Tour Subdued So Far; Questionable Route Planning; Parity in Sports; Women's Giro Wraps Up; Sponsorship Lessons From Motorsports; Is Sponsorship Necessary??

Key Takeaways:

● Subdued Tour Narrative So Far

● Questionable Route Planning by ASO?

● Salary Caps and Parity in Sports

● Women’s Giro Wraps Up

● New Models Decrease Reliance on Sponsorship

● Sponsorship Report Summarizes Lessons from Motor Sports

Through its first ten stages, the 2025 Tour de France has maintained a simmering tension, with drama playing out more in the margins than in the GC battle itself. Multiple subplots have delivered memorable moments, such as Ben Healy’s fearless ride into the yellow jersey on Stage 10, the first Irishman to do so since Stephen Roche in 1987, and Simon Yates proving his resilience by adding a breakaway stage win to his palmarès only weeks after his Giro d’Italia triumph. Yet amid these heroics, the Tour’s biggest narrative remains oddly subdued, as Tadej Pogačar already holds a lead of over a minute against key rival Jonas Vingegaard, despite the fact that the race has yet to tackle a climb longer than five kilometers.

Instead of thrilling mountain duels, fans have watched the GC contest fizzle into disputes over feed-zone rules and hydration logistics. The (mostly media-created?) controversy between UAE’s Pogačar and Visma’s Matteo Jorgenson over access to water bottles underscores how completely the 2025 route was backloaded. The discussion also highlights once again just how counter-productive some of the UCI’s rules have become. In this case, the UCI’s new smaller feed-zone restrictions – originally aimed at trying to level the playing field for smaller teams unable to deploy large fleets of soigneurs along the route – have instead created more hectic and dangerous conditions.

The situation raises some thorny questions about the modern Tour’s architecture – such as whether ASO’s packing of nearly all the significant GC stages into the final week is simply to maintain suspense in an era where one rider is so much better than the rest. (See the discussion of parity in sport below.) The last edition featuring this was 1988, when the entirety of the Alps and Pyrenees stages took place contiguously with a rest and transfer day in between. Despite spirited debate about whether Vingegaard can crack Pogačar in the Alps, recent history suggests the defending champion, now on a streak rivaling Merckx’s prime, is close to untouchable when healthy – not having lost a stage race in nearly two years. This suggests that when the race enters its second week after Tuesday’s rest day, the battle for the overall title could be decided in just two stages – Thursday’s climb to Hautacam and Friday’s brutal individual time trial to Peyragudes. If this is in fact how the race plays out, it will raise the question: was ASO’s decision to withhold and cluster the key mountain stages the correct decision to build suspense, or did it simply sequester all the race’s action into a brief 48 hours?

When the Oklahoma City Thunder recently won the NBA Championship, they became the seventh champion in seven years – lending authority to commissioner Adam Silver’s highly-touted salary cap system. To perhaps a lesser degree, the NFL has also turned away from the historical legacy of “dynasties,” and has seen an increasingly level of parity due to spending caps that indirectly flowed out of greater athlete power arrangements in the sport. Meanwhile, cycling remains stuck in the “dynasty” area – as it continues to look increasingly likely that one of two or three well-funded teams will continue to dominate the sport in years to come. While we and others have written extensively about the pros and cons of salary or budget caps, and while the UCI’s own studies have shown that big budget teams diminish the excitement of racing, any kind of controls still seem a long way off. As we are always careful to caveat, money is not the only thing that leads to success in this sport, but it certainly helps, and the current competitive situation sometimes seems almost predetermined. Meanwhile, the UCI takes almost silly steps like feed zone constraints in attempts to balance the budget inequity between teams. How many times have we asked this question: when will cycling come in to the 21^st century, understand that it lives in a crowded and highly competitive sports/entertainment marketplace, and realize that something needs to be done to level its playing field?

The 2025 Women’s Giro d’Italia concluded with fireworks over the weekend as Elisa Longo Borghini (UAE) took the maglia rosa with patience and power. Marlen Reusser (Movistar) was seemingly in position to take her first major stage race GC title but met her match when Longo Borghini attacked the Swiss rider on the final climb to the top of Monte Nerone. The Italian’s punchier acceleration exposed Reusser’s weaknesses: an inability to deal with changes of pace on steeper gradients, and the limits of her team’s high mountain climbing support. In between Reusser’s time trial win on day one and the high octane finish on the Imola racing circuit on Sunday, Soudal rider Sara Gigante took two prestigious mountain stage wins at Valdobbiadene and Monte Nerone while Lorena Wiebes (SDWorx-Protime) added to her career sprint victory tally on stage 5. Of note, Reusser’s teammate Liane Lippert took two tactically entertaining stages, including the Imola finale. As the Women’s WorldTour makes its turn towards the Tour de France Femmes, the storylines are aligning. Has Longo Borghini peaked too early, can Reusser adapt to racing against true climbers, and will Lotte Kopecky (SDWorx) recover from her race abandon and find good form? And this may all be academic when FDJ’s Demi Vollering and SDWorx’s Anna van der Breggen – and their respective teams, arguably the strongest in the peloton – charge out of the TdFF’s first neutral start zone in just two weeks.

As we noted a couple of weeks ago, the proposed new StadioBike cycling event seeks to re-energize U.S. bike racing, with a new racing series designed to merge the excitement of bicycle and auto racing. The new race format, loosely based on the legendary Indiana University Little 500 race, offers a potential avenue to address a number of the historical challenges faced by road cycling – the means to collect ticket revenue, opportunity for the audience to see the entire event, new tactical considerations, equal men’s and women’s events and a format to encourage stronger regional participation. Many observers will instinctively question the synergies between bicycle and auto racing: it’s hard to think of two sports that would appear to have less in common than NASCAR motor racing and professional cycling. One is gasoline-powered, fast and played out on a track with hundreds of thousands of spectators watching; the other is human-powered, quieter, slower, and played out on sinuous mountain-top switchbacks with a few fans standing on the roadside. However, upon deeper inspection, it turns out that there are many similarities between the two sports, particularly from the perspective of sponsorship. In that regard, we would draw the reader’s attention to a detailed report entitled Pro Cycling Team Sponsorship: Learning from NASCAR, a contrasting analysis and set of sponsorship insights and guidelines authored by The Outer Line’s Steve Maxwell and Breaking Limits President (and Stadiobike executive) Kristin Labonte.

And speaking of sponsorship, while the competitive results of Swatt Club and Unibet Tietema Rockets team are not yet quite at the WT level, they are approaching pro cycling from a new and innovative angle. Both teams are building from the bottom up, creating passionate fanbases and YouTube channels first, and then layering a pro cycling team on top of these elements. This creates new revenue streams (apparel and merchandise) that allow the clubs to reduce dependence on sponsorship income – the traditional life blood of cycling teams. While the teams started as fan movements, they’re gaining momentum in both UCI and gravel races: the Rockets competed in this year’s Paris-Roubaix, and Swatt Club’s Filippo Conca won the Italian professional road championship last month.

With the rumored move of U.S. broadcast rights for F1 to streaming service Apple TV+ and the NFL’s deal to stream Thursday night games on Amazon Prime, the decline of ad supported media is becoming more immediate. And bike racing – both teams and race – is definitely in the ad-supported category. In spite of the global popularity of the Tour de France, One would be hard pressed to say the sport is thriving: some key sponsors (Arkea-Samsic team) are leaving the sport, others (Total Energy) are moving to bigger teams, and in the United States the sport of road racing is essentially on life support. Could teams like Swatt and Unibet Tietema provide a road map for a new path forward that is more contemporary and less dependent on fickle sponsors?