TDU Wraps Up; Comments on the Big Budget Teams; 'Cross Championships Looming; New TUE Concerns; Netflix May Change the Way We Watch Sports; Does "Unrivaled" Have Lessons for Cycling?

Key Takeaways:

● First WorldTour Event Wraps Up

● Cyclocross Championships Looming

● Comments on the Era of “Big Budget” Teams

● New Concerns Around TUEs

● Netflix Going All In on Live Sports

● The Unrivaled League: Insights for Women’s Cycling?

The 25th running of the Men’s Tour Down Under wrapped up over the weekend, with Ecuadorian Jhonatan Narváez taking the overall win and the Queen Stage 5 atop the summit of now-iconic Willunga Hill. As was expected, cycling’s “super-teams” dominated the action, led by Sam Welsford’s (Red Bull-BORA-Hansgrohe) three stages; this could be a preview for the rest of the season. However, it is notable that the other two stages were won by Movistar and Cofidis – the two teams with the fewest wins in 2024 – again demonstrating that there is still opportunity for less well-funded teams to find and develop WorldTour-race winning talent if they look hard enough, despite super-teams scouting and hoarding the majority of talent amongst themselves. For example, Movistar’s 26-year-old Javier Romo, who led the race overall until the Willunga Hill and ended up finishing in second place overall, is a former triathlete who hadn’t raced seriously before being discovered and signed by Astana in 2021.

The Australian race was once again very well-attended. The fans packed Stage 5’s ascent nearly five-deep in places and the ascent looked more like a Tour de France summit finish than an early-season leg-tester. The course design itself contributes to the fan turnout, with smart use of urban loops and countryside traverses to minimize road closure impacts and maximize accessibility. All of this highlights why the relatively remote race has stood the test of time (including two missed years due to COVID) – as opposed to many former comparable events in places like the United States. This stands as a valuable reminder that the new events with real staying power are almost always those that take place in a region or country with significant grassroots support for and participation in the sport.

In a story last week from our colleagues at Wielerflits, long-time WorldTour manager Iwan Spekenbrink discussed the way in which some pro cycling “super-team” budgets have exploded in the past few years. “We are no longer competing against other teams,” said Spekenbrink, “so much as we are competing with entire countries, where the financial possibilities sometimes seem to be endless.” Team UAE is the obvious target of his ire here, a team which arguably just had the most successful season in history, and whose young up-and-coming star Jhonatan Narvaez got things rolling again by collecting the overall win in the season’s first WorldTour event at the Tour Down Under. But Spekenbrink’s concern about certain teams’ excessive spending once again raises the age-old question – that we have discussed many times: just how critical is money to success in the sport? It absolutely plays a role in assembling a squad with enough points to get a foot wedged into the WorldTour door, but it’s not the only thing, as the recent woes of Team Ineos have clearly demonstrated. Young rider identification and nurturing, training and nutrition, team morale and unity and a host of other operational and leadership factors contribute to success. “Based on our knowledge and insights, we have shown that we can develop young riders well. In that area, we are certainly not inferior to those teams. In fact, I think we are still doing better," Spekenbrink mused.

The short-lived Caleb Ewan saga was quickly solved late last week when the INEOS Grenadiers announced they had signed the 30-year-old former sprint star for the 2025 season, following his unceremonious contract release from Jayco-AlUla. It is somewhat shocking how quickly Ewan had devolved from a Tour de France stage hope (two 2023 podiums) to essentially being a “one summer and done” rider with his current team. One possible conclusion is that the market for pure sprinters has been softened by the rise of ultra-versatile fast-finishers like Mathieu van der Poel, Jasper Philipsen, Wout van Aert, Mads Pedersen and Jonathan Milan – riders who can contest one-day Monuments and perform valuable team support while simultaneously being able to win WT sprint stages. Ewan was rumored to be making nearly €2 million annually but may have signed with Ineos for a fraction of that. Sprint specialists might not hold their prior value or prestige, but all the same, Ineos may have picked up a potential grand tour stage winner at a discount – a smart move that could net the team badly-needed wins at any level in 2025. Pure sprinters may be out of fashion, but having the quickest rider at the end of a race never goes out of style.

The final weekend of UCI Cyclocross World Cup racing before next weekend’s world championships in France dropped strong hints as to who might land on the podiums – and also potentially start the 2025 classics season in roaring form. Racing at both the Maasmechelen (BE) and Hoogerheide (NL) courses was fast despite the recent rains, and on the men’s side, there were no surprises as Dutch star Mathieu van der Poel stormed away from the field to take his fourth and fifth World Cup wins of the season, with Belgian Michael Vanthourenhout securing the overall series on points. A strong second place ride by Wout Van Aert in Maasmechelen put him back among the best, but beyond these three, the remaining field is evenly matched and only the surging Joris Nieuwenhuis and consistent Lars van der Haar (NL), and EU champion Thibau Nijs (BE) seems to stand out as potential challengers in Liévin.

On the women’s side, the racing has been incredibly balanced all season and with her win at Hoogerheide, Lucinda Brand secured the overall series points title ahead of fellow Dutch racer and current world champion Fem van Empel. However, surging into third place in the series with her Saturday win at Maasmechelen and a podium on Sunday, Blanka Vas (CZ) may be the on-form dark horse for a rainbow jersey. From the perspective of the upcoming 2025 road season, van der Poel and Van Aert appear on track to peak for the spring’s Flanders Classics; but for the women, the strength and depth of the field – which includes other crossover road racers like Puck Pieterse and Zoe Backstedt, with the evergreen Marianne Vos making several strong outings – shows that the Women’s WorldTour may again prove to be the more entertaining side of the sport to watch.

The nuances of therapeutic use exemptions for potentially performance enhancing medications recently came back into focus with the use of Ritalin in cycling. An account of how the adult attention deficiency/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) medication may be legitimately used quickly led to speculation and trolling in various social media and chat room posts. Ritalin is the predominant medication used to treat ADHD and is permitted for athletes via a TUE, but it is also a type of amphetamine and imbues performance enhancing effects. In a similar vein as TUE permission of anabolic medications to treat asthma, at what point does treating an athlete’s ailment surmount to cheating in the WADA system? A TUE may allow an elite athlete to reach a baseline they otherwise could not sustain, but should an athlete’s medical condition be considered a natural limitation? Many critics believe TUEs provide an unnatural advantage allowing athletes to exceed their natural ceiling, and point out the potential for misuse when an athlete doesn’t meet the criteria for a diagnosis but is supplied one to obtain a TUE. We covered this topic in-depth eight years ago, and while the medication lists have expanded, the polarizing argument of how sick is too sick to compete at cycling’s elite level remains. And are the rules simply becoming more nuanced over time to enable – or even encourage – legal doping at the expense of clean riders trying to break into the cycling’s highest echelons?

Netflix is going big on live sports, less than two years after it said it wasn’t interested. In late 2022, the company’s Chairman famously stated, "We’re not anti-sports. We’re just pro-profit," encapsulating why the highly-successful streaming service wasn’t following its prime competitors like Amazon and Apple TV into the live sports broadcasting business. But now, after a widely successful (if unexciting) livestreamed fight between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson and two widely-watched Christmas day National Football League matchups – which reportedly reached more than 60 million viewers – the company seems all-in. It has won bids to televise the 2027 and 2031 women’s soccer World Cup, and is expected to be in the hunt for other major sporting events in the future. Meanwhile, the company’s financial performance continues to soar; it reached revenues of almost $30 billion in the first nine months of 2024, with almost double the profits, and recent price increases in its monthly fees don’t seem to have deterred customers, of which it has almost 300 million on recurring subscription. With its wide variety of sports narrative programming, Netflix seems certain to be a major player in the way we receive and watch sports in the future. Outside of its Unchained programming, could pro cycling play a part?

The launch of Unrivaled – a new 3X3 (3 on 3 halfcourt) format women's basketball league – diversifies one of women's sports most popular categories and may provide pro cycling's stakeholders with valuable insights for its Women's WorldTour. The new league was founded as a means to provide WNBA players with income and competitive continuity, as many pros have to play in overseas leagues during the off season to realize financial security. However, the uptick in basketball popularity – sparked by generational star Caitlin Clark and a recent influx of other top tier talent into the WNBA – led to Unrivaled kicking off with considerable media rights distribution backing, while the game venues have been able to charge (and sell out) with premium ticket pricing. According to reports, the first events averaged over 300,000 live viewers via traditional TV alone, which places the launch in the pre-Clark WNBA viewership range and leads to the question, "what if Clark played in this league, too?" Although women's pro cycling represents a continuum of overlapping disciplines, perhaps the addition of an independent racing series with a small but select group of the sports stars from various disciplines could be an interesting draw. More generally, the capability of women's sports to decouple from men's sports and chart new media rights and licensing directions is no longer the exception to an old rule. Could women's pro cycling's backers take the WWT in a new direction, with or without the UCI, and write pro cycling's next chapters of profitability, popularity, and global growth?