Unbound Still Evolving; Does Lappartient Really Need Another Job? Confusion in Transgender Guidelines; Joe Martin Race Illustrates Challenges; Bentonville is "Bike City" ...

Key Takeaways:

·         Unbound Gravel: Still Evolving

·         Lappartient Seeking a Third Job?

·         Transgender Guidelines Are All Over the Map

·         Joe Martin Race Illustrates Challenges of U.S. Road Racing

·         Bentonville is Becoming “Bike City, USA”

The past weekend saw the 17th running of Unbound Gravel – by many measures the most important bike race in North America – which has gone from a few dozen maniacs attempting to complete a brutal 200-mile course through Kansas’ Flint Hills, to consistently selling out its 4,000+ starting slots in a matter of minutes. Keegan Swenson and Carolin Schiff won the 2023 edition against top road WorldTour, mountain bike, and gravel professionals. However, Unbound’s strength has always been that it isn’t so much about the big stars, but about the dedicated amateurs who rush to take part in the event. In an era where even the top events often have to pay significant start fees to attract top talent (e.g., the Giro d’Italia), Unbound has been able to attract a star-studded field by hosting a challenging – some would say miserable – event in a remote and hard-to-reach town in Kansas. Indeed, the event has evolved from a cycling backwater to the nerve-center of U.S. gravel racing in a matter of just a few years. Fully half of the 10 podium spots in the 200-mile race were taken by international riders, confirming the magnetic draw of Unbound.

Nonetheless, without a live stream or any kind of video broadcast, it’s not clear that Unbound will attract non-endemic sponsors or develop a global fanbase. The sport has a wide-open opportunity to create dramatic stories in the way that Ironman, Cape Epic and the UTMB ultramarathon race do. Live video streaming now seems de rigueur for any event, no matter how remote, that wants to achieve global notoriety.

This year’s event was not without controversy. Several elite athletes, including last year’s winner Sofia Gomez Villafane, publicly criticized race management for including a long, muddy stretch early in the race that required most participants to walk their mud-caked bikes for a couple miles. Other pro riders seemed to take the position that “Hey, it’s gravel racing and adversity is part of the appeal.” Course management, safety and rules are all still in development for the nascent sport of gravel racing.

At the moment, the rules for transgender women participating in elite sport are all over the board. Spurred by last year’s controversy around transgender athlete Emily Bridges, and after studying the issue for nine months, British Cycling announced that it was reversing course, and banning transgender women from competing in elite women’s racing events altogether. At the same time, the UCI appears to be wavering on its previous policy of allowing transgender women to participate – with the requirement that their total testosterone level has been below 2.5 nmol/L for a period of at least 24 months, and remains at that level or below throughout the period in which they wish to be eligible. Last week, President David Lappartient said that the governing body would be undertaking a new review of the matter, with possible adjustments to the policy prior to the upcoming World Championships in Glasgow. Lappartient emphasized that the UCI fully supports the right of anyone to transition and that transgender people are welcome in the cycling community, but that the right to take part in high-level competition is more complicated. The UCI’s existing policy is in line with that set by the International Olympic Committee; however, various subsidiary international federations, like swimming and track and field have put in place more restrictive approaches. And within cycling, there are numerous inconsistencies between the UCI policies and those set out by some of the national federations. While some experts have pointed out that there may be a strong rationale for employing different policies in different sports, the current situation is confusing, to say the least.

There was also disquieting news last week that Lappartient is seeking to take on the additional role of President of French National Olympic and Sports Committee (CNOSF) – the French Olympic body – following the unexpected resignation of the previous head.  Declaring that he is “a servant of the sports movement” and that it did not “escape me either that my name is being circulated,” Lappartient said that he is ready to “study the situation.” With the upcoming Paris Olympics are now only a little over a year away, it seems likely that this job could be a very critical and time-consuming one; IOC President Thomas Bach was said to be monitoring the situation closely. However, given (1) the fact that Lappartient already has at least one other job – head of a regional government agency in Brittany – and (2) previous criticism that even now he doesn’t spend that much time at the UCI headquarters in Aigle, Switzerland, this seems like a questionable move. As if anticipating the critics that began to emerge, Lappartient opined that “the President is not expected to do everything but to set the course and make decisions” – a statement that seems out of character given that Lappartient has been criticized as often too immersed in the minutiae of UCI activities. And it’s not just a question of whether he has enough time to effectively do three jobs; there might well also be direct conflicts of interest in holding executive roles in more than one sport. Steering the global sport of cycling to the benefit of its participants should be the sole objective of the federation’s President. Surprisingly, this matter has not yet received much attention in the cycling media, amidst mild suggestions that perhaps a move here could signal the politically savvy Lappartient’s eventual exit from cycling.

In contrast to the seemingly incessant attention paid to Unbound by weekend warriors and the cycling media, the historically important Joe Martin Stage Race quietly wrapped up a couple of weeks ago with a criterium in downtown Fayetteville, Arkansas. The race featured fields and teams from the U.S., Canada, Colombia, and Europe (including yet another slightly bizarre participation from Colombia’s Miguel Ángel López, who has been essentially exiled from top-level road racing due to his connections with an infamous doping doctor). But even though it feels like road racing in North America is finally starting to emerge from its COVID-induced hibernation, the fan experience has not changed much. At Joe Martin, there was no live stream, no designated team area that would have enabled fan engagement, and little outbound communication and content from the race. Unfortunately, this lack of fan-facing experience describes most bike races in the U.S. While some of the big gravel events and criteriums have done a better job with outreach, it’s not clear how American bike racing is going to create new fans, or attract sponsorship, without a clear strategy for how to engage a wider audience.

The travails of U.S. domestic bike racing are encapsulated by the Joe Martin race. The long-standing event was forced to cancel its traditional four-stage category 1-2 race, which has long served as a major launchpad for up-and-coming amateur riders in years past.  Registration in the men’s professional category has experienced almost a 20% decrease in participation between 2016 and 2023. But, the biggest sign of road racing’s decline is that Joe Martin was overshadowed by another cycling event, The Rule of Three race, that took place just down the road in Bentonville on the same weekend. The innovative and inclusive gravel race has seen the nation’s top gravel riders – like Alexey Vermeulen and Russell Finsterwald, and even Lance Armstrong – participate in recent years. Being muscled out of top billing in northwest Arkansas should serve as a pertinent case study for how road racing has fallen behind gravel in the United States – failing to connect with a larger audience and to sell itself as an event that weekend warriors should aspire to attend. 

The presence of two of the country’s biggest races on the same weekend has all but confirmed that Bentonville, Arkansas, is rapidly becoming "the bike capital of America." While that moniker might have sounded far-fetched just a few years ago, it’s now impossible to deny. With a growing list of bicycle businesses either headquartered or represented in northwest Arkansas, as well as a huge number of bicycle events that span every month of the year, the region is becoming a must-visit destination for the bike community. The transformation of the area began 15 years ago with the creation of single-track MTB trails built to be free and open to the public. That’s grown to over 500 miles of carefully constructed trails to go along with hundreds of miles of gravel. This infrastructure was initially funded by Walmart heirs Tom and Steuart Walton, but the bike-focused growth in Bentonville has now taken on a life of its own. With many more aspects of the bicycle ecosystem arriving on a monthly basis, including road riding infrastructure, professional athletes, bike-themed hospitality, NGOs, non-profits and bike brands, it will be interesting to see how this region impacts bike culture and bike racing in the future.

A few weeks ago, we highlighted the cancellation of the Emilia Romagna Formula 1 Grand Prix at the flood-ravaged Imola track in Italy as an example of what can happen when a major sporting event is impacted by cataclysmic weather. Since then, the cancellation has become a well-studied and debated example of the effects of climate change on sports enterprises (particularly those which take place outdoors) and how to structure contingencies to a sporting schedule as climate-related challenges become more widespread. F1 hasn't announced a "make-up" date for the Italian race in the 2023 calendar, nor does that seem feasible based on the schedule's tightly managed logistics planning. While there will be impacts to the lost income from event ticket sales and broadcast revenues, the overall financial health of the series isn't in doubt.

But if we compare that to a sport like cycling, surfing, or triathlon, the stakes in a similar type of event would be much higher. In triathlon, for example, registrant dollars would be lost, and there would be tourism impacts in terms of hotel cancellations and related site revenues. In cycling, we witnessed a host of pandemic impacts related to races moving in the calendar and races being canceled altogether. There is increasing pressure to come up with continuity and contingency planning to accommodate these kinds of potential weather impacts. With fewer revenue sources, and even fewer options to reschedule and rerun races due to the logistics of on- and off-road race production logistics, cycling would do well to run a variety of business contingency scenarios when planning a season – an exercise that must set aside traditional concepts of monuments and classics and look towards flexibility and rapid response to an ever-changing world. If nothing else, such an exercise could provide a much-needed view into alternate calendar date options for a variety of the most popular and monetizable events, and potentially provide the foundation for a kind of “Cycling 2.0” sporting enterprise to capture new markets and delight fans across the globe.