Switch on the cycling this week and also you’ll be greeted with two prestigious WorldTour phases happening at the similar time: Paris-Nice and Tirreno-Adriatico.
In a few weeks’ time, when riders like Remco Evenepoel and Jonas Vingegaard compete at the Volta a Catalunya, there’ll be three well-known one-day WorldTour races occurring on completely different days in Belgium. It’s a bit like having a number of Formula One races staged concurrently.
In December 2022, the International Cycling Union’s (UCI) director of sports activities, Peter Van den Abeele, promised an finish to an period of eyes and a spotlight having to be scattered throughout varied locations at the similar time. “We’ll no longer allow overlaps and there will be fewer races,” he promised on the Cross van Play Sports podcast.
His superior, UCI president David Lappartient, went a step additional, vowing to streamline cycling’s congested calendar. “Within the WorldTour, each year we’d have a number of races, maybe 15 one-day races and four to six stage races,” he stated in a video following the UCI WorldTour Seminar in 2002.
There was lastly, after over a decade of on-off strain from groups, a realisation inside the UCI that skilled cycling was too complicated to observe for each newcomers and even seasoned followers. “The idea is to strengthen the attractiveness of our sport so that we can market it even better,” Lappartient stated.
However, regardless of a number of ventures and tasks to change the sport’s construction, nothing has been accomplished about it. The 2026 males’s WorldTour calendar is as bloated as ever: after the trio of three-week Grand Tours — cycling’s marquee occasions — there are a additional 12 WorldTour stage races (typically about a week lengthy) that sit alongside the 5 one-day Monuments and 16 different one-day races.
For many in the sport, frustrations are at an all-time boiling level. Not solely over the calendar, but in addition a monetary mannequin that makes groups and races nearly fully depending on sponsors.
“We’re in a downward spiral as cycling, [whether] we like it or not, and I think that’s why, for everyone, the urgency becomes bigger and bigger every day,” warned Richard Plugge, normal supervisor of Visma-Lease a Bike, at the team’s media day in January.
“You need to make sure that cycling stays [as] one of the top five sports in the world. That’s the whole issue, and now apparently we are losing eyeballs to other sports.”
The UCI rejected a Saudi Arabia-backed reform proposal final summer time, however in the previous few weeks it has launched a session with different stakeholders to redesign the way forward for the sport. Yet at the similar time, a assortment of billionaires and highly effective group homeowners have been discreetly drawing up plans for their very own undertaking that they hope can lastly speed up cycling’s progress and recognition. The warring factions danger splitting the sport in two.
Jonas Vingegaard is competing in Paris-Nice this week – most of his Tour de France rivals are elsewhere. (David Pintens / BELGA MAG / Belga / AFP by way of Getty Images)
It’s a commonly-held opinion that cycling’s mannequin is damaged — regardless of that mannequin having survived for properly over 100 years.
Taking place on open roads and away from stadiums, the sport can’t generate the similar form of income from spectators that almost all different sports activities can. Sponsorship cash is the lifeblood of groups and races.
ASO, the homeowners of the Tour de France, account for an estimated 70 per cent of all revenue from WorldTour races regardless of solely proudly owning 25 % of top-tier races. But most of that revenue goes straight to the controlling Amaury household — they’ve been enriched by a reported half a billion Euros in the previous decade alone.
Unlike in most different main sports activities akin to soccer, NFL and F1, the place groups obtain a massive proportion of all broadcast revenues, cash from races just isn’t shared amongst the varied competing stakeholders. Though they obtain a few thousand euros per day from organizers to cowl fundamental bills, groups primarily pay to race.
Iwan Spekenbrink, proprietor and supervisor of the Picnic PostNL group and a long-time backer of reform, advised The Athletic: “[For] the individuals [teams] who carry most of the cash into the sport — round 80 % — there’s completely no reward for them and little or no incentive. Because of the system we’re working in, we’re not making any revenue and due to this fact we don’t construct worth. If a sponsor pulls out, the group is in hazard.
“On the different facet, you will have race organizers who make practically €100 million web revenue in simply three weeks yearly they usually don’t pay the ones who carry the race to life.
French group Arkéa-B&B Hotels folded at the finish of the 2025 season. (Anne-Christine Poujoulat / AFP by way of Getty Images)
Though the stability and longevity of groups has by no means been larger — the common age of a 2026 Tour de France group is sort of 22 years — the merging of Lotto and Intermarché-Wanty this winter, in addition to the collapse of Arkéa-B&B Hotels, was additional proof, reformists argue, that the monetary system is outdated and too perilous.
Those monetary worries aren’t simply restricted to the smaller groups, both: in the autumn of 2023, two of the superteams, Visma-Lease a Bike and Soudal Quick-Step, had been deep in discussions about merging. To proceed the F1 comparability — a favorite of cycling reformers who admire how Bernie Ecclestone commercially revolutionised the motor sport in the late Eighties — that will have been like Mercedes becoming a member of forces with Aston Martin. Unthinkable.
There is an acceptance that the basic product of cycling — racing on public roads for a number of hours — can’t be modified, however there are many concepts (most impressed by different sports activities) which were studied and already partially trialled that many are pushing for, believing that it might lean to improved monetary sustainability for groups and organizers, in addition to rising the product on provide.
At subsequent month’s Tour of Flanders, hundreds of followers who’ve paid not less than €425 ($490; £367) every shall be packed into VIP tents alongside three of the famed cobbled bergs, watching the women and men’s races come previous them a number of occasions.
When in 2012 Flanders Classics — the third largest race organizer in the sport — launched these packages in addition to a course redesign that made the last 50km of the race three laps of a circuit, there was backlash from cycling fandom who protested that cycling is a point-to-point sport and it ought to be free to watch at any level on the course, because it has been for over a century.
The ending circuit at the Tour of Flanders has enabled the organizers to promote VIP packages. (Jan de Meulenier – Pool / Getty Images)
But the gamble paid off. The circuit racing has made the race’s finale extra unpredictable, and the hospitality tickets are nearly at all times offered out, with phrase having unfold far and large about the festive time out.
A less expensive model of that mannequin is what individuals in cycling dream of emulating throughout the board. They strongly consider that followers would pay a small quantity (€10-€20 is usually mooted) to watch a race at a crucial juncture, with riders passing not less than 3 times as a part of a ending circuit. Catering choices and different leisure would even be supplied to make the day an occasion, fairly than simply witnessing the peloton fly again for 60 seconds as in any other case occurs.
All that cash — in addition to earnings from broadcast rights and mass-participant beginner occasions like sportives and gran fondos — could be pooled into a central fund that will be divided amongst the race organizers and competing groups. That method, groups would lastly be financially rewarded for offering the spectacle.
What reformists additionally need to do is what the UCI promised however has to date failed to act on a few years in the past: to slim the WorldTour race calendar to round 80 race days a yr (and create a stronger second and third division of races), and have the finest riders competing towards one another far more recurrently than they presently do.
One level incessantly made is how Vingegaard, Evenepoel, Tadej Pogačar and Primož Roglič, the 4 excellent normal classification riders of their technology, solely ever have a tendency to face off towards each other at the Tour de France. In no different sport, it’s argued, do the finest athletes keep away from every for many of the season.
The uncommon sight of Tadej Pogačar, Jonas Vingegaard, Primož Roglič and Remco Evenepoel racing collectively at the 2024 Tour de France. (Marco Bertorello / AFP by way of Getty Images)
“The way it is right now, the calendar is blocked from mid-January to mid-October so that only a few weeks of the season can be extremely profitable,” Spekenbrink stated, referencing how the Tour de France in July is cycling’s growth time.
“If we have a fair regulatory framework then one stakeholder could not just stop other stakeholders from co-creating good products. [It would be] more exciting for the fans, more economically viable, and then you could create a valuable product for the other 10 months [of the season]
“That would be better for fans as there’d be a high-quality product for a whole year, and not just for a few weeks. That would also allow for much more revenue to be generated and shared among all the stakeholders, thus creating value.”
These concepts had been all a part of the One Cycling plans that had been stopped in its tracks by the UCI final summer time.
The fourth try at reform this century, One Cycling had largely been developed by six main groups and it had the help of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund who had been ready to make investments upwards of €250 million ($290 million) to restructure the sport and redesign the top-tier calendar round a international race collection.
Official projections that The Athletic has seen present that earnings earlier than EBITDA in the first yr of operation would quantity to a modest €10 million, however develop to €101 million after 10 years, thus awarding groups with a number of thousands and thousands of euros each season.
It’s clearly not a get-quick wealthy scheme, although, and people form of payouts wouldn’t be sufficient to make groups financially unbiased — they’d nonetheless require companies or rich personnel to make investments a minimal of €30 million each year simply to have a lower-ranked WorldTour group.
“You can say if we share the profits each team would only get €2-3 million and that it doesn’t make a difference. But that’s not the point — it’s about doing the right thing,” Spekenbrink added.
“Even if it’s one euro or €3 million a year, it’s the principle of sharing. Fair is fair. People deserve that money [and] it shouldn’t be up to someone else to decide you don’t need it.”
As properly as bemoaning an obvious lack of transparency and consultations with others, the UCI rejected One Cycling as a result of it feared it might have diminished its controlling authority over the sport, handing it to groups.
WorldTour groups are eager to share the broadcast revenues race organizers get pleasure from. (Thomas Samson / AFP by way of Getty Images)
In a non-public letter despatched to WorldTour groups final July and seen by The Athletic, UCI president Lappartient wrote that the enterprise would see “certain stakeholders [teams — ed] collectively compelling others to agree to their terms, gives [sic] rise to serious sporting — and potentially competition — concerns and creates a potential conflict of interest.”
It was additionally not misplaced on anybody that ASO was not a part of negotiations — a main stumbling block since they run the Tour de France, Vuelta a España and Paris-Roubaix, amongst others.
Neither the Amaury household nor anybody senior at ASO will communicate publicly about reform plans, however the notion is that the French firm has no curiosity in transferring to a new mannequin that will break up their monopoly.
But the plotters haven’t stopped plotting, and the UCI is again at the desk, accepting what proponents of reform — nearly all however not all WorldTour groups — have been preaching for a whereas: the sport has to evolve to preserve related.
In an open letter sent to riders, teams, organizers and national federations in February and asking for proposals on how to change the sport, UCI president Lappartient wrote that whereas “cycling is now hugely popular across five continents, its media coverage and the revenues generated for its stakeholders do not yet fully reflect its potential… there is considerable room for improvement.”
He added that “the UCI is ready to consider significant developments in a sport renowned for its conservatism, if these changes would allow cycling to continue its growth and internationalisation, while ensuring greater stability for stakeholders in a particularly challenging environment.”
UCI President David Lappartient is going through requires reform from WorldTour groups. (Anne-Christine Poujoulat / AFP by way of Getty Images)
It was fairly the about flip from the UCI who simply over half-a-year beforehand had successfully shut down One Cycling and threatened to strip the WorldTour licences of groups and organizers in the event that they went by means of with reform plans.
The cause for his or her change in stance is that One Cycling by no means actually died.
Whereas the authentic undertaking was led by group managers akin to Plugge, now influential group homeowners and billionaires have taken on the mantle in a enterprise with the working title of Team Co.
Ivan Glasenberg, who has a web value of $12.2 billion and is the proprietor of Tom Pidcock’s Pinarello-Q36.5 group, has been main Team Co alongside Soudal Quick-Step proprietor Zdeněk Bakala.
The homeowners of Red Bull, Decathlon, Lidl, Education First and INEOS are additionally stated to be personally invested in the undertaking which goals to result in a lot of One Cycling’s ambitions, however to first to create a viable enterprise mannequin that may then be pitched out to funding corporations, akin to CVC Capital Partners, PIF and Ares Management.
According to one supply, talking anonymously to defend relationships, the UCI feels threatened by Team Co’s main personnel, and thus have intervened to be seen as prepared to pressure by means of change themselves.
But there’s little or no belief in the UCI’s personal reform efforts. “The UCI wants to keep the status quo,” one supply stated. “They do not want to change anything.”
It has led to one more state of affairs the place groups and a few race organizers are happening their very own path to strive to shake the sport from its obvious slumber, whereas the UCI and ASO strive to stop a revolution that they concern might upend over a century of traditions. It was telling, reformers identified, how Lappartient wrote in his letter that modifications have to be “based on a balance between the historical strengths of our sport and an approach adapted to future challenges.”
Whether it’s the crowded calendar or creating an financial mannequin that splits revenues extra pretty amongst its stakeholders, the UCI appears decided to let cycling’s heritage be the main information. The reformers, now led by highly effective businessmen, need to be disruptors — they usually’re hopeful that they’ll lastly win the fractious battle. “It is clear that the billionaires are moving,” one supply added…