As whispers and rumors continue to filter out about the impending arrival of One Cycling, we’ve heard all about the project backers’ desire to grow the sport and make it sustainable (and likely make a nice chunk of change for those bringing it to fruition, too).
What we haven’t heard much about — apart from a desire for more finishing circuits and the vague notion of a more coherent calendar — is how One Cycling is actually going to work.
So while we patiently await the moment when our new overlords tell us what our sport will look like moving forward, we’ve decided to put together our own blueprint for a road racing revolution.
Forget One Cycling. This is Two Cycling.
Two Cycling has been collated from ideas we’ve been exploring for a while, as well as thoughts from various Escape Collective members in our comments section and member Discord server over the past few weeks.
Let’s start with what we aim to achieve—our broad objectives for a system revolution—before we get to the fun stuff.
Two Cycling’s Goals:
- Increased sporting coherence and competitiveness
- We want a more logical calendar that builds narrative and intrigue throughout the season. Competitiveness means a better spread of talent, so Two Cycling has a draft system, salary cap, and trades, as well as re-introducing national teams.
- Grow the sport in terms of eyeballs/fans and revenue, more sustainable and more equally distributed (a.k.a. Grow the Pie™)
- Bigger audiences for both the Tour de France and for smaller events.
- Streaming rights that makes sense for the sport and fans.
- Other marketing – great social media, events, etc.
- Increased sustainability and fairness
- Improve green credentials and game-ify environmental sustainability as part of the competition with reform of team and race convoys (e.g. smaller), travel (greener where possible, even if more complicated and laborious), and calendar re-alignment.
- Build out teams to be more than just billboards for advertisers, increasing job security and revenue, which should see riders on average earn more in the long run. This is done by tying in teams both to domestic fan bases and to their domestic WorldTour events, as well as sharing the revenue from things such as TV rights, which hopefully will eventually become more lucrative than they are currently.
Before we begin, it almost goes without saying that so much of this is, in reality, completely unworkable. Like all good dreamers, we try not to let reality stop us, and ask you to suspend your disbelief, imagining a world where cycling has, in effect, become a planned economy we are in charge of. We also urge you to offer better ideas or counterpoints in the comments section should you feel inclined to do so.
Will our ideas likely involve an initial short-term loss in revenue sportwide? Almost certainly. Would our proposals make the sport more meaningful, more of a true sporting competition rather than its current iteration of sport-as-marketing with competition attached? Undoubtedly. We’re inclined to imagine a world where there is a desire for more than just making as much money as possible, although understand that people need jobs and to be paid fairly for their work. Ours is a long play.
The hope is that the people who make up pro cycling are better served in the long-run by growing the sport and its fans first and foremost. Our main, overarching aim is to improve the sporting quality on display, serving the sport’s most important stakeholder, yet the one most often neglected: cycling fans.
Why we need to re-introduce national teams
Currently, the overwhelming majority of cycling fans are fans of the sport in general rather than a team. Sure, they may have a favourite rider, or preferred riders over others, perhaps even an affinity with one team over another, but affinity is not fandom. There is a leap to be made to actually becoming a fan of a particular team.
Take the list of the biggest sports leagues by revenue. Virtually all of them are contested by teams with some level of geographical basis, something tying them to the personal realities of the people watching the sport, making the athletes and competition somewhat relatable and accessible, while also tapping into our innate tribalism. The Tour de France is the closest thing cycling has to a league of any sort of heft; can you guess where the Tour’s estimated €100 million annual revenue places it globally? In between the 66th-placed German handball league and the Croatian national football league.
While cycling is more popular than both of those, it’s not popular enough for sustainable professional domestic leagues (obviously), where you would have teams representing various cities and towns across a country, like in football, rugby and baseball. So the next most logical step is to revert back to how cycling once competed: within national teams.
How we can shift the current system to national teams?
Cycling today is composed of teams separated into increasingly vague national identities. French outfits like Groupama-FDJ are still made up of 70% French riders, have French companies as major backers, and being ‘a French team’ is still core to their meaning and existence. Elsewhere, look at how Visma-Lease a Bike has shifted unapologetically away from being a Dutch team, or how UAE Team Emirates and Bahrain-Victorious have nation-states as title sponsors and that’s mostly where the association stops. Even Ineos Grenadiers, a squad that as Team Sky helped cultivate a boom period in the UK with British riders at the forefront, seems to have now abandoned that tenet and, perhaps coincidentally, is a team that has appeared rudderless over the past couple of years. Ineos has six British riders this year; EF has only two Americans on both its men’s and women’s teams.
A re-organisation where WorldTour teams are delegated to countries but can still hold commercial title sponsorships would help to cultivate increased fandom around teams and riders, and create narratives over seasons and years as rivalries, new and old, come to the fore. So you could have Team America-EF, for example.
These title sponsors do not have to be from the host country, but that would seemingly make the most sense. Yes, this could open the door to a Saudi-Arabian sponsored Italian team, for example, but we imagine a national team operating with the title ‘Your Country-Another Country’ would be much less appealing compared to investment from a nation’s businesses into their own national squads.
Okay, some of the nitty gritty. Existing teams would be able to apply for the right to hold their country’s berth. Movistar for Spain, Jayco-AlUla for Australia, Ineos Grenadiers for the UK. And even when you have more than one team that could plausibly represent their currently-registered country — Lidl-Trek or EF Education-EasyPost for the USA, or Groupama-FDJ, Cofidis or Decathlon-Ag2r La Mondiale for France — there would be space. We have 18 WorldTour spots to fill. And then there is already the ProTeam division, which with a rejig of the promotion/relegation system could also come to have more significance than it currently does. Imagine your entire country getting relegated — now there’s a way to get a fanbase riled up.
Potentially, races on the fringes between WorldTour and Pro status could also compete for promotion and relegation, ensuring race organisers are incentivised to compete to make their races and events as safe, exciting and popular as possible. Races could be scored on how safe and exciting they are, how many fans they manage to bring along (comparable to historical data), and how they engage with them. The buffer zones for demoting/promoting a race between tiers would be large, but would ensure there is more at stake for race organisers than just signing the check each year.
Homegrown riders rule, impractical pipe dream?
As a means of tying teams more closely to their home nation, there would be quotas of homegrown riders for each team. At the outset, 25% seems reasonable without being overly prescriptive, but could be moved up or down as it plays out in reality. This would also not restrict the likes of UAE from having a team, it would just mean they would actually have to put money into developing the sport in its own country along with buying the best riders (and doing a teeny little bit of sportswashing along the way).
Is this practical? With 12 American riders currently racing in the WorldTour, 8 of them would need to race for the American team. What mechanism would ensure the riders themselves don’t bargain with this knowledge in mind for a much higher salary than their fair market value? This would pose a considerable disadvantage when compared to a Belgian WorldTour team, who have a plethora of good pro riders to pick from. But we believe that because 75% of each team can be from any country, the rider market would remain relatively strong.
When you consider the impact this would have on UAE Team Emirates, who currently spend €50 million a year supporting hundreds of professionals working within cycling, it becomes less feasible. This leads us to a more philosophical question: do we just want money invested in cycling, or would we settle for less money, likely leading to less talented athletes who may opt for careers in other sports, but ultimately a better cycling ‘product’ overall, one more closely tied to grassroots cycling and with increased meaning for fans of the sport?
You could potentially still have a Tadej Pogačar riding the Tour de France for a UAE Team Emirates squad severely depleted in terms of overall strength up against a French team that is overall much stronger but without that Pog-shaped final piece of the victory jigsaw. Or, more likely, UAE, as a nation low on the rankings, could put a local company like MyWhoosh on the bum of the Italian squad, since what we know of as UAE was born out of the old Italian Lampre squad. Pogi racing with the Italians? Yes please.
Along with the WorldTour berth comes the opportunity for the country to host its own WorldTour-level event (more on this later).
Concentrating national talent on teams with a stronger national identity will focus fandom and passion more directly (especially in the traditional heartlands which are in need of revival), as well as make the sport more accessible to newcomers. A counterpoint, as raised by my editor, is Formula 1, where you do have fans of teams unaligned with shared nationhoods. My response would be until we see teams and sponsors as stable and historic in cycling as they are in Formula 1, we limit this particular comparison with motor racing.
Now, some may shrink at the idea of being easily siloed off into national boundaries. You may grimace at the idea of having to root for your own country (I know a Belgian cycling journalist who very much dislikes his own country and instead roots for Italy in every sport) or not want to encourage the animosity that can be expressed between rival fans in various ball sports. My counter would be caring too much about your team is better than the apathy that exists for many now. Can you presently really get behind Picnic-PostNL in any meaningful way?
The best teams are those with identity, and it’s harder to surpass the identity tied to where you’re from.
What might that look like?
Let’s say the top 15 nations get automatic WorldTour slots, then five more go to either the next nations or a second team from the major cycling nations, depending on team points accrued. Major teams from those nations apply to those slots. It could look something like:
- Belgium-Quickstep
- France-FDJ
- Spain-Movistar
- Italy-UAE/XRG
- Netherlands-Lease a Bike
- Slovenia-Pogi Team (sure why not)
- Great Britain-Ineos
- Australia-Jayco
- Denmark-ColoQuick
- United States-Trek
- Switzerland-Tudor
- Germany-Bora
- Colombia-EPM
- Norway-UnoX
- Eritrea-Wanty
Now into the second round: - Belgium-Lotto
- France-Decathlon
- Spain-Caja Rural
- America-EF
- Ireland-An Post
In the second tier you’d have teams like Portugal-Sabgal, Kazakhstan-Astana, more French teams with Arkéa or Cofidis, and the like, all trying to get up.
There are some sizeable holes to poke in this list, but you get the idea.
Draft system
This new, revamped WorldTour system is underpinned by each nation having a development squad that only consists of their own nation’s riders between 18-21 years old (exact age range TBD but this seems a sensible place to begin). This would be mandatory.
Upon graduating from the development team (at the age of 21) all riders enter that year’s draft, akin to how the major leagues in American sports work.
The draft order is set by how many UCI points each team accrued that past season, those with the fewest picking first etc., with all of the usual draft protocols. However, in the first round, each team can only select a rider from their own nation. So you better have a good development team.
Additionally, each team is given two (again, exact number up for debate) “franchise tags” per year that allows the team to retain its star rider(s) by being given the ability to match any offer presented to its rider by another team. There is also a salary cap, intended to keep the sport economically sustainable and competitive. This puts an onus on teams to develop its own national talent, with the goal of re-invigorating cycling in its national grassroots programmes.
A salary cap usually denotes a decrease in the total spend by teams, and therefore a reduction in the average wage of a professional rider. No doubt this would prove unpopular with riders having to transition to earning less than before. However, we believe the increased competitiveness of spreading top cycling talent throughout WorldTour teams, and the resulting financial stability and increased sporting spectacle for fans, will result in salary increases in the long run. For the majority of teams, who already operate at near where the salary cap would be, it would be a help, bringing the runaway super teams back down to Earth. A competitive sport is a better and bigger one.
A salary cap and draft engenders a trade system whereby players and draft picks can be traded by teams freely within set transfer windows in the off-season, which would also maintain a level of interest during the September-January off-season. Maybe even a mid-season window, too. Wouldn’t that be fun?
Proper promotion/relegation
There is also a second division, similar to what we already have with ProTeam status, where major countries can field a second team and smaller countries can build and hopefully one day compete for promotion.
Promotion and relegation must happen every year. This three-year nonsense we have now is no good. Yearly relegation and promotion increases competition and interest in races, and the competition for Tour de France wildcard spots amongst the second division teams becomes a hotly contested spectacle. It also means relegated WorldTour squads are unlikely to immediately lose their Tour de France spots upon relegation. We know how important guaranteed Tour de France access is to teams, but actual jeopardy is far more interesting.
The all-new WorldTour calendar
We’re going to steal and adapt Caley’s re-jigged calendar mentioned recently on the Spin Cycle podcast into an overall competition split into 1) Early Season Openers with a big international tour of Oceania and Asia 2) Classics Cup and 3) Grand Tour Season. All roads lead to the Tour de France, and the points accrued along the way offer tangible benefits when you get to the biggest race of the season where performance matters most. Think of everything leading up to the Tour as the regular season and the Tour de France as the playoffs and Championship Finals.
Not only does this make more sense, it helps keep ASO happy, since without their sign-on none of this is possible. Their darling remains the pinnacle of the sport.
The points a team accrues throughout the season not only allow the bottom teams to earn a spot at the Tour, they also provide benefits within the Tour de France itself. Those benefits include: higher position in the race convoy, better hotels (teams currently are put on rotation between good and less good hotels), option to choose sign-on time in the morning, an extra rider in your Tour squad (maybe for the four teams with the most points?). The more we can incentivise racing for both wins and points throughout the season the better, if this involves a significant advantage at the Tour de France (in lieu of initial interest in any overarching ranking, which is currently lacking) then at least that’s a start.
Equally, there will be individual and team competitions for each of the three racing blocks — let’s call them Cups — as well as an overall ranking. Winners will get special jerseys to wear for the next season, and past victors will get bands to go on their kit. Think peak Paolo Bettini winning the old World Cup.
The new season structure (using 2025 dates as an example):
The International Cup
Cadel’s Great Ocean Road Race: Sunday January 19th
Tour Down Under: Tuesday January 21st-Saturday January 25th
UAE Tour: Tuesday January 28th-Saturday February 1st
Tour of Guangxi: Tuesday February 4th-Saturday February 8th
Japan WorldTour one-dayer: Wednesday February 12th
Tour of California/Hawaii one-dayer: Saturday February 15th
Classics Cup
Omloop: Saturday March 1st
San Sebastian: Wednesday March 5th
Strade Bianche: Sunday March 9th
Il Lombardia: Sunday March 16th
Milan-San Remo: Sunday March 23rd:
E3: Sunday March 30th
Liège-Bastogne-Liège: Wednesday April 2nd
Tour of Flanders: Sunday April 6th
Amstel Gold Race: Wednesday April 9th
Paris-Roubaix: Sunday April 13th
Grand Tour Season
Two-week Vuelta a España: Saturday April 19th-Sunday May 4th
- 15 stages (one rest day on the middle Monday)
Tirreno-Adriatico: Sunday May 4th-Sunday May 11th
Two-week Giro d’Italia: Saturday May 24th to Sunday June 8th
- 15 stages (one rest day on the middle Monday)
Paris-Nice: Sunday June 8th-Sunday June 15th
Criterium du Dauphiné: Sunday June 15th-Sunday June 22nd
Tour de Suisse: Sunday June 22nd-Sunday June 29th
Three-week Tour de France: Saturday July 12th-Sunday August 3rd
Road World Championships: Saturday August 23rd-Sunday August 31st
For any current WorldTour events that are missing, as well as prominent non-WorldTour races, these will now be second-tier races. Races which still contribute towards your overall points ranking, but to a lesser extent than the points gained at WT events, obviously.
Having actually gone through the process of trying to re-jig and optimise the cycling calendar, it’s a harder task than it first appears. Given the parameters set out earlier with 1 WT team = 1 WT event hosted in that country, clearly there are gaps. Yes, we know the team list above and the calendar don’t currently jive. For instance, we currently have two American WT teams but only one (revamped) American WT event, the same with the Netherlands, and we’ve got the Japan Cup on there but no Japanese team.
Details, details. The overlap between the old world and this new world is structurally pretty close already, even if the dates and rhythm of the season has been upended.
The compactness of this calendar would also likely require WorldTour squads remain the same size they are now, which should hopefully protect jobs.
WorldTour events need to be more than just a race
It goes without saying, we’d hope, that the belief is many of our recommendations are applicable to the women’s peloton, although we’re sure there are specific blindspots we’ve not addressed. There’s an easy rule to add in here: each team has both men’s and women’s squads, and each men’s WorldTour race has to have a corresponding women’s event, held on or the day before the men’s event. Flanders Classics is the model here thus far.
Interwoven into these women’s and men’s elite races are a multitude of Gran Fondos, with categories spanning age, distance and competitiveness. Obviously, many of the biggest races already have these events, but we’re talking about bringing all of them fully in-house, standardising them with respect to how you sign-up, their safety and how they are run, and making participation a key factor rather than an afterthought to get some more money through the door. What these WorldTour events would ideally resemble is mini-festivals of cycling hosted throughout the world, each nation’s cyclists converging on top tier events hosted within their borders. Think Jerry World, but make it WorldTour.
The Tour Down Under is probably the closest to what we have in mind at the moment.
We have to add some paid seating. But while paid-for/commercial seating is re-imagined to give race finishes more of a stadium atmosphere, the high climbs remain sacrosanct, and free to spectate, a priceless keystone of our sport.
These ticket sales, ranging in price and access, as well as the accompanying trade shows and other commercial vendors that spring up around this travelling (albeit now more organised and streamlined) circus create a lucrative festival weekend, with money going back into both funding the men’s and women’s WorldTour, ProTeam and development squads, as well as each country’s grassroots. Yes, this likely gives an advantage to the bigger nations, but a draft system and salary cap helps reduce that, as well as the fact that in cycling it takes just one superstar rider (whether he hails from Slovenia or Denmark) to bring the rest of the peloton to heel.
TV rights are bundled into an overall WorldTour network subscription service. If you want wall-to-wall cycling, this is the only place to get it. The exception is each nation can also sell its own race to a free-to-air broadcaster in its own country, and maybe only the final two hours or so of coverage. If you want racing from KM 0, you have to pay. Maybe the same could apply for the Grand Tours, particularly the Tour de France which is a gateway drug for many a cycling fan, as well as Paris-Roubaix and Tour of Flanders.
Revenue sharing amongst teams will be necessary to balance out the obvious advantage of having an already-established major race as your ‘home race’, it can’t be an ‘eat what you kill’ scenario. Hopefully, by controlling the ecosystem and not being beholden to the whims of broadcast media executives, teams will know that as long as they are there putting on racing worth watching, the fans paying to do so are putting the money directly in their pockets.
Game-ify environmental sustainability
Something as big, convoluted and, let’s face it, polluting as a bike race isn’t going to become environmentally sustainable overnight, if ever. Carbon capture schemes offer debatable benefits and what we don’t want to do is preach environmental sustainability simply as a marketing tool, a ‘do as I say, not as I do’ attitude.
Instead, how about making it part of the competition? Dutch UCI Continental team Beat Cycling recently posted about how once again they travelled to a team camp in Girona by train instead of flying, making the journey more complicated and expensive, but believing because it was feasible, it was the right thing to do. How about a complimentary ‘green’ table that adds points to your overall haul as you approach the Tour de France? By utilising fewer resources, being less wasteful, and making less damaging travel choices, you accrue points to add towards your total. The portion of points allocated would have to be substantial enough to make teams actually care, unlike the current fines system where riders and squads are docked amounts of Swiss Francs and UCI points that they barely notice.
You may say this makes the competition not about bike racing, but currently it is unknown whether bike racing as we know it will exist in 50 years. Something has to change. Aside from stopping completely (which would be the most environmentally sustainable option) other resolutions must be found.
Conclusion
What do you think? Is this all complete codswallop? Barking up the wrong tree entirely with ill-thought through ideas? Or is there at least a nugget of a good idea in there somewhere?
This was a fun exercise, even if it is one based entirely in fantasy. So, how would you change cycling with a similar ‘king for a day’ mentality? Let us know in the comments.
Did we do a good job with this story?