Is Men's Cycling Becoming Boring? And What To Do About It; Industry Turmoil Continues; WADA's Latest Scandal Hits New Low; Question re Red Bull Sponsorship; Rodriguez Take Romandie

Key Takeaways:

●        Is Men’s Cycling Becoming Boring? and …

●        What Can Be Done About it?

●        Cycling Industry Turmoil Continues

●        WADA Scandal Hits New Low

●        Questions About Red Bull Sponsorship

●        Liberty Makes Another Key Acquisition

The Giro d’Italia begins in a few days, and all eyes will be focused on Tadej Pogačar’s potentially quixotic quest to win both the Giro and Tour, but regardless of his placing, his UAE team is thriving. The team leads the UCI points ranking by a staggering margin through the first four months of the season, nearly doubling second-place Alpecin-Deceuninck’s total. The team is also tops in terms of wins, with 12 more than second-place over Visma-LAB (30 vs 18). But the team doesn’t simply rely on their superstar for this WorldTour leading production; in the week since Pogačar last raced, the team has racked up five wins with four different riders. And this dominance is unlikely to end anytime soon as three of those riders are aged 22 years old or under. Meanwhile, Visma-LAB, which won all three Grand Tours in 2023 and was generally considered the sport’s top team (despite finishing a very close second to UAE in points) is currently sitting 5th overall in the points rankings. And their overall prospects at the upcoming Giro and Tour seem bleak as their two top stars, Wout van Aert and Jonas Vingegaard, are currently out with injuries.

As the sport is increasingly dominated by a small number of teams and riders, the racing is becoming more predictable and less interesting. Although some would argue that cycling has always been like this – with one or another team dominant for a few years and then fading – a growing chorus of fans is demanding that something should be done to make the sport’s outcomes more exciting. We write virtually every week about how the Big Six riders, or perhaps a new category of the big three (or four?) teams are dominating most of the men’s 2024 road events. Some argue that it makes for exciting racing, since most of the Big Six are now on different teams, but a louder refrain is heard from the nay-sayers – that too much money and competitive power is concentrated in the hands of too few teams. Given the difficulty of implementing some type of budget cap (though perhaps this is lessening – see below), The Outer Line and our colleagues at Wielerflits will, in the next few weeks, be examining an alternative cap and limit types that might achieve the same targeted goals for greater competitive parity.

Visma-LAB’s downturn has perhaps cooled this talk of salary caps, but UAE’s quiet dominance, and, in particular their hoarding of young stars, certainly highlights the continuing need to investigate mechanisms for leveling the playing field and promoting competitive parity. There may be significant hurdles to this, but the English Premier League’s recent move toward a hard spending cap – which is tied to a multiple of the revenue of the lowest-earning club, not the individual revenues of each club – marks the first time we may see a hard salary cap employed outside of North America and sets a potentially interesting precedent and benchmark for professional cycling. 

Turmoil within the cycling industry has been well publicized, with Trek, Giant, BMC, and Specialized making headlines as they’ve encountered supply chain, managerial overturn and entire brand “right sizing” crises. However, only Scott Bicycles has had to have police intervene in managerial disputes. When former majority shareholder and CEO, Beat Zaugg, was terminated and replaced by the current majority owner, Youngone Corporation, it apparently didn’t sit well with Zaugg. According to the police, the situation in early April was resolved without incident, but it drew unfortunate attention on yet another of cycling’s cornerstone brands experiencing “downturn heartburn” (it was also revealed that Youngone recently loaned Scott $166 million). Adding to the downturn news, Kona is also reportedly in a rough patch, and will reportedly be put up for sale by its parent company, Kent Outdoors, less than two years after they acquired it. That the company was seriously in trouble could have been divined several months ago, when it promoted its seemingly absurd "two for one" bike sale.

And there was another casualty this past week, when high-end apparel maker Rapha announced that it was shuttering its U.S. operations office in Bentonville, Arkansas. Laying off most of its employees there, the London-based company said that it was realigning “to better reflect our strategic priorities and current market dynamics.” The development underscored the degree of today’s market challenges, particularly as Bentonville is one of the emerging capitals of American cycling, home to Walmart Corporation, and also home to the Walton family's RZC Investments company which acquired Rapha back in 2017, and which owns several other cycling and outdoor brands. Cycling’s major brands are a fundamental sponsor and technical support behind all of the pro sport’s disciplines, and it would not be surprising to see the landscape change further as supply commitments, market position, and financial stability continue to shift.

Carlos Rodriguez’s victory at the Tour de Romandie this past week showed that his 5th place overall at last year’s Tour de France was no fluke, which suggests that his long-struggling Ineos team could enter this summer’s Tour as a legitimate podium threat, or even pull off an upset victory. His teammate Egan Bernal – who provided essential support for Rodríguez all week – showcased his improving form and suggested that a full recovery from his horrific training crash two years ago is looking more likely. Surprisingly, Decathlon-AG2R La Mondiale, which finished as one of the worst teams in the WorldTour UCI Points rankings in 2023, continued their red-hot run at Romandie, with Dorian Godon winning two stages and Andrea Vendrame netting two stage runner-ups. This will help the team pad their points haul (they currently sit in 4th place) and stay out of the dreaded relegation zone. Meanwhile, Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe hinted that they have the roster talent and performance staff to match their increase in profile by putting two riders on the overall podium – Aleksandr Vlasov and previously unknown 23-year-old Florian Lipowitz.

Given Red Bull’s now formal title sponsorship of the Bora team, one wonders how that investment in a team jersey can coexist with the energy drink giant’s portfolio of individually sponsored riders. Red Bull invested in Wout Van Aert and Tom Pidcock to wear emblazoned helmets throughout the season – a successful scenario as both riders have had a nearly year-round presence with road and cyclocross campaigns – and MTB, in the case of Pidcock. (Red Bull also has rising women’s star Zoe Backstedt and a host of MTB riders under contract to wear the brand’s ubiquitous logo in races and public events.) Contractually speaking, the situation has always been part of pro cycling, as riders often have individual clothing and gear contracts for shoes, pedals, and even saddles – items with a highly personalized preference and often an outsized impact in the cycling product marketplace. But Red Bull is playing an entirely new card; bike brands like Specialized have sponsored multiple pro teams simultaneously, akin to Starbucks’ saturation strategy to place stores on adjacent and profitable street corners. Red Bull in cycling – via its rider portfolio – is essentially paying a Starbucks employee in each of those stores to wear a Cafe Intelligentsia hat behind the barista counter. Questions about its prominent title sponsorship will inevitably arise in July, as there could be new wrinkles to the usual team collusion/cooperation scenarios. For example, what would INEOS stakeholders think of Red Bull stealing the limelight of a potential Pidcock podium finish in Paris at their team’s expense? The stakes are high for a team title sponsor to have a star rider’s public image and representations diluted or hijacked, and it will be instructive to see how Red Bull’s sponsorship blitz plays out shortly on the sport’s biggest stage. As far as we know, the UCI has not yet weighed in on this matter.

Last week’s Chinese swimming doping scandal has pulled back a formerly impenetrable Swiss curtain on the World Anti-Doping Agency’s legitimacy. The full extent of the damage to trust in the antidoping system is only now coming into focus as details from the German television documentary and New York Times article are independently verified and layered with new revelations. (The TLDR summary: positive drug tests for 23 Chinese swimmers were swept aside with an unconvincing story from China’s anti-doping agency CHINADA, and perceived policy breaches by WADA.) The chorus of critics has been led by USADA CEO, Travis Tygart, who openly called for an independent investigation of WADA’s actions, and reiterated his intention to seek medal reparations for athletes who may have been cheated out of podium placings. The IOC was quick to rush to WADA’s defense with a statement of confidence, but WADA was only too happy to oblige Tygart’s request for an investigation – in what has been interpreted as a cynical and self-preserving response.

WADA announced it had retained the services of a Swiss special prosecutor to review the narrow procedural framework of the Chinese positives independently – this coming after WADA and FINA (swimming’s international federation, aka World Aquatics) already reaffirmed the handling of the original case through their lawyers. However, as reported by the Times of London, all of the lawyers involved are linked to a single firm (which also formerly employed the current Director General of WADA), and which has direct links to the IOC. The “independent” findings by FINA and WADA came from the same place, or, as the German documentary lead posited on X about the investigations, “How likely is it that two partners of the same law firm advised independently of each other?”

If any of this feels familiar, pro cycling had a similar but smaller-scale meltdown when the Vrijman Report was published in 2006 to “clear” the sport of doping insinuations, only to be debunked and thrown in the bin in the wake of both the Armstrong Reasoned Decision (2012) and CIRC Report (2015). Currently, if you are keeping score at home: WADA has called into question its impartiality, the IOC may have taken subtle moves to protect the Olympic brand from doping reputational harm, China will be sending 13 of the 23 positive athletes to the 2024 Paris Games, and USADA seems poised to play its Rodchenkov Act card to compel its anti-doping partners to come to the table. We may be witnessing multiple catalysts for the first major reforms in anti-doping since WADA was conceived in 2000 – it seems like things can only improve from this new low.

Liberty Media recently completed one of the biggest acquisition moves in sports business this year when it paid $4.4 billion to become the majority owner of MotoGP’s motorcycle racing series. Assuming the deal passes regulatory scrutiny, Liberty Media will now control two of the most recognized global motorsports series; it already steers the wildly popular Formula 1 auto racing empire. The business and brand synergies are easy to relate: with a revamped schedule and a perennially popular docudrama series driving up fan interest, F1 has reached enviable heights for TV viewership and media rights, and there’s every reason to believe that Liberty Media will take a similar approach to reinvigorate MotoGP. As we’ve discussed before, there are many parallels between motorsports and professional cycling from a business and organizational sense, with similar reliance on sponsorship and “constructor” (bike brand) relationships, as well as the fact that in motorsports the racetracks are independently owned – similar to the operational independence of cycling’s race organizers. Where the two sporting enterprises differ is that F1, MotoGP, NASCAR, and others are just that – enterprises – whereas cycling is a loose affiliation of different racing tiers, and to date lacks a Liberty-sized media deal for its flagship WorldTour series. Nonetheless, it will be instructive to watch Liberty’s next moves with MotoGP, and how this might inform any future enterprise-scale realignments which could benefit our sport.