derailleur fixed, I was in no-man’s land with one other rider until the second-group on the road finally caught us.

I lost my head. Pissed off at the mechanical, and how it just felt we were commuting to the finish line, my mood got pissy. I’m blaming jet-lag here too.

With an hour to go, it was lights out. I was dehydrated, sleepy, and tired. A split occurred in our second-group, and I had nothing. I rolled to the line P16.

I do want to say how stupidly hard we raced those first few hours. Almost half of the original front-group blew up in the final hour and crawled home. The roads of the Mid South Gravel had riders finishing in ones and twos all evening. The sign of a proper day out.

Onwards, I’m in Boulder now. Next up, Redlands.

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It seems that I put out one of these Privateer Diary entries on a monthly basis. It’s pure chance, I realised there’s a lot on my mind, and a few things to put out into the world.

I’ve just got back from London. I did a 30hr trip there to surprise my Mum. I bought her tickets see a show for Christmas, and flew in myself to see it too. It’s always nice to break the Girona bubble and get into the real world of London, even just for a day.

This week:

• 🚴🏼‍♂️ My biggest ever training month

• 🏆 Maggie wins a pro-race Down Under

• 📅 My 2026 Plans

• ✍🏻 Articles I’m working on

• 🤔 Team news

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The 120hr training month

January really was my biggest month ever on the bike 120 hours or 3,486 km.

I’ve always ridden well off volume. And I genuinely love riding my bike, so it’s a pretty ideal match. My coach, Alex Welburn, is one of the more flexible coaches out there and usually lets me tack on a little extra within reason.

The weather has been the worst of my five winters in Girona, but I still rode 30 out of 31 days. One day was meant to be an optional recovery spin but it poured with rain, so I opted out. Another was indoors because we got a weather warning not to leave the house. My January had a simple weekly routine.

Monday: Optional 1hr Reco. Tuesday: Endurance + VO2 work. Wednesday: Endurance. Thursday: Endurance + Torque. Friday: Cafe Ride. Saturday: Endurance + Z3/Sweetspot. Sunday: Adventure day.

This is how I’ve always done it when I’m at home. It’s not the traditional three-day block style, but it allows me to break the week down mentally and still leave Monday and Friday for predictable work days.

January was also a month of exploring. We hunted for new roads and ended up on concrete goat tracks that I’m convinced hardly anyone has ever ridden. I love living in Girona. I don’t care what anyone says. The road riding here is the best in the world.

My favourite ride was probably this six-hour epic I did with Felix.

This past month was also the furthest I’ve pushed myself in a winter training block. Averaging just shy of 4 hours per day on the bike, with a bucket of intensity, I was limping into this rest week.

I am on Strava if you wanna follow the craziness, though I am kinda offended they took away my pro badge last year.

My 2026 Plans

My 2026 season starts a little later this year, which is why I could afford a bigger January block. I’ll open at Mid South Gravel in Oklahoma in March. I’ve decided to skip Santa Vall for various reasons, the main one being that I don’t enjoy it.

After Mid South, I’ll head to Boulder for altitude, then over to California for the Redlands – Sea Otter – Levi’s trio.

I really wanted to add the Tour of Gila at the end of that block. It’s a five-day mountain stage race with a TT at altitude, basically my dream race. But with most stages sitting above 2,000 m, you have to prepare properly. Doing Gila would mean dropping both Sea Otter and Levi’s.

After Levi’s Fondo, I’ll fly back to Europe via New York City. The plan is to go after the Central Park KOM. I do still need to sort a TT bike out for this, though, the deal I had fell through just this week due to supply chain issues. 😕

Then it’s back to Europe, maybe Lincoln GP, definitely Unbound, and I’m going to do British TT Nationals as well. My calendar after that is very much TBC.

I need to start organising, I leave in less than five weeks and haven’t got a single thing booked.

Maggie won a pro race!!

Last season was a tough one for Maggie. She had unexplained problems during the Classics, which eventually led to surgery on her iliac artery in July.

Getting everything sorted was a huge amount of work. You’d be surprised how much an athlete has to navigate themselves, even as an Olympian in the WorldTour. Finding the right people, the right treatment, the right rehab plan. It’s a lot.

I think one of the biggest misconceptions about pro cyclists is that everything gets done for you. It really doesn’t. Maggie was brilliant with her surgery and rehab. So much effort went into building the right team around her at each stage and doing everything properly.

She went to Australia high on confidence, but a DNF on Stage 2 of TDU had her feeling down. Luckily, it was ‘only’ some nerve issue after travel, and by the time the TDU one-day race came along a few days later, she was feeling better.

And she won. Her first win since Nationals in 2022, her first proper pro win. One of those moments where all the hard work suddenly makes sense. I was buzzing.

She’s been on the road for nearly a month now. She flies back via the UAE Tour, then home. We’ll be up in Andorra as long as the snow lets us, with some boring (and expensive) life admin like buying a car, before the Classics begin.

What’s happening with the team?

So, I have some news.

We’re doing a composite team for Redlands.

I know. Not the big news. But still news.

I haven’t found the money for the full team yet, as I’ve written about so many times, but we do have something small. Everyone who reads this knows how much Redlands means to me. It’s an incredible stage race in a brilliant town outside LA. Along with Michael Garrison, we’ve pulled together a squad of privateers to try to win races and, more importantly, have fun.

Michael and I both came up on the road, and both still love it. Maybe one day I’ll look back and see this as the first small step towards something bigger.

What articles am I working on?

I’m currently reading the Rapha Roadmap that I turned into an e-book for my Kindle. It was first published back in 2019 and collates 18-months of research into a 65-page-ish document. It, quote: “analyzes the various challenges and opportunities facing pro cycling and presents a series of bold reforms that could bolster the economic prospects.”

It was commissioned after Rapha ended their Team Sky sponsorship, and ultimately led their investment into EF, something which ended last season. It informed their decisions around the EF Gone Racing series and their Alt Calendar. It’s one hell of a read; everybody working in pro-cycling should read it. It’ll come as no surprise that I’ll be writing something about the Roadmap.

I’m also deep into a three-part series on the Red Hook Crit, fan-first racing models, and the whole Specialized–Rocket Racing universe. I’m having coffee with David Trimble, Mr Red Hook himself, this week. He’s based here in Girona and is always a fascinating person to sit with.

This topic is my favourite rabbit hole.

I’m sorry my Substack has been quiet in January. Partly because of the training load, partly because I’ve been doing other work.

• What does it take to start a pro-cycling team?

  • This was for CyclingNews. I wrote about Ribble Rebellion, planning my next team, and the Unibet Rose Rockets.

• Rockets Newsletter

  • I’m the writer for the Unibet Rose Rockets Sustack, and in January, we published two newsletters. My favourite was the most recent. I sat down with Marcel Kittel for a half-hour, and he walked me through their tactics for winning their first sprint with Dylan Groenewegen. It was kinda surreal, I grew up watching Marcel win Tour stages.

    

  • One final note. The Rockets are knocking their media out of the park currently. They’re uploading race videos on the same day as the race. That’s unheard of in cycling. And the proof is in the pudding, their videos are flying!

Speak to you all soon,

Joe

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This allows me to write articles that don’t necessarily fit in at one of the normal outlets. I’m currently working on something about the Red Hook Crit series. This article has been on my to-write list since 2022.

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These are all things that I spend hours upon hours thinking about. I don’t know what it is, but the economics and politics of cycling grab my brain in a certain way.

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DSM will probably go bankrupt.

Okay, they’re called Picnic–Post NL these days but everyone still knows them as DSM.

A recent Substack article from Money in Sport reported that the team have lost 19.5 million euros in the last three years. Their personnel costs sit at 134.5 percent of revenue. That alone tells you everything you need to know.

Money in Sport

Picnic-PostNL's €19.5m losses in last three years: How is this team still racing?

The financial woes in the Dutch cycling world keep stacking up. In November Money in Sport reported on the €6.1 million operating loss incurred by Team Visma Lease-A-Bike in 2024. In December we turned our attention to the equipment companies and reported on huge losses at Accell of over €700 million in 2023 and 2024 and a badly timed $0.8 billion acquisition of Dorel Sports, the owner of Cannondale and Schwinn, by PON.Bike…

Read more

3 months ago · 5 likes · Money in Sport

It also explains why Oscar Onley was sold to the Ineos Grenadiers for a reported six-ish million euros. To put it bluntly, they were finished without that money.

It’s an interesting team, and not for the right reasons. The management has long been accused of being rigid, unwilling to compromise and slow to adapt. Comments from ex-riders have included reference to management as a “soviet regime”, and another saying riders are "treated like little children". There is a list of talent who have left mid-contract.

To be fair, DSM are one of the best development organisations in world cycling. Few teams produce young riders as consistently as they do. The issue comes later. There is a clear gap between them developing a future star and then managing that rider once they reach the top level.

Notably, Oscar Onley is one of the few that has left DSM on good terms.

DSM often argue that the lack of a transfer system is hurting them. There is some truth in that, but it is far from the whole story. If they want riders to stay, they need to offer long-term contracts that pay fair market value and create an environment where people feel valued.

If those things are in place and a bigger team still wants to buy a rider out of a contract, DSM would be compensated fairly. But if you underpay riders, treat them poorly or avoid committing to longer deals, you cannot be shocked when they walk.

I don’t see how they come back from this huge financial hole.

They have lost their brightest star and are struggling to attract big talent. The UCI have only granted them a one-year WorldTour licence, which tells its own story, and the current roster doesn’t contain any major names who can reliably score the UCI points needed to survive at the top level.

At some point, the management has to look internally and ask whether they are the common factor. That moment is probably right now, considering they are staring at a twenty-million-euro hole.

EF have money, but wants more.

EF has money. They just want more of it. They are not in trouble. But if they want to win big, they need a bigger budget. Simple.

Just twenty-four hours after announcing their talisman, Ben Healy’s long-term contract, EF announced a “unique and unprecedented opportunity.”

EF will continue contributing at its current financial level. The fact that they signed Ben through 2029 implies financial security in the medium term.

But, crucially, they are willing to step back from naming rights if it helps bring in a larger sponsor and expand the budget.

Context: Back in 2018, EF - an education company - joined as a long-term sponsor and simultaneously bought the management company behind the team, Slipstream Sports. In other words, EF owns EF Education–EasyPost. They are not just a sponsor.

Credit where credit is due here. EF is willing to keep funding the team even if they no longer get the same publicity as the title sponsor. They are effectively saying: we will hold the floor so someone else can raise the ceiling. That level of commitment is unusual.

Why might EF do this? Escape Collective spoke with team manager Jonathan Vaughters, and reported: “They love being the first name of the team, but they love winning more.” EF is willing to take second billing if it means more wins.

This is in reference to the billionaire Hult family, who own the team. Vaughters did say that EF Pro Cycling’s budget comes from EF’s marketing budget, but it feels amiss to mention the billionaire, cycling-mad family behind it.

Their website explains further: “It’s rare in professional sport, and nearly unheard of in cycling, for an owner and anchor partner to commit long-term at EF’s current level and still invite an additional title partner to invest purely to make the team stronger,” says team CEO Jonathan Vaughters.

The “unique and unprecedented opportunity” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in their statement, though. What EF are really saying is much simpler:

We need more money to compete with the top dogs, so we’re open to a sponsor. We will keep funding the team at the level we are now, so it is stable, but if someone out there wants to put in money, the name above the door is negotiable.

By keeping their current financial commitment while inviting a larger partner to take over the naming rights, they get the best outcome available. The team remains stable, the brand remains attached, and the competitive ceiling rises without EF having to write a bigger cheque.

It’s quite a nice strategic play, just not really unique well, or unprecedented.

Unibet Rose Rockets miss out on the Tour de France

The fact that this has dominated cycling headlines today says a lot about the Rockets.

Just four years after starting as a Continental team, there is public outrage that they have not been selected for a Tour de France wildcard. I have a bias here because I like and freelance for the Rockets.

The issue is not really that they were overlooked. But that Caja Rural got the nod instead. Yes, the Grand Depart is in Barcelona, and yes, Caja Rural finished one place higher in last year’s UCI ranking. But that alone does not explain the decision.

The Rockets have invested massively over the winter; we are probably talking an eight-figure spend once all is said and done. And while Caja Rural did beat them in the 2025 UCI Rankings, that says very little about the 2026 Tour de France.

It is unclear whether the ASO simply does not like the Rockets. There is history there, particularly around media rights from the days when the Rockets were just a YouTube channel. Or perhaps the Spanish Grand Depart created pressure, formal or informal, to include an additional Spanish team.

Either way, it seems the ASO do not really care. They own the sport’s biggest race, and that gives them the freedom to act however they want.

To me, the decision feels short-sighted. You have a French-licensed team bringing thousands of new fans into the sport, and they get snubbed because, well, I don’t know.

Christian Prudhomme, the Director of the Tour de France, gave an explanation, which didn’t really help: “We used the same principle as in previous years. We took the ranking of the second division. Unibet Rose Rockets? They don’t claim a French identity at all. They have more Dutch riders.”

The point about the 2025 UCI Rankings is fair enough on paper, but if that is the sole criterion, why call it a wildcard at all? Why not simply select based on last year’s ranking? Again, the Rockets of 2026 are not the Rockets of 2025.

And the nationality point is absurd. Caja Rural has one French rider. The Rockets have six. And they race under the French flag. If identity is the argument, it does not hold up.

Of course, the ASO can do whatever it wants. It is their race, their rules, their world. They answer to nobody.

What does this all mean?

Yet again, we are heading into another unpredictable year in pro cycling. Total Energies and Flanders-Baloise are rumoured to be folding, and DSM look to follow. Meanwhile, EF are looking to go big, and the Rockets are crashing the party whether the ASO likes it or not.

The reality seems to be simple. Have a budget that EF inspires to, some forty-odd million, or write a new playbook a la Unibet Rose Rockets that forces people to pay attention.

Thanks for reading. This article, selfishly, was my way of making sense of all this in my head.

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The world’s best gravel racer. The reigning XCM World Champion. The face of modern gravel. Keegan Swenson signing for Specialized just makes sense.

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Why Specialized?

American rider. American brand. And they have the biggest chequebook. Sometimes the most obvious story is the right one.

The fact that it has taken Keegan this long to become a Specialized athlete is almost surprising in itself. I can picture conversations in the boardroom where they’ve debated how to beat him, or who to sign in place of him. If you can’t beat him, just sign him.

They’re an American company, gravel is culturally an American sport, and Keegan Swenson is the most-credible racer in the discipline. I could list his results, but it is pointless. He has won everything that matters. His name is inseparable from gravel racing itself, and when its defining era is looked back on, he will be spoken about as the best.

Specialized’s athlete strategy mirrors Nike’s. Don’t overthink. Just sign the best.

Keegan brings legitimacy, results, and trust in one hit.

Win on Sunday, sell on Monday.

With the Life Time Grand Prix moving away from a high-altitude specialist series, it’s no longer a guarantee that Keegan will win every year. That played out already in 2025: Cam Jones took the overall, while Keegan finished fourth.

It was the first time since the inception of the series that Keegan didn’t run away with it. That does not mean 2025 was a write-off. He won two rounds of the LTGP, and a World Championship. Rainbow Bands rank higher than another LTGP title.

Gravel is evolving, but Keegan will still win.

The thought of winning Leadville in the Rainbow Bands is enough to send Specialized giddy. And barring an incident, he wins Leadville every time he starts.

His contract runs through to the end of 2028, conveniently lining up with the Los Angeles Olympic Games. It also coincides with an Olympic product cycle for Specialized, with several major launches already in the pipeline.

Expect new mountain bikes and gravel bikes sooner rather than later. And expect a very deliberate push to dominate the conversation at the exact moment it matters most.

The Big S has never been subtle about how it plays this game. They win. And they unapologetically subscribe to the idea that if the best athletes in the world choose your equipment, the rest of the market follows.

Across every discipline, Specialized wins on Sunday and sells on Monday. They have always gone after the very best. Tom Boonen. Peter Sagan. Lorena Wiebes. Christopher Blevins. Demi Vollering. Remco Evenepoel. Lotte Kopecky. And, I’ve missed a few here, too.

Keegan fits the mould. Even as the gravel landscape becomes less predictable, he remains the safest bet in the sport.

RIP to the Privateer Era?

Specialized have put its stake in the ground with a super team. Keegan Swenson, Matt Beers, and Mads Würtz Schmidt. It’s a statement.

What does this mean for gravel racing? Of course, we’re going to see some team tactics, but just how much can you influence a race with three guys?

Off-road racing has a habit of stripping away theory. There are mechanicals, crashes and chaos on the regular. Matt Beers alone is worth two men, but I’d want to go into every race with him as a nailed-on co-leader, not a domestique.

If the budget had allowed, I would have signed two other guys to be workers. Maybe an up-and-coming U23 rider - say Griffin Hoppin. Or a new-ish American guy who’d be as loyal as a dog - a Skyler Taylor. Or even an ex-World Tour rider who’s happy to ride the front all day. These are all money-no-issue scenarios, of course.

Now that one brand has committed properly, the rest are almost forced to respond. PAS Racing's downsizing to concentrate resources is not a coincidence. The Canyon rumours do not come from nowhere. This is how arms races start in elite sport. Slowly at first, and then all at once.

Which brings us to the uncomfortable question nobody really wants to answer. Can privateers survive? For sure, it will not change overnight, and there will still be days when the script gets torn up.

However, the privateer era is unlikely to end with a bang. It will just fade, slowly.

Velocio came too.

For people who care about sponsorships, one of the most striking things about Keegan’s announcement was the Velocio logo on his sleeves.

Keegan signed a deal with Velocio at the start of 2024, and by the looks of things, he brought that over with him. Velocio is owned by SRAM, which slightly changes how you read this whole project. Specialized do not need an external kit sponsor; they make their own. They do it for Red Bull–BORA–Hansgrohe. They do it for their XCO team. Apparel is something they usually like to control.

Keegan clearly has a significant personal relationship with the SRAM Corporation, and considering the team was already more than likely to use SRAM components (most Specialized Factory teams do), adding Velocio simply made sense. The Velocio deal is a team deal. The announcement videos of all riders have ‘Velocio’, ‘SRAM’, and ‘Rockshox’ printed on their t-shirts - all SRAM-owned companies.

So while the name on the door reads Specialized Factory Racing, what sits underneath is more interesting. Equipment and performance-wise, this seems to be a Specialized-SRAM project.

And then there’s the announcement image itself.

Keegan’s announcement photo came from Specialized’s Win Tunnel at their Californian HQ. Their purpose-built wind tunnel. This is gravel treated with the same seriousness as WorldTour road or Olympic mountain bike programmes.

What does this mean for gravel?

Gravel has grown up.

Its first era was one of personality. Riders like Ted King, Pete Stetina, and Ian Boswell are all exceptional athletes in their own right, but they were also signed because of the profile that came with them.

That era of personality signings is fading.

Gravel is going to flex, change, boom, and there will probably be some sort of a correction along the way, but it will always exist. Storytelling and content have been all the craze in this era, but not the Keegan signing. Results and athletic credibility are centre stage.

Specialized aren’t signing potential with Keegan Swenson, they’re signing certainty. It’s almost a declaration that gravel is no longer a side project or a marketing experiment for them. It is a serious racing discipline with serious consequences. This signing is about owning the gravel space both in the US and internationally.

At 31-years-old, he’s in his prime. A three-year deal means it’s likely this is Keegan’s penultimate big contract, and that itself is a clever move from Specialized.

By the end of his time at Specialized, it’s hard to imagine Keegan not adding a Cape Epic win alongside Matt Beers, a gravel rainbow jersey, and a long list of other wins that hardly need listing.

He’s the GOAT of professional gravel racing. When this era is written about, his name will sit at the top, just like John Tomac in mountain biking.

My best guess is that the history books will remember him not as a Santa Cruz rider, but as a Specialized rider.

That kind of legacy is worth more than any single result.

I want to note that Specialized Factory Racing is a mixed-gender team. The women’s side is headlined by Sofia Gomez Villafane, who is undisputedly the best female gravel rider of this generation. Sofia and Keegan also got married this past off-season, another thing that makes his Specialized signing perfect. Sofia will be joined by Gee Schreurs and Annika Langvad.

Also, perhaps it’s significant that Keegan Swenson, Sofia Gomez Villafane, and Matt Beers all have the same agent. This was one hell of a deal.

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I’ve added a paid subscription and a ‘Buy Me A Coffee’ link to this post. This allows me to write articles that don’t necessarily fit in at one of the normal outlets. Thanks for your support.

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The following brands are racing partners of mine, which allow me to do cool stuff.

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• Rudy Project

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This is going to be one of those messy pieces where I go here, there, and everywhere.

From a 72hr bike packing trip to Andorra, where my head is with the privateer sponsorship market, and a few words on my 25th birthday that happened in early December.

I’m back in Girona now after spending Christmas back home in Lincolnshire with the family. Maybe it’s getting to my mid-twenties, or perhaps it’s because we’ll probably go to Canada for Christmas next year, but this past week felt extra special.

Bumping into old friends, spending time with family, and riding old training roads. I moved away from Grimsby just after my nineteenth birthday and never moved back, and probably never will, but that changes nothing.

Anyway, let’s have it.

I turned 25.

To many of you reading this, I’m probably still a spring chicken, but to me it feels like a milestone birthday.

I remember my 10th birthday, as my sister was off school with a snow day, and I thought it was a big deal that I was entering ‘double digits’. There’s not much in my head about my fifteenth birthday, and my twentieth was spent in this weird limbo. I’d just moved back from France, we were in COVID lockdown, and I was about to move to Girona. It’s even stranger to think of the next five years - I’ll be thirty.

Twenty-five feels like that point where life is all over the place. Some of your friends are away, travelling the world, others are climbing the corporate ladder, and some are starting to take life a lot more seriously.

I’m at the middle point. I have intrusive thoughts on a weekly basis to drop everything in life and move to New York City or California. I still want to live in Nice at some point. I want to start a team, and I still want to win races. There’s a lot.

It’s that age where I don’t feel settled. Bike racing has defined all of my adult life, and while it still means everything to me, the last few years have reminded me how easily plans can change.

Anyway, that’s enough of being deep.

Bike packing to Andorra.

Speaking of intrusive thoughts, I acted on one in mid-December and did a mini bike-packing trip up to our place in Andorra.

I had a few big days on the plan and wanted a little bit of adventure. Why not ride to Andorra and back over three days, I thought.

Conn McDunphy, my old training partner, was in town and was also recruited for the silly idea. I’ve done the ride a few times in summer, but never in winter. The ride takes you from Girona and criss-crosses the lower Pyrenees, over La Molina ski-station and finally up and over the peak of Andorra at some 2400m in elevation.

It’s December, and Andorra is a ski resort, so there’s plenty of snow and some questionable road conditions. Day one was the big day, day two was to the cafe, and day three was back home.

I love riding up there. The air is thin, the roads are hard, but it’s bloody beautiful.

Privateering

I’ve been asked to write a couple of pieces for CyclingNews, one about the financials and realities of privateer gravel racing, and another on building a team, so expect a few thousand words to come from me in January.

I’ve already said on this Substack that I’ve turned down some contracts for 2026 as I’m extremely clear on what I want to do, or more, what I don’t want to do. Of course, that means leaving money on the table, which is tough. I’m far from a financial situation where I can afford to do that, but it just feels right, and I’ll figure it out.

It’s a tough market out there. Lots of friends and colleagues are struggling to pull together a package that’s on par with previous years. There are a few reasons here: brands are investing more heavily in big projects (like Specialized Factory Racing), some teams are folding (Classified-Rose and Ridley Racing), there are more gravel riders, and there seems to be more targeted spending than before.

I’ll be honest, there have been a fair few sleepless nights. My financials aren’t as strong as in previous years, and I’m trying to budget carefully for flights to the US races and everything that comes with them. I’m about to receive a TT bike from Colnago, but it’s a frame-only situation, so I still need to buy the Shimano parts to build it up. I’m still with ENVE, but they don’t make a TT rig.

All of these things cost money. I know I’m in a crazy, fortunate position to even be able to say “I’m about to receive a TT bike from Colnago” and that my life allows me to do some pretty cool things, but heading into 2026, I’ll need to be a bit more creative with the budget.

That also means picking up some work alongside racing. I’m comfortable with that, I’m just figuring out what it looks like. So, please hit me up with any opportunities!

I’ll personally be going through a few sponsor changes, too. I’ve decided to leave Castelli and their SOG project. There was an offer on the table from them, and Soren Jensen, who’s my boss there, has also become a close friend. We spoke at length about my plans both for 2026, and the future.

It’s one of those relationships that goes into the ‘don’t be sad it’s over, smile because it happened’ category. Castelli is a brand that got me through many Lincolnshire winters as a kid and is a brand that I’ve always looked up to. There is a huge part of me that is sad to leave.

It wasn’t an easy decision, but I want the freedom to make choices based on my own long-term vision. Sometimes that means knowing when to step away.

There’s more to come on where I’m going in January.

Other bits

I’m going to hit you all with some recommendations because I’ve had some class reads and podcasts recently.

1. The Formula: How Rogues, Geniuses, and Speed Freaks Reengineered F1 into the World’s Fastest-Growing Sport

   1. Just trust me - this is one of the best books I’ve read in a long time.

2. Second Nature Pod

   1. This is about Dylan Bowman, the co-host of Second Nature, being retired from his Red Bull sponsorship. It’s great.

3. Freakonomics Pod on Horse Racing

   1. This was a Cole Davis suggestion. It’s a three parter, and an extremely good listen.

4. Unibet Rose Rockets Substack.

   1. This is biased as I help them to write it, but I love how the team just say it how it is - no bullshit.

Rockets Cycling 🚀

Come aboard on our journey! We'll send you exclusive updates from Bas, Jose & Devin, news about the team and content you won't even see on Youtube!

By Devin van der Wiel

Righto, that’s it for today!

As always, please do feel free to reach out to me by replying here or hitting me directly on jtlcycling@gmail.com - I’m always up for conversations or article ideas

I don’t start racing until Mid South in March this year so the winter build feels a touch slower, but honestly, that’s quite nice too.

I always put a bit up in the newsletter about the team I’m trying to build, and unfortunately that project has taken a little to the back seat. The simple reason is money. I spent most of autumn pitching it and although we had many good conversations, ultimately none of them resulted with what I deemed as an appropriate level of funding to get it off the ground.

It’s something I keep working on, but it needs to be with the right person, or partner, and ultimately the right financial backing.

It’s got to be done properly. And my network is currently maxed out when it comes to conversations.

Thanks, as always, for taking the time to read.

Joe

While you’re here…

I’ve added a paid subscription and a ‘Buy Me A Coffee’ link to this post.

This allows me to write articles that don’t necessarily fit in at one of the normal outlets. I’m currently working on something about Keegan’s move to Specialized, and also something about the different funding models for a team.

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Cycling has convinced itself that results are enough. If you win races, fans will magically appear. But there is only one Tadej Pogačar, and the rest of the sport would be silly to depend on unicorns.

Somehow, it is a group of twenty-something YouTubers leading the way. The Unibet Rose Rockets are proving that it is not rocket science at all.

Just be honest.

Teams assume fans only care about perfection. But if everything were perfect, would anyone care?

People are tired of cringey content, empty press releases, and PR trained answers. They want real humans. The days when people simply cared about the result at the final whistle or who crossed the line first are over. In the social media era, everything is up for discussion. The process matters just as much as the performance.

It’s a cultural shift: brutal honesty beats manufactured perfection.

Look at Wrexham AFC and Williams Racing. Both were historic names stuck at the bottom and drifting into irrelevance. Then they opened the doors. Welcome to Wrexham took fans into the boardroom. Williams handed their Team Principal, James Vowles, a microphone and let him tell the truth. Honest communication rebuilt belief. That’s when people started to care again.

Of course, Wrexham had a leg up with celebrity appeal. But attention isn’t the same as loyalty. Loyalty came from honesty.

The Unibet Rose Rockets, a team that formed less than three years ago from a YouTube channel. have taken a leaf from the same book.

When they can’t afford something, they tell you why. When they sign a crazy expensive rider, you see the human reaction. There’s no mystery. No spin. You’re seeing the operation as it happens.

And because fans see the work, they feel part of it. When the team goes well, supporters genuinely feel like they helped push it there. That is a powerful thing, and ridiculously rare in professional cycling.

Even having a real name makes the Rockets unique in professional cycling. The sport is obsessed with sponsors first, identity second. But the Unibet Rose Rockets will always be the Rockets, no matter which brand sits first. A name is an identity. It is remarkable how that is seen as revolutionary.

No wonder fans finally feel like they have a team they can get behind.

Team first, riders second

Welcome to Wrexham and Drive to Survive did something that sport had rarely done before: they told a human story, not a sports story.

They made stars out of unlikely characters. Paul Mullin is a brilliant footballer, but he’s no Messi or Ronaldo. Before Welcome to Wrexham, most fans outside League Two had never heard his name. Now he’s a cult hero. Why? Because we got to know him.

The Rockets understand this better than anyone in cycling today. Take Lukas Kubis. The Slovakian was almost completely unknown before he joined the Rockets. Now fans care when he races, because they care about the team he represents.

As Mitchell Minnaard, the Rockets’ Head of Communications, told me:

Our goal is to be the most likeable, and best followable team.

Lukas finished sixth at Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, a WorldTour race, this spring. Uno-X won with Wærenskjold and it was a big success for them. But we got more media from sixth place than Uno-X got from winning. Why? Because people cared about who the team was, they wanted to know who that Lukas Kubis guy was.

Then came our realisation:

If sixth place can do that…imagine if we won a stage at the Tour de France.

Cycling always gets this backwards. Teams rely on riders for identity, so when a rider leaves, the fans leave too. How do you build anything lasting like that?

The media strategy everyone missed

Sports teams traditionally rely on other people to tell their story. If the media doesn’t show up, their existence disappears.

The Rockets own their channels, and not only do they own them, they boss them too.

They’re most known for their YouTube channel that the team was born out of. It brings long-form storytelling, it’s almost like a pro-cycling reality show.

Their social media, Instagram and X (Twitter) is more reactive and fun. There are memes, lifestyle and humour. It’s fast paced and largely unhinged.

Then there’s their Substack, a recent addition to the Rockets media armoury. It gives context to what’s happening and a direct communication channel between management and fans.

The beauty of it? All four platforms appeal to different audiences, but they’re all connected to one ecosystem.

Just think, when was the last time you heard directly from Dave Brailsford at Ineos Grenadiers, or Ralph Denk at Red Bull Bora Hansgrohe? Not the team account. Not a press officer. Them.

Oh, and real-world events too. Not invite-only launches, or media days. Actual in-person fan engagement.

What’s the story line?

None of this matters without a storyline.

Sport relies on structure and meaning. Leagues, knockouts, promotion, relegation. Every match has context. Every moment feeds into something bigger.

Cycling does not have that. There are no clear stakes. How is it that finishing fifth can be a huge success one week, but a disappointment the next?

The Rocket’s breakthrough came from failure. A video where the whole team DNF’d became their most-watched of the season. Why? Because it was real. A group of riders who tried, cracked, and had to deal with the very human truth of failure.

They kept experimenting. They tried following riders at races. But without a bigger story in play, it still didn’t land. They didn’t need more wins. They needed a plot which everything could feed into.

Mitchell Minnaard, explains more:

I’m the first to say we did a lot of shit, and we’ll do a lot of shit in the future. But, we are learning from it and the videos we published along the way brought us to this strategy.

During the year, we asked ourselves, “What’s the goal for the rest of 2025?” Our goal was to be in the Top 30 in the UCI Rankings, and we needed UCI Points. We came up with ‘August Madness’, a month with a lot of stage races and UCI points. That clicked with our fanbase. Every race played into a bigger picture of our ranking. That’s when it clicked.

Our fanbase is the people who watch the Tour de France, but don’t follow every race and result. So it’s all about giving the right context and a good storyline. With UCI Points, we saw an opportunity to create a storyline that went beyond individual races.

If we don’t get it right?

If we don’t get it right, professional cycling is in trouble.

Evolve or die. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: as the gap between the top and bottom World Tour budget continues to stretch, the outcome becomes painfully obvious.

If you’re not innovating, you’re drowning.

The sport is splitting in two. A handful of super-teams hoovering up the talent and wins, while everyone else fights just to exist.

The bottom could very easily fall out of the WorldTour, and fast.

Because here’s the brutal truth: the money isn’t going to magically balance out. If teams keep relying on tradition, spreadsheets, and hope, they’ll get left behind. Just ask Arkea, or Lotto.

Building something bigger than race results is the only way to future-proof a team, not just against future sponsorship, but against irrelevance.

When you build identity and connection, you attract talent - riders and staff - who want to build something that matters. You give fans a reason to stay, even when the results wobble. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Where to start? Start simple. Open your doors. Tell it as it is. You’ll get a lot wrong, but you’ll learn.

A message to the sport

Sport is entertainment.

Look at the Ineos Grenadiers, nee Team Sky. A team that once redefined cycling is now struggling with relevance. Remember when they were untouchable? When marginal gains felt like magic and the rest of the peloton was years behind? Those days are long gone.

Instead of adapting, they put up walls and leadership became defensive. Their culture slipped, and once that goes, everything goes with it. You cannot expect fans to buy into a team that barely looks like it believes in itself anymore.

The Rockets are the opposite of that. They know the game has changed. They understand that people want to feel involved. They are building a fanbase by telling the truth, even when it isn’t pretty. They are showing the work, not just the results. They are having fun, letting people in.

The Rockets are, dare I say it, perfect. I can’t find a single fault in their strategy.

Cycling can cling to tradition and wonder why few care. Or it can follow the teams who are actually giving supporters something to believe in.

Allow me to repeat the first line of this article:

If you’re not winning, and you’re not appealing to fans, then what the hell are you doing?

— Joe

-

I’m realising there’s a lot more I want to say, but I’m already way over my self-imposed word limit. The Rockets’ approach is simple: put fans first. Build a storyline people can actually follow. Make them feel part of it.

This is my future. Maybe that means building my own team. Maybe it means helping others rethink what a cycling team can be. Maybe it means giving the Rockets my CV at some point. I never planned to care about media strategy or fan engagement. I just wanted to race bikes. But somewhere along the way, I learned something important. Attention matters. Story matters. Connection matters.

We don’t have to accept the systems in place just because they exist. Especially when they’re clearly broken.

Why not build something better?

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If you liked this, you may also like:

• You don’t need $65m. You need fans.

• The $350,000 Blueprint. Why I want to build another team.

• Nike, Specialized, and Vollering: FDJ-Suez’s Off-Season Masterclass

The following brands are racing partners of mine which allow me to do cool stuff.

• Pullwood Consulting

• AG1

• ENVE Composites

• Castelli Cycling

• Cotton Sox

• Panaracer Tyres

• Rudy Project

• dussl

• invisiFRAME

I’m back in Girona and, honestly, I think this is the first time I’ve spent more than three weeks at home since February. It feels…nice.

It’s that time of year when I’m getting back on the bike but also working my way through a long list of life admin. The bike storage is finally built, the wardrobe is tidy, and I’ve got an IKEA order on the way.

But I’m also a little bit bored. Racing feels miles away. I can’t really plan anything yet, and riding is simple. It’s a strange limbo with no big goals or adventures lurking just around the corner.

My last article about the Gravel Earth Series ruffled a few feathers, so I promise today’s is a bit less controversial.

Here’s what’s inside this week’s ramble:

🎙️ I’m on a podcast
🤑 What’s happening with the team idea?
🤔 What the 2026 plans look like
😴 A bit of everything else

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Podcasting

Soren Jensen is the Global Marketing Manager at Castelli. He speaks countless languages and is extremely good at his job. He’s also one of the nicest people you could ever wish to meet.

Soren and I think similarly about things, and over a beer at Rouleur Live, we remembered that we’d recorded a podcast in the autumn of last year. For some reason, that podcast never went live. Even though it’s a year on, we both agreed we should change that.

We talked about the transition to gravel, how much it costs to run a privateer calendar, advice for U23s and a whole lot more.

The team idea

If you’re reading this, you probably know what I’m talking about. If not, go and gander over here quickly and come back.

I’m still working on building a team, however, it’s not going to be happening in early 2026. When I set out my grand plans in August, I don’t really know what I expected. It led to this web of conversations right across the industry. From brands, to founders, CEOs, and companies completely out of the sphere of our sport.

It taught me three things:

1. This is going to take time.

2. People like the idea.

3. Raising money is really hard.

I’ll have a handful of productive conversations over a few weeks period, and then it’ll all go quiet again. I’m learning that this is a marathon, and not a sprint.

With no obvious funding ideas on the horizon, I’m thinking about what I can do in 2026 to at least make steps towards this. Michael Garrison and I are texting about a plan for one race, but we’ll see what happens there.

Again, not to toot my own horn, but I spoke on a podcast about this last week.

My 2026 plans + health

Long story short: it’s another year of privateering.

It seems I’ve finally got to the bottom of my breathing issue. Basically, breathing-mechanics, laryngo-spasm, and a few nose issues. So, that means I can make athletic plans for 2026.

There’ll be the obvious races: Mid South, Redlands, Sea Otter, Levi’s, and Unbound.

But, there’s also a few different ideas too: National TT Champs, PCH FKT, maybe a crack at the Central Park KOM?

I’m in an interesting position where I want to race what I want to race. In my opinion, the whole point of privateering is that you can do whatever races you want as an athlete, but I’m definitely leaving money on the table doing it this way.

This is the first off-season where I haven’t been dominated by the stress of chasing contract dollars. And trust me, that is not because I suddenly have the financial security to relax.

I’m not sure why, it just feels right that way. I want to chase the events that make me excited to get out of bed in the morning. If that means a slightly chaotic calendar that blends gravel, road, time trialling, and whatever else catches my eye, then so be it.

What am I working on?

I’ve recently been doing some freelance work with the Unibet Rose Rockets. In my humble opinion, they’re the only team doing it right in the world of cycling when it comes to media.

I’m working on an article for this Substack about them. When I say working on it, it’s all in my head currently and I need a few more long rides in the mountains to piece it all together.

That’s similar for an article I have cooking on the Life Time Grand Prix. Life Time are doing a great job over there, but I think there’s so much low hanging fruit that they could easily implement in their pro-events.

Bikepacking

Okay, I know I said there were no adventures, but we did bike pack from Girona to Barcelona this weekend to watch Mumford and Sons. That was a lot of fun.

Righto, I think that’s it for this newsletter. Sorry it was more of a brain dump than anything else. Sometimes I find it’s nice just to write what’s happening and see where it takes me.

Actually, one last thing. I was scrolling through LinkedIn this week and saw my dream post racing job! Does anybody know anybody at Substack?!

Until next time,

Joe

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While you’re here…

I’ve added a paid subscription and a ‘Buy Me A Coffee’ link to this post. As the year progresses, I’m planning on building this blog and putting out articles which I’ve always wanted to write but for whatever reason haven’t wanted to pitch.

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/joelaverick

The following brands are racing partners of mine which allow me to do cool stuff.

• Pullwood Consulting

• AG1

• ENVE Composites

• Castelli Cycling

• Cotton Sox

• Panaracer Tyres

• Rudy Project

• dussl

• invisiFRAME

Once again, cycling finds itself paralysed by multiple stakeholders who refuse to talk to each other. Gravel had the opportunity to rewrite the script, but somehow ended up with the same old story.

The Gravel Earth Series (GES) is the brainchild of Klassmark, a Girona-based events company behind the Traka, Santa Vall, and a host of other races. They’ve built some of the best-organised and inclusive events in gravel, complete with live streams, strong YouTube storytelling, and a genuine sense of community.

Next year’s calendar, though, makes little sense. It’s messy, mistimed, and in conflict with the very riders who helped build its reputation.

Before we dive in, let’s remember that, like it or not, this is a professional race series. There are podiums, prize money, and an explicit invitation for the world’s best to show up.

Decisions like these matter.

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1. Fewer races are good

Let’s start positive: downsizing the series was the right call.

The 2025 calendar was bloated: 25 races, little coherence, and no clear storyline. Cutting it down to 12 gives it room to breathe. It helps focus the narrative, build consistency, and bring some legitimacy to the overall standings. There’s also an introduction of age-group racing, which gives more people something to aim at.

Credit where it’s due, this part makes sense.

2. The riders are confused.

Within minutes of posting my thoughts about the calendar, I had a large percentage of the GES Top 10 in my DMs.

The sentiment was near-unanimous: disappointment.

Allow me to be clear, I do not want to be critical. Klassmark is a family-owned business, and Life Time is a multi-billion-dollar corporation. But that’s exactly what made their Gravel Earth Series special; it genuinely felt like a rival to the billion-dollar-backed Life Time races.

It felt human. It felt independent. It felt like ours. It was built on passion.

These latest moves seem corporate and calculated. I’m sorry, Klassmark, but you’ve missed the mark, and if you want to play this game, you will lose to Life Time.

3. The new structure is CRAZY

Did Klassmark forget that Unbound Gravel exists?

Ranxo, a race that’s gained a reputation as the GES finale and beloved for its proximity to Girona, has been moved to the week after Unbound. The week after Unbound?! Erm, why?

Unbound is the Tour de France of gravel. It’s the one event the world’s best riders will always prioritise. Holding a race in the backyard of most riders just eight days after the 200-mile Kansas event is, frankly, ridiculous.

To make it worse, the week after Ranxo (so two weeks after Unbound), the GES calendar lists Lost and Found Gravel in California. To go from Unbound to Lost and Found, with a recovery week in between, would’ve been perfect. Instead, they’ve jammed Ranxo in the middle, a scheduling decision that defies logic.

4. It’s impossible to race the whole series

The whole point of a race series is to bring together the best riders - but this calendar makes that impossible. Even before factoring in other major events, the GES schedule is so scattered (and logistically expensive) that no rider can race the full series.

If they can’t match Life Time’s half-million dollar prize pot, the least they can do is design a calendar that makes it easy for riders to attend.

5. The gap grows to the Life Time Grand Prix

There’s a huge financial disparity. Just last week, Life Time announced a $590,000 prize pot for 2026. The format is simple: a defined calendar, serious money, and genuine prestige. Win those races, and it can change your career.

As one pro put it: “I feel like we are going to see Life Time eat Gravel Earth Series’ lunch as the wealth gap increases.”

I feel GES need to take a page from the Life Time Grand Prix playbook.

Life Time has a clear distinction: Life Time events are open to everyone, but the Grand Prix is a pro competition that overlays those events. The branding is consistent, but the difference is clear.

6. Where have The Rift & Gravel Worlds gone?

If the Traka is the crown jewel of the GES, The Rift was second.

First raced in 2019, the Icelandic event has earned a reputation as one of Europe’s gravel monuments. It’s featured in the GES since the beginning and is one of the most anticipated stops on the calendar.

‘Gravel Worlds’ is conspicuously absent, too. The race is widely regarded as an American classic with an incredible organisation team. They also boast a six-figure prize pot to get pros drooling.

Both absences in 2026 raise eyebrows. While it’s officially unclear why they are no longer part of the series, the whispers help to fill out the gaps.

Events pay to be included in the GES, and it’s believed that high(er?) fees and marketing demands are hard for organisers to justify. Sources tell me that high-profile races walked away due to a lack of clear returns and that other events turned down invitations to join.

With that in mind →

7. Cuckoo Gravel feels wrong

As if losing The Rift wasn’t enough, the creation of Cuckoo Gravel - a Klassmark event in Iceland - has left a sour taste in a lot of mouths.

It’s scheduled just two weeks before The Rift and, from what’s been shared, appears to take place in a similar region and on a similar course. That doesn’t sit right, and for a series built on collaboration, it’s tone-deaf.

There’s no hiding the fact that Cuckoo Gravel steps on The Rift’s toes. With competitors inevitably torn between obligations, Klassmark’s new race will actively hurt the progress that made The Rift a global classic.

I don’t know the full story, but reportedly, The Rift organiser only found out about this new race in the past few weeks. The optics aren’t good here. This move feels like something dreamed up in a corporate boardroom, not a family business.

8. “No nature, no future” feels ironic.

The irony of seeing the GES slogan, “No Nature, No Future,” plastered across a calendar that gives you jet lag just looking at it is hard to miss.

The GES has made sustainability part of its identity. Riders are required to label nutrition with their race numbers in case of littering, a small but symbolic gesture that’s always felt genuine. If the series truly believes in its message, it needs to prove it through bigger actions.

I know, glass houses. I travel more than most people in this sport. But that’s not the point. My brand isn’t built on an environmental mantra.

9. Short-term thinking?

Klassmark has a business to run, and while I respect that, I do worry they’re thinking in a three-year cycle, when the sport needs a thirty-year vision.

What makes them different is that they aren’t the faceless Life Time organisation. They’re independent. Yet, these moves feel like an imitation of its American counterpart, just without the billion-dollar backing. The irony is that in trying to compete with Life Time, Klassmark may have forgotten why the riders cared in the first place.

In this sport, trying to be something you aren’t is a dangerous game.

Thanks to Chris Mehlman and Logan Jones-Wilkins for reading through drafts of this.

If I had a dollar for every time I mixed up GES and LTGP in this article before publishing, then, well, maybe I’d have enough dollars to afford the Unbound entry fee. But that’s an article for next week.

If you enjoyed this article, you may also like:

While you’re here…

I’ve added a paid subscription and a ‘Buy Me A Coffee’ link to this post. As the year progresses, I’m planning on building this blog and putting out articles which I’ve always wanted to write but for whatever reason haven’t wanted to pitch.

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/joelaverick

The following brands are racing partners of mine which allow me to do cool stuff.

• Pullwood Consulting

• AG1

• ENVE Composites

• Castelli Cycling

• Cotton Sox

• Panaracer Tyres

• Rudy Project

• dussl

• invisiFRAME

I’m currently in Maple Ridge, Maggie’s hometown, just outside of Vancouver. We’ve just got back after a couple of weeks away. My trip took me from Bentonville to New York City, and then a holiday road trip up the coast: LA, Santa Barbara, San Francisco, and Santa Rosa. In true Joe fashion, it’s been full on, but it’s been fun.

It’s been nice to escape the cycling bubble. To have days where the world doesn’t revolve around watts, weight, or the latest contracts. It’s frightening how quickly that world starts to feel like the only one that exists. Getting out of it has been a quiet reset, a reminder that when passion turns into profession, perspective is usually the first thing to go.

That being said, I’m equally excited to fly home this week. My own coffee machine, my own bed, my own apartment. It’s the little things.

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The phantom sickness

There’s been an awful lot of thinking the last few weeks. It’s been a difficult year racing. A year characterised by puking up my guts. What’s wrong with me? I still don’t know, and the hardest part has been not knowing.

If you break a bone, you can see it on a scan. You count the weeks, you heal, you ride again. But when it’s something invisible that’s wrong, it becomes this internal war.

Some mornings I wake up and feel fine; other mornings I barely make it through brushing my teeth before the gagging starts. When I ride above the threshold, it’s like a switch flips, my stomach inflates, I dry heave, and then I’m bent over the bars, emptying whatever’s inside me.

I’ve told myself it’s stress, bad nutrition, or an illness. But months have passed, and it still won’t go away. I’ve seen specialists, had tests, ruled out the obvious. Still, no answers. Just theories. And when your job is literally to push your body, that uncertainty sucks.

Some days I laugh about it, chalk it up to another weird chapter in an even weirder career. Other days it’s harder. I’ll sit on the roadside with rapid, shallow breathing, like I’m having an asthma attack and feel a wave of frustration that has nothing to do with fitness.

With health issues dominating so much of my year, it’s only natural that my mind has cast to what’s next. I know that I’m not going to be able to race bikes forever.

Wait a sec, this isn’t a retirement article. I’m not quitting the sport.

I still love riding my bike too much for that. I still love the chaos of the circus, the small moments that only make sense to people who’ve lived them. Feeling class on a bike when everything clicks, and the arrogance comes out.

But I am questioning what being in the sport means. For my whole adult life, racing has been my whole identity. My results determined my mood, my confidence, and my pay cheque. That’s a dangerous way to live, especially when your body stops cooperating.

So, if this isn’t me quitting, what is it?

Well, it’s me trying to get my thoughts down on paper; it’s cathartic in a way. And, honestly, it’s me trying to take a bit more ownership. For the past few years, everything I’ve done has been through the lens of performance; how it would help my racing, how it would look to sponsors, or how it would fit into the story I was trying to tell.

I’ve got the itch

Lately, as you’ve probably realised by all my building a team posts, I’ve got the itch to build. The itch to put my brain into something more than just my own performance.

A part of this shift is financial. I’m in this awkward middle ground where I struggle to define if I’m a pro-racer, influencer, or copywriter. I’m good at what I do, playing the game that is privateering, but it’s exhausting.

I’ve often been told I’m too honest on the internet, that I should keep some cards close to my chest. I hear that, and those people are probably right and just trying to protect me, but here we are.

So, what’s next?

I’ll still be racing. I’ve got unfinished business with Redlands and the Mid South, to name but a couple. I’m getting the TT bike back out and focusing on TT Nationals, too.

I’ll keep pushing for my team. I’m pitching, creating decks, and networking my little socks off. My dream is to bring this team to the table. To build something that I want to exist, and that so many people want to feel a part of. That doesn’t mean it’ll be easy, or that it’ll even exist, but I’ll be damned if I don’t try.

And, there’ll be a little more personal work going on behind the scenes. I’m helping a pro team with their Substack presence, and I’m on the lookout for a few other gigs too. Because having a little bit of financial security that isn’t linked to my race results or Instagram following would be quite nice.

Writing this has been a reminder of why I started sharing on here in the first place, not for clicks or sponsors, but to make sense of it all. This might get me in a little bit of trouble or cost me a little bit of money in contracts along the way, but honestly, that’s okay.

I’d rather be honest than polished.

The following brands are racing partners of mine which allow me to do cool stuff.

• Pullwood Consulting

• AG1

• ENVE Composites

• Castelli Cycling

• Cotton Sox

• Panaracer Tyres

• Rudy Project

• dussl

• invisiFRAME

While you’re here…

I’ve added a paid subscription and a ‘Buy Me A Coffee’ link to this post. As the year progresses, I’m planning on building this blog and putting out articles which I’ve always wanted to write but for whatever reason haven’t wanted to pitch.

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/joelaverick

Excuse any typos or formatting errors, I’m quite badly hungover.

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1. Bentonville is beautiful yet bizarre

It’s where Walmart was born, and it’s where the Walton family has invested millions of dollars. Bentonville is a beautiful place - the trail network is mind boggling, the town is clean and everyone is smiling.

I’ve asked myself many times this week if it’s utopia or dystopia, and I’m still not quite sure.

2. The race…worked?!

Hot take: The 50 mile course is the perfect Grand Prix finale.

It’s twice the carnage in half the distance, and truly throws a cat amongst the pigeons. People are so fried this late on in the season, I think with some course alterations that it’s a cracking final round.

Just look at the results, they were quite different to what we normally see and that can only be good for the sport.

And it makes a more watchable product for the livestream.

3. We have to talk safety

We need safer races. Racing incidents are fine, but the controllables need controlling. It’s disgraceful that there are cars driving towards a 150 rider peloton, vehicles in the bunch, the list goes on.

It needs fixing, before a serious incident occurs.

I’ll cut some slack because of the late course changes, but this wasn’t an isolated incident to yesterday’s race. There’s big money on the line and it’s a pro-sport - it will never be perfect but it must be better.

4. Cam fcking Jones

If Unbound wasn’t enough, winning the Lifetime GP overall confirms it: we have a new gravel king. Cam you beauty. It could not have happened to a nicer person. Cam’s the sort of guy that everyone wants to see succeed. He’s a gent, and I don’t have enough superlatives in my locker.

Cam showed the power of the LTGP. A relatively unknown talent, he got in through the Wild Card and his life changed because of it.

Quick shout out to Griffin Easter, Cam’s main rival for nicest guy in the peloton. He had a stellar ride to finish 2nd at Big Sugar.

5. Gravel is fun out back

I’m still puking up when I go hard, so my day was spent off the back, and being “neutral service” for those in need. We often joke about the spirit of gravel in the pro field, but let’s be honest, that left when five and six figure contracts came in.

In the age-group and amateur field however, it’s well and truly alive. Yesterday made me take a step back, and realise why we’re all racing. Perspective is nice.

6. The US scene is unique

The US is a funny old place for many reasons, but the racing scene over here is special. On road, off road, whatever - it’s this travelling circus with people from across the globe.

There’s a uniquely American characteristic of supporting people no matter what and their never ending optimism too.

There were a few times that I stepped back and shook my head last night, questioning how life got me to a party in rural Arkansas.

I have the US cycling scene to thank for so much in the past few years.

7. It’s a long season.

We have to be fit in February and try to make it last through October. There are so many flights, engagements, training days, and races.

Everyone is fried, and it seemed ready for off-season. I’m bizarrely emotional writing this and I have a lot of reflecting to do.

This sport is brutal, bloody brutal. But, it’s quite beautiful too.

8. Thank you all.

This week, more than any other in my life, I’ve had so many of you come up to me and ask about my writing, or my crazy team idea.

Thanks to all of you - it seems weird that me writing thoughts here reaches so many, but thank you.

It’s not been a season I’m proud of results wise, but there’s a lot more to life than a number on a piece of paper.

I’ve added a paid subscription and a ‘Buy Me A Coffee’ link to this post. As the year progresses, I’m planning on building this blog and putting out articles which I’ve always wanted to write but, for whatever reason, haven’t wanted to pitch. Your contributions allow me to do that.

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/joelaverick

The following brands are racing partners of mine which allow me to do cool stuff.

• Pullwood Consulting

• AG1

• ENVE Composites

• Castelli Cycling

• Cotton Sox

• Panaracer Tyres

• Rudy Project

• dussl

• invisiFRAME

Watching him race is watching cycling perfection, and he’ll go down as the GOAT. But the problem with perfection is that perfection is boring.

UAE Team Emirates has an annual budget in the US$65m arena. Pogačar’s take-home pay is more than 10% of that. They’re a sovereign-backed super-team operating at a Formula 1 level of sponsorship. For reference, the new Cadillac F1 Team is rumoured to be asking a similar number per year for a title sponsor.

Pogačar isn’t just the best rider in the world; he’s the most complete athlete cycling has ever seen, surrounded by the most advanced infrastructure money can buy. Outside of the Top 5 teams, everyone else is playing a different sport. Mid-tier teams chasing them like club sides were trying to outspend Manchester City. It’s delusional.

So, if you can’t win the arms race, stop fighting it.

It is far too rare for a team to step up, accept the power of their limitations, and build a cycling product that is different. One that is, perhaps, dedicated to the pursuit of fan engagement rather than chasing the ghost of success in the face of US$65m dollar teams and the greatest rider of all time.

Teams are built to win races, to sell products, or, in the modern era, sportswash. But when was the last time a team was built to entertain?

Professional sport is entertainment. And if you forget that, you forget the entire point.

If you haven’t already, please hit Subscribe. It’s completely free.

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Is the equation upside down?

Professional cycling teams continue to pour money into performance. Every tiny detail is analysed and optimised. If the evidence doesn’t exist, research papers are funded.

The sport is built on the idea that winning creates fandom, that UCI points lead to Tour invites, and Tour invites lead to sponsorship cheques. Why is the Tour de France so important? Because that’s where the fans are.

I’m not naive enough to think it’s this simple, but maybe it’s time to flip that model. Instead of chasing the Tour de France, go straight to those fans.

Right now, teams treat fans as numbers, not as people. The media value report matters more than the community that the report supposedly represents.

It’s not rocket science.

This past week, Mathieu van der Poel turned up at the Ponies Ride in Los Angeles. It created an excitement across LA’s riding community that spread online across the world.

The script was flipped on the sponsor rides that pros usually dread. Instead of forcing the fans to a random event, MVDP turned up on their ride.

It was described as “guerrilla marketing” on LinkedIn. It wasn’t. It was common sense. A reminder that in this era of trackable metrics, data, and influencers, people want a real connection.

Who knows how many Whoop bands, Canyon bikes, or Zwift subscriptions MVDP sold by turning up, but that’s not the point.

With his team, Alpecin-Deceuninck, rumoured to be looking for around US$7 million in new sponsorship, it’s far more likely they’ll find it through moments like this than by adding another midweek race in France to their palmarès.

Side note: In how many sports can you go out for your morning exercise before work, and one of the best athletes in the world joins you? Completely free. No tickets. Bikes are great.

You still need legitimacy.

Please don’t think I’m saying that teams don’t have to win races. Performance still matters and gives you the legitimacy that allows a brand or a team to flourish. But legitimacy doesn’t have to come from spending tens of millions in the World Tour.

Take L39ION of Los Angeles. Between 2019 and 2022, they didn’t need to race in Europe to make noise. They built their own world, their own brand that often felt bigger than the races themselves. For a period, they seemed like the most talked-about team in cycling.

We’ve seen flashes of what’s possible elsewhere. Bas Tietema’s Unibet Rockets grew from a YouTube channel run by a few mates. While their direction has slightly shifted since, they proved that you can build a professional cycling team out of joy and storytelling.

EF Education–EasyPost are another case study. They went through countless identities before landing on their current mix of culture, travel, and adventure. That 2019 Dirty Kanza film remains, in my opinion, one of the best mini-docs in cycling history, and proof that fans crave authenticity more than results.

That said, even EF could go further. Lachlan Morton has transcended that team, he’s become his own ecosystem. I can’t help but think they could do so much more if they brought their same creative energy down to the local level.

While there is other great work out there, I can’t put everything in a 1200 word op-ed, it seems like these are the exception not the rule. The peloton feels like the same logos shuffled around every year.

Why can’t we have a team built from the ground up to be entertaining not just in races, but off the bike too. A team that belongs to fans, does not try to sell to them.

Screaming into the void…

I know that I sound like a broken record shouting at clouds. I’m just a 24-year-old kid slamming the keys on a laptop that a few thousand people will read. It frustrates me that I, and so many others, can see the issues but can’t seem to fix them.

How can I play a my part? Is it starting my own team to show what’s possible? Climbing the corporate ladder inside one of the big brands so I can cause change from within? Hell, is it running the UCI?

People have been asking these questions for decades, but nothing changes. Instead of taking risks to grow the sport, everyone fights over the same small pie and focuses on the next quarter’s figures. The money flows to the same names, the same teams, the same ideas.

I feel my duty to this sport is so much more than just that of a bike racer. I owe it everything and it kills me to see how much potential is being left on the table.

What scares me most is that it’s such an uphill battle that one day I’ll finally shut up, stop believing change is possible, and go to get a proper job…

I’ve added a paid subscription and a ‘Buy Me A Coffee’ link to this post. As the year progresses, I’m planning on building this blog and putting out articles which I’ve always wanted to write but, for whatever reason, haven’t wanted to pitch. Your contributions allow me to do that.

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/joelaverick

The following brands are racing partners of mine which allow me to do cool stuff.

• Pullwood Consulting

• AG1

• ENVE Composites

• Castelli Cycling

• Cotton Sox

• Panaracer Tyres

• Rudy Project

• dussl

• invisiFRAME

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The Ryder Cup

I’m not really a golf fan, but my Dad is, so I’ve spent my whole life catching it in the background. I know I have a lot of Americans on here, so I’m not going to wax lyrical or rub it in. I’m not going to write about how Europe won, or how the sports fan deep inside me thought it was even sweeter that the Americans started their comeback but still lost.

Anyway, over my morning coffee, I came across an interview with Luke Donald, the European captain.

“Ryder Cup weeks are the best weeks of our lives…those individual accolades are fun, we individually want to achieve as much as we can…but those weeks we spend together are the ones we remember the most, and we cherish the most because of the times we get to spend with each other. That’s a big part of my captaincy, to create an environment where these guys are having the best weeks of their lives. We will always remember this.”

Golf is an individual sport. Your reputation lives and dies on your own performance; there’s no team to cover your mistakes. In that sense, it’s not so different from being a privateer bike racer. But the Ryder Cup showed the other side of it, how much richer sport feels when you’re part of something bigger.

I’ve spoken to a lot of the Rebellion boys this year, and we all feel the same: racing isn’t quite as fun as it was last season. The spark is still there, the races still matter, but without that shared something, it’s just not quite the same. The Ryder Cup team had that heartbeat. Some players were brilliant on Saturday and faded on Sunday, while others were the opposite. It didn’t matter because the team made the whole stronger than the sum of its parts.

My cycling career, like that of golfers, will be judged on individual achievements, but it’s the weeks you spend side by side with teammates that you’ll always remember. It’s why I keep coming back to this team idea. Chasing success on my own is great, but I know the real fun for me lies in chasing them together. So, yes, I’m still trying.

Right, back to normal business, and no more comparing myself to the best golfers on the planet…

Adventure Season

This past week, I spent a silly amount of hours, just over thirty of them, riding my bicycle. We’re officially in adventure season, that time of year when training is almost solely dictated by morale. For me, the best way of riding for morale is going on adventures.

If you ever need a friend for a trip that involves an adventure, give Riley Pickrell a call. That man has adventure running through his veins. So, when I got a little too adventurous on Strava Route Builder last week, I messaged Riley.

This all coincided with a fresh delivery of Tailfin AeroPacks. I’m conscious not to make this sound too sponsor-y because it’s not. James at Tailfin was kind enough to send me a pack for my Namibia trip, but I never ended up using it. So, while the packs were technically ‘gifted’, we’d have bought them with our own money.

They’ree a complete game changer for training trips away. From Girona, we headed up and over the French border. There were many stops, including one to get the iPad out and watch Riley’s girlfriend, Franzi, compete in TTT World Champs.

We landed in Caramany, a town of less than 150 people, just after dark, as we’d procrastinated wayyy too much throughout the day. But what’s an adventure ride without chasing daylight?

For Day Two, we ditched the bags as we were coming back to the same accommodation. We figured the best plan for these trips is six or seven hours towards new territory, drop the bags and do a four-hour loop to the same place, and then six to seven hours home on new roads.

Riley is one hell of a route builder, so our Day 2 went in and out of gorges, over mountains and through wine country; it really was beautiful. We spent a long time searching for lunch as every cafe seemed to close at 2 pm, and then my former life as a French resident reminded me of the boulangerie move.

Side note, given how rocky my year in France was as a twenty-year-old, there’s a huge part of me that loves and misses it. I get a skip in my step - or I suppose pedal stroke - when I cross the border. I love speaking French, and I love the culture of the country.

I’ll forever be thankful for Chambery for making me learn French. Even all these years later, I’m confident enough in the language, and it’s one of those things that, while inconvenient at the time, was huge. I’ve been saying this since I was fifteen, but I will live in Nice one day, even if just for a winter. Luckily for me, Maggie is fluent in French and more than happy to go ahead with my crazy ideas, so maybe winter 2026…

Anyways, the ride back to Girona was long. We took twisty back-roads and I was on the ropes as Riley enjoyed watching me suffer. We even found some gravel. Has the spirit of gravel come full circle to bikepacking on road bikes?

We rode back into town on Friday evening, and then Saturday, we drove up to Andorra to sort some house and life stuff out. In my infinite wisdom I decided to ride home, adding another six-hours to my riding tally for this week.

It’s been a long time since I’ve done a thirty-hour week. I was on the phone with Jon Twigg of Pullwood Consulting earlier this week. I was telling him how there was so much I knew I needed to do, but nothing I could actually do so I just felt I was constantly waiting.

“Just go and ride your bike.”, he told me. He was right, sometimes I just need to disappear and ride my bike for a week. No laptop, no emails - nothing.

What’s Next?

We fly to Canada on Thursday to be with Maggie’s family for the off-season, and then I head to Big Sugar from there. Big Sugar will be the big line under the bike racing season that was 2025 - something that I’m happy to say.

From Bentonville, it’s a little holiday to NYC to catch up with my Good Guys teammates from Redlands, and then Maggie and I will do a holiday up the California coast before returning to Vancouver, and finally back to Europe with Rouleur Live.

There’s a time for me to talk about renewing contracts and my plans for 2026. But that’s not today. The only thing I will say, is that a TT bike will be coming back out next year. I’ve neglected the discipline that I love so much for too many years now.

Cheers,

Joe

The paid subscription and ‘Buy Me A Coffee’ link allow me to continue writing these posts. Thank you all for your contributions; they’re always appreciated.

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The following brands are racing partners of mine which allow me to do cool stuff.

• Pullwood Consulting

• AG1

• ENVE Composites

• Castelli Cycling

• Cotton Sox

• Panaracer Tyres

• Rudy Project

• dussl

• invisiFRAME

Here are some rumours, and me trying to make sense of it all.

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Teams are coming, but what does that mean?

It’s an open secret that Specialized are bringing a team to the table, and there’s an extremely strong rumour that Canyon will too. The make-up and transfers of those teams will cause shock waves, but I’m no Daniel Benson, so I won’t be writing who.

If we add in the Classified, Ridley, Ribble, and PAS teams, we have something meaningful. Whether we’ll start to see team tactics at Unbound is certainly something that’ll be worth following. If these end up being teams in the traditional sense, then it’ll be a big change, but we’re in a weird privateer-team hybrid middle ground. Take PAS Racing, they’re a team, but they all have different bike sponsors, so they’re not necessarily incentivised to race with their team mates.

What will the collapsing pro-road job market mean?

If the rumours are to be believed, within the next 18 months Lotto and Intermarche will merge, and Total Energies, Arkea, Wagner Bazin, and Team Flanders-Baloise will fold. That’s an awful lot of talented riders on the market, and there’s an inevitability that some will find their way onto the gravel scene.

So far, the front-runners in gravel have largely come from mountain biking. That’s no surprise; it’s a numbers game. Pro road racing offers more paid spots, and the hundredth-best roadie in the world can still clear $250k in salary. For context, that’s roughly what a top-five World Cup mountain biker will make, with Nino Schurter as the obvious outlier. MTB contracts are fewer and far less lucrative, so it’s easy to see why so many have viewed gravel as a viable path.

But, with road jobs drying up, or more accurately, there being an oversupply of talent in the market, the gravel dynamic could begin to shift. We’ve already seen riders like Mads Würtz Schmidt and Simon Pellaud show what happens when a WorldTour-level engine is dropped into gravel.

The question is whether more will follow, and if they do, how it will reshape gravel’s identity. A wave of road pros could push the scene toward a more professional, ruthlessly competitive model. That could mean harder racing, higher speeds, and new tactics. But it could also threaten the “privateer dream”, the idea that anyone with hustle, creativity, and a decent engine can make a career in gravel.

The calendar needs a sort out.

Hot take: Neither Life Time, Gravel Earth, nor the UCI have a good race series.

The Life Time Grand Prix is good, but it’s not gravel; it’s a multi-discipline series. Plus, the storytelling is a bit shit. Why are four of the six races after August?

The pros to Life Time are obvious: prize money, worldwide coverage, and the biggest races. Unbound and Leadville are the jewels in the crown, events that transcend the series. Sea Otter holds its own, but Chequamegon, despite being the USA’s oldest MTB race, lacks relevance. Little Sugar and Big Sugar are fine, but they don’t yet have the pedigree that makes the crown jewels feel special. It’s a bit like ASO on the road: Unbound is the Tour de France, Leadville is Paris–Roubaix, and the rest, while important in their own right, will always live in the shadows.

The Gravel Earth Series has some big races. However, the scoring system is so complex that it hurts my brain, and there are way too many races. With a bloated calendar, it also lacks identity or a hook for a global audience to care about. Less would be more here.

And, the UCI…golly, where do I start with the UCI? Dangerous races, mixed gender starts, the list really goes on. They have the basis of something good, but it needs much better organisation to garner any respect at all from the racers.

US vs the Rest of the World

Gravel in Europe is growing rapidly. There are countless races and the standard at the front of those races is insanely high. However, bar Traka, the US still holds all the legitimacy in gravel.

I understand why. Gravel has its roots in the US, there’s more prize money, more sponsorship money, and ultimately more fans too. Gravel doesn’t have to compete with the pro-road scene in the US either.

However, it’s quite difficult for Europeans to go and make their mark on the US gravel scene. There are a few reasons - mainly logistical and financial. There’s no doubt in my mind that Keegan Swenson is head-and-shoulders above everyone else in world gravel, but apart from him, I think the gap between the respective scenes’ talent is negligible.

I don’t have a bias either way. All I know is that the Americans deem the Euros to be unprepared for US Gravel, and the top Americans haven’t really come over to Europe to show what they're made of yet, because, well, there’s no need to.

I think the continental competition is healthy for the sport, and I’m looking forward to seeing Keegan Swenson win the Traka one day soon.

Can gravel continue to monetise?

Money makes the world go round, and although it’s such a taboo subject for so many, we need to talk about it. I want there to be more openness with gravel salaries. Why? Because it’s better for everyone. Brands should know the cost, and athletes to know how much others are being paid.

The problem with gravel is that there’s no solid X=Y calculation to salary like there is on the road, or MTB. There are SO many gravel races, and barring a core few of them, it’s hard to say that winning race X equals salary Y.

Then there’s the content side too. Some get paid more as their personal profile is bigger than their results, which is completely fine; business is business. Some brands come in and pay massively over the odds; there are some that don’t have a clue.

Riders can make a good living off gravel, but don’t think every single one of us who races gravel is rolling in it - trust me. The gravel scene largely like MTB, seems to be funded by the cycling industry, unlike the road, where it’s more non-endemic. It’s also quite clear that US riders make a lot more money than those in Europe.

Doping?

There is zero reason, rumour, or conjecture for me to write this; let me be clear. I have never seen or heard of anything in my career.

Why do I bring this up at all then? Well, living in a house with three World Tour roadies, it’s pretty normal for our doorbell to go off at seven in the morning with an anti-doping officer. To the best of my knowledge, there are just a few guys in the gravel peloton on Whereabouts.

I suppose this is more of a careful warning. If the sport of gravel continues to grow in prize pots and salaries, then we have to invest in anti-doping too. Look at triathlon for some case studies…

What annoys me most with gravel is that there are all the ingredients to make something special, but there are, just like road racing, too many stakeholders. On the road, it is the ASO that holds all of the power because they own the Tour de France - then there’s RCS, Flanders Classics, the UCI and the teams. The list goes on.

Gravel has gone the same way. This past weekend, there was Sea Otter UCI in Girona, the same weekend as the European Gravel Championships. UCI Gravel Worlds clashes with the penultimate round of the LifeTime Grand Prix.

It’s frustrating. And for all those of you who read this and say racing spoiled gravel or whatever. I both agree and disagree with you. There is now professional gravel racing, and that is good as it brings more riders, more attention, and more investment into the sport. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to care. The beauty of gravel is that you can still ride your local event, line up next to pros, and have the same experience on the same roads.

The bigger question is: will gravel learn from the mistakes of the road, or repeat them? Right now, it feels like we’re heading for the same turf wars, calendar clashes, and fractured storylines. Gravel racing doesn’t need a Tour de France, but it does need some coordination, otherwise it risks cannibalising itself before it truly gets going.

The paid subscription and ‘Buy Me A Coffee’ link allow me to continue writing these posts. Thank you all for your contributions; they’re always appreciated.

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/joelaverick

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The following brands are racing partners of mine which allow me to do cool stuff.

• Pullwood Consulting

• AG1

• ENVE Composites

• Castelli Cycling

• Cotton Sox

• Panaracer Tyres

• Rudy Project

• dussl

• invisiFRAME

Here, there, and everywhere - that’s how my head has felt this summer.

It’s been a year. Racing in the US, having this weird sickness problem, travelling to Namibia, Maggie’s surgery. So much has happened, and I feel like I’ve been chasing my tail.

I’m currently sitting in VIA Atelier in London, just around the corner from Kings Cross. I have my laptop out and the Vuelta TT is on in the background.

From trying to start a pro-team, to my health, and everything else. It’s time for a quick Privateer Diaries.

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The Team

The thing I’ve been working on quite publicly, to say the least. How’s it going? Well, it’s going. It’s a game of pitch - talk - refine - pitch - talk - refine.

It’s a never-ending game of networking, talking.

Each time I talk to someone, each time somebody reaches out, the idea gets a little better. The past few days in London have been meaningful to say the least. I’ve never been so sure.

I’m working on everything at once, and I’m currently considering a few options that we can put out in public:

1. Roll out “membership” - how does this look? We’re still figuring it out.

2. Release “merch”. This is linked to number 1.

3. Financial planning. It’s boring, but there are a fair few spreadsheets.

More to come.

Namibia

Oh, I haven’t really mentioned on here as I’m waiting for all of the edits to come but I spent 10-days in Namibia both racing and bike adventuring at the end of August

I finished 6th in the race, and the trip that followed was spectacular. I’m looking forward to sharing more from that when I can.

My Health

The elephant in the room the second half of this season has been health. I’ve gone to countless doctors, specialists and done who knows how many tests. I’ve not been able to race, or train without getting symptoms.

For those unaware, I have a bizarre dry heaving (often puking) and breathlessness whenever going hard, laughing, and at random points in the day.

When I started writing this yesterday I felt a bit helpless, but in the last few hours a new specialist has come to light with experience in this field and having seen people with my symptoms before.

Fingers crossed.

My Head

I’m putting on a brave face, but I’m completely bummed about my health.

If people ask me about racing or training, I try and dance around the subject or change the topic of conversation. I’m almost embarrassed to bring it up.

It sucks, a lot. I miss the highs of Redlands earlier this year. Feeling fully healthy, riding a TT bike to the stage win. Oh to be back in that health and fitness.

There’s a huge part of me that wants to call it a season. Just to go on holiday, to check out and focus on 2026 and some slightly different targets I have there.

As things stand, there’s one more race on my calendar: Big Sugar in October.

I know I often sound negative on here when I talk about my own performance, and I really don’t mean to be. This year has just been extra tough. It feels like I’m doing lots of things averagely and nothing perfectly. It feels like I’ve got more questions than answers.

Yes, I do an awful lot more than just race bikes. But, bike racing is still a huge part of my identity, and when I can’t do that well, I have a crisis.

Don’t be gloomy Joe

Amid all the chaos, there are many anchors. Maggie is slowly but surely coming back from her iliac artery surgery. Watching her go through recovery hasn’t always been easy, but it feels like there’s light at the end of her tunnel.

The small moments. I did a beauty of a six-hour ride with Riley last week. I was smiling from ear to ear, and it reminded me of why I do what I do.

Oh, and it sounds soppy, but the support that people who read this have given me too. I went pretty bloody public with my team idea, and it’s quite a crazy idea. But, it’s pleasantly surprised me how many of you have reached out with support, with ideas.

Anyways, I’m back in Girona now as I finish writing this and I’ve just been informed that dinner is ready.

Until next time,

Joe

I’ve added a paid subscription and a ‘Buy Me A Coffee’ link to this post. As the year progresses, I’m planning on building this blog and putting out articles which I’ve always wanted to write but, for whatever reason, haven’t wanted to pitch. Your contributions allow me to do that.

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/joelaverick

The following brands are racing partners of mine which allow me to do cool stuff.

• Pullwood Consulting

• AG1

• ENVE Composites

• Castelli Cycling

• Cotton Sox

• Panaracer Tyres

• Rudy Project

• dussl

• invisiFRAME

So, here’s a follow-up: a few of the questions I’ve been asked, and what’s going on inside my head.

All of the updates to this project will come via this Substack, so please do hit subscribe.

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The Reality.

We have $0.

Cycling teams come and go all the time with little to no context. You hear whispers that this team has that backing or that brand is doing this thing. But it’s never put in black and white on the internet.

That’s what I want to do here.

If it works, we build it together. If it doesn’t, well, at least you’ll see why.

This isn’t just another team.

People don’t want to be sold to; they want to belong.

If I build a team that looks like a slick extension of a marketing department, then I’ve failed before the first race.

Of course, partners need value. But value doesn’t have to mean selling out. It doesn’t have to mean forgetting what makes cycling special in the first place.

The Catch-22…

I can’t launch a team without money, but money isn’t the only ingredient.

If we can build a foundation of people like you. The readers, the riders, the racers, the fans then the financial backers will follow. That much I’m sure of.

I always thought the “pro team” had to come first: kit launches, sponsor decks, race schedules. Maybe I had it the wrong way around. Maybe the fanbase comes first.

Can we create a kit without a team? Can we launch something before there’s a structure behind it? Can we build a community and fanbase for something that doesn’t even have an ending yet?

Well, that’s the experiment.

How can you help?

That’s not a rhetorical question. What do you want to see?

Is it a global cycling club with a team to support at the top? Is it a team that wins? Is it membership? A WhatsApp group? Custom kit? Group rides? Casual wear?

Many good examples have been built both in sport and other industries. Cycling has always been at its best when it feels like you’re part of something bigger than yourself. The more ideas you throw at me, the stronger this becomes.

But, there are others doing something similar?!

Yes! And that’s great.

Bas is doing a great job with his Unibet Rockets. Carlo is doing a cracking job at Swatt Club. Mattia and Frank are on the right path at Enough. Rose Racing Circle has the model dialled. I’m sure there are some I’ve missed too.

Each project is carving its own space. That doesn’t mean there isn’t room for another.

My angle? Multi-discipline. And a focus on the UK and North America - markets that still feel wide open.

What this could look like…

Picture this: you sign up for the Traka, or Unbound, or some other race that’s been circled on your calendar for months. You’ve got the same feedzone and mechanic as the pro team. You’re staying in the same accommodation, doing pre-race rides, sharing meals, being part of the same story.

It’s those small, high-touch details that make the difference. That makes it feel less like buying into a brand, and more like belonging to something alive.

Why build in public?

Because, why not? I’m not scared of failing.

Cycling has enough teams built in boardrooms, chasing spreadsheets and cold sales figures. This one, if I can pull it off, will be built by the people it’s for.

So please do keep the messages coming.

Will it be called ‘Rebellion’?

No. I’ve been informed I cannot use the ‘Rebellion’ name whenever we bring this to the table.

London

I’m in London next week.

Any ideas, leads, or if you just want to meet for a ride and to talk about this…

My DMs are open.

For updates please do Subscribe to my Substack, it’s completely free!

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I’ve added a paid subscription and a ‘Buy Me A Coffee’ link to this post. As the year progresses, I’m planning on building this blog and putting out articles which I’ve always wanted to write but, for whatever reason, haven’t wanted to pitch. Your contributions allow me to do that.

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/joelaverick

The following brands are racing partners of mine which allow me to do cool stuff.

• Pullwood Consulting

• AG1

• ENVE Composites

• Castelli Cycling

• Cotton Sox

• Panaracer Tyres

• Rudy Project

• dussl

• invisiFRAME

Then it’s about $1million in year two, and probably $1.2million for year three.

I’m looking at doing another team.

Like, seriously, seriously. Hear me out.

The Vision:

This will be a multi-discipline squad that blends gravel, road, and crits into a year-round programme, built on a media-first, people-first approach that connects fans, riders, and sponsors.

We’ll race to win, but our real edge is in storytelling, creating content that makes people care, and activating across multiple markets - US and Europe - to deliver value far beyond race results. I’ve seen firsthand, from Ribble Rebellion to my privateer career, how engaging communities, riding with locals, and putting people at the centre can have as much an impact as a podium.

The timing is crucial too: gravel is on the brink of a team era, and road is restructuring.

I don’t understand why nobody’s tried to build something that spans gravel and road. The audiences are far closer than the Lifetime Grand Prix’s gravel-MTB mix, and yet no one’s joined the dots.

Call it privateer racing meets Welcome to Wrexham: a brand, a story, and a team people will follow because they feel part of it.

Why Now?

Teams are coming to gravel. With the looming collapse at the bottom of the Pro/World Tour rider market: too many development riders, not enough jobs, teams folding, more talent will cross over.

That means fields are going to get deeper, and races are going to become even harder to control.

At Unbound this year, the early break went, and the favourites got annoyed that no one would work with them. But why would you? They’re competitors, not teammates.

Teammates are coming. It’s inevitable.

The question is whether gravel itself can sustain teams. I don’t know the answer to that, but I don’t think so. There are only a handful of gravel races in the world - say five - that ripple into the mainstream cycling media. Gravel racing (not gravel riding) also has a fan conundrum, but that’s an article for another day.

Below the WorldTour, a year-round road calendar doesn’t stack up either. There are a few crown-jewel events, but not enough to justify a full road programme. Put the two together, though - mix in a few major city crits too - and suddenly you have a legitimate, year-long, multi-discipline calendar.

It spans markets, crosses territories, and delivers serious value to sponsors. Plus, the content potential is enormous.

The best of all worlds.

Why me?

This isn’t just a team idea to prolong my race career. It’s the team I wish existed - it’s the team I think the sport needs. A way to combine everything I love about racing with everything I’ve learned about storytelling and connecting with people. I’ve been on both sides: the scrappy privateer chasing start lines, and the guy building a team that made people care. This is my chance to bring it all together.

To be a pro at the minute, you have to stick in a box. I want that to change.

I ran Rebellion. We were a road racing team based out of the UK that took the US by storm last year. A lot of this comes from what we built and learned..

Going to mid-week crits was just as important as going to National Series races. Pre riding with locals in the park was as important as podiums. We focussed the team on people, not metrics. Brands need to reach people, not just numbers on a screen.

I’ve run my own privateer calendar for three years, I understand the basics of the calendars and what’s needed financially. Plus my media side too. I’ve always been told that I think too much to be a bike racer, in this case, that’d actually be a good thing. I’ve worked on the brand side, I’ve worked on the media side, I'm an athlete too.

I get it, and well, it’s got to be somebody hasn’t it?

The money side

While I’m beyond fed up of watching brands spend tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to do ‘mid’ things, I’ll be the first to admit that business is hard.

Building a team isn’t that different from building my own racing budget. You map the calendar, work out where to race, calculate logistics, content, salaries. The difference? The number is a lot bigger.

To execute year one properly requires $350,000. That figure brings a meaningful MVP to market substantial enough to generate visibility and proof of concept, while lean enough to validate the model before scaling.

Where do you start raising that number? I’ve built a good network over the years, but I don’t have a billionaire mate I can call for a half million quid. It’s going to take networking, soft pitching, persistence, and luck. Like many things in life, I think the right time-right place is going to be essential.

And raising the money is only the start. You still need the right riders, the right content, the right name. There’s a long road between having a plan and having a functioning race team.

Shoot for the sun

I’ll be real, it’s a balancing act. Planning my 2026 season as a privateer while looking at something bigger too. I’ve written about wanting to do another team multiple times before, but these past few months have been the first time that I’ve sat down and pulled the numbers together.

By 2027 at the latest, I’ll have put a multi-discipline team together, or I’ll have exhausted every contact, every play, and every trick in my book.

A wise man once told me to shoot for the sun. This Substack is where that journey starts.

If you see yourself in that vision, or feel like you know anyone who would. My inbox is open.

I’ve added a paid subscription and a ‘Buy Me A Coffee’ link to this post. As the year progresses, I’m planning on building this blog and putting out articles which I’ve always wanted to write but, for whatever reason, haven’t wanted to pitch. Your contributions allow me to do that.

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/joelaverick

The following brands are racing partners of mine which allow me to do cool stuff.

• Pullwood Consulting

• AG1

• ENVE Composites

• Castelli Cycling

• Cotton Sox

• Panaracer Tyres

• Rudy Project

• dussl

• invisiFRAME