Oh look, in an extremely crowded category, it’s the most dour man in cycling Richard Plugge. What has he got to say? Ah yes, he’s been talking about the future of cycling again. I wonder has he got anything interesting ideas this time.
What’s that? Ah yes. He still thinks cycling is fucked.
“…cycling is in a downward spiral,” said Plugge. “Whether you like it or not, the urgency becomes bigger every day. Not only teams, but also organisers are getting into trouble. Even relatively big teams are getting in trouble. So you have to make sure cycling makes a big change.”
Which big teams are in trouble Richard? Which relatively big ones are in trouble? What exactly is spiralling downwards?
Whenever Plugge speaks, or any of the other advocates for change, Jonathan Vaughters or whoever it might be, change is deemed necessary for the stability of cycling. The financial model is broken we’re told. Something needs to change.
Why? Why does it? What problem are they actually trying to solve?
My day job is in software development. I’ve been working in that industry for 20 years now (Jesus fucking Christ I’m getting old). Quite regularly, after a project has started, we could be weeks or months into it and someone at some stage will put up their hand in a meeting and say “hang on, what problem is it that we’re actually trying to solve here”?
It’s definitely one of those generic questions that might make you sound smart in a meeting when actually you haven’t even been paying attention. There’s also a very serious side to that question where, if the person being asked it cannot give you a simple answer immediately, you should probably consider binning the project. Every piece of work should be aiming to improve something, otherwise it’s a waste of time. And sometimes, we’ve all lost sight of what it was we were doing and we’ve ended up doing work for the sake of work which ultimately is going to serve no tangible purpose.
Last year, Mitch Docker made a podcast called Is Pro Cycling Financially Broken? where he explored this whole idea. It was a long episode where he spoke to plenty of people involved in the sport including Iwan Spekenbrink (Picnic PostNL boss), Scott Sunderland (Flanders Classics race director) and Simon Clarke (pro rider about to retire). And they all largely agreed that yes, cycling was broken.
Mitch asked me on to the podcast as well to see if there was any positive side to what’s been going on that I could offer. Is there any evidence to suggest it’s actually not broken?
I told him that statistically, cycling - the top tier of men’s cycling - has never been more stable than it is now. Ever.
The average age of a Tour de France team is 21.7 years. Not the average age of the riders. The average years that each team has existed.
I told him that this average has been increasing steadily every single year since 2010. The ‘youngest’ teams in the Tour last year were eight years old - both Bahrain and Tudor. If you go back 20 years, at the 2005 Tour de France, 11 of the teams were eight years old or less.
Multiple teams used to disappear every single year. If you go back to the 1990 Tour de France, only one team had existed for more than 11 years. Now, every team apart from Tudor and Bahrain have existed for more than 11 years.
I told him that all 22 teams that rode the 2023 Tour de France also rode the Tour in 2024 and 2025. That had never happened before in the history of cycling.
The model hasn’t changed, it still relies heavily on sponsorship. Since trade teams returned to the Tour de France in 1969 after it had been contested by national teams for a while - the financial model of cycling has largely remained the same. Teams can still fold. And since I spoke to Mitch, a team did - Arkea. Nevertheless, one team folding doesn’t really dent those numbers very much. Cycling has undeniably stabilised. It is stable. It is not in a downward spiral. It is and has been for 15 years in an upward spiral.
For Plugge and Vaughters to beat this drum now, still beating it after years and years of cycling becoming more and more stable makes it seem like the energy they are putting into these stabilisation efforts is wasted.
I sat through an interview with Vaughters at Rouleur Live last November where I was grumpy already because I was outrageously hungover having been out getting bollocksed drunk the night before watching Ireland smash Portugal in the football. And Ronaldo got sent off. Glorious stuff. But the Vaughters interview made me grumpier. Largely because of the hangover, of course, and partially because we’d heard it all before. But also because even if cycling was broken and needed saving, even if that was true, there were no ideas to fix it.
The only idea these guys ever have is a new set of races. The calendar! Simplify the calendar! Then we’ll be able to sell cycling properly and we’ll all be rich.
First there was World Series Cycling brought to you by the Gifted Group (the GIFTED group! Fuck off!) which was a 10 race series of stage races of four stages each - one time trial, one sprint, one hilly, one mountainous - all the same format so our tiny brains could comprehend what was going on. Then there was the Hammer Series brought to you by Velon where they wanted to simplify cycling for the moronic viewership and they simplified it so much that they ended up with a scoring system which included decimal places. Then we had One Cycling, the plan for which nobody really knew because it was such a big dark important really really big secret but would definitely definitely be really good and save cycling.
Now we’ve got more murmurs and rumours about a Super League!
What is it about cycling that makes them think that a series of uniform races in places where cycling isn’t even popular, is the answer?
There’s also a phenomenon in software engineering called the ‘second-system effect’. This is where some clever clogs comes along and examines the system that is currently in place and thinks “we need to make an entirely new system which fixes all the mistakes of the existing one”. So work starts on this new and magical system which will be perfect. The work never gets finished. The old system never gets fully replaced. It barely even gets partially replaced. So instead of having one perfect system to replace the shite one, you now have two shite ones.
This is what would happen in cycling if Dick Plugge gets his new shiny races. (Although to be clear, I don’t think the existing race calendar is shite at all, I think it’s magnificent.)
Vaughters and Plugge and all the lads want to stabilise cycling? They’re 20 years too late. The ProTour was contentious at the time, but thanks to our previous glorious leaders Hein Verbruggen and Pat McQuaid, it worked. It took a few years to sort itself out but it actually worked. That system that Vaughters always wanted which would guarantee entry to the Tour de France, so that he could successfully market his team to potential sponsors, that one - it exists now.
I did also make the point in the podcast that the stability of cycling over the past 15 years has been helped by the lack of doping scandals. The last rider to test positive for a performance enhancing drug and be thrown out of the Tour de France was Frank Schleck in 2012. That’s quite a long time ago. There is a whole generation of cycling fans who have no idea what it’s like to experience a high profile doping scandal.
I think it’s likely that if a big name rider or entire team suddenly all got busted for drugs the way they used to in the late 1990s and 2000s then the stability I’ve been banging on about could easily crumble to pieces. And I also don’t think the existence of a few new races and a bit of extra TV money would make much difference to that.
Wouldn’t it be great though if cycling teams had more income than just sponsorship Wouldn’t that give teams stability? A solid foundation on which to build on year on year so that they’re not solely reliant on one fickle stream of money?
No. It wouldn’t. They would spend it on one thing and one thing only. And teams have demonstrably proved this year after year, that if their budget goes up, most of it goes on rider salaries. Salaries, salaries and more salaries. If you offered, say, Cofidis, to double their budget for next year, they wouldn’t bank the money so that they could be stable for 2028. They would splurge on the transfer market. A big fat splurge. And so would every other team.
The counter argument to this is have a salary cap, one of Vaughter’s’s’s’s’s favourites. The salary cap. As Jed Bartlett said to Governor Ritchie on debate night (I fucking love The West Wing)… what’s the next five words? Oh you want a salary cap? Great., what’s the next five words? How? How are you going to implement a salary cap in professional cycling?
It works in the USA because all of those people work in the USA. They are governed by one set of employment laws. Cycling is a basket case of employment law stretching across any number of jurisdictions. Some riders are employees, others are contractors.
How are you going to implement that? How? You can’t. You just can’t.
Maybe now I need to stop my whining and offer an idea of my own. A salary cap involves laws which exist outside of cycling. Laws which are too much for a governing body to circumvent or to integrate into any salary system. Everyone has a right to earn a living. But not everyone has a right to enter the Tour de France. The UCI still have control over the rules of the game, as long as it doesn’t impinge on any law.
A salary cap would ensure teams wouldn’t consistently spend every penny they have on salaries but it would also serve to ‘level the playing field’ which I think most people would agree is a problem that needs to be solved. I think we’re probably all growing tired of UAE winning everything all the time. Not even a krazy kangaroo could stop Jay Vine from sauntering to the win at the recent Tour Down Under.
But did you see the team that UAE brought to that race? They had two former winners and four Grand Tour stage winners. Their third best rider has finished on the podium of the Tour de France. It doesn’t need to be like this. What if there were rules governing which riders can be selected for certain races? What if a team can only select three riders who are currently in the top 100 of the UCI rankings in any given race? Or they can only select two riders from the top 40? Or you can only ever have one former winner of a race in your team? Or you can only have a maximum of two former Grand Tour stage winners in your team?
For any given race, of course. You can stockpile and pay as many superstars as you like but when it comes to race day, your options are limited. So maybe stockpiling so many team leaders isn’t going to be such a good idea.
Would it work? Let me know in the comments down below?
Is it a good idea? Or am I just as bad as Plugge and Vaughters and I can also get in the sea?
You can listen to that Mitch Docker podcast about the financial state of cycling here:
I have no idea if cycling needs to be saved and if, how to do it. What I do know is that I really enjoy your writing.
Here for more West Wing references crowbarred into cycling journalism