This was my final year as a full-time bike racer.

In a way, I’ve stopped once before. At the end of 2022, I aged out of the U23 ranks and couldn’t find a road contract. I didn’t know what was next, but deep down I knew my bike racing story wasn’t over.

I fell sideways into gravel, into Rebellion, into whatever the journey these last four years have been. Now, I have the same deep-down feeling as in 2022, but this time it’s telling me something else. It’s time to step away. Racing will now be a hobby, something I do for myself rather than as a career. It’s time to call it a day.

I always promised myself I’d step away when I stopped loving racing. I wanted to go out on my own terms. Don’t get me wrong, I still fucking love bike racing. It’s a part of me in a way that I cannot describe. Not just when a number is pinned on, but the little quirks that just become an innate part of a bike racer’s personality.

But, it’s a part of me that’s started to change. I have less appetite for risk, my brain does the maths on what the outcome of a crash would look like. You can’t race like that. You have to be a goldfish to succeed in this sport.

It’s not just risk; I spend more time thinking about the economics of the sport, how an event or a team succeeds, than I do about carving an extra percent out of my own body. With hindsight, Rebellion was the best and worst thing that ever happened to me. It taught me so much about myself, and inadvertently tread the path that I want to take next.

It was also the final year that I was competitive at the level I always knew I was capable of. The form I had in the Spring of 2024, wow. I remember leaving Redlands that year and seriously wanting to return to the road full time. But, for one reason or another, it never happened.

It didn’t stop me racing to win. I hit 2025 with incredible form. I wanted to prove to everyone, but mostly myself, that I could be competitive on and off road. Equally, I found an old diary entry from that week recently:

It’s April 14th 2025, I’m on a plane from LA to Santa Rosa having just completed Redlands. I won the opening stage and went into yellow. I didn’t win yellow in the end and collapsed on the final stage with sickness, but I raced full every day. I raced to win. I bloody love road racing, and this week reminded me that.

Equally, it’s the first week I’ve seriously considered how much longer do I have doing this? I came close to winning Redlands this week, but unfortunately that doesn’t mean much anymore. That’s my thing with racing. What’s next? Where’s the progression? It scares me, once I’m done, I’m done. When I walk away then there’s no coming back. My contracts won’t be there, and all will be forgotten.

That sickness I mention was the weird stomach-puking-breathing thing that still plagues me to this day. Eighteen months after writing that, I still haven’t figured out why it comes and goes. It’s been a tough period with more lows than highs. Knowing I’m no way near my physical capability.

Amongst all that, I think this year I finally worked out my ‘thing’ was as a privateer. It’s doing everything. Gravel, road, crits, TTs. I’m a bit of a chameleon. I could race at a high enough level to be taken seriously and still connect with the person at the back of the start pen. Maybe that’s because I was always slightly off the pace, always chasing a little bit more. Anyone chasing a goal knows that feeling.

It also meant I always felt behind. Always chasing my tail. A good gravel season, a good TT season, the bike packing epics, decent articles, a team, some road racing. All while being financially viable. I tried to do it all, and that isn’t sustainable.

I’ve got what-ifs. Maybe if I’d been born a few years earlier, if I’d picked different teams, if injuries hadn’t come at such awful times. Maybe, but probably not. This sport is tough, but the cream always rises to the top. I did it my way because that’s how I wanted to do it.

There are plenty of things that I didn’t do, and, if I’m really honest, I didn’t get the ending I wanted. But who does? I’ve lived my dream for my whole adult life. I’ve raced all over the world, met incredible people and seen spectacular places.

It was never just about the racing. It’s the back of team cars, the random coffee shops on pre-race rides, the nomadic circus that somehow became home. It’s having friends in every corner of the world. This sport puts you in weird and wonderful situations, and they shape the person you become.

If you’re a teenager chasing the dream I once chased, go for it. Go for it properly, with everything you’ve got. Just don’t let the contract become the only measure of whether you’re any good. And if it doesn’t happen, don’t think the years chasing it weren’t worth it. Most of us don’t make the Tour. It’s just how the numbers play out.

And finally, remember to enjoy it. Fun has dropped down this sport’s list of priorities, but trust me when I say it’s far too hard to do without it. Enjoy it, because it won’t last forever.

So, what’s next? Everyone asks that question, it equally frightens and excites me.

Let’s start with what I do know. I’m still going to race time-trials. This summer reminded me how much I love them. It’s a return to my roots, racing for nothing other than pure love of the game. I want to build a wicked fast TT bike. Chase some fast times and go after that elusive National 10 title.

Everything else, I don’t know, and that’s the part I’m most excited for. I want to stay in cycling, working on the parts of the sport I’ve spent the last few years writing about: the money, the teams, how the whole thing actually works. There’s a lot about this sport that could be better, and I’d like to help fix that. I know I don’t want to go into journalism; I want to be on the side of doing, not just writing.

You know what's petrifying? Not having the next big goal. Not knowing what to target. My life has been extremely linear since I was at school. Train all winter; race all summer. Try and win more bike races and chase contracts worth just enough money that I can justify it all. What’s the next metric? Salary? Career progression? Influence? I don’t know yet, but my inbox is open to suggestions.

There are too many people to thank, but here goes nothing.

To Dave Evans and the late John Mould, two men who I owe my life on bikes to. To Alex Dowsett and James Millard, who shaped me as a person and who I owe my whole career to. To Ryan Sosna-Bowd, for getting me out of my slump in 2022 and guiding me through what became the privateer years. To Jon and Nick Twigg, for letting me fail, for the mentorship, and for paving the way to whatever comes next.

To my sponsors, and every one of you who let me sleep on their couch, lent me equipment, helped at a race, or whatever else. It takes a village.

To Mum and Dad. I don’t think you knew what you were getting yourselves into over a decade ago. All of those long drives to Belgium, the stresses about contracts, coming downstairs and telling you I’m moving countries. You never once told me to stop. I guess it all worked out okay.

And to Maggie. I don’t know what’s coming next, but I do know that I’m going to fulfil my HAB (male version of WAG!) duties to the best of my ability.

This is a pretty serious post for a guy who’ll still be racing bikes next year. A guy who’ll still be writing about bikes, and who’ll probably end up working in the bike industry. But joking aside, this is the end of a huge chapter in my life, even if I’m the only one who’ll really feel the difference.

Bike racing has given me everything. I owe the sport so much, and it owes me nothing.

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It’s punchy, it’s selective, and the descents are technical enough to make a difference. While the gravel is gnarly and flats are a regular occurrence, this is overall a great course for racing.

Hats off to PAS Racing. The week after winning Rainbows in Australia, Tobias Kongstad backs it up with a win in Bentonville. I’d love to see that team race together more often. In the women’s race, Stella Hobbs pulled off a surprise solo win.

Mechanicals and chaos define racing.

“It’s nice to see that mechanicals and chaos can still define the race even if tech gets better.” - Logan Jones-Wilkins

This weekend served as a reminder that shit happens and sometimes your biggest problem is keeping air in the tyres.

Specialized win, again.

Keegan and Sofia take home the LTGP title, and with it, a collective $100,000.

While Sofia seemed to be in control all day, Keegan suffered an untimely flat that saw him on the back foot. It was the ride of the day to come back and win the overall by a single point.

Interestingly, neither of the other two Specialized boys were at the race to help him. It does make one question how much the team prioritised winning the overall title.

Either way, there’s no questioning which brand won gravel this year.

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Everyone is tired.

The athletes, the brands, even the mass participation riders. The energy felt lower, the expo quieter, and the media attention more scarce.

It’s the time of year. I feel the Sugars are a month too late and most people are hanging on. It’s not helped that conversations revolved more around 2027 than this weekend.

Rider safety!!

In the first 20km, there were sections where oncoming vehicles passed extremely close to the peloton. When a bunch this size is racing at speed, the yellow line rule isn’t enough protection. One poorly timed crash could be catastrophic.

Credit where it’s due: it was a clear improvement on last year, and the marshalling was very good overall. But one oncoming car is one too many. Full road closures, or rolling closures, must be the standard.

It’s hard, and it’s expensive, but safety cannot be compromised.

Bentonville…

Bentonville is a beautiful yet bizarre place. Walmart money has brought major investment, and it shows.

It’s extremely clean, it’s walkable, and it’s safe - you can leave your bike outside without locking it. There are hundreds of miles of purpose-built trails, and I can guarantee future champions will be born here.

However, it’s weirdly too perfect. It’s the most bubble of a town that I’ve ever seen, and I’ve lived in Girona.

Can we all hang out more often?

The non-ironically named ‘Gravel Rave’ is the end-of-season party where everyone lets their hair down. It’s the final time we all see each other before disappearing off to our respective corners of the world until Sea Otter.

It’s rare that the whole community is in one place with no agenda other than relaxing and having fun. We should do it more often.

More teams are coming to play in 2027.

Not all contracts have been signed, and for many, the rider-brand dance is still taking place. However, if the rumour mill is to be believed, there’s a smattering of new teams entering the gravel scene next year.

What remains to be seen is how teams are set up. In my opinion, the whole point of a team is to work together towards a single collective goal. Specialized has shown the power of that.

The Grand Prix isn’t a gravel series.

Just a reminder that the LTGP is just as much a MTB series as a gravel series. It will always favour a rider with an MTB background.

While that’s completely fine, it’s strange to me how we all talk about the Grand Prix as a gravel series when 50% of the races aren’t on a gravel bike.

For the first time in memory, the world’s most dominant gravel racer was not in the Grand Prix.

I think many of us expected the Gravel Earth Series to compete with the LTGP. Instead, the GES lost momentum in 2026.

What’s next, Life Time?

It seems there will be more money on the line in 2027, a different Wildcard system, and an extra race.

The LTGP is a good series that has plenty of potential. From adding a leaders jersey, to better fan-activations, and calendar expansion. There are plenty of ideas, many of which don’t cost money at all. I hope some of the low hanging fruit starts to be picked.

Whatever happens, the LTGP has done a lot for American racing and will continue to do so.

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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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They’re sitting dead last in the men’s WorldTour rankings, and a dozen ProTeams are ahead of them. They’re sitting dead last in the Women’s WorldTour rankings. They lost €19.5m in three years. Their bike sponsor is in judicial reorganisation. And it seems every rider who leaves the team significantly improves.

What the hell is going on at Picnic-PostNL?

This is a team that has won the Giro d’Italia, collected Grand Tour stages and nurtured a generation of the sport’s best talent. Now it's struggling on every front. Dig into the problems, and the red flags keep coming, with almost all of them leading back to the same place.

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How to lose €19.5m in three years.

Money talks in professional sports, and Picnic-PostNL’s accounts are singing off-key. The team’s finances are a good place to start: they expose how the team is run and show why it may never bounce back.

Earlier this year, Substack account ‘Money in Sport’ reported that the team lost €19.5m between 2022 and 2024. The article revealed that Picnic-PostNL had personnel costs which were running at 134.5% of revenue. In simple terms, for every €1 the team brought in, they were spending €1.35 on staffing costs alone.

The revenue side of the equation is clearly the problem, with the team drastically underperforming versus the rest of the WorldTour. Their accounts show an average revenue of €11.9m across those three years.

Their 2025 accounts show a significant jump in revenue to €17.7m. This is largely presumed to be the reported €6m that the Ineos Grenadiers paid for the services of Oscar Onley.

So, while the revenue increased, it’s unrealistic to see this become a trend - you can only sell your star rider once. And, even still, a revenue of €17.7m in 2025, a year when the average WorldTour budget was €31.1m, isn’t enough.

Then there’s the debt; documents seen by Money in Sport show the team to be reliant on €16m of loans at the end of 2025 at a subsidised interest rate of 1.25%. There is no clear way to repay this, and it’s presumed whoever holds the loan is writing it off. One expert called it a “dicey situation”, another saying “Financially fragile would be the polite way to describe it.”

Unfortunately for Picnic-PostNL, their money problems will likely continue. Their latest going concern disclosure sheds light on the situation: “To ensure going concern for the 2026 season, we are dependent on agreements with current and new partners to be able to pre-invoice 2027 sponsorship income to meet our liquidity requirements for the current season.”

Put simply: Picnic-PostNL is already spending next year’s money.

Lapierre and the Accell collapse.

In modern professional cycling, equipment is becoming ever more important. And while a team changing bike sponsor isn’t news, Picnic-PostNL’s move from Scott Bikes to Lapierre Bikes for 2025 brought headlines.

The switch came late in the year, with multiple sources indicating that the team had already ordered their bike from Scott, and riders weren’t made aware of this until as late as October. The Dutch site Wielerflits reported that one of the reasons Lapierre moved to sponsor the team was because Accell Group, their parent company, was losing money and wanted to rid itself of excess stock.

Lapierre is an undeniable downgrade in performance versus Scott. And while it’s not uncommon for a team that’s financially struggling to take on sponsorship of a worse product that provides a greater financial benefit, dig deeper and this deal seems to be a lose-lose.

The Dutch-headquartered Accell Group was bought for €1.56b in 2022 by a consortium led by KKR, an American investment firm. This move proved to be horrendously timed, with Accell proceeding to lose over €700m in the following two years.

This was all public knowledge at the time. Yet in December 2024, the team announced a four-year deal with Lapierre, a brand whose parent company was in a deep financial hole. Hindsight is 20/20, but that looks like a serious misjudgment.

In August 2026, Accell was granted a suspension of payments, and Lapierre filed for judicial reorganisation in France. Days later, an Amsterdam court declared Accell bankrupt.

Lapierre isn’t the only time the team has stepped down in equipment. In 2026, the team swapped its tyre partnership from Vittoria to Michelin. Riders I’ve spoken to have reported substantial rolling resistance and do not trust the tyres, even noting that they have caused freak crashes. One can only assume Picnic-PostNL’s switch was financially motivated. Why else would you choose to go slower?

The culture of control.

Picnic-PostNL has a long rap sheet of issues between the team and its star riders. It is rare for a professional cyclist to leave their contract early; it is even rarer to leave their contract mid-season. For Picnic-PostNL, it’s an annual occurrence.

Marcel Kittel. Warren Barguil. Tom Dumoulin. Ilan van Wilder. Marc Hirschi. Michael Matthews. Tiesj Benoot. Lorena Wiebes. Charlotte Kool.

Here lies a list of big names that decided to up and leave under a cloud. Sometimes it was money-motivated; more often than not, it was culture-related. Picnic-PostNL’s management style is their way or the highway.

Two names sit at the top of the tree that are often pointed to as the root of the problem: Iwan Spekenbrink and Rudi Kemna. Spekenbrink founded the team in 2008 and has headed it ever since as CEO. Kemna joined the same year and is now Head Coach. The culture of the team is their culture.

In 2021, the Flemish broadcaster Sporza published an investigation into the team. Most riders spoke anonymously, and the findings were damning. Two said they were “treated like little children”. Another told Sporza: “The team doesn’t realise that it is working with people instead of robots. They want 33 riders who all do the same thing and think the same way. But actually, you are dealing with 33 individuals.”

The harshest criticism was aimed at the top of the management tree. “The worst thing is that Kemna and Spekenbrink never question themselves,” one rider said, “If two riders break their contracts, you can still say that it might be down to their character. But if ten disgruntled riders terminate their contracts, then that is no longer a coincidence.”

Spekenbrink’s public response largely proved their point. He dismissed some of the criticism as “riders who really wanted to stay at the time, but didn’t get a new contract” and in another interview went on to say that “We are always open to dialogue, that is based on arguments. And then everything is open for discussion.” Sources within the team told me dialogue is not something management are fans of.

That criticism came in 2021, and in the five years since, little has changed. In January this year, Pat Eddy, a product of the team’s development system, won the Australian National Championships, just months after Kemna declined to offer him a new contract. In his post-race interview, Eddy didn’t hold back: “I told Rudi Kemna I’d make him look a bit silly when he gave me the flick, so that one’s for you, mate.”

In August this year, just eight months after starting with the team, nineteen-year-old Megan Arens, the 2025 Junior World TT Champion, terminated her contract by mutual agreement. It’s not just the stars leaving, the team can no longer keep its brightest young talent.

The staff are leaving too. Marc Reef left for Jumbo-Visma in 2021 and later became their Head of Racing. While I was drafting this piece, Matt Winston, the British sports director behind many of the team’s few big wins, announced he was leaving for Decathlon CMA CGM.

All of this creates a reputation, and reputations stick. The more riders who leave in unusual circumstances, the less appealing the team becomes to new ones. One former pro I spoke to had no other offers on the table, but chose to end their career rather than sign for the team. Another rider told me that when the team came calling, they instructed their agent not to even open talks.

The evidence has been piling up for years. At what point will management look in the mirror?

Kemna answered that question back in 2021. Speaking to Wielerflits, he said: “Well, actually, we aren’t strict enough yet… I am convinced that our way of working is the future.”

The world’s best development team*.

There is no denying the talent that the team has developed. Their going concern document even states their “development philosophy remains a key pillar of its long-term strategy.”

The reputation as one of the world’s best development programmes comes from its Sunweb era (2017-2020). Back then, it was one of few in the sport and had little competition for talent. Hagens Berman Axeon, SEG Racing and Sunweb were the three big names. It wasn’t until Groupama-FDJ launched its development team in 2019 that WorldTour development squads started to become the norm. Picnic-PostNL didn’t get worse at development, everyone else caught up.

The same was true on the women’s side. The team brought a generation of the best women’s riders in the world through the system. The most winning rider in the WWT, Lorena Wiebes spent her formative years on the team, as did Juliette Berthet (née Labous), Charlotte Kool, Liane Lippert and Franzi Koch.

The story goes that they identify and develop young talent who then move away on big money deals. Cycling’s lack of obvious transfer system means the team invests in development, but doesn’t reap the fruits of their labour.

That’s partly true, but there’s more to it. To profit from the riders it develops, a team has to tie them to long contracts, as football (soccer) clubs do. That’s why the Onley deal worked: he signed a five-year contract at the end of 2022, so when the Ineos Grenadiers came calling, they had to buy him out. Spekenbrink himself says the team’s job now is to “play the transfer game better than the competitors.” That model relies on two things: identifying generational talent you can later sell, and the money to lock them into long, lucrative deals.

But “playing the transfer game” only works if you have the talent in the first place and there’s a bigger problem at play. For what’s claimed to be the world’s best development team, there’s an eerie correlation between riders leaving and instantly improving.

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The post-Picnic glow-up.

When there’s enough evidence of riders leaving and immediately getting better, one has to look at the internal structures. Especially when the team requires all of its riders to be coached by them.

One of the main criticisms is that riders are put into predetermined boxes rather than given personalised training. One former rider told Sporza that if you trained even slightly differently from your schedule for a day, an angry staff member was on the phone immediately and you had to justify yourself. Other riders have said that they don’t train enough, and that the team doesn’t listen to their demands.

The 2026 season brought a host of case studies. Pat Eddy spent two years with the development team and two with the WorldTour squad before being let go. Based on UCI Points, Eddy’s 2026 is twelve times better than his best with Picnic-PostNL. Tobias Lund Andresen, a product of their development team, left at the end of 2025 and immediately took the first WorldTour wins of his career in January.

Another rider who left last season was Dutch sprinter Charlotte Kool. With nearly eighteen months still left on her contract, she moved to Fenix-Deceuninck. Her results speak for themselves, she’s taken six wins, including Scheldeprijs, and at the time of writing she’s eighth in the PCS Rankings, with the highest points haul of her career.

The clearest example of all is Franzi Koch. The German joined Picnic-PostNL six months into her professional career and stayed until her move to FDJ United-Suez. Her season highlight was winning Paris-Roubaix, but a string of podiums and Top 10s at the world’s biggest races shows the magnitude of her improvement.

Again, PCS Rankings (below) tell the story.

The team’s answer to riders leaving has been to appeal to loyalty. In an interview this summer with Rouleur, Callum Ferguson, the coach who oversees the women’s team, said:

“Our vision is to create a team that starts a journey together. One that develops, rides, lives and learns together. When something goes wrong, they don’t let themselves down but everyone – it’s that feeling of all being in it together, of creating a team environment of all being responsible for each other…If a shark comes in and says you can come to SD Worx for an extra €20,000, they sit there and say, ‘Yeah, €20,000 more would be nice, but if I leave now I’ll let down my teammates who I’ve raced with for the last few years’”

The sentiment is understandable, but with the median WWT salary at €80,000, €20,000 is a significant pay rise. Professional cycling careers are short, and asking riders to turn that down out of loyalty isn’t building a team culture. It’s asking them to subsidise the team’s budget with their own livelihoods.

At the end of 2026, there’s set to be a further exodus of talent. After spending her whole career with the team, Pfeiffer Georgi is switching to UAE Team L’IMAD. On the men’s side, Casper van Uden and Pavel Bittner, the team’s only two race winners this year, are also heading for the door.

If riders were stocks, the smart money would already be buying Georgi, van Uden and Bittner.

Is there any way back?

The premise of this article was to conduct an analysis of what’s going wrong and figure out how to fix it. There is no hiding in elite sports and the facts speak for themselves.

In any other sport, if you were performing this badly on the pitch, had a financial situation this dire, and your best talent left and instantly improved, heads would roll. The team’s uncompromising culture has left it so far behind that its reputation is badly damaged.

They are in a self-fulfilling spiral. The worse their reputation becomes, the harder it becomes to attract young talent. The fewer young talents they develop, the worse their supply of riders to the WorldTour team. The worse the WorldTour results, the fewer sponsors they attract.

Suggestion 1: Drop to ProTeam level.

This is the level the team is currently at both in terms of budget and talent. There’s an inevitability that it will happen naturally. Given their (lack of) sporting performance, the team will almost certainly be relegated from the WorldTour at the end of the current cycle in 2028.

On paper, being a ProTeam has its advantages: lower fixed costs, fewer mandatory race days, and they can race at a level that matches the budget. In this scenario, the WWT team and the development team would carry on as normal.

Whether the team drops by choice or by relegation, it risks losing the most important asset any team has: automatic access to the Tour de France. There is no doubt that some, if not most, of the team’s contracts are linked to participation in the Tour de France.

The current regulations state that the top three ProTeams are automatically invited to every WorldTour race, and then each race has Wildcard invites too. Picnic-PostNL are currently ranked 30th in the world, behind twelve ProTeams. So, it’s unlikely they’d get the auto-invite. And, Wildcards are often politically motivated based on a race’s nationality, or star-rider pull. For the Grand Tours, Picnic-PostNL has neither.

This is effectively the situation they will sleepwalk into by the end of 2028, so while choosing it in advance would save costs, giving up the next two years in the Tour de France makes little sense.

It does remain to be seen if the UCI will make this choice for them. The team was only granted a single-year WorldTour licence, rather than the standard three.

The day before this piece was published, Vélo-Club reported that, according to its sources, Picnic-PostNL is considering voluntarily dropping down to ProTeam level.

Suggestion 2: All in on women’s racing.

The men’s market is out of control. With a culture and reputation as poor as the team has, the only way they will attract talent is by massively over-paying riders. Their financial situation does not allow for this.

The team already acknowledges the problem with the men’s market. Its own going concern document says its development approach supports “financial sustainability by reducing reliance on the increasingly competitive rider market.”

The average men’s WorldTour budget in 2026 is €33.1m, and the median is €28m. The average WWT budget sits at €5.7m (I couldn’t find reliably sourced median data). Picnic-PostNL’s 2025 revenues for its three teams, (including the presumed €6m in Onley money) was €17.7m

Collapsing the men’s professional team and doubling-down on its investment in the WWT would mean that the team has a narrow focus, and for the first time in years, a financial playing field it can compete on.

There’s precedent here. At the end of 2023, Human Powered Health folded their men’s ProTeam and focussed the whole organisation into their WWT team. It would also play to home advantage. Picnic-PostNL is a Dutch-registered team with Dutch sponsors, and the Netherlands is a heartland of women’s cycling.

It would mean folding the men’s development programme, the one part of the organisation with a proven track record. But there’s an argument that this is where the opportunity lies. Development pathways in women’s cycling are still limited. Taking the same philosophy into the Women’s WorldTour could give the team the same development advantage it had on the men’s side a decade ago.

There’s the same problem in this argument though. Would sponsors stick around without the guarantee of the sport’s biggest event: the men’s Tour de France?

Suggestion 3: New ownership.

There’s one option that is highly unlikely: a sale, a merger or a new investor.

Every option that comes up ultimately has the same flaw: management. The team can reorganise the budget or change its structure, but that leaves the people who built the problem in charge. Because Spekenbrink owns the team, nobody can sack him. Change at the top would only come through new money.

With this much debt, this reputation and this culture, any new investor would be better off starting from scratch.

So, what the hell is going on at Picnic-PostNL?

The same thing that’s been going on for two decades. Almost everything around the team has changed, but the upper management has stayed the same.

Whatever option the team chooses, nothing will improve until management does. Without new leadership and a new way of working, it could have a budget to rival UAE Team Emirates and still fail.

Bankruptcy, relegation, or maybe the UCI deeming them unworthy of their licence. Picnic-PostNL keeps digging, hoping to strike gold. It’s about time they started looking for a ladder.

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Huge thanks to the brains behind ‘Money in Sport’ for the help with dissecting financial data. Also, Jon Twigg and Chris Mehlman for reading drafts.

For further reading, I highly recommend these articles by Money in Sport:

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

• Anatomy of a Bike Industry Collapse

Beneath the headlines of growth, the Women’s World Tour is blindly sleepwalking into the broken economic model that has plagued men’s pro cycling for decades: teams depend on a single sponsor’s marketing budget, or philanthropy from wealthy benefactors, to survive.

The unavoidable reality is that professional cycling, for both men and women, lives inside an economic conundrum where teams neither receive a share of media rights revenue nor have budget caps. In this environment, teams are encouraged to spend more and more money with the sole goal of winning the biggest races. However, the men’s World Tour has proven that winning does not equal financial security.

If winning alone does not always work for the men’s World Tour, a market that has much bigger reach than the WWT, then why are women’s teams trying to follow the same model? Even still, only a handful of riders have a realistic shot of winning the biggest races. So the smaller teams who cannot afford those riders must think outside the box to survive.

Teams are completely missing the opportunity to engage fans, both new and hardcore, from around the world. Fan engagement, not the ‘win at all costs’ model, is part of the answer for those teams. While winning is important, and every professional sports team should have the goal of winning, it is not the only part of being a professional sports organisation. Even the best teams do not win very often.

It would be easy to write this article specifically referencing the men’s World Tour, but that is so entrenched in tradition that it can be hard to change. The WWT is new and full of optimism. There are no traditions getting in the way of progress.

Most women’s teams are still built to do one thing: win. But most teams, in any given race, lose. If a team isn’t winning and isn’t giving fans a reason to care, what exactly is it for?

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Teams need to build brands.

The advent of the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift (TDFFaZ) in 2022 means that women’s professional racing is in front of millions of viewers across the world. The power of the Tour de France brand cannot be overstated. The television ratings and media attention there dwarf every other women’s cycling event. However, the TDFFaZ is only a nine-day event. How do these multi-million-dollar teams stay relevant for the other 356 days of the year?

The current economic structure of professional cycling teams is largely based on a single source of revenue: sponsors who pay to have their logo placed on the team’s assets. There are no ticket sales or media revenue that a team can depend on. The sponsoring brands hope to drive earned media in exchange for their sponsorship. The more a team wins races, the sponsors pray, the more earned media is achieved, and ultimately the more they benefit.

The problem with earned media is that the only way of guaranteeing it is to consistently win big, and no team wins all the time.

The vast majority of a team’s revenue is sponsorship income, and because of this the team is typically named after the brand giving it the most money that year. The team colors and identity often reflect this brand, changing from year to year depending on who writes the biggest cheque. This causes teams to constantly violate the most basic principle of good branding: consistency.

Imagine if the Dallas Cowboys NFL team, who have maintained the same logo, name and colors for sixty-five years, were “Team AT&T” one season (with that brand’s corporate colors) and then “Team Starbucks” the next season. It’s laughable, but that’s how pro cycling currently operates.

Over just the last ten years, one Dutch World Tour team has been called: Giant-Alpecin, Team Sunweb, Team DSM, dsm-firmenich, dsm-firmenich Post NL, and Team Picnic Post NL. Each of the six team names came with a different colour palette.

One team trying to change this, and operate more effectively as a brand, is the Unibet Rose Rockets, a men’s team that started with a YouTube channel four years ago. Their Head of Communications, Mitchell Minnaard said, “Our goal is to be the most likeable and most followable team with the biggest fanbase.”

Followable is the key word here. Most professional cycling teams are built to win, and of course that is a key goal for the Rockets, too. They see winning as just one part of their overall strategy. The team chose to invest heavily in media — their internal media team sits at more than twenty people — and while this was often at the expense of sporting performance, it was a decision that has also paid dividends to the team. The Rockets have a large, engaged fanbase that attracts sponsors and media attention at a greater value than their results would suggest.

And as it relates to branding, they are doing a lot of things right: the name of the team (The Rockets) stays the same even when they bring in title sponsors (Unibet, Rose). They have a thriving YouTube channel, with 135,000 subscribers. That’s more than either of the two winningest teams in the world, Team Visma lease a bike and UAE Team Emirates XRG. The Rockets’ team colors have stayed, maybe not identical, but at least similar, since they started.

In an interview with Olympics.com, the Rockets’ co-founder, Bas Tietema said: “Normally it’s an investor or multinational [corporation] who are starting a cycling team, trying to get better riders on board and then trying to get fans by performing well on the road. We believe that if we can take people inside our journey, then that could be the product.”

At the time of this writing, not a single women’s team is taking the approach of Unibet Rose Rockets. This is a huge missed opportunity. We know from talking to women’s cycling followers all over the world that fans of the sport want stories, personality and energy. Yes, fans love teams that win, but they want much more than that. Neither the teams nor their sponsors seem to understand this.

We do recognize that there are a few teams moving in the right direction, notably EF Education-Oatly and FDJ United-SUEZ. But even these two are only scratching the surface.

As it currently works, any additional money that a team gets goes immediately to signing better riders or trying to improve performance. But what if serving fans with better branding and engagement actually got more earned media for sponsors than incremental performance improvements?

After all, isn’t that the reason sponsors are there in the first place?

Treat the organization like a business, not a 1970s sports team.

The issue that many professional cycling teams face is quite simple: they are run the same way they have been for the last fifty years.

A majority of team managers would reject the idea that brand or media rank anywhere close to sporting performance. But the world has changed since the 1970s.

The advent of the internet and social media globalized fan engagement for sports teams and athletes. Teams are now able to circumvent traditional media channels (television/streaming and print) and connect directly with their audience. Most pro cycling teams seem to completely ignore, or do not understand, current best practices in media, marketing and sponsor activation.

Outside of pro cycling, many professional sports take a dual perspective on management: one side focuses on performance, the other on commercial viability and long-term growth. There is no better example than the Formula One World Champions, McLaren Racing. Leadership is split: Zak Brown drives commercial strategy and partnerships as CEO, while Andrea Stella oversees performance on track as Team Principal.

McLaren did not become Formula One World Champions by deciding whether on-track performance or commercial success were the most important. It staffed people in both roles. Stella’s job is to make the car as fast as possible, Brown’s to make the team as commercially appealing as possible. While each of the jobs have very different goals, both are mutually beneficial. Serving both brands and fans better brings in more sponsorship, and that money funds both sides of the team.

Most professional cycling teams do the opposite. They funnel as much money as possible into human performance, betting that winning more bike races is the only way to attract bigger sponsors.

That bet is risky, as race results are historically unreliable, and a team solely focusing on results doesn’t protect itself from a bad year. Building an audience away from results brings loyalty that doesn’t rely on podiums. It also brings something that teams can take to a boardroom, no matter how many or how few wins they have.

We can already hear the complaints of team managers: “We are already tight on budget, how do you expect us to be able to afford this?” The question shouldn’t be “How do we afford this?” It should be “How much money are we losing by not doing this?”

How would we run a WWT team?

Now, it’s all good looking at current practices, but what would we do if we were in charge of a women’s pro cycling team?

1. Start at the foundation

What does the team stand for and why does it exist?

Every strong brand or organization needs a purpose. This has to start with management, and it impacts everything the team does: the sponsors it attracts, the riders it signs, the races it travels to, the content it creates, the staff it hires, and just as importantly: the things it doesn’t do.

“We exist to win races” is not enough. Virtually every pro cycling team could use this. A proper mission or purpose should be unique to that particular organization. The team needs a North star that everything comes back to, and it cannot just be ‘racing for women.’

As an example, the Unibet Rose Rockets express what they do this way: We’re here to push boundaries, chase results, and tell authentic stories along the way. Note that “telling stories” is part of the reason they exist!

If we compare that with “UAE Team L’IMAD exists to empower women, nurture talent, and use professional cycling as a platform to inspire the UAE and the wider world to dream bigger, live healthier, and believe in the power of sport to create opportunity, unity, and progress.“

This says a lot and nothing all at once. Kind of a professional sports word salad. We challenge anyone in the organization to recite this from memory. The team has great riders, and fans follow them. But ask what the team itself stands for, and there’s no answer.

2. Hire the correct people

There needs to be someone experienced and skilled in charge of marketing, media and sponsor activations. This sounds so simple, but it’s actually very rare in the pro cycling space.

Most teams have a press officer, someone who writes race reports, manages rider interviews and posts results on social media but that’s communication, not marketing. The job we’re describing is different: building the brand, growing the audience and making sure sponsors get more out of the partnership than a logo on a jersey.

This person can’t report to a sporting Team Manager, where every budget conversation gets decided in favour of another rider. They need to sit alongside the performance side as an equal: cycling’s version of Zak Brown.

3. Create a distinctive brand identity

The name, the kit, the look of the bikes, the logo, the culture. Together they should make a team recognisable from a helicopter shot or a single Instagram post.

EF Pro Cycling is the best example in the sport. When the team rebuilt its identity in the late 2010s, it went further than most. The Rapha partnership fitted who the team wanted to be at the time, the films were better than anything else in cycling, and the pink kit could be spotted from the skies. The kit has outlived the Rapha deal and moved across apparel sponsors, because the pink belongs to the team, not the supplier.

This is the consistency argument from earlier. Sponsors change, but the identity shouldn’t.

4. Media

This must align with the mission of the team and be distributed on channels where fans exist. Meeting the fans where they are is the priority. In today’s non-linear firehose of content, staying on brand yet still distinctive is a challenge. Any of us may be watching media from ten different channels every day, on dozens of topics. Team content has to be eye-catching, well executed and relentless.

Teams often get this wrong. Their media consists of race line-ups, results, and sponsor appreciation. As if that is all fans care about. Of course they want more than this. Who are the riders without their helmets and glasses on? Where are they from? What inspires them?

While F1 is an overused example, the approach of the teams since Liberty Media’s acquisition of the sport shows what’s possible. Under the Ecclestone regime, teams and drivers were tightly restricted in what they could film and share. Liberty Media opened up the paddock, encouraged teams and drivers to create their own content, and backed Netflix’s Drive to Survive, which turned drivers, engineers and team principals into characters.

Teams built in-house content operations, and a sport long followed by diehard fans found a younger, broader audience. The lesson isn’t that cycling needs a Netflix show. It’s that the personalities were always there.

Visa Cash App Racing Bulls, Red Bull’s second team, rarely fights for wins, yet its content punches well above its results. Its channels are built around the drivers being themselves: challenges, jokes and behind-the-scenes moments. That’s exactly the lesson most WWT teams can take. They won’t be the favourite on race day, but they can be the team fans most enjoy following.

Laini ‘Bones’ Multer shows what happens when a person is free to be herself. Her ‘Taking Men’s Strava Crowns’ series has gone viral in the past six months. In her own words: “I had no sponsors or people I was afraid of rubbing the wrong way, so I could be 100% myself and post what I thought was funny. I just did what was authentic to myself. I’d bet a lot of pro-teams wouldn’t be a huge fan of my posting as they likely want to be sponsor-safe. I think maybe a fear of divisive content leads to more vanilla social media personalities and stifling people from being themselves.”

That’s the opportunity: allow people to be their own personalities.

5. Show up in person

In 2026, one of the most important brand experiences around the world is community management. Getting fans together in real life is something that cannot be easily duplicated digitally or by another team.

Two good examples of this would be both Mathieu van der Poel of the Alpecin-Premier Tech team and Wout van Aert of the Visma-Lease a Bike team (along with Margaux Vigie) coming separately to Los Angeles last fall to do wildly popular group rides with hundreds of fans.

These were unique and special experiences in a country where World Tour racing does not exist. Separately, the Cheer Squad that Iris Slappendel organizes at TdFFaZ is electric and unlike any other activation in bike racing. Hundreds of women dancing to a DJ on the route before the race comes by. There’s an opportunity to do much more of this.

6. Win

Every sports team has to win. There is legitimacy that comes with winning that is irreplaceable, and we are not making the argument that performance does not matter.

Winning and having something worth following are not in competition with each other; they benefit each other. Winning gives the media operation a story to tell, and inspires fans.

Why does this matter for women’s racing?

The TDFFaZ has done its job and is pulling in a new audience to the sport. With their ‘Watch the Femmes’ campaign, Zwift have converted a new generation of cycling fans, and are directly responsible for increasing female fandom within the sport. They have done the hardest, and most expensive part of the whole equation: they have made people care for the first time.

But how much of this attention belongs to the teams? It belongs to the race, the title sponsor and the individual athletes. When the nine days of the race end, how does a new fan stay engaged?

Cycling has long been a sport where fans follow riders more than teams. That has upsides, since strong riders gain profile and leverage. But riders also need strong teams to sign them, pay them and put them on the start line. Each depends on the other.

That raises a question: do fans attach to riders mainly because teams give them nothing else to attach to? Names, colours and sponsors change every year. A team with a consistent identity can keep the audience when a star rider moves on.

This is where women’s cycling has an advantage the men’s sport doesn’t. The audience is new, the teams are young, and the budgets are yet to be measured in the tens of millions. The sport is in a position to flex to the best version of itself. To do this successfully takes financial investment and time. These are two things teams are rarely keen on, and it means running performance and commercial as equals.

Teams that embrace this approach will see positive impacts on sponsor appeal, fan engagement, revenue and long-term relevance. Fans attract sponsors. Sponsors bring stability. Stability attracts riders. Riders win races, and winning brings more fans. It’s the same cycle every team is chasing. It just doesn’t start with the podium.

The Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift has created the opportunity. The teams that take it will own the next decade of women’s cycling.

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For further reading, we strongly advise reading the article below by Elena Wu-Yan, and any of Natascha Knaven den Ouden’s writings for Domestique.

Miss Elena's (Miscellaneous) Musings

Women’s Cycling Needs More Than Investment.

Last spring, I did an independent research project on the growth of women’s sports and what cycling could learn from more commercially developed sports like basketball, soccer, and hockey. I had spent the previous several months attending sports business conferences and talking to people across the sports industry—from investors and team owners to execu…

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a month ago · 15 likes · 9 comments · Elena Wu-Yan

If the Philly Classic was the sleeping giant stirring, Montreal was it swinging its legs out of bed and heading downstairs to make coffee. Of course, a World Champs is always going to draw big crowds and be special, but that’s not to say only a World Champs can have this impact.

I need to sleep, drink more coffee, and come back to this. But I’m bullish, and I want to be part of building what comes next over here. At the very least, this past week proved that GP Quebec and Montreal need WWT races too.

Anyway, here are my takeaways from World Champs.

Montreal, take a bow. That was special.

I’m struggling for words. There were hundreds of thousands of people at the roadside. The racing was electric. I’ve seen one or two things close to that in Europe, but even I didn’t think North America had that in it. It was bonkers.

For those of you who didn’t go, I am sorry. It was worth every dollar. It was worth the travel. It was worth the countless miles we all walked. The collective tiredness on Monday.

Road racing fandom in North America is alive and kicking.

Montreal put on one hell of a show.

Build it and they will come.

Worlds are a reminder of so much, but most of all that professional cycling is at its best when the world’s top riders are racing against each other in cool places.

The best riders attract the biggest crowds. Like moths to a flame, people flocked to Montreal. I know of at least five separate groups who rode up from New York. Others flew in from the West Coast or drove for hours just to be part of it.

The ingredients are clear: big names, accessible circuits, a cool city.

Circuit racing rocks.

It’s no surprise a well-designed circuit creates exciting tactics and the perfect day out for fans. The 13km lap meant that those at the roadside got to see the race three times an hour.

With the men missing the GOAT, it was all to play for. The Americans played their cards at the perfect time, and Brandon McNulty delivered their first men’s road title in 33 years.

The women’s race was edge-of-the-seat stuff. Demi went long. Too long. There was a brief moment it seemed that ELB was going to do it, but in the end, it was 1st vs. 2nd at the Tour de France Femmes sprinting for the line. Demi took the Rainbow.

Fans and fans and fans.

After Saturday’s women’s race, I was shaking my head at how mad it had been. I didn’t think it’d be possible that even more people could come out the next day. I was wrong.

We stationed ourselves next to a big screen on Mount Royal, and there was a music festival-style atmosphere as everyone crammed to watch. The climb itself was multiple layers deep, with fans from bottom to top.

Polytechnique was apparently a mega vibe, and the neighbourhood climbs too. In truth, everywhere was special. As the race finished, everyone swarmed to the finish straight to witness the winner come home.

Bike racing fans were everywhere.

Business and pleasure.

The week was more than the bike races. The activations, rides and parties deserve a mention. So many brands turned up, and the emphasis at almost every pop-up was fun, not product. That’s rare.

So much was going on that it was impossible to make it to everything. The week also doubled up as an industry connection week. Brands, dealers, bike shops and athletes were all in one city doing business.

A world-class race isn’t just a weekend of racing. It’s a trade show, a tourism boost and a marketing platform rolled into one.

Races hold the power.

Events are powerful in the sports world.

We spend a lot of time thinking about teams and athletes, but events are the foundation for everything.

Look at the last month. The Philly Classic’s return, Soldier Hollow in Utah, and now the Montreal World Champs. Everything stems from events. If there are big races, with big names, that people want to travel to, then everything else will follow.

Teams will form, sponsor money will come, and the next generation will become inspired. It was cool to be a cycling fan this past week, and when that happens, the sport grows.

So, what’s next?

First, we should look back with a smile. That week will go down in cycling history.

Then we need to build. The January month of racing in Australia is a great case study for North America.

Montreal worked because people could get there, move around, and see the race again and again and again. Get the best racing the best, any event in North America will be hard to attract talent because of the travel, but having the best riders in the world is crucial. And the better the riders, the more fans.

Make it an event. The big screens, the festival atmosphere, the neighbourhood climbs, the brand activations. Each and every component is important for a successful race.

And finally, build it to last. The impossible task - the funding. Building events that outlive a single commercial sponsorship is the biggest obstacle. That’s something I’m going to write further about later.

A valuable lesson to learn.

I wrote this after the Philly Classic, and I stand by it:

North American cycling fans were let down. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve been told that American road racing is dead. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve been told that people don’t care about road racing.

The races died. The publications stopped covering the US scene. They told me nobody cared. That their data showed trends were going to gravel, and gravel only.

They were wrong. The data is wrong. The industry let itself down.

The fanbase in North America was always there.

The industry mistook the collapse of the biggest American road races for the collapse of American interest in road racing.

This isn’t just an ‘I told you so’ (okay, maybe it is). This is a proof of concept that the World Tour should look to expand further in North America. It’s a market that holds so much growth opportunity.

The last time World Champs came to North America was for Richmond in 2015; a lot has changed since then, and little for the better.

It’s not easy to figure out, but it is there to build. This past week showed what’s possible.

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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. Thanks for your support.

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/joelaverick

The following brands are either financial or equipment partners of mine and allow me to do cool stuff.

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The creation of the Life Time Grand Prix (LTGP) was perhaps the greatest marketing move that they could have made for their mass participation event business. They have the best off-road athletes in the world competing in and promoting events that they own. With that in mind, the Grand Prix has already been a success.

They’ve built this success by being, relatively speaking, commercially cautious. But the instincts that make an events company profitable are the opposite of the instincts required to build a thriving sports league.

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What is the Life Time Grand Prix?

On their website, the LTGP calls itself the “professional movement of off-road racing”; their social media states “Where the world’s best off-road athletes meet North America’s most iconic races.” In reality, it’s half a mountain bike series, half a gravel series – a championship built from the events Life Time has acquired or started over the years.

First launched in 2022, the positioning of the series makes it look like their aim is to build a professional league. The 2026 prize money increased by 55% to $590,000, and Kimo Seymour, the Senior Vice President of Life Time Events, said at the time: “We’re very proud of how far the Life Time Grand Prix has advanced in just four seasons, with 2026 reflecting our elevated and ongoing commitment to professional off-road cycling.”

There’s a tension for Life Time here. Their core business is mass participation, and that’s extremely profitable. For the LTGP to take off as a professional sports league, it needs to appeal to something entirely different: fans.

There’s not enough racing to build a league.

The most valuable asset to any sport is its fans. Sponsors only pay athletes because people are following them. Media rights only have value because people are watching. Everything comes back to eyeballs, and having a season-long narrative is what keeps fans interested. This is the part the LTGP hasn’t cracked, and the reason why is nuanced.

Importantly, it isn’t because the talent in the races is subpar or because nobody will ever care about gravel. One of the biggest problems is that there isn’t enough racing to sustain interest in the league across a full year.

There are very few, if any, professional sports leagues where the athletes compete as infrequently as they do in the LTGP. That scarcity is one of the key features that cap the LTGP’s strength, not the quality of what happens on the days it does race.

The 2026 LTGP operates as a six-race series spanning from mid-April to mid-October. The series will add one extra race going into 2027. Having a six, or even a seven, race calendar is simply not enough.

If we compare the LTGP to other sporting competitions, it becomes clear that there are too few race days. Both T100 and SailGP are new sports leagues with large private backing. After a rocky start due to COVID, SailGP expanded from its original five to a global series of thirteen races. T100 is only a few years old, but immediately came in at seven events, before expanding up to nine. Neither league treated its original calendar as the final product.

This problem is further exacerbated by the shaping of the calendar. The six weeks between Sea Otter and Unbound works, especially because the biggest non-LTGP gravel race in the world, Traka, sits in the middle. Then, it’s eleven weeks of nothingness. A near three-month break in the height of the race season creates a narrative hole.

To a degree, the ‘summer break’ is a good idea. It gives athletes time to prepare for upcoming events and recover from the effort that is Unbound. However, a balance needs to be found, and a break this large erodes any narrative or hype that existed after Unbound.

The back end of the season intensifies the problem further. Half of the series takes place within the final four weeks. The split of events doesn’t help the case too: Gravel, Gravel, MTB, MTB, MTB, Gravel. After the eleven-week post-Unbound gap, it feels less like a mixed-discipline series, and more of a mountain bike series.

This isn’t just me making the case to give fans more to watch; it’s about giving Life Time something to sell. Sponsors pay for attention, and attention has to be earned consistently.

The audience the LTGP already has is exactly the one that corporate partners want. Participants and fans of these events have high disposable income that non-endemic partners pay to reach. A calendar built to hold attention all year is what turns that audience into an asset that household names are bidding for sponsorship packages, not just a ketone or hydration brand.

Life Time’s ownership conundrum.

It isn’t just that the LTGP doesn’t have enough races; it doesn’t have the right ones either.

As previously mentioned, the LTGP is a championship of the cycling events that Life Time owns. While this strategy works in theory, it makes it difficult to claim “the world’s best off-road athletes meet North America’s most iconic races”. Many of the “most iconic races in North America” aren’t in their championship.

They hold the crown jewels in Unbound and Leadville, but if we were to draft a list of the ten best off-road races in the US, a majority would not be owned by Life Time. This is their Achilles’ heel. To expand as a professional league, Life Time has to relinquish some control.

Working in collaboration with existing race organisers rather than acquiring them would be a win for all parties. The independent race organisers would get a deeper pro-field and therefore more coverage. They would also keep the (often profitable) mass-participation side of their business, which would inevitably increase due to the pro attendance. The pros get a deeper calendar with a clearer sell to their sponsors. And Life Time gets a better product they can take to corporate partners, as well as maintaining control of the events they currently own.

Whether Life Time would ever allow this is another point. Their current mentality when it comes to events is comparable to a black hole: suck up everything.

Alongside adding non-Life Time owned races into their calendar, they should identify key growth areas to build races. The Front Range, Oregon, Texas, or anywhere on the East Coast are all obvious contenders. The goal should be to build races in, or in close proximity to, areas with an already healthy cycling scene.

Bringing bike races to places that people would already want to travel to is an easy way to increase attendance. SBT GRVL in Steamboat Springs and Oregon Trail in Bend are both good case studies. The events borrow the town’s pull, which is far easier than manufacturing demand.

A league is only as credible as the races within it, and right now there are too many races missing. Collaboration closes that gap quickly. It solves the problem of calendar expansion and brings legitimacy to the series. Building new events takes more time, but also brings new opportunities in growth markets. Both paths matter equally.

Mass Participation vs. Pro Racing

The current Life Time courses are great for mass participation fondos, not for bike racing.

There is an insurmountable tension between the two. Given mass participation is the profit engine, the motivation to address this will always fall on deaf ears.

However, with the premise of this article being the growth of the LTGP, I’m going to look at how they could make the LTGP more spectator-friendly. I’m not advocating to change the classics: there is a beauty to Unbound being 200 miles in the Flint Hills, and Leadville being 100 miles at altitude. But there should be experimentation with new formats of racing.

The 2025 championship finale, Big Sugar, was halved to 50 miles due to adverse weather. It was arguably the best thing that happened to the LTGP that year. With the overall series still hanging in the balance, it was two hours of edge-of-the-seat racing that wasn’t decided until the final fifty metres. Adverse weather accidentally handed the series the crescendo it needed.

Sofia Gomez Villafane, the overall winner of the Women’s Life Time Grand Prix, summed it up: “I was praying we were going to do the 50, I thought it would just deliver some really exciting racing. It was chaos for 50 miles, attacks going left and right, and it came down to the wire.”

There’s an obvious argument to bring a Short Track MTB race into the series too. The US has an abundance of MTB talent; trying to coax those riders who ply their trade on the World Cup circuit to some rounds of the Grand Prix would only increase external attention.

A short track race could be easily implemented as part of a double race weekend at Sea Otter*, or as a part of the Sugars at the end of the season. Trialling a ‘dirt crit’ could be a nice halfway house and mean that XCC specialists don’t have too much an advantage.

In a world of sports moving to be more spectator-friendly, gravel continues to embrace long distances. The LTGP is the perfect test ground, but the organisation seems bizarrely immune to experimentation.

The positioning of the Poggio in Milan-San Remo, or Montmartre on the final stage of the Tour de France, creates a ‘will they, won’t they’ scenario that stays unknown until the closing metres of the race. What is the LTGP’s moment? It can’t be something like Leadville’s Powerline, a climb so decisive that the strongest rider can go solo; it needs to be a finale that creates the most uncertainty.

This year’s Leadville finale was accidentally the perfect case study - again, a course change forced by external environmental conditions - the men’s race was a thrilling final 15-minutes where five riders could’ve won.

*I’ll write something about the new LTGP selection criteria at a later date.

The Life Time Grand Prix must evolve, or risk death.

The LTGP holds all the cards to create a bike racing product for the twenty-first century. There’s no tradition, and a blank sheet of paper. It’s an unprecedented opportunity.

Life Time has put money and structure behind American off-road racing, and more jobs exist because of that. I respect, and thank them for that. But, in doing so, they have quietly built into an A.S.O. style figure. They own the crown jewel events, influence the biggest athletes, and, to a degree, have become the de facto owners of professional gravel racing. With great power comes great responsibility.

Building the LTGP would require Life Time to do things that don’t come naturally to its existing business model. They would have to spend money based on speculation. They would have to build a calendar based off the best racing, not what already exists in their portfolio. Perhaps most crucially, they’d have to give up some control.

As previously mentioned, this is venture-capital risk, not publicly traded fitness club risk. Why would they take the risk?

The obvious case study to look at is Ironman. The triathlon giant has nailed mass participation alongside pro-racing. Yet, I don’t think it’s as simple as many claim. Ironman has a very clear and exportable unique selling point (USP). It is a bucket-list distance that can be packaged and sold across the world. Life Time doesn’t have this, their events largely depend on the location: Unbound is the 200 miles of Flint Hills. Leadville is altitude, Columbine, and Powerline.

That lack of USP is the single biggest risk. Life Time are very good at running events, but will events alone be scalable enough for this to survive? Furthermore, the LTGP has been driven internally by Kimo Seymour; what happens in the world when he retires or moves on from the company?

Expanding the Grand Prix would make it harder to kill. The more established it becomes as its own product, the more it attracts media rights deals and big-name commercial sponsors, the less of a chance someone at Life Time’s corporate HQ will kill it - even if the key player is no longer there. As a public company, everything sits on a P&L that one day can be cut.

Life Time was the right owner for getting this off the ground. Whether they’re the right owner for the next twenty years remains to be seen. They accidentally created something that could become a valuable sports property, but they haven’t yet decided whether they want to build that sports property, or just use it to market their events.

Unless it makes money in its own right, the Life Time Grand Prix stays a marketing tool. And marketing tools, eventually, all meet the same end. Death.

Side note 1:

I didn’t know where to put this, and the piece is already longer than I thought, but it’s worth thinking about who would buy the Life Time cycling events portfolio. Ironman was acquired in 2020 for $730m. A year later, Ironman bought 45% of trail-running giant UTMB, for €12.4m.

Anybody who would buy the Life Time cycling events (and therefore the LTGP) would have a rebrand, a global expansion, and the task of making it the default home of gravel racing on their hands.

Side note 2:

Please, don’t think I am advocating for the erasure of the culture that made gravel racing what it is. That culture is not just the charm of the sport, it is the sport. Many of you will read this and think gravel should have stayed small and community-based. Honestly, I often find myself agreeing with you, but the cat left that bag a while ago. There will always be grassroots events that epitomise everything we love about gravel. The same can be said about road, time-trial, MTB - any discipline, really.

The biggest events have been owned by the multi-billion-dollar corporation for a while now. There is a world where the corporate ownership of Life Time can exist with the culture that made gravel be gravel. I have witnessed that with my own eyes. If the Grand Prix was to grow commercially, I strongly believe it would benefit the grassroots level.

Life Time has got a lot right, but they also take some things too far. I like to believe that the commercial success of the LTGP would help to mitigate the ever-rising entry fees at the big events - Unbound entry is $350. I know this is unrealistic to expect, in an American world, profit will always win. But it shouldn’t have to be one or the other.

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The Philly Classic returned this weekend to roaring success. It felt like a glimpse of something we haven’t seen in a while, like we’d been dropped into the mid-2010s of American bike racing. It’s a glimmer of hope that leads me to something I’ve said so many times recently:

American road racing isn’t dead.

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The Philly Classic was last raced in 2016; Barack Obama was in the closing months of his Presidency. It was a very different America, and a very different American race scene. One that included the Tour of California, Tour of Utah, Colorado Classic, the Road World Championships in Richmond. Since then, it has been a sorry state for America. All of its big pro races, gone.

The gravel scene has offered financial opportunity for US-based pros, but gravel has never managed to figure out appealing to spectators.

Appealing to spectators is exactly what the Philly Classic did so well. It’s a worthy reminder that circuit racing works so well. The 23km circuit had two key features: Lemon Hill and ‘The Wall ’, both places where fans could spend the day and feel a part of the race.

One spectator I spoke to who was on ‘The Wall’ said, “The atmosphere was electric; I loved it. People into cycling, people not into cycling, lots of people just celebrating. It was cool to see how everyone got behind every rider, celebrating the guy last as much as the guys at the front. It felt like a grown-up, World Tour version of Tulsa Tough”

Bike races need roads to close, and naturally that brings disruption. Getting the community to tolerate the event is one of the biggest barriers it faces. Philadelphia didn’t just tolerate the race; it embraced it:

“It felt like the whole city was around it, like their basketball team was in the finals,” Andy Lydic, an American pro who competed, said. “Every restaurant, every gas station, every cafe I went into. Everyone knew about it and was so excited for it to be back. Philly is a big sports city, and it was like cycling was their new adopted sport”

Another rider’s take was simpler: “Electric. It was unreal.”

Ten years is long enough for a whole generation not to know about the race. Families who’d never watched a bike race in their lives were bringing their kids down because professional sport was happening on the roads they usually use to drive to school and work. The US isn’t a country where professional sports come to your doorstep free of charge.

The videos from the fans on course say a thousand words. The atmosphere was incredible. It makes you want to step inside your phone and witness it firsthand. I had serious FOMO. I wanted to be on both sides of the barriers: racing it in person and experiencing the crowds, but drinking beers on the side of the road, being a part of the noise.

What’s next?

The livestream was provided for free on YouTube, which meant it was easy to watch - one of cycling’s biggest problems since the demise of GCN+. The infographics on the left of the screen were nothing special for pro sport, but a step forward from what we usually have in cycling. For a hardcore cycling fan, the commentary team wasn’t the best, but I’ll let that slide.

With my bike racing brain on, the Philly Classic should rise to a .PRO race, crucially not a World Tour race. In doing so, it would allow US-based Continental teams to continue racing while also attracting a deeper start list. It should also move one week further back in the calendar to be closer to GP Quebec and Montreal. In this scenario, European teams could race two .WT and one .PRO race within eight days. Logistically, this is easy too. Philadelphia is only an 8hr drive, or a 90-minute flight to Montreal.

The Philly Classic has proven that there is interest in bike racing. The course doesn’t have to be crazy; it has to be convenient. For bike racing to be successful in the US, it must be brought to the people. We can’t expect people to travel to it.

Philadelphia did have an unfair head start. It’s easier to revive a race that was already popular in the community than start from afresh. But the videos from fans on the course show that it was a success. For a bike race to be a success, it doesn’t have to only appeal to cycling fans; heck, it shouldn’t only appeal to cycling fans. It needs to be an event that any casual spectator can enjoy.

Where could it be next? San Francisco could build something incredible around Hawk Hill, but I doubt the city would ever sign off on it. Texas has already proven its appetite with the Breakfast Club’s rapid growth. Bend, or Portland in Oregon, feel like obvious choices.

Whichever city it is, it needs the perfect storm. A local government willing to invest in making the event happen, to remove the bureaucratic barriers. A circuit that lends itself to spectators and exciting racing, and a high enough UCI level to pull some WorldTour teams to the start line.

North American cycling fans have been let down in the 2020s. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve sat in cycling industry meetings and been told that American road racing is dead. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve been told that people don’t care about road racing in America. The races died. The publications stopped covering the US scene. They told me nobody cared. That their data showed trends were going to gravel, and gravel only.

They were wrong. The data is wrong. The industry let itself down. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I’ve travelled across the States to towns big and small. I’ve attended group rides and races of all levels. Every time I write about my experience of racing, or my adventures on the American scene, people would read it, comment, and feel a part of it.

The American fanbase was always there, but the industry gave up on them. They mistook the collapse of the biggest American road races for the collapse of American interest in road racing.

The people showed up this weekend. The sleeping giant is awakening. Now it’s on the sport of cycling to make sure it’s not just Philadelphia that gets to enjoy it.

Thanks to Alec Levy-O’Brien for reading the early draft. To Andy Lydic, Liam Flanagan, Maggie Coles-Lyster and Brad Shenton for the insight. And to Luis Bastardo for the photos.

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When the British government imposed a road-racing ban in the 1890s, cyclists had to get inventive, and the time-trial was born. It allowed them to race but under the nose of the authorities. Going off at one-minute intervals, no one could prove that they were racing. The course codes indicate the location, and they’re deliberately tough to decipher.

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My bike racing life began at one of those time-trials back in 2014. The ‘Fonaby 1 Lap’, a nine-ish mile course. Thirteen-year-old Joe walked into Great Limber village hall with his £6 and received a race number in return. Wearing a flappy jersey and riding an 8-speed Raleigh Revenio road bike, he posted a time of 27:52.

Twelve years after walking into that village hall for the first time, I still pay the same £6 and ride the same Fonaby 1 Lap course. I now hold the course record: 17:36. Twelve years, ten minutes faster.;

I’ve raced my bike all over the world, but there’s a beauty that I ironically can’t quite articulate about returning to the Club TT scene. It’s the same sign-on sheet, the same faces at the start line, the same pre-race routine. It’s like stepping back ten years in my life.

The last three seasons, I’ve averaged one time trial per year. Redlands. 3rd, 1st, and 4th. Each time, I hop on my TT bike two weeks before and do some shakeout sessions. I enjoy it to no end. I always say I’ll spend more time on the TT bike, but it never quite fits with my schedule.

Then, last summer I was sitting in Boulder, watching the British National TT Champs. I had serious FOMO. I committed to myself there that I’d race Nationals in 2026. I also knew there was no better prep than the humble Club 10.

Racing that National Champs TTs is perhaps the most selfish thing I have ever done as an athlete. I didn’t race for my sponsors, I raced as ‘Individual’ in a blacked-out skinsuit. I didn’t race because I thought I would win the jersey - I’m a realist. I didn’t race for financial gain - if anything, it cost me money. I raced for one thing: myself.

Finding myself back in the UK for August, the TT bike was sitting at my parents’ house, and I was staring at an empty race calendar. I thought, why not continue that good time and go back to my roots? It’s been a blast. I’ve broken my own course records on the local courses. Rode a 17:37, a new PB, for 10 miles. I rode 18:16 on my local Club 10 course. I’ve been trying to crack into the 18s since 2018; now I’m questioning if there’s a 17 in there.

I went 3rd at the National 25 Mile TT behind a storming John Archibald and an ever-strong George Peden. I’ve had a thoroughly good time. It’s walking back into the village hall after the race to compare times. It’s the same conversations and questions with everyone, no matter how fast they are. It doesn’t matter if you’ve done a 25-minute 10, or a 17-minute 10; that headwind out was still a bitch, and getting caught at the roundabout still cost you a few seconds.

It’s the unserious seriousness. We’re all racing hyper-optimised bikes out of cars that cost half as much. We’re all scratching our heads over watts and aero. We’re all trying to answer one very simple question: how do I get faster?

I often get asked how I pace a TT. I never have a good answer; “I just do” is my reply. Racing a TT is one of the few times in bike racing that I achieve flow state. My body, brain and bike all work together. There’s something in my subconscious that knows how to regulate the effort. My brain empties; it just knows what to do.

Am I naturally disposed to it physiologically? Am I good because I enjoy it? Do I enjoy it because I’m good at it?

I imagine it’s a bit of everything; add in that it’s the discipline I cut my teeth in as a teenager. Almost every Tuesday night from that summer in 2014, I’d be doing a Lindsey Roads Club TT. All of those miles have clearly added up.

Halfway through writing this I remember I wrote an article for CyclingTips on TTing back in 2020. The link to that piece is now dead (thanks, Outside), but here’s an extract I found in my old drafts:

“The oxymoronic nature of the TT scene is what I love most. It’s a chasm between technology and ‘retroness’. Obsessiveness and friendliness. On one hand, you have space-age kit. There are 3D-printed handlebars and custom-made fairings on helmets. Amateurs regularly visit wind tunnels, and the talk of the carpark is watts and CdA. It’s a simple sport, you can do it on a borrowed bike, or, you can spend twenty grand. On the other hand, there’s not a timing chip in sight, and you can still enter races by postal entry. Each rider is timed with a simple stopwatch and your number dictates the order you start in. To find the start line, there’s niche instructions like: ‘the start is in the layby after the third lamppost, north-east of village X’.”

Tomorrow I’ll be racing the National 10 on the O10/1 course. It’s a pan-flat out-and-back course. About as traditional a 10 as you can get. Here’s the official course description:

I don’t think I’ll win it, but I reckon I’ll be close. I know I’ve got the power and the brain to be competitive; I need to work on the aero side of things. That’s my biggest problem at the minute. Hopping between disciplines, I always feel slightly underprepared against those who race consistently.

I’m also on a borrowed bike. Alexey Vermeulen, an incredible human, gave me his bike for the season - borrowing equipment is also a story of my time-trialling life. That also limits how much money I want to spend on making myself faster on it, knowing I’ll be giving it back.

Going into 2027, I’ll be looking to get my own TT bike, which means I can put as much time and money into making myself as fast as possible on it. The quest for gains in the time-trial scene never ends. Most guys at the pointy end of these races are more optimised than top World Tour pros.

This article is far from what I’d normally write about. Time trialling is not a good spectator sport, nor a good TV product. It doesn’t hold the answers to improving the popularity of the sport. But at the same time, I don’t care. I love time trialling for what it is.

It’s the closest thing our sport has to a 5k, or a marathon - a distance that people of all ages and abilities can measure themselves against. I feel the World Tour should have more time trials in stage racing. This year’s Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift showed how a well-placed TT in an undefined GC battle can throw a cat amongst the pigeons.

There’s nothing cool about being a time trialist. But I was a football goalkeeper before I was a cyclist, so apparently I don’t care about appearances. I wish I had the same natural love and skill for time-trialling as Maggie has for bunch finishes, as Matt Bostock does for a crit, or Bjorn Riley does for riding a mountain bike. I also wish domestic time trialling paid what domestic gravel racing in the US. But of course it doesn’t; why would it?

The race against the clock is a race against yourself, for yourself. It’s the weird, wonderful, and geeky discipline that I owe my whole career to.

When digging up that old CyclingTips article I wrote in 2020, I ended on a line that I’m going to end on today too.

My racing career started at the club TT, and it’s a pretty safe bet that one day, my racing career will end at a club TT too.

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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.

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/joelaverick

The following brands are either financial or equipment partners of mine, and allow me to do cool stuff.

• Pullwood Consulting

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• Endura

• Rudy Project

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The crux of my article is simple: I hope the WWT doesn’t sleepwalk into the men’s model while blindly chasing equality. Equality is not the answer here; building a better system is.

Thanks,

Joe

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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 Delcourt 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.

If you enjoyed this article, here’s a recent piece I wrote about FDJ United Suez signing Red Bull:

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. Thanks for your support.

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/joelaverick

The following brands are either financial or equipment partners of mine, and allow me to do cool stuff.

• Pullwood Consulting

• ENVE Composites

• Endura

• Rudy Project

• dussl

• Quoc

Now they’ve got Red Bull too.

The worst-kept secret in women’s pro cycling is finally out, and of course they chose the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift to announce it. The biggest name in sports marketing looked at the best team in women’s cycling and decided it wanted in.

How long has this been in the works for?

It was the end of February when I first got word that Red Bull would be signing with FDJ-Suez. When the often-correct Daniel Benson announced on his Substack in early March that something was brewing, I was certain.

Little was said through the Classics season, but a spate of big-name contract renewals implied a bigger budget had been secured. When Kate Courtney’s signing was announced with immediate effect just weeks before the Tour de France Femmes, it became a case of when, not if.

The when answered itself. There's no bigger race to launch a partner like Red Bull than the Tour de France.

Why has this happened?

FDJ-Suez need more money, and Red Bull is a sponsor every sports team wants.

Stephen Delcourt has a problem most managers would kill for: his team can't stop winning. But it's costing him a fortune. In the midst of a WWT salary boom, the surest way to increase your own wage bill is to keep winning.

The Vollering and Chabbey contract renewals through to 2028 won’t have come cheap, and they’re only the start. Paris-Roubaix winner Franzi Koch will command a very different salary when her current deal expires in 2027, given her performances since she signed.

He’ll want to invest elsewhere too: perhaps a squad pushed towards twenty riders, more altitude camps, or a better-resourced performance department.

The 29% cost inflation.

At the start of 2026, Delcourt told Cyclingnews his costs had risen by 29%. His team’s success this year will push that number higher again.

“We are like a start-up without funds. We play with money that we don’t have in our pockets. That’s dangerous…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. I really feel that if [costs] continue to increase at 29 per cent, I need to be calm and not go too fast.:”

How’s the Red Bull deal structured?

The evidence shows it may not be as significant an investment as many expected, but that remains unclear. To me, this reads more like a blanket helmet sponsorship of the team.

It’s a very different arrangement to the deal Red Bull struck with BORA-Hansgrohe in 2024. There, they acquired a controlling interest, a 51% stake, in the holding company behind the team, costing a rumoured $10m.

The tells with FDJ United - Suez are in what isn’t happening. Red Bull aren’t in the team name, nor do they have their logo on the jersey. This is an increasingly rare move from them. Across their sports portfolio, Red Bull usually takes a controlling interest or naming rights in the team, often both.

Red Bull brings more than just money.

While we’ll never know what the financials of the deal look like, it’s worth remembering that Red Bull brings a lot more than financial support to the table.

Start with the brand recognition. Red Bull is arguably the biggest brand in sports marketing, and having them on board changes the positioning of the team. For attracting new riders, staff, and sponsors, Red Bull brings that extra bit of legitimacy.

There's the activation spend too. Red Bull always invests around their sponsorships. Whether that’s content, events, or campaigns. FDJ don't need to be taught how to do that. But this should help their brand step up to a new level.

Finally, there’s the performance play. The Red Bull performance team is huge, and we’ll likely see FDJ-Suez take advantage of those resources and their Athlete Performance Centres in LA and Salzburg.

Expect a development play to follow.

Wherever Red Bull invests, talent development follows. Their philosophy across the sports portfolio is always long-term - build the pipeline, not just the first team.

In football, Erling Haaland came to the top via Red Bull Salzburg; in Formula One, Max Verstappen came up through their junior programme. Their Rookies cycling project has already produced names like Boichis and Finn.

FDJ are already winning the present. A Red Bull-style development pipeline is how you win the future. ‘Tomorrow is decided today’, as their own slogan puts it. I doubt it’ll show as a traditional development team.

Women's cycling doesn't have the pyramid for one yet. The U23 calendar is thin, and there’s nowhere near enough racing at the level below the WWT to develop a rider properly.

If Red Bull were serious about development, it’d be investing in the infrastructure - a proper development calendar, or a league that gives young riders somewhere to race. That’s unlikely, of course.

Realistically, FDJ-Suez will probably sign more young riders onto their roster (like they have with Thaïs Poirier).

Who else could sign?

FDJ-Suez have fifteen riders signed for 2027 and look to be holding their core group together. Amid a run of re-signings, one name stands out: Kiwi sprinter Ally Wollaston has yet to commit and is rumoured to be heading elsewhere.

The Red Bull connection makes for some obvious guesswork. Zoe Bäckstedt is the lazy pick, but she’s contracted to Canyon-SRAM through 2028, so it seems unlikely. Blanka Vas is another Red Bull name, but tied to SD Worx through 2027.

Looking at the squad, I’d want a big-name sprinter. They don’t strictly need one, but WWT racing has a high density of bunch sprints so not having one feels amiss. I’d also look at Pfeiffer Georgi. Her Picnic-PostNL contract is up this year, and the list of riders who’ve left that team and improved is ever-growing.

Where can FDJ-Suez improve further?

The team are the gold standard, but the best can get better.

FDJ United-Suez isn’t a long-term identity; it’s a sponsor name. Naming rights are cycling’s greatest branding flaw: the name belongs to whoever’s paying, so when they stop paying, the name and its history can vanish.

The team have built something genuinely valuable, but none of it is anchored to a name they own. The best franchises in world sport outlive any sponsor. A team building a brand this good should own the one that carries it.

Could they do a luxury goods play?

For a sport with an ever wealthier audience, cycling has yet to have its luxury goods era. While watch brands like Tudor and Richard Mille have entered the men’s World Tour, nobody has gone further. Burberry partnered with Qhubeka NextHash in 2021, but that lasted five minutes. BOSS sits on the flank of Red Bull-BORA’s kit, and partner Tudor Pro Cycling, but neither partnership has never amounted to much more than a logo.

FDJ could be the team to do something here. They’re French, they’re brand literate, and they're out front of a fast-growing sport. My brain goes to LVMH: a French luxury goods conglomerate for a French superteam.

LVMH are investing big in the sports world. Last year, they entered a 10-year partnership as the ‘global luxury partner’ of Formula 1. Earlier this year, the LVMH-backed private equity firm, L Catterton, bought a major stake in Hyrox.

The sports audience is the one luxury wants.

Where does this leave the WWT?

The best team in the world just got richer, and it got richer because it was already the best team in the world. That’s how elite sport works: winners attract money.

Most sports have mechanisms that push back to keep competition fair; cycling does not. No salary cap, no revenue sharing, no nothing.

The outcome is likely that the gap between the top and the bottom of the WWT increases further. A small group of big-budget teams will pull clear, and everyone else fights to exist. Racing becomes more predictable as a consequence.

Women's cycling has spent decades fighting for money. It's now finding out that money brings its own problems too.

The team deserves this investment.

FDJ-Suez have done everything right.

They built the team’s culture, performance and brand. In doing so, made themselves the obvious place for a company like Red Bull to put its money. That’s the lesson for the rest of the WWT. FDJ-Suez operate like a modern sports team, not a traditional cycling team.

What they’ve done is not a secret formula. It takes investment, risk and time. It’s being willing to leave the cycling bubble and think differently. It’s the reason they’re thriving, and the reason most pro cycling teams are not.

If you want to read more about the FDJ United-Suez team, I wrote this at the start of last year.

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. Thanks for your support.

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The following brands are either financial or equipment partners of mine, and allow me to do cool stuff.

• Pullwood Consulting

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England last won the football World Cup in 1966. Sixty years without success for the country that created the game. For the French, it’s been over forty years since their last male Tour de France winner. They can’t find a way to win their own race.

Neither country is short of talent. Neither is short of money, infrastructure, or fans. All they’re short of is winning the thing that matters. And every few years, someone comes along who makes the whole nation believe this could be the year.

For France, that someone is Paul Seixas. Nineteen years old and racing his first Tour de France, he’s already carrying the weight of a nation. Alaphilippe made them ask “what if” in 2019 with that magnificent two weeks in yellow. Before him, Bardet’s back-to-back podiums in 2016 and 2017 were close, but a million miles from yellow.

Paul Seixas will not win the Tour de France this year, but the French are back to believing. I know the deal, because I’m English and there’s a World Cup on. At the time of writing, England are two games from history. Two games is close enough to start believing it could happen, but as I know all too well, it is the hope that kills you.

This World Cup has been brilliant. After Qatar and Russia, the bar for a host nation was low. There were many questions going into the US World Cup, and Trump proved once again that he’s world-class at making everything about himself. But football has prevailed - sport is bigger than it all, and will bring people together.

It’s been a World Cup of superstars. Haaland was Norway’s main man. Kane and Bellingham are carrying England. Mbappé is ruling for France. Messi for Argentina. That’s how sport works, you rely on your biggest players in your biggest games, and there is no bigger prize in sport than the World Cup.

Why is it, though, that some of these superstars are different in a national shirt? Mbappé at Real Madrid is not the same player as Mbappé for France.

I think the difference is that you can’t transfer away from your country. When you pull on that national team shirt, you’re not representing an owner or a sponsor. You’re representing millions of people watching at home. A flag does something a badge can’t. That thing has a name. Purpose.

Which brings me back to cycling. Professional cycling teams don’t have flags, but many have a culture deeply rooted in a country. Visma is Dutch. Movistar, Spanish. UNO-X, Norwegian. The same was once true of Team Sky. Those days are gone.

When they launched in 2010, Team Sky’s purpose was simple: win the Tour de France with a British rider within five years. Britain had never produced a Tour winner; ambition bordered on delusion. By 2012, it was Wiggins in yellow on the Champs-Élysées, and by 2018, Brits had won six of the last seven yellow jerseys.

The ‘British winner in five years’ goal wasn’t just marketing; it was the operating system the team ran on. It told them who to hire, what to sacrifice, and where to focus resources. Only three of the eight riders in that 2012 Tour line-up were British, but two of them went first and second overall. The third was Mark Cavendish. He won three stages in the rainbow jersey, including the final stage on the Champs-Élysées. The team’s core was undeniably British.

Fifteen years later, ask what NetCompany - INEOS exists to do. Take your time. I’ll wait.

Britain will never again reach the dizzy heights of 2012. The country was drunk on Olympic success. Wiggins winning their first Tour de France, before backing it up with a home Olympic Gold, meant cycling was in the national spotlight.

But the part that stings is that Team Sky’s success created a golden generation of British riders. Today, Great Britain has 33 WorldTour and 15 ProConti riders; in 2010, those numbers were 14 and 3.

One of Team Sky’s biggest mistakes was being too late to build a development team. Talent fled to the continent, and by the time that generation came of WorldTour age, the team had seemingly abandoned its British roots, and with it, the riders it should have built around.

Imagine the alternative - a British superteam stacked with the very riders its own success produced. These days, it feels like the team’s hiring policy changes with the wind. Once upon a time, the whole country got behind Team Sky. How many people are NetCompany - INEOS fans?

The England football team knows something about this. For a decade, the national team looked like a group that couldn’t care less. Players cared more for club than country. That changed under Gareth Southgate’s management. He took over at the lowest point and rebuilt the one thing that was missing. Not the players’ talent, but the team’s culture. Southgate’s no longer at the helm, but his work means the country is back to believing.

A team’s culture can be rebuilt. It just has to remember why it started in the first place.

Seixas will give France hope for the next decade. Kane and Bellingham will bring England hope this week. It’s the hope that kills you. The only thing worse is a team nobody hopes for.

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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. Thanks for your support.

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/joelaverick

The following brands are either financial or equipment partners of mine, and allow me to do cool stuff.

• Pullwood Consulting

• ENVE Composites

• Endura

• Rudy Project

• dussl

• Quoc

Sometimes I need to do a big brain dump. It helps me centre my thoughts before I write a longer piece. This is one of those times.

I’m sitting on a flight between Denver and Chicago, with the next leg being over to Barcelona. It’s time to head back home. These last two weeks have been pretty special. Trying to race National TT Champs in Wales, and then a 72-hour race 4500 miles away in Steamboat, Colorado, was certainly something.

Then, I had a week of downtime in Colorado with the Lydic’s. I saw old friends, explored the mountains, went sailing, and spent the 4th of July weekend up in Keystone.

Next up, back to Girona for a few days, then I’m heading up to Andorra to spend some time in the mountains with Maggie. We’ll be heading to the MTB World Cup this weekend too, my first time seeing it in person, and I’m excited.

So, what’s on my mind?

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Can we launch a team?

I still want to launch a team. There’s a part of me that wishes I could put it to bed, but it always keeps coming back to me. There’s a product to be had there.

A team that focuses on building something for the fans across the US and UK markets. A team that builds a global cycling club alongside it. Imagine being able to line up at Unbound in the same colours as a team racing at the front of the race. Then seeing that same team race the biggest crits or road races in the country. It needs to be performance-oriented, but more importantly, it needs to be fun. Sports teams are entertainment - cycling must remember that.

This is nothing new to those of you who have been following me for a while, but it’s something I simply cannot leave alone. I can only imagine the support we’d get if we launched it.

It’s the funding part which I’m yet to figure out. How do you pull together a good six-figure budget? It seems that you need a healthy dose of luck and skill to do that.

There are a lot of new people here, so if you have any thoughts, hit me on email: jtlcycling@gmail.com

The Life Time GP need to dream bigger

I’m also in the brainstorming phase about a big Life Time Grand Prix series. There’s a very real chance that this reaches 10,000 words similar to my ‘Peloton Economy’ piece.

What Life Time have done for the US racing market is nothing short of incredible, but I can’t help but think about how much room there is for growth. My brain is asking the question of what would happen if the key events were bought out with the goal of building a bigger league? Life Time has nailed the mass participation side of the business, but when it comes to a pro sports league, I have to say they are lacking.

From media coverage to the number of race days, branding, athlete selection, overall strategy, and so much more. What would the series look like if its only goal was to grow? How different would the strategy be if it existed outside of the Life Time portfolio?

The biggest unlock for me is moving it to a spectator-friendly sport. To bring in big sponsorship dollars, there have to be more eyeballs; to me, that tells you exactly where investment should go.

It’s funny how, in a world of sports moving to be more spectator-friendly, gravel continues to embrace long distances. The LTGP is the perfect test ground for new things. Why not introduce a Grand Prix and Wild Card only Short Track race? How about experimenting with having Big Sugar as a 50-mile race, which worked well last year, and a two-hour race is a better product than a 4-hour race.

Expanding the calendar is a no-brainer. It’s ridiculous that the series is only six races, especially when you consider two of them are back-to-back weekends at the end of October. A consistent storyline has to be in place across the year. And, what’s the whole thing with having a two-month break from Unbound to Leadville? It’s nonsensical.

I think we’re going to see a very interesting scenario play out when UCI World Gravel Champs clash with motivations around the LTGP in October. The penultimate round of the Grand Prix, Little Sugar, clashes with the UCI World Gravel Champs in Perth. How many guys will we see go to Worlds over Little Sugar? The $50,000 on the line for winning the series is obviously significant, but racing for money alone is never going to attract the biggest names. The best riders in the world would rather chase the Rainbow Jersey than $50k.

The Tour de France has the yellow jersey, The Masters has the Green Jacket, and the World Cup has an iconic trophy. What does the LTGP have? The series doesn’t have a tangible something that people can understand. The prize is just cash. That needs addressing.

Final word on branding, the Life Time Grand Prix needs to improve here. There’s not a colour, a logo, or really anything that can be attributed to being them. It comes across as very grey and extremely corporate. The series needs to be its own brand. Look at Red Hook, they are the gold standard.

I respect Life Time and the crew so much for what they have done for the sport, and what they are doing. They want to grow responsibly, but for a sports league to take off, it needs big initial investment and even bigger dreams.

There’s more on this to come; I need to sit down with my keyboard and a few weeks.

Firecracker 50

I found myself up in the Colorado mountains for the 4th of July weekend. My old teammate and close friend Cole Davis was on the start line for the Firecracker 50 in Breckenridge. What I saw with my own eyes was nothing short of spectacular.

The race started on the town’s main street, which was lined three or four deep for over a kilometre. There must’ve been five thousand people on the side of the road. They were all there to watch the 4th of July parade, but the support for the bike race was incredible. I’ve never seen a bike race in the US with that much support.

The town has made the bike race a part of the parade, a part of that day. It was something special to witness, and I had a huge smile on my face as I walked through a wall of noise.

The World Cup

Football was my first love, and although I don’t follow it nearly as close as when I was younger, watching England brings out nine-year-old Joe. The England-Mexico game was class.

My biggest takeaway from the World Cup has been the whole world experiencing what I’ve been saying about the US for the last couple years. The US is a contentious place these days, and trust me, I get it. Equally, you cannot paint 330million people with one orange coloured brush. The people in the US are amazing and welcoming. The country is full of beautiful scenery.

It’s been cool to see.

Some reading bits

Finally, if you’ve made it this far, thank you. Here are a few bits that I’ve been reading recently that I recommend you check out:

• Le Fric: Family, Power and Money: The Business of the Tour de France

• The Formula: How Rogues, Geniuses, and Speed Freaks Reengineered F1 Into the World's Fastest-Growing Sport

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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. Thanks for your support.

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/joelaverick

The following brands are either financial or equipment partners of mine, and allow me to do cool stuff.

• Pullwood Consulting

• ENVE Composites

• Endura

• Rudy Project

• dussl

• Quoc

More brief than normal, as I only arrived in Steamboat Springs fifteen hours before the race started. But, long story short, you should put SBT GRVL on your calendar for next year.

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1. The best course in American, if not world gravel?

It’s an honest and true gravel race.

A sporting course where the balance is right. It’s dynamic, with multiple options to keep it fresh year on year. There’s a low risk of mud. No place you’ll blow up a bike. Not even a major risk of flatting. The black course is a perfect distance; not every race has to be six hours plus. Hard enough to hurt, manageable enough for everyone.

SBT GRVL’s narrative isn’t surviving, it’s all about racing.

2. SBT is back, but will it return to its best?

After a few years of calendar clashes and arguments with locals, SBT feels like it’s back.

The town is beautiful, the event is great, and the course is spectacular. There was a point in gravel’s young history that people spoke about SBT in the same breath as Unbound. Those days seem to have gone, which is a real shame.

SBT has all the ingredients of a world-class gravel race; it’s just missing the start list it deserves. Will it return to its 2024 strength? Only time will tell.

3. The organisation is great.

The SBT organiser and comms team are gold standard. Pre-race instructions were clear, the smoke risk was handled transparently and quickly, and the course itself was safe. In fact, I think this is the first big gravel race I haven’t had to write “We’ve got to talk about safety.”

Extra kudos for the good prize money, the free photos sent to every participant, and the post-race food and drink.

4. Shock! Specialized win again.

Is this the most successful first year of a team in cycling’s history?

Specialized ‘only’ had Keegan and Sofia lining up at SBT, but of course, they won.

Those two winning is nothing new, but their pure dominance cannot go unmentioned.

5. Life Time events shouldn’t dictate the calendar

The pro field at non-Life Time races in the US has seriously dropped off, and the vacuum of start-list depth has been disappointing to see.

We need more gravel race days and more regions of the country to have big races. There needs to be a way to generate buzz outside of the Unbound, Sea Otter, or Leadville strongholds.

Ironically, the LTGP is missing a race exactly like SBT or Mid South, and it’s still CRAZY to me that they don’t have a single summer gravel race. We have Life Time to thank for modern-day pro gravel in the States, but it’s a shame that other races don’t get the same recognition.

6. Steamboat’s altitude is no joke.

The average elevation of the black course is 2,178m (7,145ft).

With the start line sitting a touch over 2,000m (6500ft), and the highest point of the race at 2,500m (8,200ft), altitude is a constant presence. Everything feels harder.

Paradoxically, the course doesn’t really feel like you’re at that high of an altitude; American high altitude feels very different to European altitude.

7. Bring races to cool places.

You’d go to Steamboat Springs whether there was a race on or not, and that’s kinda the point. Colorado in summer is hard to argue with. The mountains, the town, the whole setting, they all add something that Kansas cannot.

The mid-west gravel scene has its charm that I love, and I don’t want to take anything away from it. But Steamboat is more a ‘fun for the whole family’ sorta place. It’s a destination race; heck, there’s even a rodeo the same weekend.

It’s a true American western experience.

8. I want to come back for the Hill Climb.

The Friday night special event.

A Hill Climb that doubles up as a costume party (fancy dress for my British readers) that triples up as a party.

I couldn’t attend as I was still travelling, and I’m disappointed that I missed it.

9. I’m world-class at doing too much.

A personal note. Big shock as racing TT Nationals on Thursday afternoon in Wales, flying 4,500 miles on Friday, and driving 4 hours on Saturday is sub-optimal prep for a big race.

I had good legs at TT Nationals and was hoping, praying, that they’d transfer to Sunday’s race. Unfortunately, I picked up a sniffle on the plane - probably as a result.

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Thanks to Andy Lydic, Rob Lydic, and Logan Jones-Wilkins for contributing.

-To read Logan’s articles from the weekend, click here.

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. Thanks for your support.

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/joelaverick

The following brands are either financial or equipment partners of mine, and allow me to do cool stuff.

• Pullwood Consulting

• ENVE Composites

• Endura

• Rudy Project

• dussl

• Quoc

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1. The London Nocturne is back.

The London Nocturne returned with a bang after eight years away.

The crowds were deep, the racing was good, the media was great, and the buzz in the city was real. It’s exactly what the British cycling scene needed. One sports event expert who attended summed it up to me: “Very successful return. Masterpiece of event logistics.”

The best part? The City of London Corporation approached James Pope, the organiser. Not the other way around. That detail matters, there’s a desire for bike racing.

2. Bring bike racing to the people.

Make things that people want.

To have a good bike race, you need fans. To have fans, it needs to be an event that people want to go. It needs to be fun and in a location that’s easily accessible.

Crits are the answer. Put it in the centre of a city with an incredible cycling scene, and you’ll get a crowd - it’s not rocket science.

This is what cycling needs.

3. The right economic model.

The question nobody asks loudly enough: who pays for these events?

The Nocturne has kinda answered it. Their model is varied: multiple sponsors, a Pro-Am corporate day on the Friday, and buy-in from local stakeholders. It’s also why the City of London’s approach to Pope matters so much. Everything becomes much simpler, and most importantly, cheaper when you own the streets.

The Nocturne also has a huge future lever to pull with the London running community.

4. What’s next for Nocturne?

Build. And keep building.

The goal should be to make it a race that the biggest crit riders in the world want to attend. If you have the best riders, the event grows and grows. The potential is huge.

It looks like there needs to be a clearer qualifying system - maybe a flying TT lap in the afternoon - to make the gridding system fairer? From a safety perspective, it the neutral lap needs scrapping too.

5. Can the UK build?

It’s not just the Nocturne, VIA Crit has proven the model in London too. Ilkley and Otley do a class job up north, as does Sheffield GP.

Is there a world where GCN hosts a crit/ event in Bath or Bristol? How about British Cycling organise one in Manchester? If they’re going to organise the Tour of Britain, why not grassroots too?

Is there a point where we can have the ‘Battle of London’ crit week with the Nocturne, a Crystal Palace, and the VIA Crit within one week? Or if Ilkley, Otley, and Sheffield formed a Yorkshire Cup?

Good events are the answer to unlocking the cycling scene.

6. Road is not dead.

Ride Regent’s Park at 7am on a Friday and tell me domestic road cycling is dying. There are hundreds of riders of all ages and abilities riding laps before the city woke up.

The same thing happens every morning in every major city in the world. A thriving, healthy, completely alive road scene playing out before most people have had their coffee.

So why does everyone keep telling me the road is dead? It isn’t.

The audience is there, it always has been. Events just need to focus on being as fun a spectator experience as possible.

7. The 2010s were NOT a baseline.

The British cycling boom was extraordinary. Success on a global level was normalised, and the domestic scene underneath it was thriving. But underneath it all was a different world.

Marketing spend in the 2010s was more liberal, with more money floating around and less scrutiny on where it went. With the rise of influencer marketing and targeted ads, coupled with a world of higher interest rates and tighter budgets post-Brexit and COVID, the money situation is different. I’m not saying that’s the sole reason so many domestic cycling teams collapsed, but it was one of the many dominoes.

Yet not everything that drives a brand can be measured by a dashboard. In-person events count for something a spreadsheet can’t capture.

8. Organisers don’t get enough credit.

It only takes a few good events, and an entire narrative can shift. James Pope, I don’t know you, but what you put on was spectacular - thank you.

The same can be said for David Trimble. He did it with Red Hook, he’s now doing it in running. Michael and Mike at VIA Crit deserve credit for what they’ve done, too.

There are countless others I haven’t named, and thank you all. Often it comes down to these people who have the passion to take the initial steps and risks.

So here’s my question: what can the industry do to support these people? To lead the charge and invest in events rather than waiting for individuals to prove it works first?

9. A moment for the Voi City Bike race.

Formula 1 had fun with a Lego car race, MotoGP had their tuk-tuk race. The Voi City Bike race was from the same playbook.

As the winner, Tobias Daulhaus (who also happens to work in marketing) said:

“It’s something instantly recognisable by a mass audience, paired with the silliness of the racing and people committing in full race kit. It’s driving conversation, and leading to more curiosity around this big spectacle.”

This race was made for social media, and that’s what modern sport does best.

10. Why don’t we have a Criterium World Champion?

Seriously, question to the world, why don’t we have a Criterium Rainbow Jersey?

Imagine a World Crit Champs taking place in the heart of London, on the streets of Berlin, or under the Manhattan skyline. A man can dream.

11. Or, a Global Crit Series?

Tulsa Tough. Armed Forces. Athens Twilight. Gastown. ZuriCrit. VIA Crit. London Nocturne. PoliCrit. And a load more I’ve forgotten.

There is a world where we have a global crit scene. Bike racing in the heart of the biggest cities in the world. How can it happen?

12. £250,000 for another Rebellion.

It was Matt Bostock who won the men’s race. Bocky is an insanely good crit rider, one of the best in the world. He was also a Rebellion rider.

Pound for pound, crit racing offers one of the best ROIs in the sport. You can build the best crit team in the world for a very modest number by sports marketing standards. I’ve seen the potential firsthand. I know the playbook. I have the timeline. The only thing I’m missing is the financial part.

Rebellion had so much unrealised potential; we can build it back bigger and better. We can take bike racing to the people. We can make something that people want to be a part of. Something that means something.

I have the financials. I have the spreadsheets. All it takes is one brand willing to back it.

Call me.

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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. Thanks for your support.https://www.buymeacoffee.com/joelaverick

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

• Pullwood Consulting

• ENVE Composites

• Endura

• Rudy Project

• dussl

• Quoc

Unbound is in the rearview mirror, and the world of gravel has left Emporia for another year. The race always brings up plenty of talking points, and marks the point in the season where two of the three biggest gravel races are done for the year.

If they haven’t already, brands and organisers will be starting to figure out their 2027 priorities and strategies for the year ahead. I had plenty of thoughts on my flight back from the States, so I decided another piece was needed.

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1. The Triple Crown is on.

Traka. Unbound. UCI World Champs.

If it hasn’t been already, I’m designating that trio the gravel triple crown.

Both Sofia Gomez Villafane and Mads Würtz Schmidt only have one to go, and with many dubbing the Aussie World Champs course a true gravel race, the odds are in their favour.

If either of them pulls it off, it will be the greatest gravel season ever.

Side note here. The fact that UCI Gravel Worlds clashes with the penultimate race in the LTGP is dumb. Nobody cares which of you chose the date first, can you both just talk so there’s not a clash in future? Thanks.

2. The world’s best male gravel racer isn’t in the LTGP.

The Life Time Grand Prix has never been a gravel series. It calls itself “the professional movement of off-road racing”, yet the global narrative has always positioned it as a gravel series. With a 50:50 split, the LTGP is as much a MTB as a gravel series.

There is no doubt that the best male gravel racer in the world right now is Mads Würtz Schmidt, but with him not being in the Grand Prix, it does raise questions. If neither the world’s best male MTB riders nor gravel riders sit in the LTGP, it’s an interesting dilemma.

Life Time has never had the issue of the clear best male pro gravel racer not being in their series. My 2c is to lean into the multi-discipline angle and add an event or two on road bikes too.

3. Teamwork works.

Quelle surprise as teamwork works in a bike race. I feel vindicated, and this is a bit of an ‘I told you so’. When I said a few years back that true teamwork can change gravel racing, I was accused of being too much of a roadie.

Now we’ve seen just how important teams can be, the question is, who can follow?

Here’s what I wrote back in 2024:

“Specialized is the obvious choice. 

It makes sense from a geographical perspective; they have one of the biggest marketing budgets too. They’re already close with Matt Beers, Sofia Gomez Villafane and Howard Grotts. They also sponsor a lot of individual athletes: Ian Boswell, Lance Haidet, Gee Schreurs (via SD Worx), Sarah Sturm. They could reasonably pull all of this together to create a full-blown team.

“Wait, didn’t Sarah Sturm lead out Gee at Unbound even though they’re not on the same team?”, I hear you cry. Well, yes. Maybe. Kind of. It’s complicated.

I imagine if Specialized launched a full-blown gravel team then the Canyon Collective would follow suit.”'

4. But who can actually afford a team?

A pro racing team is a money game, trust me, I’ve tried (trying) to launch one. With Specialized’s team easily in the seven-figures, and Canyon rumoured to be up there too, it’s not a cheap endeavour.

PAS Racing are one of gravel’s best teams and consistently proves they can compete at the biggest races. However, with the team not having a common bike sponsor, there’s a weird paradox where the riders both are and aren’t teammates. If Tobias Kongstad (PAS Racing, Specialized bike) came to the line with Magnus Bak Klaris (PAS Racing, Factor Racing), the tactics are an inherently different calculation than if Specialized Racing had two guys together.

Scott Bikes has a similar issue. Their male gravel roster is impressively deep - Brennan Wertz, Cam Jones, Matt Wilson - and while they don’t race like a team, they’re certainly in alliance. Now, imagine the three of them are singing from the same hymn sheet for one shared goal. That’s a lot of horsepower.

As I said, though, it’s a money game. The sponsor-alliance privateer hybrid squad is much cheaper than an all-singing, all-dancing pro team. And, unless you’re winning as often and controlling the narrative as much as Specialized, is gravel racing worthy of that seven-figure investment yet?

5. The gravel season goes quiet.

In the first half of the season, the biggest gravel races arrive in quick succession. Sea Otter, Traka, and Unbound are separated by only six weeks, with ‘semi-classics’ like BWR Arizona, Santa Vall, and Mid South around there too.

The post-Unbound slump is very real. Some of those ‘semi-classic’ level races - SBT Gravel, The Rift, Oregon Trail, Garmin Gravel Worlds - are coming up, but none that reflect the upper echelons of Traka or Unbound in terms of start list, cultural relevance, or media coverage.

This isn’t a new observation. I’ve said for years that I struggle to find the same excitement for the post-Unbound calendar as I do for the races that come before it. If I raced mountain bikes, it might be a different story, but in gravel we’ve built a calendar where two of the world’s three biggest races are over before summer has even begun.

6. Should the LTGP expand?

Life Time’s decision to remove The Rad and Crusher in the Tushar aged like fine wine and truly opened up the series. However, having a professional series that only races six times per season isn’t enough from a racing or media angle.

After Unbound, the series has 2.5 months of nothing until Leadville. Leadville brings a week of hype, and then the series largely quietens down until the Sugar’s double header at the end of October. While Chequamegon deserves its place on the schedule in September, it doesn't carry the same global significance as the other marquee events

Long term, I believe the LTGP should aim to grow to ten races. The current gravel calendar is too concentrated around the first half of the season. A summer event in Oregon could make sense, and there's already a proven blueprint there if you call Chad from Breakaway Promotions. An East Coast race could broaden the series geographically. You could even experiment with a Grand Prix/Wildcard-only short-track MTB race at Sea Otter. Or, dare I say it, add Tulsa Tough to the mix.

There’s a lot of nuance to expanding the series, especially when choosing which towns you expand into, but that’s an article for another day.

7. LTGP Wildcard Consistency.

I haven’t given this too much thought, but with both Matt Wilson and Skyler Taylor wildcarding into the Grand Prix two years in a row, it does question the overall selection protocol.

Paradoxically, I could argue that the selection profile is actually too detailed. I know elite sport is full of ifs and ands, but if Matt Wilson didn’t flat out of the breakaway in Big Sugar, he would be in the LTGP. It’s crystal clear to everyone that he deserved that spot.

I have heard an argument that the Wildcards should get auto-qualification for the year after, but that’s silly. There’s a separate, much-tighter argument that there should be fewer pre-selected spots and more Wildcards, which would, in theory, improve the series’ competitiveness.

Furthermore, the fact that we choose the Wildcard from the two gravel events (Sea Otter, Unbound) when it’s a 50:50 gravel:MTB series, deserves bringing up. If we throw in my Sea Otter short-track race idea, that would help ;)

8. How soon will ultra racing scale?

There’s an argument to be had that ultra racing in 2026 is how gravel racing was pre-2020. It’s niche, but growing in both popularity and sponsorship dollars.

The outcome remains to be seen, but as athletes continue to receive $$, then further emphasis will be put on winning. We’ve already seen a narrative of cheating begin to unfold at the top, another sign that it’s going towards all-out racing.

But, I thought the whole point of ultra was the story behind it all? Wait, isn’t that what we said about gravel…

9. Gravel keeps growing.

North of 500k views on the YouTube livestream, and the highlights are currently sitting at 180k. These are big numbers; gravel racing is still growing. Of course, Unbound is the biggest race in the discipline, so these numbers will be higher than the rest of the races, but that doesn’t undermine anything.

Gravel racing is young; it will make mistakes and have headwinds, but there is no doubting that it continues to grow in relevance. There’s no better time to be a part of growing the sport’s future.

Some thoughts on media:

I apologise that I haven't done any deep dives recently. I feel that I set the research bar so high with The Peloton Economy that anything smaller doesn't feel worthwhile. That's the wrong way to think about it; listicle and long form both have their place

There’s also an element of me writing to the reader. If you’re reading this section, then you’re on Substack, and thank you. But the reality is that most of my traffic now comes from what I've dubbed 'swipey posts' on Instagram - the article cut down into individual slides.

For reference, here is the difference between my Substack and Instagram statistics on a recent post:

Metrics aren't everything to me, but the goal of my writing is to get people talking and help change the sport for the better. If a format change means the piece reaches more people, that's a good thing.

There's also an algorithmic reality. Instagram pushes content to new audiences in a way Substack does not. On Substack, my ceiling is more or less my subscriber count. On Instagram, a post can find people who've never heard of me. This is similar to how YouTube works, too.

The broader media context matters here too. Attention spans are shrinking, and reading habits are changing. I often joke that most of my articles are toilet reading. This means they need to be of a certain duration and layout; the mini-sections I’m doing aren’t an accident.

Media outlets rely on web traffic to sell advertising and are caught in an impossible situation. This is why we’re seeing paywalls pop up everywhere. It’s also why we’re seeing more sponsored content on media sites; these articles are written in a journalistic style, but they are as far from journalism.

There is a prime culprit of this in cycling media, who I’m not going to name. It’s a shame, because they used to be the gold standard of journalism. I understand why they’re doing it, as the economics of media don’t leave many options, but it still sucks.

What’s particularly deceptive is that they will note in print that a piece is ‘produced in association with Brand X’, then run a very similar article online without the disclaimer. They are probably doing much better financially now because of this, but the ‘Independent Journalism’ that runs on their website ticker holds little truth.

Glass houses, I hear you cry. I am sponsored, so I have bias. Guilty! I feel there's a difference. I'm sponsored as an athlete, but when I write about my sponsors, I make my conflicts of interest abundantly clear. I also see myself as a commentator, not a journalist. I don’t dress up my opinion as independent reporting. Maybe that’s a thought for another day.

Anyway, this section ended up being much longer than I intended. All I will say is that I’m happy my livelihood doesn’t depend on my writing, and that I don’t have any plans to go into full-time journalism!

Thanks for reading,

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. This allows me to write articles that don’t necessarily fit in at one of the normal outlets. Thanks for your support.

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/joelaverick

The following brands are either financial or equipment partners of mine, and allow me to do cool stuff.

• Pullwood Consulting

• ENVE Composites

• Endura

• Rudy Project

• dussl

• Quoc

1. We got MudBound.

It always rains in Kansas; it’s just whether it’ll impact the race. This year, it very much impacted the race. It was a dirty, muddy, rainy day. Lots will be written about the mud, and before all that discourse plays out, I do want to say that the risk of conditions like this is what makes the event epic. Rain makes mud, and this is the Midwest.

To have an epic event, it needs a special something. Mud to Unbound is what cobbles are to Roubaix. Nothing could have been done to avoid mud today, and yes, it’s a little silly, but so is bike racing.

2. Specialized has gravel’s best team.

Launch a new bike, win the sport’s biggest race. A sports marketing dream. Specialized once again proved that they’re the best team in world gravel racing. Going one-two in both the men’s and women’s races is the stuff of dreams.

Seeing Keegan give Mads a wheel answered so many questions about whether that team can work together at the crux moment. The fact that he still finished 5th is wild. And, for all those doubting that team tactics will play a role in gravel racing, we now have our answer.

He’s not on Specialized, but shout out to Cobe Freeburn. It looks like he blew up in the end, but that was one hell of a ride.

3. The live coverage was great

Mid-race split-screens, equal coverage of the men’s and women’s race, and good commentary, too. The social clipping online was great and went viral fast. Life Time seriously stepped up their game this year, and it worked well.

This is the first gravel livestream I’ve watched which felt like a true professional production.

4. We all love to hate Unbound

There’s a very long list of reasons to dislike Unbound: mud, rain, distance, duration, punctures, and cost, to name but a few. Yet, all of that is what makes Unbound special too. There’s something special about this bike race in Emporia, Kansas.

It’s Never Never Land, you spend multiple days chatting rubbish with mates you only met that week. It’s going to the Shake Out rides, stressing about tyres, questioning life decisions. A weird Emporia sized bubble.

5. Great safety protocols.

I crashed hard, and was driven to the hospital to get my knee stitched up. With that, I got to see first hand the logistics behind the race. It’s impressive, very impressive. My injury was pretty minor in the grand scheme of things, but I was still seen by a First Aider on course within twenty or so minutes.

Add in that major road crossings were marshalled and there were protocols in place for when it went wrong. Safety was very much thought about today, and I thank everyone for that.

6. 2026 seems to be a bridge year.

No major new names broke through, there were no huge WorldTour names (though crazy ride by Emil Herzog) on the start list, and no major regulation changes. While the mud will take the headlines, and gravel has well and truly professionalised, Unbound was surprisingly mellow.

7. We need better journalism

There are more stories at Unbound than at most World Tour races. We need better journalism, and true storytelling. This should be treated like one of the biggest races in the world, as it’s certainly one of the most popular.

Thousands of words were written about equipment and bikes, but more needs to be written about the event itself. The race, the organisation, the athletes, the community. Good journalism, whether that’s writing, podcast, or video, makes you feel a part of the race, no matter where you are in the world. Trust me, I understand that business is hard for journalism, but let’s not resort to clickbait.

Also, let’s not mix content with media.

8. The XL start is the best part of the week

At 3pm on Friday, a few hundred crazy people line up to race the 350 miles of Unbound XL. It feels like the whole of Emporia comes out to support. It’s prime time, everyone is downtown checking out the expo and comes to cheer them on.

It was an incredible atmosphere. Gravel needs more moments like this. This is what makes bike racing special.

9. Neutral zone circus

There was a little bit of craziness in the elite men’s neutral start, and it felt like we went for a whacky loop around town. The route we took didn’t match the GPX file we were given so it just caused a few “huh” moments. This was mostly fine, as the lead-motos did good work and kept the speed very slow and very safe, but this could still have been avoided.

In future, we need the neutral zone to be included in the GPX, and let’s continue to limit the oncoming cars as much as possible.

Overall, though, it was great to see Life Time take on the feedback from Big Sugar and make steps in the right direction.

10. Pro gravel is no longer an American game.

Cam Jones winning the Grand Prix last year put this point in motion, but only having one American in the men’s Top 10 at Unbound is a distinct shift. Gravel is undoubtedly an American sport, but as it grows in professionalism and opportunity, talent from across the world has been attracted.

11. Bikes cost a lot of money

I don’t know the answer to this, but we need to talk about how conditions can cause thousands of dollars of damage in a few metres. As a pro rider, I’m in the privileged position that I get my equipment covered by ENVE. However, for almost everyone in the race, they paid thousands of dollars for their bikes.

I’ve already said that I think mud is good for this race, however I do think we need to recognise and discuss that excess mud can cause financial problems.

12. Unbound, I’ll probably be back.

I was asked this week how many more Unbounds I’ve got in me. I’ve always said that I want to do five, and that’s me done. What I really meant is that I want to finish five. I was planning on finishing this weekend, so that would’ve meant one more 200-mile, and I’m out.

Well, I guess I’ve got unfinished business. I hate that I love this race deep down because I really hate this race too.

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. Thanks for your support.https://www.buymeacoffee.com/joelaverick

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

• Pullwood Consulting

• ENVE Composites

• Endura

• Rudy Project

• dussl

• Quoc

Welcome to Kansas. Well, Missouri actually - Kansas City is confusingly not in Kansas.

It’s 08:42. I’m sitting in an airport hotel, having already finished breakfast a few hours ago. I’m jet lagged, but that pleasant jet lag where you wake up at 6am thinking it’s 9am. Frank Sinatra is playing over the radio, and my friend and photographer from Grimsby, Dan Hutchinson, is sitting to my left.

It’s Unbound week.

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For those who are new here since The Peloton Economy, or my recaps from Traka and Levi’s, welcome, and thanks for reading. I want to apologise for my lack of activity, my May disappeared into a training block in Andorra. It turns out there’s an inverse relationship between hours on the bike and intelligence levels. Consider this me resurfacing.

We’re about to drive across to Emporia, a two-ish hour drive west. We arrived late last night, and our AirBnB doesn’t open until this afternoon, this morning is deliberately slow. Walmart to do groceries, a bike shop for our spares, and generally get as many ducks in a row as possible. I’ve made an unconscious decision this year that I’m going into Unbound extremely calmly.

In previous years, I’ve over-prepared in the way that it starts to become its own stress. Multiple wheelsets, double the amount tyres, plans for every conceivable scenario. This is my fourth Unbound, and somewhere between then and now, I’ve stopped confusing preparation with control. The course will be what it will be. I checked the weather forecast once on the plane and decided not to check it again. If there’s mud, there’s mud.

I know where things are in Emporia. I know how the race tends to unfold, for better or worse. My tyres are chosen, the nutrition plan is sorted - Carbs Fuel, Haribo, Monster Energy - anything else is noise. One recon ride tomorrow, and then as little as possible.

Will this work? Honestly, I don’t know. Only time will tell.

I went back and read my piece from 2023 this morning. The beauty of writing all of these blogs is that I can reflect and see into my own headspace. Unbound back then felt like one big adventure rather than a race with pressure.

“I think I accidentally found the spirit of gravel in those flint hills of Emporia. The spirit of gravel isn’t all serious racing for the win, or having F1-style pit crews... it was nice to be on the other side. Pros and amateurs alike sharing a beer late into the night, cheering on riders still finishing after dark. A race I really wanted to hate. A race I came out loving.”

Gravel has changed considerably since I wrote that. The mud in 2023 was controversial, but the controversy felt innocent; there was something silly about it all. Now the sport is more polished, more watched, more serious, and a lot richer. We can argue until the Flint Hills cattle come home about whether that’s a good thing.

I’m not sure I have a clean answer. But I do think the more a sport organises itself around performance, the more we have to remember to hold onto whatever drew us here. For me, that something was the feeling of adventure, doing something new, and telling the world about it.

This race is owned by the corporate beast that is Life Time, but it’s somehow managed to maintain something special. Don’t get me wrong, there are more camera crews than your average movie set, and every brand is trying to do something to stand out, but beneath it all, there’s an endearing charm about the biggest gravel race in the world.

For all you read about the US, the reality of the Midwest catches me off guard every time. Strangers chat to you at breakfast, wish you well, and genuinely mean it. People I see a few times a year greet me like I’m a local. There’s a community that forms around these races and small towns that I’ve never quite found anywhere else. It’s intangible, and the more I try to describe it, the further away it gets. Some things are like that.

I’m happy to be here. It feels a bit like 2023 again, which is strange given how much more I know now. Funny how experience can bring you back to something that feels a lot like a beginner’s mind.

Will I win? Probably not. Will I try to have as much fun as possible, and race as hard as I can? Yes.

For more updates from Kansas, keep up to date on my Instagram.

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. Thanks for your support.https://www.buymeacoffee.com/joelaverick

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

• Pullwood Consulting

• ENVE Composites

• Endura

• Rudy Project

• dussl

• Quoc

I wasn’t going to write anything because I didn’t race but then the whole race started gossiping to me so I decided to put their words together with my thoughts.

It was a different experience seeing the Traka from the sidelines, and here are my takeaways.

1. 200 or 360°?

Having two premier races in one weekend is confusing and splits the pro field in two.

The Traka 200km used to be perceived as the main event, and then last year the 360km grew in prominence with more Gravel Earth Series points on offer. This year the same has happened, and the pro field seems to have been split even further.

Also, the 360° is 325km now, which is kinda confusing. Make it make sense.

2. It’s the biggest gravel race in Europe.

This event keeps getting bigger every year. It’s the third biggest gravel race in the world (behind Unbound and UCI World Champs). The talent pool is deep, and it draws people from across the world to attend. The proximity to Girona is an added bonus too.

I can’t think of another race in Europe that comes close to the coverage, attendance, and prestige.

3. The race’s media was great.

The livestream was one of the best I’ve seen. Mid race clips were immediately posted online and went viral. The use of drones was 10/10, and a great case study for other organisers to study

I have nothing but good things to say here. This was truly one of the best I’ve seen at a gravel race and tops many big road races. Like, really, really, really good. Congrats.

4. Let’s talk about safety.

I didn’t race, so I have no first hand experience of the race. What I can say is that I saw an interview from Romain Bardet:

“I think gravel needs to find [its] own rules. You know it’s getting more and more competitive. The way it works works right now, it’s not good enough for the safety of the riders.”

What I will say is that knowing this course in general, it’s not the safest. Unprompted, one of the top pros (who races MTB) told me: “These descents are just dangerous. It’s like we’re on the wrong bike.” If the pros are saying that, how is it for those further back?

The race needs more signs too. Both from a ‘where does the race go’ perspective, but for warning other road users too.

5. Start line carnage.

At the start of the 360°, the organisation accidentally let almost the entire age-group men’s field start before the pro women. This wasn’t the plan, and the elite women were supposed to start before the amateur men. When the organisers tried to turn the age-groupers around, some carried on, some didn’t. Then, even though explicitly not allowed in the regs, plenty of men were drafting the pro women.

Accidents happen, and this was an honest mistake. I wasn’t going to write aout it as I didn’t witness it in a person, however a bunch of the pro women in the Top 10 have messaged me about it, so it feels amiss to leave it out.

As one of messaged me: “If hundreds of amateurs went off just before the pro men’s race, there would be outrage.”

6. Specialized are the best team

1st and 3rd in the men’s 360°, 3rd in the women’s 360°, and 1st in the women’s 200km.

Specialized have done to gravel what they do in every other discipline: hire the best riders and win.

I do want to mention Rosa Klöser of Canyon. Rosa won the 360° and is one of the best female gravel racers in the world. While I understand why (overlapping contracts) it does seem bizarre that Canyon launched this big factory gravel team, and doesn’t have their best gravel athlete on it.

Either way you look at it, the two richest teams in the sport of gravel are the best. Shock!

7. Stupid onboard camera rules.

This was brought up to me so I checked the rulebook.

21.20 The use, possession, or carrying of any recording or transmission device during the race is prohibited, including but not limited to action cameras, on-board cameras, glasses with integrated cameras, smart glasses with artificial intelligence features, or any similar device capable of recording, transmitting, or assisting the rider. Non-compliance may result in penalties or disqualification.

This rule is stupid, and doesn’t make sense. You can’t play the safety card on this because by that math, bottles are dangerous too. Riders filming the race benefits everyone. Let’s just agree to change that rule, okay?

8. Communication needs improving.

I’m told that both the Traka 560 start day and time changed multiple times in the lead up to the race. And that the course for other races changed multiple times too. I’m a big fan of how the Unbound organisers do their course: you know the ‘ish’ direction of the race, but the final route isn’t released until it’s truly final.

9. Opportunity for better Girona integration.

The event can be better integrated with Girona itself. The start village is a ~10min walk from the centre of town, but there’s so much opportunity to bring them together. It’s the biggest gravel race in Europe, let’s celebrate that.

The Costa Brava car rally placed a big screen and livestream in Placa Independencia, the town’s main square; maybe the Traka can follow suit.

Equally, I’ve got to note that we need better education of riders in Girona - and better sign-posting of one-way systems. More education and awareness is needed from both sides in a weekend with this many cyclo-tourists in town. We can’t complain that people aren’t following the road rules when the road rules aren’t clear.

10. Extremely well done brand activations

With only race sponsors allowed in the expo in the start village, many brands turned their attention to ‘pop-ups’ in Girona.

Two of my favourites were the Quoc pop-up, and the ‘Gravel Times’ newspaper which was distributed across town. Hats off has to go to Athletic Affair, the marketing agency who led both of these campaigns.

Factor had a heavy presence, both branding and wrapping a handful of cafes as ‘Factor House’. However, I do wonder why they chose ‘Specialized red’ as their colour of choice.

11. Gravel Earth Series?

I am still not convinced about the viability, nor relevance of the Gravel Earth Series. The Traka is a huge one-weekend event, and is very clearly a ‘Monument’ of the gravel calendar, plus the biggest race in the GES.

Unfortunately for the GES, Life Time has a much bigger bank account, and a much clearer offering filled with globally relevant races. I wrote about this at length late last year, but the GES losing ‘The Rift’ and ‘Gravel Worlds’ really has impacted it.

12. Brands, be nice to your athletes

This isn’t necessarily a Traka takeaway, but it reared its head a few times around the race. Brands, please be nice to your athletes.

If a rider isn’t performing well, putting them down further isn’t the way to go about it. Trust me when I say that we are our own harshest critics and don’t need to be reminded.

Yes, athletes are paid to perform - and there’s a time and a place for that conversation - but elite sport dictates that not every race is a good race.

Be kind, it costs nothing.

13. I didn’t race, and helping mates is great.

For a whole bunch of reasons, I chose not to race. It was nice to be on the sidelines to help my mates out, and ultimately get a very different experience of the event.

When you’re in the race, it seems like it’s the biggest thing in the world. When you step back to just being a part of the race and helping a mate out, it brings a healthy dose of perspective.

14. Nice work, Klassmark.

Klassmark and I have butted heads so many times that I feel I have to add this in.

The Traka is a great event. It attracts worldwide attention and is a very fun week to be a part of. I write these articles to both highlight the good, but also point out what can be improved. Every event, no matter how big it is, can be improved. I hope that by writing these, we move to safer, and better races for all.

These articles have never, and will never, be with malicious intent. They come from a desire to make the sport better.

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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. Thanks for your support.https://www.buymeacoffee.com/joelaverick

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

• Pullwood Consulting

• ENVE Composites

• Endura

• Rudy Project

• dussl

• Quoc

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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