Exciting Last Week for the Giro; Unbound Race to be Live-Streamed; The Potentially Broader Impact of the "Enhanced Games;" Why Do Rich People Invest in Sports? ...

Key Takeaways:

● Giro Still Wide Open

● Women Race in Spain

● Unbound to be Broadcast on YouTube

● Potential Broader Impacts of the “Enhanced” Games

● Why Do the Ultra-Rich Invest in Sports?

After Tuesday’s unpredictable stage marked by crashes and abandons, 21-year-old Mexican rider Isaac del Toro defended his race lead, but just barely. His UAE teammate and hitherto main rival, Juan Ayuso, suffered badly across the climbs and dropped out of GC contention, while early favorite Primož Roglič withdrew from the race after his fourth crash. With del Toro struggling on the stage and UAE seeming out of sorts after the Monday rest day, Simon Yates moved into second place while Richard Carapaz attacked to recover more time and now sits in third only a half minute back. The race is far from over with almost 80,000 feet of climbing during the week – especially with other veteran riders like Damiano Caruso, Derek Gee and Egan Bernal hovering relatively close behind. The tight GC spacing and Del Toro’s relative inexperience as a leader could distill into a fascinating youth vs. experience battle through the final few brutal mountain stages. If Del Toro does hold on to win the overall, it would be the second time in the last five years that a 21-year-old burst onto the scene to win the overall at a Grand Tour, a feat that was considered close to impossible in modern cycling before Tadej Pogačar did it at the 2020 Tour de France. It would also force the sport to grapple with the implications of two generational GC talents on the same team, potentially steamrolling their way through the sport. In particular, teammates like Juan Ayuso and João Almeida would be greatly affected and at risk of completely missing their chance of a grand tour trophy unless they look for more opportunities in new teams.

With such a young rider sitting atop the Giro, it’s difficult to figure out where the historical “Under-23” category fits into the modern iteration of the sport. For example, this weekend across the pond at the USA Cycling National Championships in West Virginia, EF Education-Aevolo rider Gavin Hlady won the U23 road race for the second consecutive year, with Cole Kessler of the WorldTour Lidl-Trek team winning the individual time trial in the same category. (WorldTour riders Kristen Faulker and Quinn Simmons easily won the senior Men’s and Women’s races against fields somewhat depleted by the awkward calendar and physical placement.) With both riders already firmly placed on top-tier teams, or their direct feeder squads, they have little to gain other than personal validation for the results. Considering the talent of these two riders, it stands to reason that those who finished behind them must also have massive engines and potential. However, there is a competing trend among WorldTour teams to slow their recruiting out of the U-23 category and instead focus talent identification and development efforts into juniors and below.

This highlights the fact that top teams are putting most of their focus on recruiting younger and younger riders, and are now less interested in talented but raw 22-year-olds. It also underlines the anemic state of the development in U.S. cycling, in combination with the virtual gutting of the domestic calendar to the detriment of men’s and women’s programs. For the men’s WorldTour, the lack of races stateside means that if a rider isn’t polished, accomplished and cultured enough to get noticed by a top development squad by their early 20s, there is no longer much of a path for them to develop further or make the jump to the top level later on. Currently, only a handful of riders in the road race, like Colby Simmons on EF Education-EasyPost and Evan Boyle on Hagens Berman-Jayco, are on a team in the top two tiers of the sport (WorldTour or ProTeam) or one of their affiliated feeder teams. In fact, through the last seven editions of the U23 race, Hlady is the only winner who is currently on a professional-level team; most of the former winners are already completely out of cycling. Despite North Americans being in the top five overall of the Giro (Isaac del Toro and Canada’s Derek Gee), it is noteworthy that neither is from the United States.

The Women’s WorldTour stayed in Spain for the Vuelta a Burgos stage race, and for anyone asking if the peloton is more than just Demi Vollering vs. Anna van der Breggen, the answer was a resounding yes. With the respective FDJ and SDWorx star riders taking a breather, the best-of-the-rest showed up in the sunny weather. The Lorena Wiebes/Lotte Kopecky SDWorx 1-2 punch was successful on the first stage, with Wiebes taking the win, but Uno-X took a much-needed victory via Mie Bjørndal Ottestad’s punchy sprint in stage 2. But it was Movistar’s Marlen Reusser who stepped up and showed brilliant form to take the final two stages and the overall victory. She broke away to take a mountaintop victory in stage 3, holding off Fenix-Deceunink’s Yara Kastelijn (in a leadership role while Puck Pieterse contested the Nova Mestre round of the MTB World Cup) and Lidl-Trek’s Elisa Longo Borghini. Reusser also dominated the final time trial to seal the GC win. The balanced racing highlighted the depth of FDJ, who were highly competitive especially with Juliette Labous’ second place in the TT and Elise Chabbey’s strong performance, as well as Uno-X’s support for Ottestad’s top 10 on GC. Are the contenders for the Tour de France Femmes becoming clearer after Burgos? Yes, but the list and depth of the contenders is growing, to the benefit of the sport – and distinctly in contrast to the men’s side.

Unbound Gravel, the world’s most important gravel race, announced that Saturday’s event will be broadcast live on YouTube. It thus becomes the first top level American gravel race (outside of maybe the long running Lauf Gravel Worlds event in Nebraska) to create a livestream of the race. Live broadcasts of long bike races, particularly in remote areas of the United States where there is often limited or no cell reception, are logistically complex and expensive to pull off. Gravel races, which have grown rapidly over the past several years, will need to leverage media in order to build a global fanbase, sponsors from outside the bike industry and more participation – and a free livestream is the best way to accomplish these things. So, kudos to Life Time for making it happen.

It’s now official – the first Enhanced Games will take place in Las Vegas from May 21 through 24, 2026, with eight events (thus far) to be contested across swimming, athletics, and weightlifting. Regardless of the podiums, the “games” will blur multiple lines between clean sport and doping, and may represent the tip of a spear that pierces the WADA’s legacy armor. The Las Vegas announcement jointly highlighted a new 50-meter freestyle swimming record set by an “enhanced” athlete, and the $1 million award he earned for the feat. Athletes are already being warned by their respective federations to steer clear of the games, but that may not matter to most of the potential participants who would financially benefit given the $500,000 purse per event and million dollar bonus for breaking current world records. So how could this “clown show” – as described by USADA CEO Travis Tygart – upend elite sports?

The Enhanced Games has too much capital investment to fail, too much spectator and market potential to be invisible, and carries loaded cultural wildcards in its deck. First, the investor profile and board of advisors is a virtual who’s who list from the venture capital, bioscience, sports personality, and “tech bro” fields. There are supplements and medications to be tested, new training methodologies and treatment protocols to be fielded, and a new telehealth subscription platform being launched that will market the products and supportive services to a global consumer audience. And that audience is not insignificant; it is in fact a wide majority of humans on planet earth who are constantly searching for, procuring, and using supplements that promise healthy benefits. The only difference is that in this case, the supplements will be proven through the games’ competitive outcomes – with or without scientific documentation.

More to the point, as it adds events, introduces newer supplements, and retains telehealth subscribers, this event could start to normalize the cultural acceptance of performance enhancement. Just 25 years ago, the UFC struggled with the perception that it was a form of “human cockfighting,” but it gradually subsumed the language of “violence” and won over detractors with its tamer cousin – “combat sports.” A gray morality in sport is on the horizon: that new swimming record is just two-tenths of a second faster than the previous mark. If other records improve only incrementally, one intriguing and perhaps damning question will surely arise: did many current records – supposedly clean records – actually involve doped exploits by athletes who went undetected under WADA’s testing purview. Public perception could shift under the narrative that many successful elite athletes are already competing in an enhanced state. That sentiment is likely to gather momentum as the games’ engagement model embeds in social media and sporting platforms, calls WADA’s mission into question, and disrupts the Olympic movement’s clean-sport rhetoric. Record shattering or not, the Enhanced Games will lift a performance veil and make training methods, drug and supplement regimens widely available – and perhaps embolden previously doped athletes to come forward, even if they never tested positive. Again, we ask, could this impact cycling? Bluntly put, all sports will be impacted if the Enhanced Games are successful, and there may be little anyone in sports governance can do to stop it. The Olympic Games are an approximately $8 billion dollar sports licensing cash cow every four years, but the current sports supplement ($60 billion) and pharmaceutical ($90 billion) self-enhancement annual market is an economy-shifting apex predator.

To drive that point home, the topic of GLP-1 weight loss drug microdosing has reached a new crescendo as fitness influencers, drug manufacturers, and legislation intersect in the consumer marketplace. The semaglutide drugs – under a variety of manufacturer trade names and generating nearly $50 billion in annual sales – are being widely and often loosely prescribed by physicians for patients seeking health benefits. While weight loss is the primary goal, increasing accounts of athletic performance benefits are coming to light. Studies are not yet widely conclusive, but popular accounts in news outlets and social media platforms indicate that fractional doses allow individuals to suppress unhealthy cravings while maximizing training to increase VO2 max efficiency and reduce body fat (notably, full doses of the medication can also reduce muscle and exacerbate fatigue). Experts in anti-doping are weighing the possibility that the drug is performance enhancing – in a general sense. For example, use of the drug to maintain racing weight throughout the off season might provide endurance athletes like pro cyclists with a preparation advantage. However, medical experts are expressing universal concerns of patients and under-supervised telehealth consumers misusing the drugs, and the potential for drug safety issues regarding compounded versions of the medication.

A fascinating look into the economics of sports ownership aired last week and confirmed several notable trends as to why so many members of the ultra-rich ranks are sinking their fortunes into sports franchises and leagues. Sports enterprises are sometimes held up as recession-proof investments, but they can also be useful for mitigating financial losses and offsetting tax bills. The strategies of leagues to prop up teams, push into new markets on behalf of the team owners, and generally function as cohesive economic engines to constantly improve the product for fans makes it relatively easy to generate good profits after a team changes hands. Highlights of the interview included a deep dive into collegiate sports and the impacts of Name/Image/Likeness legislation on university-level sports (although it lacked discussion of the potential impacts of private equity investment in this space), and an exploration of women’s sports as an explosive investment frontier. However, a short tangent into the importance of niche sports may indicate why pro cycling could yet land with an angel investor is worth noting (though the One Cycling hoopla continues to fade away). On the topic of Formula 1 motorsports and why a sponsor would make multi-million dollar, multi-year investments to steer a franchise, one statement from a sponsor was noteworthy: “You give me one sport with one buy, and I get the world.” This angle and insight lands tantalizingly close to pro cycling’s wheelhouse. The expert opinion that a sport can become successful while being closely associated with specific education, economic affluence, and spending habit demographics hints at where pro cycling’s similar fan base might be steered in the future.