Top Stars Take Gravel Titles; Can the "Genre" Grow Without Them? Pog's Crazy Season; More Commentary on Race Safety; Was Legalized Gambling a Mistake?
Key Takeaways:
● Mainstream Stars Grab UCI Gravel Titles
● … Can Gravel Racing Grow Without Them?
● Pogacar’s Preposterous 2024 Numbers
● CPA Weighs in on Rider Safety
● Pro’s Closet the Latest to Shut Its Doors
● Was Legalized Sports Gambling a Mistake?
This weekend’s UCI Gravel World Championships in Belgium seemed to be a smashing success and featured wins by two of cycling’s biggest mainstream stars, Marianne Vos and Mathieu van der Poel, live-streamed broadcasts, and thousands of fans cheering along the roadside. It’s informative to compare the second year of the Worlds event to genre-defining and wildly popular gravel events like Unbound and SBT. Independently organized North American gravel racing has mostly dirt courses, complete rider self-sufficiency on the course, equal distance and prize money for women, a general absence of team tactics, and a unique sort of spirit and energy – but it still lacks large numbers of spectators, live-streaming, and world-famous cyclists. The Belgian UCI race this weekend accomplished all of those things – and it’s important to note that the participation of big stars is critical in driving that overall success. This underlines a potential future shortcoming in terms of the U.S. gravel scene; most of the key races take place in remote rural locations and at times when it’s difficult for European-based road pros to attend, given that they are in the middle of their racing season.
Thus, a critical question becomes: can marquee gravel races on other continents grow and thrive if they don’t entice top European stars to travel to and participate in their races? We won’t have to wait long to find out, as the 2026 UCI Gravel World Championships will take place in the remote Western Australian town of Nannup. That’s a long way to travel for anyone not already based in the country. And there are several other questions: will the U.S. bid to host the 2027 gravel Worlds? Will USA Cycling invest scarce resources to send an American team to Worlds next year, even though it occurs during the home stretch of the Life Time Grand Prix series – the primary professional gravel racing circuit in the U.S.? At this week’s event in Belgium, without many of the top U.S. pros in attendance, Americans were nowhere near the front. Lauren Stephens was the top American in the women’s race in 15th place, and the first American in the men’s race was young MTB racer Cobe Freeburn in 53rd place, 14 minutes behind winner the winner.
The 2024 professional road season may be winding down, but the sport’s biggest rider and super team hasn’t yet satisfied its thirst for victories. Over the weekend, the UAE team added to their completely insurmountable lead in the UCI points and win tables with American Brandon McNulty winning the overall at Cro Race and Marc Hirschi winning at Coppa Agostoni; the team now has nearly double the UCI points of second place Visma-Lease a Bike, as well as double the win total of second-place Lidl-Trek). And of course, this was topped off by Tadej Pogačar’s logic-defying 24th win of the season at the Giro dell'Emilia after easily riding clear of a star-studded field, which included Remco Evenepoel, Tom Pidcock and Primož Roglič. To put Pogačar’s win total into perspective, he already has the most single-season wins since Alessandro Petacchi’s total of 25 in 2005, and has the potential to surpass the Italian sprinter’s mark if he wins his remaining two races (Tre Valli Varesine and Il Lombardia). This is even more impressive when we consider that Pogačar is a GC contender and thus, at least technically, has fewer chances to win races than a sprinter. For comparison, Vincenzo Nibali, a multi-Grand Tour winner and formidable one-day racer, won 54 total times throughout his entire career, while four-time Tour de France overall winner Chris Froome won just 46 total times. Meanwhile, Jonas Vingegaard, the sport’s other premier stage racer, has just 12 more victories throughout his total career up to this point (36) than Pogačar has in 2024 alone. The results are already in: Pogačar has had one of the most incredible seasons in bike racing history.
The recent death of Swiss junior rider Muriel Furrer at the recent world championships cast a renewed light on race safety, with the CPA now making public statements concerning the tragedy. An interview with rider association President Adam Hansen ran over the weekend in which he brought to light two key deficiencies at the intersection of safety and athlete rights. First, he noted that there have been multiple pro race crashes since he took office in which the event organizers did not know an athlete had fallen and been gravely injured during. This points to policy failures; the common practice of an observer taking notes in the caravan or at the finish line can lead to broad gaps in the timing between an athlete’s disappearance and later discovery at the crash scene. And second, the UCI’s defiance to adopt technologies which could improve rider safety is an impediment to progress. From this perspective, mandatory race radios for rider communications within all points of the peloton to notify teams and race officials of adverse events is a compelling argument for why they should not be banned in competition – a ban which the UCI believes improves competition. More critically, Hansen asserts that adoption of helmet sensors with signaling capability would greatly benefit the sport – an idea which we've wholeheartedly endorsed to alert and mobilize emergency responders. While a joint policy (UCI, teams, organizers, and riders) would need to be implemented – the UCI is squarely in the crosshairs here, because its oversight role is clear. It has dragged its feet on elevating rider safety, but with three prominent fatalities in just over one year, the time to build responsible policies and implement the best technologies is past due. The stakes are too high to consider any other course of action.
In another hit to an already reeling bicycle industry, Colorado-based retailer The Pro’s Closet announced it would be shutting down this month. The online and retail storefront had a central focus of reselling high-end used bikes, equipment, and some soft goods, but it expanded significantly with a Series B cash infusion of about $40 million in 2021, leading it to offer a broader selection of new equipment and expanded social media/video content as well. As a reseller, the business originally thrived on its reputation of providing former pro rider equipment to prospective buyers, but saw its fortunes buoyed by a pandemic marketplace in which new bikes were impossible to find, but where there was no shortage of used high-end bikes which could be “flipped.” According to observers, TPC may have overextended on the acquisition of used goods and was then caught flat-footed when the cycling supply chain rebounded to meet muted consumer demands. Consumers were clearly hesitant to splurge on high prices for used bikes when new ones were being discounted as much as 50% to clear inventory. This news – that the big manufacturers are still burning down deadstock, thus depressing the reseller market in kind – shows that the turning point for the industry may be further out into 2025 than many industry analysts had been hoping to see.
Does national investment in Olympic sports actually lead to gold medals? A recent article might have implications for national sports federations and future bidders of major sporting conference events such as the Olympics and cycling’s world championships. Canadian researchers demonstrated that increases in high performance program sport program spending on athletes does lead to more medals, but, interestingly, does not correlate to more participation in those sports. In fact, the number of athletes taking up these sports has dropped by nearly half. “Despite the complex causality,” write the authors in Play The Game, “there is no evidence that the success of Canadian athletes results in increased sport participation in the general public.” The authors express the opinion that sports policy should seek to lower socioeconomic barriers and accessibility factors that often prevent children from engaging in sport by shifting investment towards grassroots development instead. The argument that sport “inspires” participation has been a central framework of the Olympic movement’s sales pitch to its prospective host cities, and the credo has been central to the UCI’s “cycling for all” movement. The questions raised here are thought-provoking as to how nations invest in sporting development, and whether or not the model needs to change if data doesn’t support the perceived payoffs.
In yet another sports commentary from the mainstream media, The Atlantic magazine weighed in recently with an article on the problems gradually emerging in legalized sports betting – saying that “the rise of sports gambling has caused a wave of financial and familial misery, one that falls disproportionately on the most economically precarious households.” Now that we are almost six years into the new laws, this article claims that the evidence is convincing: “Legalizing sports gambling was a huge mistake.” The article cites several recent academic papers which suggest that easy access to on-line immediate betting “yields not only debt and bankruptcy but emotional instability and even violence.” Other criticisms include allegations that tax revenues from gambling have been far less than what was predicted in justifying the change of law in 2018, and the fact that legal gambling has by no means eradicated under-the-table operations in states where it is still not legal. Within a year and a half after it became legal in many states, betting volumes increased by a factor of as much as twenty. Although there are few statistics about the volume of betting in pro cycling – it mostly occurs in Europe, where the sport has a much higher visibility, rather than the United States– it has definitely increased during this time period as well.