Mas Maintains Lead in Vuelta, While Van Aert Returns to Form; Another Reform Effort That Seems Unlikely; The Kawhi Leonard Case and Relevance to Cycling; The End of LIV Golf ...

Key Takeaways:

● Tight Vuelta Heads in to Final Week

● Van Aert Returning to Form

● Another Reform Effort? Doubtful for Now

● The Kawhi Leonard Case: Lessons for a Salary Cap in Cycling?

● The End of LIV Golf?

Movistar’s Enric Mas has confirmed his role of unlikely leader as the Vuelta heads into its final week. Mas consolidated his lead of 2:06 lead over Decathlon’s Félix Gall, with RedBull-Bora-Hansgrohe’s Primož Roglič another four seconds back. Richard Carapaz and Oscar Onley round out the top five, both still theoretically within striking distance. On the surface at least, this is exactly the kind of race fans have been begging for since Tadej Pogačar started turning grand tours into foregone conclusions by the end of the first mountain stage: a real GC battle, multiple credible contenders, and enough terrain left to blow the race apart. But it’s worth asking whether a competitive but controlled Mas, who hasn’t lost so much as a second of his lead through fourteen stages of racing, is actually delivering the spectacle fans and some analysts say they want. A tight time gap and untested leaders don’t automatically mean excitement on the road. Thus far, Movistar has looked disciplined enough, and Mas comfortable enough, that the margin in the standings – and the inability for the other top contenders to separate from one another – may overstate the race’s competitiveness. Perhaps cycling fans need to be careful what they wish for: a GC battle decided by seconds instead of minutes is not necessarily more dramatic than one decided by a dominant rider, if nobody’s able to crack the man in red.

Beyond the topline GC battle, one interesting subplot is the return of Visma’s Wout van Aert to top form, helping his team win an impressive 33% of all stages raced so far. This also creates an interesting foreshadowing of the men’s UCI road race World Championship approaching in just a few weeks’ time. In fact, Van Aert’s win on Sunday’s heat-shortened Stage 15 (cut from 189.7 kilometers to 110.2 in response to extreme heat) was one of the most thrilling stages of the year, and raised an interesting question. If race organizers can protect riders from dangerous conditions while also producing a better entertainment product, why shouldn’t they consider simply creating shorter, more explosive stages in the first place? The shortened, high-intensity format produced a more explosive, unpredictable stage than the original route likely would have. Most critically, the modified stage proved that safety-driven adjustments and compelling racing aren’t mutually exclusive – and perhaps a topic for reform.

On that note of rider preparation for the world championships, spare a thought for the pro women as they target Montreal rainbows: of 16 total UCI races scheduled this past Sunday, there was only one for the women. While last week’s women’s Bretagne and Philly races were a key indicator for who to watch in Quebec, the racing desert leading up to the UCI’s premier event leaves much to be desired. Calendar structure and spacing must remain a clear focus for the women’s sport if it is to be successful in the long term.

On the eve of the world championships and various accompanying committee meetings and strategy plenaries, reform topics are on everyone’s lips. Given the UCI’s efforts to solicit stakeholder input earlier in the year, there are renewed hopes that real change could be in the works. However, there has not yet been any formal announcement of any findings or conclusions, or any signal of a new approach to governance. Following meetings of the Professional Cycling Council in early September, the only news was that further details would come later after the world championships. But one story emerged last week, speculating that there is yet another, private reform effort in the works. This time, it was reported that a new “Cycling Collective Group” has been formed to remake professional cycling. This was a bit reminiscent of reports two years ago assuring readers that the “takeover” of the sport by Saudi Arabian investors was virtually imminent. There is such a long list of prior reform efforts that never made it off the ground that we are skeptical each time one of these stories surfaces.

The current story reported that virtually all of the critical business parties (i.e., teams) have supposedly bought into this new initiative, even though the entity does not yet have a business plan. This statement stretches the imagination to the breaking point, given the level of serious analysis, investment and collective unity required to reshape a legacy sport (see our LIV Golf discussion below). Readers are inevitably skeptical and dismayed by the lack of any hard details, an almost complete reliance on anonymous sources, outright conjecture as to the aims, and apparently mass disregard for non-disclosure presumably agreements signed between the parties. In a sport like pro cycling, where any kind of real change will require tight discipline and unity between the teams and riders, the existence of early leaks and ill-informed media speculation almost certainly guarantees that nothing will happen.

Leaks about any part of a plan, real or imagined, have been a prime reason for the death of several recent reform efforts. Why? First, leaks provide ASO and the UCI with advance warning and intelligence as to which teams and parties are actively colluding against their controlling position in the sport. As we all know, the lack of ASO buy-in or support has killed all committed prior efforts to implement change; hence, no serious reform alliance would publicly leak or trumpet its intentions. Second, leaks can destabilize serious investor interest by compromising the identities, plans, and even the egos of often controversial billionaires or other private parties involved. Serious investors do not take kindly to public revelation of private investment initiatives before they become reality. A case in point: when Middle Eastern investment funds first sought to own stadium naming rights and stakes in premier soccer clubs, but were forced into lengthy delays and expensive PR campaigns to defuse club booster backlash. Subsequent sponsorships arrived without so much as a whisper.

A future reform path may still play out, but we caution observers and fans to take a longer view: successful change will only come if there is team unity, rider involvement, and steering by economic levers – a plan within a plan. All of the recent reform stories seem to involve early leaks to the press, possibly from the same handful of sources. Elsewhere in business, entertainment, and politics, it is not uncommon for the media to be unscrupulously played by the participants or power brokers to facilitate personal or business agendas, often by dangling a guaranteed exclusive story. That same modus operandi may also be at play here with the unfortunate result of knowingly (or perhaps unknowingly) sowing group-wide discord that derails the overall objectives. Our perspective is that successful transformational reforms in professional cycling are possible, but they will not succeed without discretion, cohesion, and visionary leadership.

One governance topic which might be addressed during the world championship meeting cycle is the whole issue of a salary cap – and pro cycling might learn something from the recent NBA debacle surrounding Kawhi Leonard and the Los Angeles Clippers. Contract spending in men’s cycling has been out of control for at least a decade, leading to a polarization of talent and general homogeneity of race results among the top six capitalized squads. And rapid development of the women’s sport without adequate planning and talent pipeline strategy could lead to a similar impasse there. While Movistar may be about to break that streak at the men’s Vuelta as we write this commentary, the concurrent drop in viewership due to fan disinterest and lack of investment refocus on the broadcast side of the sport is undeniable. Yet, a salary cap might be another case of “be careful what you wish for.” Kawhi’s handlers reportedly structured under the table sponsorship arrangements with companies doing business with the Clippers and illicitly arranged for him to be paid $28 million or more above the team’s salary cap limits – in order to retain the star player. Having been caught, the NBA fined Kawhi the measly amount of $700,000 while the Clipper’s owner, billionaire Steve Balmer, was banned from his own arena and all NBA activities for a year. The team also forfeited five consecutive first-round draft picks – a very stiff penalty which all but guarantees their mediocrity for years to come.

Any salary cap in pro cycling could be fraught with the potential for similar loopholes and legal escape clauses, and will be complicated by concerns around freedom of movement from a labor rights perspective. Athletes will always be paid what the market will bear, albeit in cycling’s current structure, it’s not so much the market but the whim of the team’s patron. That context will create a complex problem, the elements of which are already in place. First, any team-level cap can be immediately negated by the creative will of individual sponsors to supplement a rider’s contract salary with a separate income stream not officially calculated in the ceiling. (The catastrophic Kawhi-Clipper crash is an obvious example of that “creative math.)” For example, the long-term presence of Mathieu van der Poel at Alpecin is instructive. A team which on paper should not be able afford one of the world’s top three riders is in fact able to, via one of the sport’s most lucrative arrangements; a sizeable source of his pay is directly from the team’s bike sponsor, not the team itself.

Other top riders’ pay arrangements are similarly structured to reduce the operational burden or otherwise create a retainer incentive to keep the star rider happy (or as rumored in Remco Evenepoel’s recent transfer, grease the wheels). The bottom line is that a dollars and cents cap may not really work in cycling – there are simply too many ways to get around it. This problem has led to other ideas for controlling and divvying up the talent in the sport, for example a UCI points based cap in which a team cannot exceed a points ceiling. That model would make spending more strategic and force teams to construct rosters of greater complexity than just hoarding potential grand tour and classics winners to stack the deck. Cycling clearly needs stronger regulation in this area if it is to offer a compelling sport to reinvigorate its fan base. Despite all the other issues that need thorough analysis and executive attention – such as race safety – we hope that the leadership of the sport will face up to this critical issue and demand in the near future.

One sports reform effort that we followed closely over the past couple years is LIV Golf, and for lack of a less ominous epitaph, LIV is now DOA. LIV sought to supercharge and subsume golf’s international professional tournament structure with an immediacy and impact rarely seen in sports business. The project was largely funded by Saudi Arabia and the PIF sovereign fund, which invested over $5 billion to build and sustain an annual tournament cycle that eschewed tradition for a more upbeat fan experience and dynamic broadcast product. In its favor was an overdue revamp of player payment scales, with many stars decamping from PGA and European tours in favor of guaranteed appearance and exclusivity fees from LIV. However, difficulties in securing long-term broadcasting partners became a limiting factor in its growth, and the PGA was quickly forced to adapt and evolve to a new landscape by raising tournament pay and extending the placings payouts. In other words, competition made the incumbent business leader better through careful reaction and patience: in retrospect, all the PGA had to do was wait for LIV to either burn out player interest, or run out of cash, or both.

The final nail in LIV’s coffin was conflict in the Strait of Hormuz, which ironically compromised the venture’s predominant U.S. market and placed its Saudi investors in existential risk. As we noted in earlier AIR editions, Saudi dollars have shifted from frivolous infrastructure vanity projects and sports spending, reorienting more to national defense. Tangentially, we are eager to see how the United Arab Emirates, sponsor of the eponymous world’s top men’s WT team handles similar pressure as its own economy, political position, and regional security interests face the same threats. LIV’s lessons learned are multilayered, not the least of which is the scale of investment needed to successfully disrupt a legacy sport. But that spending has to be focused in key areas; athletes must be paid, but the market must be met through media. LIV never caught on with broadcast audiences because golf’s go-to networks were already committed to the existing PGA and related tour products. Thus, as LIV’s business unwinds or is subsumed by golf’s legacy stakeholders, any serious effort to force change in pro cycling will have to pay attention to the post-mortem facts and strategic elements of other sporting reform efforts.