Pog Drawing Even with Merckx? Superlative Women's Race; Latest Race Tragedy Should Lead to Safety Changes; New Saudi Concerns; Return of Crypto ...

Key Takeaways:

·        Pogačar Chases Legendary Merckx Palmares

·        Superlative Women’s Championship Finale

·        Swiss Tragedy Should Lead to Meaningful Safety Changes

·        New Questions About Saudi Investment

·        Crypto Returns to Sports Sponsorships

·        LeMond’s Youthful Exploits, Restored

Tadej Pogačar continued his historically dominant 2024 season by winning the Zürich World Championships road race on Sunday with yet another shocking long-range attack, this time launching 100 kilometers from the finish to take his first career rainbow jersey and become only the third rider of all-time (after Eddy Merckx and Stephen Roche) to complete the Giro d’Italia, Tour de France and World Championship “Triple Crown.” Pogačar continues tracking roughly parallel with the career achievements of the sport’s greatest rider, Eddy Merckx, a feat long considered impossible. However, with an astonishing 23 victories this year across 55 total race starts in all events, there is little debate regarding his status as the sport’s best rider at this point. The downside to Pogačar’s historic run of stunning solo attacks is that they have come from such distance and impunity that riders the level of Jonas Vingegaard, Mathieu van der Poel, and Remco Evenepoel have been unable to keep the outcome interesting. Furthermore, chasing for the remaining podium spots lacks the same fan suspense. On the other hand, we should remember that the hierarchy can turn over rapidly in modern men’s cycling, and year-to-year dominance is difficult to maintain. Point in case: Visma-Lease a Bike failed to win a single Grand Tour in 2024 after sweeping them in 2023.

The women’s race on Saturday was much more suspenseful and action-packed, save for the protagonists: the Belgian and Dutch teams. Defending champion Lotte Kopecky may have ultimately taken the victory, but the end result wasn’t a foregone conclusion. The Netherlands sent prior World’s winner Marianne Vos off the front with Australia’s Ruby Roseman-Gannon and held numerical superiority in the group behind, heading into the final lap. But when team leader Demi Vollering accelerated, hoping to ride clear, she instead pulled the chase group even with her teammate’s breakaway, before dropping Vos and isolating herself in a front group composed of far stronger sprinters – like Kopecky. The race was thus somewhat of a disaster for the Netherlands, which went from having five riders in the front heading into the last lap to missing the podium altogether for the first time in over a decade. Nonetheless, it produced a thrilling viewing experience for fans and was by far the most exciting event of the World Championships.

One subplot of the World’s road race weekend was the strong American presence. Chloé Dygert scored a surprise second place in the women’s road race, and combined with Kristen Faulkner’s gold medal ride at the Olympics, the American women have harvested more combined Olympic and World road race podiums than the powerhouse Dutch team. On the men’s side, Quinn Simmons put in one of the best races of his career to finish 9th while racing on the front foot all day, and his teammates were well represented in nearly every key move, thus placing three U.S. riders inside the top 20. (This compares to two in 2023, one in 2022, 2021, and zero in 2020). But the women’s race stole the show; if cycling’s paymasters were astute to the trends, they might look to pivot programming focus to its Women’s WorldTour schedule next season. This is what basketball (NBA and NCAA) and soccer (MLS and NWSL) have done, as viewership in men’s competition has flattened out while interest in women’s side has accelerated.

The entirety of the 2024 Zurich world championships will be interwoven with the tragic death of the Swiss racer Muriel Ferrer, who suffered grave injuries in a crash during the junior women’s event and later died in the hospital. First and foremost, we join the broader cycling community in mourning the loss of a promising young rider, and her unfulfilled hopes and dreams within and outside of the sport. But with this loss we must also revisit the topic of safety in bicycle racing, particularly the professional and elite events licensed or organized by the UCI and its national federation signatories. At the risk of repetition, this is a topic we’ve revisited too many times over the last few years, and while there have been marginal gains for course safety achieved through soft pressure on the UCI by the riders’ associations – particularly the CPA and TCA – not enough has been done to bring the sport into parity with other high-speed sports.

There are hard lessons reinforced with every new tragic racing crash. The racing is faster and the equipment so finely tuned as to leave little margin for error when a rider is faced with a split decision; riders on the edge of exhaustion or in a visually-impaired position in the peloton are as apt to make the right as wrong decision when taking an uncertain line. However, the UCI has seemingly continued to deflect responsibility onto the riders – through (1) policies which presume that reckless individuals are supposedly at fault in “half” of the sport’s accidents, and (2) institution of a FIFA-like carding system to penalize riders for the alleged behavior. This subjective sword of Damocles is ill-suited to make a dent in the overall safety context of elite-level road racing, in which skill and risk intersect with the axes of victory and injury. If the UCI was more serious about safety, it would stop talking about banning race radios for riders to “improve competition” and instead implement proven technology like mandatory helmet decelerometers – steps that would instantly signal race organization medical staff where and when a rider is down with likely injuries. (Nonetheless, President David Lappartient seemed to double down on his “yellow-card” mentality toward the riders in a press conference on Saturday morning, while simultaneously offering condolences to the sport’s global community.) We would suggest that the UCI shelve any talk about punishing riders until it enacts more impactful measures to protect its greatest assets – and we don’t mean its media licensing fees.

The dominant investment position Saudi Arabia has carved for itself in global sport has redefined our world view, but at what cost? A recent column examines this question in the wake of how one reporter was turned away from covering the late September heavyweight boxing world championship bout at Wembley Stadium, ostensibly for sharing critical views of Saudi sportswashing in the Daily Telegraph prior to the fight. That fight – massively underwritten financially by a Saudi royal – may be an indication of how the kingdom is using its leverage to tamp down dissent of its marketing goals using sports as the messaging vehicle. The column’s author explores her position as a freelancer in good standing with many sports now accepting PIF dollars, and whether or not journalists could be excluded or even detained on Saudi soil during championship events held there in the near future. This is a relevant topic for elite cycling, as the 2025 UCI world championships will be held in Rwanda – another country with a recent history of detaining and jailing dissidents, human rights violations, and low freedom of press rankings – and which may be using the events to sportswash its ongoing role in regional unrest to its economic benefit. While no one will deny the benefits competitive cycling has brought to the African nation, could the risks outweigh the benefits for journalists visiting Rwanda to cover the racing? And for that matter, has Rwanda solved its organization committee and national program issues to successfully host a global event in a year’s time?

Cryptocurrency is making a return into sports sponsorship with a resounding bang: Singapore-based Crypto.com recently signed a sponsorship exclusivity with the UEFA Champions League through 2027. For an as-yet undisclosed sponsorship fee, the crypto platform will now have broad placement and integration with UEFA’s global marketing, including stadium banners, general advertising across print and digital media, and its universal broadcast reach. The deal breaks the ice which formed over cryptocurrency sponsorships in the wake of tighter regulatory scrutiny stemming from the collapse of the FTX trading platform in 2022. The FTX collapse – which included its stadium naming rights for facilities like the Miami (Heat) NBA arena – gave sports enterprises pause to consider if the sponsorship revenue could ever be physically converted from the virtual blockchain ether. Pro cycling already felt that sting in 2022 – prior to the FTX debacle – when the Qhubeka program’s naming sponsor NextHash was nixed by the UCI WorldTour committee after it failed to pay the team or its riders in 2021 despite being on the hook with a five-year sponsorship deal. However, with some 100 million global users, Crypto.com’s platform appears to be financially stable, and this has given UEFA’s board enough confidence to bring the partnership together in time for the next Champions League tournament.

The venerable New Yorker magazine recently published a feature-length story about the joy of cycling, which the “mainstream” bike racing community might do well to consider. It profiles the life and philosophy of Grant Petersen, the Northern California-based alternative bike designer and founder of Rivendell Bicycle Works. Petersen decries the excessive focus in cycling today on speed, competition and technological optimization, as well as the “widespread marketing to recreational riders of spandex kits, squirty energy gels, and workout apps such as Strava.” Petersen believes that the glorification “personal bests, constant quantification, metrics, leaderboards” discourages many new or would-be riders, and that the “whole purpose of pro riding now is to create a demand at the retail level for the really expensive bicycles.” Patagonia founder Yves Chouinard agrees that this is a concerning trend across all endurance sports. “People are bicycling, but they have a motor. And people are climbing, but they’re climbing indoors. They’re riding big waves, but they’re being pulled in by Jet Skis.” Fortunately, he adds, there are a few firms like Rivendell that are bucking that trend. Petersen believes that the Tour de France should only allow riders to ride one bike the entire tour. “Do their own maintenance, change their own flats, the way that normal people have to” – sort of the way Lachlan Morton does things today. Even with those types of changes, adds Petersen, “the races themselves wouldn’t be less interesting at all.” Food for thought?

Forty-five years after the International Indoor Cycling Classic aired as the first cycling event ever broadcast on the brand-new all-sports cable channel ESPN, new technology has allowed a restoration of the original 1979 broadcast, shown here for the first time. The 40-minute highlights clip is introduced by veteran cycling commentator Phil Liggett and features a rare glimpse into the emergence of one of cycling's greatest racers – Greg LeMond at age 18. The two-day Denver event was a co-promotion of the biggest stage race in America, the Red Zinger Bicycle Classic, with owners of the smallest cycling track in the country, Madison Velodromes from Detroit. Three semi-loads of 14,000 nails and bolts, and three houses worth of marine-grade plywood arrived in November 1979 for a two-day small board track competition, reminiscent of the heyday of six-day racing so popular – not only in Europe but at the turn of the century in America. LeMond was just returning with gold from the junior Worlds in Argentina and had never ridden on a 125-meter small track before, let alone in any head-to-head track competition. Video producer Michael Aisner said that the restoration process had to wait four decades until software existed that could revive the footage from its original low-grade 1979 video. “Using new AI technology, we can now enjoy this insane action” and it provides “insight into the early ingredients of the fortitude” that would make Greg LeMond one of the great racers of all time.