The Peloton Economy

An investigation into the business, economics, and power structures that shape professional road racing.

Mar 30, 2026

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

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

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

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-Joe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. The Rapha Roadmap, a blueprint ignored.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Foundations of the Roadmap:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did anything change?

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

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

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

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

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

An overwhelming focus on traditional models of performance and sponsor return on investment has too often had a negative effect on fan engagement.
Cycling must be revitalised to become more widespread and more popular, and it must prioritise meaningful engagement with the audience above all else.

My Suggestions

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

Sport is entertainment, and cycling must put fans at the forefront of any reform. Without fans, there are no economics.
Financial regulation is essential for both economic sustainability and maintaining a level playing field that protects the overall health of racing. A consultation period is needed.
The Women’s WorldTour offers a unique opportunity and should ignore the male WorldTour model in favour of forging their own path.
The UCI’s broad mandate creates unavoidable conflicts of interest in governing professional road racing.
WorldTour squads should be reduced to a maximum of 20 riders, with an accompanying development roster of up to 15 riders, in order to encourage less racing and therefore a healthier, more competitive calendar.
The WorldTour calendar must be shortened and create a season-long narrative.
New forms of racing must be trialled to appeal to the modern sports fan, ensuring the sport evolves with changing consumption habits while preserving tradition.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Just to set the record straight: The Alternative Calendar, along with Lachlan’s signing to EF, were both pitched to Philip Hult (then JV’s boss) by Rapha. The concept, direction, and execution of the original content series came entirely from the Rapha team.
“It was Oil Duggan, Sam Craven, and Jevi Repponen who led the thinking, creative direction, and production. They deserve full credit for bringing the idea to life, not post-hoc narratives that downplay the role of the team who created it.”

Welcome to Kansas

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

The comments under this first video are telling:

“Breath of fresh air, viewing pros outside the peloton. Real credit to the sport. EF hands down the most exciting WorldTour team.”
“EF have become my No. 1 bike team to follow. They have now have credibility in real cycling that goes well beyond the WorldTour results sheet.“
“Love this team so much more now, nice to see a human side to the pro peloton!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lightning rarely strikes twice

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Their challenge might be that they built cultural capital they couldn’t fully monetise, partly because Rapha captured the commercial upside, and partly because cycling’s data infrastructure for proving sponsor ROI remains primitive.
What’s the strategy for building first-party data assets that let a team tell a sponsor: ‘We have 80,000 people who have actively opted in, here’s their demographic profile, here’s their purchase intent data’? That’s a fundamentally different conversation from saying: ‘We have two million YouTube views.”

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

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

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

Storytelling doesn’t win the Tour

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What economic model?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The arrival of the nation states

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

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

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

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

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

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

The arms race

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is a budget cap possible?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, what can change?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teams are not assets

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

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

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

To quote Van Reeth:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you own the races, then you own cycling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do we change this?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“As a thought experiment, if the roughly €125 million in annual dividends from pro cycling’s major promoters were to be split equally between the main stakeholders in the sport – the 18 WorldTeams and three top ProTeams that get automatic invites to all WorldTour events, the three largest organisers and the UCI – each would receive around €5 million per year.
“That is far more than what teams achieve nowadays where they essentially pay to race, but it wouldn’t make a really meaningful contribution to a team’s financial sustainability, and at an average budget of over €31 million per year, they would still be significantly reliant on sponsorship revenues.”

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

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

You cannot buy the Tour de France

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Tour works as intended.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“In his interview with Duff, Jean-Etienne Amaury seems to belittle the fact that ‘Americans think everything is for sale.’ One comes away with the conclusion that ownership and control of the Tour is not likely to change. And it’s not about the number.
The family’s unwavering stance may be predicated on protecting and growing its own wealth, or, as Jean-Etienne claims, it may be based more on protecting a cultural icon for the French people. Either way, for the rest of pro cycling, it doesn’t much matter.
All the evidence suggests that ASO will continue its cautious and conservative head-in-the-sand strategy, and will likely drag its feet in terms of coordinating with other stakeholders to implement any kind of substantial change or restructuring within the sport.
Any plans to reform the sport are going to have to deal with – or find a way around – this fact of life.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Roadmap states:

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

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

Enter David Trimble

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Rockstar years: Why Red Hook worked

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

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

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

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

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

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

The $50-million risk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What if it had grown?

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

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

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

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

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

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

But, what ifs are hypothetical…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Tour-ning Point

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rapid growth: a good problem to have?

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

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

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

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

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

“[FDJ-Suez] are understood to have a budget of around €5 million, compared to the €7 to €8 million budgets of the richest teams. For over a decade, manager-owner Stephen Delcourt has factored in an annual budget increase of between 5 and 10 per cent – but in the last year alone, his costs have increased by 29 per cent.
“We are like a start-up without funds,” he says. “We play with money that we don’t have in our pockets. That’s dangerous. The consequence is that we have 15 WorldTour spots, and only 14 [teams] apply. We need to analyse that. We go too fast because we have no rules. There is space for the big teams, but for the others, there is no place.”
“There is a budget decision and a sports decision,” he said. “I really feel that if [costs] continue to increase at 29 per cent, I need to be calm and not go too fast. And with the new UCI rules, I want to be careful.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We should not be advocating for a minimum salary through the whole pyramid, instead we should focus on development. When I was manager of NXTG in 2020, 40% of our €200,000 cash budget went towards rider remuneration. We couldn’t spend it on professional staff, training camps, or expenses for other races. That’s not development.”, said Knaven-den Ouden, “With the folding of smaller races, and the increasing salaries in the WWT, we’ve seen development teams get squeezed. Teams go back down to sixteen riders, development teams are around eight or nine riders.
They are then put in with the WorldTour team to gain UCI Points or fill out rosters. Riders are not gaining experience in smaller races against the same level of rider, they are missing so many steps. There are only a few teams doing it right, who see the goal of their development team as developing riders, not filling out their WorldTour roster.”

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

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

What about a closed league?

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

“I do think we should consider budget caps. Without clear financial guardrails, the sport risks becoming unsustainable, with a handful of teams outspending the rest and creating a competitive imbalance. Nobody wants that.”, said Veronneau, “We should absolutely be discussing what new measures need to be in place to build stability and protect the long-term health of the peloton.
This is the moment we should be taking a really hard look at the structures, the rulings in place, and if that works for this modern age. We understand the landscape better, how fans are engaging with the sport. We have the opportunity to learn from other women’s sports that are thriving right now.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teams must do better

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

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

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

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

Reform: Now or never.

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

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

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

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

7. Is it time for a new Roadmap?

Change is needed, but can change really happen?

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

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

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

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

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

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

My suggestions

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

Sport is entertainment, and cycling must put fans at the forefront of any reform. Without fans, there are no economics.
Financial regulation is essential for both economic sustainability and maintaining a level playing field that protects the overall health of racing. A consultation period is needed.
The Women’s WorldTour offers a unique opportunity and should ignore the male WorldTour model in favour of forging their own path.
The UCI’s broad mandate creates unavoidable conflicts of interest in governing professional road racing.
WorldTour squads should be reduced to a maximum of 20 riders, with an accompanying development roster of up to 15 riders, in order to encourage less racing and therefore a healthier, more competitive calendar.
The WorldTour calendar must be shortened and create a season-long narrative.
New forms of racing must be trialled to appeal to the modern sports fan, ensuring the sport evolves with changing consumption habits while preserving tradition.

What’s reality?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What does it mean for me?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is one big game of power and money.

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

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

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

Thank you…

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

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

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. Thank you for your support.
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/joelaverick

Kyle Dawes

Mar 30

Fantastic piece, Joe. I couldn't agree more about the fragility of the Women's WorldTour. I'm glad you included Natascha's perspectives and highlighted her efforts to build better foundations in women's cycling. She's truly one of the smartest people in our sport.

Wojtek Felendzer

Hmmmmmmm... I wonder to what extent this piece on Cycling News published today April 17 (behind a paywall for me : https://www.cyclingnews.com/pro-cycling/a-billion-dollar-business-soon-to-be-a-relic-what-pro-cycling-can-learn-from-the-blueprints-of-f1-and-soccer/ ) was "inspired" by your excellent long read article. I wonder if it was word-for-word inspired... Headline : "What pro cycling can learn from the blueprints of F1 and soccer"

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