Despite the International Cycling Union's refusal last week to incorporate the proposed One Cycling project into the men’s and women’s WorldTour calendars for the 2026-2028 seasons, some of the project’s key personnel have insisted that the venture is not dead and remains on course to be launched in the future.
Following three years of intense negotiations designed to restructure road racing’s economic model and create a more comprehensive and global race calendar, the project was dealt what appeared to be a significant blow last week, with its initial launch target of the 2026 season denied by the UCI in a strongly worded statement. Separately, UCI president David Lappartient rather pointedly said that One Cycling had a “belligerent intention” to create a two-tier system in the sport.
If you want a fuller understanding of what exactly One Cycling is, read our report from April, but briefly it is a scheme to reform the sport led by up to 21 teams – including a claimed 14 WorldTour teams (including men's and women’s teams) and three standalone women’s WorldTour teams – in partnership with race organisers RCS and Flanders Classics, but not Tour de France promoters ASO.
Chris Marshall-Bell
The UCI stated that while it was “welcoming the fact that road cycling is attracting new investors” – Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) is prepared to invest up to €300 million over roughly a decade – they had “unanimously decided… not to respond to the request, as it stands, to include the One Cycling project in the UCI Women’s WorldTour and UCI WorldTour calendars.” The same statement added that the proposition “was deemed incompatible with the governance and regulatory framework of the UCI as well as lacking sporting coherence.”
One Cycling, however, are preferring to focus on the final comments from the UCI’s press release, which said that the governing body “wishes, as do all cycling’s stakeholders, to continue discussions with the representatives of this project in order to collaborate on the internationalisation of the UCI Women’s WorldTour and UCI WorldTour calendars and the economic development of our sport.”
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