For riders in women’s WorldTeams and ProTeams, salaries are the highest they’ve ever been. Athletes are finally able to make a real living from riding their bikes while contracted for one of the top teams in the sport. But for the Continental teams, the grass isn’t quite as green. The 2024 season saw multiple long-standing Continental teams fold, including DNA Cycling in the United States and Lifeplus-Wahoo in the United Kingdom. In the case of Lifeplus, riders’ contracts were terminated in early August, before the 2024 season even properly wrapped, forcing staff and riders to gain access to the team’s bank guarantee.
The Cyclists Alliance (TCA), the biggest union for professional female cyclists, was able to step in and help riders and staff secure a percentage of what they should have made in 2024, but TCA wasn’t only helping Lifeplus riders and staff. The union was involved in multiple cases last season – most involving Continental teams – where riders or staff needed access to bank guarantees after teams failed to fulfill their contracts.
From the outside, women’s cycling is looking pretty good, in particular the rapidly growing Women’s WorldTour. But while the optics of the sport are mostly positive, the reality at the Continental level isn’t quite so rosy. Continental teams aren’t as stable as the top tier of the sport, which means more of them end up in financial difficulty and riders and staff have to call on the bank guarantee. But in the event those employees do need the guarantee, accessing it isn’t as straightforward as it sounds, and the money available is often far short of what is owed.
What is a bank guarantee?
A bank guarantee is a sum of money the UCI requires a registered team to set aside at the start of each season. The bank guarantee exists as a safety net in case a team isn’t paying riders or is forced to shut down. In most cases, calling upon the bank guarantee is a last resort, according to Judith van Maanen and Cassie Nelson of the legal and ethics department of TCA.
The amount is different depending on the level of the team. For WorldTeams and ProTeams, the required funds are 25% of the salaries of all contracted persons, including riders and staff, plus 15,000 CHF (US$16,400). The total guarantee amount isn’t allowed to be less than 130,000 CHF (US$142,000).
For Continental teams there are two options. They are required to set aside either 15% of the total pay due to contracted riders and staff or €20,000 (US$25,000), whichever is higher. In the case of Lifeplus-Wahoo, the team exceeded the minimum guarantee, but only just: £23,000 (US$28,000) was available to pay the full team of riders and staff when the team folded on August 5, 2024.
“It’s a backstop and without it it would be way worse than it is,” Nelson told Escape Collective. “But it’s also very clear that it’s very different depending on the level of the team.”
“The WorldTour and ProTeam bank guarantees are held by the UCI and then at the Continental level, it’s all arranged through the national federations,” Van Maanen explained.
With a total amount in the low five figures, the fund may sound generous, but it’s not. “It’s the [total] pot; it needs to be divided,” Van Maanen continued. While all riders and staff are entitled to call up the guarantee, they aren’t the only creditors who can dip into the fund. “The UCI may take out fees that are not being paid,” noted Van Maanen.
A typical Continental team has at least two staff members – possibly more, although most Continental teams hire soigneurs and mechanics on a race-by-race basis – and has a roster of 10 to 15 riders. So the best case scenario, if the bank guarantee is the minimum amount the UCI requires, is that each rider and staff member receives a little over €1,000. This is a general average; there are riders who get more or less, depending on their prior contract.
The process of accessing the bank guarantee is different depending on the level of the team as well. For ProTeam and WorldTeams there is a form easily found on the UCI website. In fact, all someone would have to do to find the form is to search “UCI bank guarantee.”
“At the Conti level, there are riders that don’t even get paid, so 15% of the total [team salaries and wages] is already not so much,” Van Maanen said. (The common practice of riders racing for no pay at the Continental level artificially lowers the total salary pool, and is why the UCI requires a minimum of €20,000 from Continental teams.)
“The spread of salaries in a Continental team is also massive,” Nelson added. “You’re getting [riders making] zero Euros to [riders making] in the 20s or 30s [thousands], sometimes more. And staff members are included in that, and staff members are almost never making zero, so that skews the payouts and the value of the bank guarantee.”
And with less professionalism at the Continental level, The Cyclists Alliance is often more involved when it comes to riders needing to access their team’s bank guarantee than it is at the WorldTeam level (where team failures are also considerably more rare).
“In the case of Lifeplus-Wahoo it did go to all the riders and staff but it was a collective action initiated by the [riders],” Nelson said. “TCA didn’t get involved until a rider reached out, but at that point, the team had already contacted British Cycling.” And while riders face immediate expenses, the payout often lags far behind. In the Lifeplus case, Nelson noted, the action began in August “and the riders just got paid [in December].”
An essential ally
The Cyclists Alliance, founded in 2017 by three professional riders, is the leading independent women’s union in cycling. (There is another union as well, CPA Women – a branch of the men’s CPA union). The list of things TCA does for women in cycling is long, from a mentoring program, to providing legal advice, to their PreCareer x Strava Grant program. When it comes to the legal side, TCA’s services include advising riders during contract negotiations, helping enforce those contracts when necessary, dealing with ethical or legal complaints from riders, and assisting if riders need to access their team’s bank guarantee.
“Most of what we do is ultimately related to legal or ethics in some way,” Nelson explained. “Beyond reading through contracts and making sure they’re OK, we try to help the riders enforce their contracts. We don’t go to court with the riders, but we support them in every other way we can, whether it’s getting their salaries when they’re owed or figuring out what to ask for in terms of salary amounts. We get questions on insurance, visas, ethical things, misconduct …”
Throughout the 2024 season, TCA was in contact with Continental riders on multiple teams regarding their employer’s failure to pay salaries.
“We are learning this as we go, and every case seems to be a little bit different,” Nelson said.
Van Maanen worked on one case where a rider’s contract was terminated prematurely, with one year remaining. With the help of TCA, the rider received the salary she was owed without needing to access the bank guarantee.
“She had two years and [the team] terminated it,” Van Maanen explained. “In labour law that’s not how it works, so we claimed for the second-year salary as well. I went to the team and they didn’t respond. The bank guarantee is a last resort; you need to try and solve the dispute with the parties involved first. If that doesn’t work you can go for the bank guarantee. In this case, when the team didn’t respond … I contacted the national federation and they were quite cooperative and then the team started to respond.
“It worked as an activator to get the team responding and in the end, they paid her a whole year of salary so we didn’t have to access the bank guarantee.”
“I have another Continental team at the moment that we are waiting for the national federation,” Van Maanen said. “Everyone has to make their claim before the national federation acts.” (Van Maanen and Nelson did not disclose the identity of the teams in question when speaking with Escape.)
Twice bitten
Heidi Franz knows a thing or two about the fragility of women’s cycling at the Continental level. Over the past few years, Franz has been a rider for multiple teams that have either folded before the season ended or suddenly stopped paying riders.
She was contracted to ride for the women’s B&B Hotels team that fell apart before the 2023 season even started, subsequently signed for Zaaf, which then made headlines when the team collapsed just a few months into the season. From there, she was part of Lifeplus-Wahoo, which folded in August of 2024. That’s three teams that folded prematurely in less than two years, if you’re keeping count (in between Zaaf and Lifeplus, she rode for DNA Pro Cycling, which closed at the end of 2024 via normal order). In the case of Zaaf and Lifeplus she had to take the reins to access the bank guarantee so she and her teammates, and the team staff, would receive payment.
“The process of this bank guarantee this year was much different from the Zaaf bank guarantee experience,” Franz said. “The Zaaf bank guarantee situation was definitely rider-driven. It was basically Lizzie Stannard and I trying to convince all 15 riders, ‘You have to accept the fact that they are not going to pay us, and we need to do it ourselves.’ “That was a big moment where I was like, ‘Oh, that’s how a bank guarantee is called up.’ The riders have to do it.”
In the case of Zaaf, Franz was trying to access the bank guarantee through the Spanish federation, and for Lifeplus-Wahoo it was British Cycling. Neither federation was easy to deal with.
“We emailed the Spanish federation and also CC’d a bazillion other people: someone from the UCI and all these other folks,” Franz said of the Zaaf experience. “The Spanish federation were kind of classically slow. They were very slow to respond, to begin with, and it took a bunch of emails to them to be like, ‘Hello. Have you even received this email?’
“I don’t know exactly [why that was] – if the Spanish federation has their own regulations on how they distribute or how they allocate the funds in the bank guarantee. What we were told was that in order to go after expenses that were owed from Zaaf we would have to do a completely separate arbitration process. We’d need to hire a lawyer. We would basically have to spend upwards of €10,000 to hire a lawyer and go to court to fight for the expenses that we were owed.”
After starting the process in April of 2023, Franz received one full month of payment, plus 88% of a second month’s payment. She was finally paid in October of 2023.
When it came to accessing Lifeplus-Wahoo’s bank guarantee, Franz turned to TCA for help. She’d already gone through the process once without assistance and wasn’t keen to do it again.
“August 5, we have this phone call with Tom [Varney, General Manager for Lifeplus-Wahoo], and find out the team is basically folding that day,” Franz explained. “Then Tom, on the phone call, said, ‘Heidi, I think you would be a great rider to take the helm on this one. Ten minutes later, he had an email written to British Cycling saying, ‘We’re shutting a team down, we need to call in the bank guarantee to get these rider payments, and here’s Heidi. She’s going to be kind of the rider representative for the team.’
“I’d been through this before, so I needed to be the one that helps try to get us [the bank guarantee]. A few days later a friend told me I needed to delegate. I had young riders emailing me asking, ‘When are we getting paid?’ I’d already included Cassie in the first email after the team meeting. I wanted to include TCA in that email and immediately put them in the loop to make sure they had eyes on everything. A few days later I let TCA try to take on more of the responsibility which was really good because they did an amazing job.”
Even with the help of Nelson at TCA, it still took months for the riders to receive the money from the bank guarantee.
“From August 5th and 6th when the communications were first getting started, we didn’t really hear any updates until November 10, and that was when Cassie emailed us to say that British Cycling actually was in possession of the funds from the bank guarantee,” Franz said. “They didn’t give her any other information: how much we were getting paid, when we were getting paid, the timeline of it, they just said, ‘We’re going to distribute it.’
“November 20, British Cycling sent Cassie a payment schedule that made no sense. They were trying to push to include reimbursements in the bank guarantee and Cassie was trying to push back because it gave the team a windfall when the bank guarantee is for salaries. Then there was a lot of back and forth, and British Cycling didn’t even respond to Cassie until December 5th about why they were including reimbursements in the bank guarantee. Finally, we got paid on December 12.” British Cycling did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
In the end, the members of Lifeplus-Wahoo received a tiny percentage of what the team owed them had the team been able to finish out the year and pay salaries normally. “Their calculation was one payment for the month of August plus 27.75% of September,” Franz explained. That experience underlines how meager the bank guarantee is; even after successfully accessing it, riders and staff were completely out of luck for a full quarter of their salaries.
After the initial call with team management when the riders found out the team would be terminated immediately, and the first email with British Cycling where management handed over responsibility to Franz, members of the team didn’t hear much from the people who had promised them a year of stability.
“[The team] kind of just washed their hands of it, and we didn’t really hear anything else,” Franz said. “We had possessions in the team camper that were confiscated by the vehicle leasing company. Like €500 worth of custom shoes, a bunch of helmets, and clothes that were all in my rain bag. How am I getting that back?”
Franz said that both of her experiences with national federations trying to gain access to the bank guarantees left something to be desired. Neither the Spanish nor the British Federations were easy to communicate with, and both took “too long” to hand over any money to the riders or staff.
“British Cycling was surprisingly slow also, to just respond,” Franz said. “It sounded, especially from Cassie’s end, that they were just, really dragging their feet a bit with updates. They decided how they were going to do it and didn’t really take any other input.
“We tried to reason with them a little bit. It just seemed like British Cycling was a lot more stubborn and kind of took the side of the team more than actually getting riders the funds that they needed.”
Is there a better way?
Each situation Franz dealt with came with different challenges, and other cycling federations would surely come with their own share of hoops to jump through, but handing over all responsibility to the UCI, even in the cases of Continental teams, wouldn’t necessarily be the right answer.
“There are pros and cons,” Van Maanen said of the current system. For example, the UCI charges a fee of CHF 500 to manage the bank guarantee for each team. For a WorldTeam, it’s not that big of an ask. For a Continental team, budgets are so meager it can be a challenge to hand over even that much sometimes. “On the one hand, I would say, have it all done but the UCI because they know how to do the trick on the WorldTour and ProTour levels, but 500 Swiss Francs, I don’t think [Continental teams] could pay 500 Swiss francs with the money they got,” said Van Maanen.
“I don’t know if the UCI has the bandwidth,” Nelson added. There’s the simple issue of the number of teams, for one thing. There are 18 men’s and 15 women’s WorldTeams, and 17 men’s and seven women’s ProTeams, all under the UCI’s oversight for bank guarantees. But there are 186 men’s and women’s Continental teams worldwide. “They should [oversee the guarantee] if they’re licensing these teams,” said Nelson. “They should have the bandwidth to take care of them, but in terms of pure efficiencies, I don’t think [accessing the bank guarantee] would happen any faster.”
Speaking with TCA and Franz, it’s clear that accessing the team bank guarantee is not a straightforward, easy process. “It’s not the kind of thing where you’re like, ‘My salary payment is late, I need to access the bank guarantee,’” Nelson said. “We do wish more riders were aware it existed when things are at their worst because it could help even in internal discussions with teammates and team managers.
“It’s not that common riders come directly to us; it’s usually we’ve already been in touch because of other issues that have come up with the team.”
One potential factor that would help the situation would be the UCI imposing stronger regulations when it comes to Continental teams. ProTeams and WorldTeams are held to one standard, while Continental teams are held to another, far more lax standard, and not just on financial issues. When it comes to professionalism of staff, safeguards put in place for riders, and other issues, Continental teams simply have fewer rules.
“Continental teams, it’s in the regulations, they are treated very differently from the WorldTour and the new ProTeams,” Nelson said. “It’s all rooted in the regulations; for better or worse, it’s a little bit wild wild west at the Continental level.”
This is true not only of the bank guarantee situation, and the frequency with which Continental teams land themselves in hot water, but also when it comes to rider and staff salaries. Riders on Continental teams, as Van Maanen pointed out, are more often than not making no money, or very very little. In the case of Lifeplus-Wahoo, the bank guarantee was only £3,000 over the minimum, and so while already not enough to make the riders and staff whole, it could have been even less.
It’s not everything, but it’s something
For all the bank guarantees flaws, it is at least there. But until there are more rules put in place for Continental teams it’s likely Van Maanen and Nelson will have to continue pestering national federations on behalf of riders. Misinformation doesn’t make their job any easier.
“There are sometimes rumours that the bank guarantee is only for employed riders and not self-employed riders, and that is not true,” Van Maanen said. “So either [riders] don’t know about the bank guarantee or they have the wrong information.”
A self-employed rider is contracted by the team and, in the case of ProTeams and WorldTeams, receives a higher monthly payment with fewer benefits – no health insurance, for example. An employed rider receives more benefits from the team and a lower monthly salary, but both are contracted through the team and thus have access to the bank guarantee if they need it.
“My advice would be to first reach out to TCA because we have more experience with this,” Van Maanen said. “This is not a promo, but it’s easier for us. On the UCI website there’s a link, but the first thing you need to know is what is in the contract, do you need to go through the team manager first? If you don’t resolve it with the team you can then go to the UCI.”
“There’s a lot happening, especially in the Continental teams, I think,” Van Maanen added. “Luckily there is a bank guarantee. It’s not solving the whole problem because riders don’t get the full amount, but at least there’s a little bit of a solution.”
Even in the case of ProTeams and WorldTeams the bank guarantee is only a fraction of the total salary amount for all riders and staff, not nearly enough money to pay employees their due amount in full. When it comes to the bank guarantee itself, Continental teams could be asked to front the same percentage as ProTeams and WorldTeams. Unfortunately, for some Continental teams, even setting aside the required amount isn’t easy.
“There’s not enough money at the Continental level to fix it,” Nelson said. “The teams don’t have the money, the riders don’t have the money. That’s what we’re working with at that level.”
The problem here is twofold. The first issue is that, even in the best-case scenario, the bank guarantee will not cover more than two months of salary. The other is that Continental teams end up needing to access the bank guarantee more often. That’s not strictly about smaller budgets; it has more to do with less sponsor stability and a lower degree of professional bookkeeping among team management. Sponsors sometimes stop paying teams prematurely, but even the money that is there isn’t always making it to the riders and staff if the team mismanages what money they have.
Regardless of what the system is, the number of times TCA has had to step in for Continental riders is a problem, and they don’t even get the chance to help every rider who isn’t receiving their salary, because riders aren’t always aware they are available to help.
“Everyone deserves better than to be shuffled around and feel like there’s not really a backstop, even when there is,” Nelson said.
As the sport continues to grow from the top it’s possible these issues will become more prevalent. Many Continental teams feel they need to enter the top races in order to get visibility for the sponsors so they can survive, without having the backing to properly support their riders and staff. In some cases, sponsors of Continental teams push for the team to compete against WorldTeams, but don’t commit enough money to make those goals feasible.
The issues around salaries at the Continental level, team budgets, and how Continental team management is overseeing funds signal problems at the lower level of the sport right now. All these problems are related, and none of them are easy to solve. For 2025, Franz is on Cynisca Cycling, a US-registered Continental team. It’s her fifth pro team in the last 37 months, and she hopes her days of contacting national federations are over.
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