One Cycling, the project designed to restructure cycling’s economic model and pit the best riders against each other on a more frequent basis, could be launched in a matter of weeks, a number of sources involved in negotiations have told Escape Collective.
Since the autumn of 2022, some of the sport’s biggest teams have been discussing ways to make the cycling season more comprehensible and overhaul TV broadcast rights to help teams become more financially sustainable.
As the project has gathered pace, it has attracted attention from a number of investment firms, including CVC Capital Partners, but now appears to be close to securing support of up to €300m from SURJ Sports Investment, a subsidiary company of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) that in recent years has invested in golf, boxing and football, among other sports.
One Cycling is the latest in a long line of attempts to wrestle power and some of the financial might away from the Amaury Sports Organisation, the owners of the Tour de France and Vuelta a España, and the concept has run into several age-old issues, principal among them being that ASO have refused to be part of negotiations. The Tour’s race director Christian Prudhomme said one year ago that One Cycling “doesn’t interest me … every time cycling has wanted to transform itself solely with money, it has failed.”
But one team manager recently told Escape that he is “optimistic” that One Cycling will soon be established, while Patrick Lefevere, the recently retired manager of Soudal-Quick Step, said in December that he too was “confident,” adding, “If cycling wants to grow money-wise, everyone has to push for this project.” Similarly, Ralph Denk, the general manager of Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe, teased that news was imminent: “I know something, but I cannot say a lot. We will see what will happen,” he told Escape in December.
A week before Christmas – around the same period that Escape was informed that contracts were being finalised – SportsPro published an interview with Danny Townsend, the chief executive of SURJ, in which the Australian said Saudi Arabian investments in new sports would be announced “in the next couple of months.” He expanded: “We’ve been working on some of the deals that we’re close to closing for over 12 months now. We’re really excited by the ones that we’re very close to announcing, and I think once we announce them, the market will see that they are transformational for the sports we’re investing in.”
One source said that Townsend’s comments “correlates with everything that’s going on,” indicating that one of the projects the Saudis will be imminently investing in will be One Cycling.
The players
Sources told Escape that Mia Norrman, president of EF Education-EasyPost, and Bessel Kok, the billionaire chairman of Soudal Quick-Step, are the two main figures in regular discussion with the Saudis; Richard Plugge, the general manager of Visma-Lease a Bike and originator of One Cycling, also remains a key player. Virtual meetings are held most Fridays, and Escape understands that some of the sport’s biggest stakeholders were represented in Saudi Arabia in the autumn to meet SURJ face-to-face in their home territory. Previous meetings with SURJ have taken place in London and across Europe.
In late 2023, all men’s 18 WorldTour teams, plus a handful of ProTeam outfits like Israel-PremierTech and Lotto, were asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) if they wanted to be part of the project. Seven did: Visma-Lease a Bike, Ineos Grenadiers, Lidl-Trek, Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe, Soudal-Quick Step, EF Education-EasyPost, and Picnic-PostNL.
Teams were also offered the opportunity to sign a letter of intent (LOI) to be kept abreast of developments; it is believed Bahrain Victorious, Movistar and XDS-Astana each signed a LOI. UAE Team Emirates-XRG and Intermarché-Wanty, as well as second-tier Lotto, have also moved closer to One Cycling’s orbit in recent weeks. Jayco-AlUla and the four French WorldTour teams – Arkéa-B&B Hotels, Cofidis, Decathlon-AG2R La Mondiale and Groupama-FDJ – have so far refused to be part of the project.
Velon, an organisation set up by 11 WorldTour teams in 2014, has emerged as a key part in negotiations – perhaps no surprise given that all seven signed-up teams are founding Velon members and the broad outlines of One Cycling are similar. Sources said that the organisation, already with one of the sport’s biggest digital reaches, would be folded into the One Cycling transaction, with teams believing that Velon’s rights, its tracking system that delivers performance data to TV coverage and online, as well as its on-bike cameras, are crucial to enhancing the broadcast spectacle as the sport seeks to grow its audience and engagement.
Flanders Classics, which runs Belgium’s biggest one-day spring races, is one of the few race organisers that have so far committed their support, with its CEO Tomas Van Den Spiegel an especially enthusiastic backer. The Tour de Suisse’s organisers, Unlimited Cycling, are also thought to be on board, while RCS, the promoters of the Giro d’Italia and most Italian WorldTour races, remain on the fence.
Proponents of the project rebuffed Italian reports from October that suggested eight new races would be added to the calendar as part of One Cycling. But at the UCI’s WorldTour seminar in November, attendees were informed that 14 new top-tier races would be launched in 2026, without specifics being divulged. UCI president David Lappartient has often called for a rethink of the calendar and it is thought that the UCI remains warm to the prospects of One Cycling, provided that it is not a breakaway league run outside of the auspices of the UCI – something advocates of the project have insisted it wouldn’t be.
Lappartient told Bloomberg in August, “When you have stakeholders that want to invest in cycling, I take this positively that there’s an interest in cycling.” But he warned, “You also need to respect what the red lines are for the UCI, and what are the key principles: that we will never support a clone league. We have to see together with the Saudis how they can join us, how we can work together without disrupting everything but something that will benefit all stakeholders. I don’t think there will be a Saudi breakaway league.”
There are still issues to be resolved, said sources, in particular around governance and how exactly teams will ensure their best riders are at One Cycling-affiliated races, but there is hope that agreements that satisfy most if not all parties can be reached within the coming weeks.
Plugge, who has said he is inspired by Formula One’s revolution in the 1980s, has repeatedly said cycling’s rivals are not its teams but other sports, and that professional bike racing must undergo a revamp if it is to exist in the coming decades. That could include more circuit races to enable ticket sales and VIP packages, something that Red Bull manager Denk recently alluded to when speaking with Escape. “We have massive [numbers of] people alongside the road, but our sport is still free,” the German said. “Some spots [to watch] are really nice, and some spots you can make a return on investment.”
Is this really, finally, happening?
It was October 2023 when news of cycling’s latest reform plans first emerged, and what’s been clear throughout is that the One Cycling project has never truly died, even if there have been a number of false dawns.
As of right now, the plan is to push One Cycling through with the expectation that once it is a fully financed and developed project, with stated objectives and aims revealed to the wider public, other teams and race organisers will come on board. It’s a bit fake-it-until-you-make-it, but there’s substantially more money than the original Velon project had to work with, so it may be enough cash to fake it for quite some time. The eventual hope for proponents is that One Cycling will become so big that ASO will no longer be able to resist a slice of the pie.
There remain, however, many uncertainties. What will One Cycling actually look like? If it’s not a breakaway league, will there be a One Cycling-branded competition alongside the WorldTour? It’s a question that no one has yet fully answered – what seems to be the preferred tactic of those behind the project is to force it through, and then deal with the actual nitty gritty parts afterwards. That’s also in keeping with Saudi Arabia’s disruptive tactics in other sports.
Those finer details matter a tremendous amount. How can they ensure that Tadej Pogačar races more regularly against Jonas Vingegaard and Remco Evenepoel if UAE Team Emirates-XRG aren’t yet fully on-board with One Cycling? And what about the Women’s WorldTour? Women’s racing has gradually become a small part of the conversation after initially being overlooked, but will women’s teams be folded into the package?
In a statement, the UCI told Escape: “The UCI is expecting further information on the developments of the OneCycling project, which has been pending for several months. As the governing body of cycling, it is essential that the UCI, along with race organisers, teams, and riders, fully understand and discuss this initiative and its implications.
“The UCI supports initiatives aimed at enhancing the financial stability of professional cycling and its stakeholders. However, it is crucial that these efforts are collaborative and acknowledge the UCI’s leadership role in jointly developing and advancing our sport.”
Chapter one – getting the thing off the ground – might be reaching its end game, but the hard work in persuading other stakeholders and fans to join the enterprise hasn’t even begun yet.
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