UK cycling boom was not here to stay and lack of institutional will could keep it away

“The cycling boom is here to stay,” the chief executive of British Cycling, Ian Drake, proudly announced in 2014. A more innocent time. Perhaps it’s all a little early in the cycle for 2010s nostalgia, which is why the decade still feels more like a palimpsest of random motifs and images than a cogent cultural narrative. I’m getting Cat Bin Lady humming Despacito on her way to bottomless brunch. I’m getting a Buzzfeed quiz entitled Pick Your Favourite Food Bank and Let Us Guess Your Age.

And in this country at least, it was the decade of cycling. It was the decade when Laura Trott’s and Jason Kenny’s wedding made the cover of OK! magazine (relegating “Princess Charlotte’s First Royal Tour” to an inset picture). It was the decade of “G” and “Cav”, of Wiggo sideburns and Hugh Porter, of long summer afternoons wasted away in the Rapha café while some bore in Lotto‑Soudal kit droned on about echelons. Dave Brailsford was a god-level genius, and the sun would never set on the British Empire.

Related: British Cycling launches rescue mission for 2024 Tours of Britain

Narrator: the cycling boom was not here to stay. A decade after literally the whole of Yorkshire turned out to watch the grand depart of the Tour de France came the news that British Cycling has been forced to step in to save the Tour of Britain, under threat since the previous organiser was liquidated last month. The Women’s Tour last year was cancelled because of a lack of funding and this year it will almost be a slimmed‑down race. The Tour de Yorkshire quietly disappeared during Covid and never returned.

Meanwhile, British Cycling has been cutting jobs amid a decline in sponsorship revenue and falling membership numbers, the latter due in no small part to the outrage over the deal it signed with the oil giant Shell last year. Smaller teams such as AT85 Pro Cycling, Madison Genesis and JLT-Condor have gone under. Bike shops, which saw a mini-spike during the pandemic, have been closing in swathes. The former Giro d’Italia winner Tao Geoghegan Hart wrote last year that “the sport of cycling in the UK is at a low that I’ve not seen during my time”.

At which point we run into a paradox. Because by many measures cycling in this country is still in a relatively healthy place. Jim Ratcliffe’s Ineos may not dominate the sport as its predecessor Team Sky once did, and Brailsford himself has decamped to Manchester United, but this country still boasts plenty of top-end talent: Geoghegan Hart, Lizzie Deignan, Tom Pidcock, Hugh Carthy and Pfeiffer Georgi on the road, the likes of Emma Finucane and the Barker sisters on the track.

The world championships last year was billed as the biggest cycling event in history, with a million spectators descending on Glasgow. The Tour of Britain generally attracts superb crowds. Anecdotally, the grassroots scene seems to be holding up pretty well. Meanwhile, stroll through many British cities these days and there are lattices of cycle lanes that simply could never have existed two decades ago. Clearly there is still an audience for this thing. So why does it still feel like the air is getting thinner?

To discover the answer, it’s worth examining what else Ian Drake had to say a decade ago, because amid the justifiable back-slapping was a veiled warning. “Medals and role models alone cannot transform Britain into a nation of people on bikes,” he said. “Fundamental to our approach is a mixed economy of funding and support from across the spectrum of private, public and voluntary sectors.”

The medals are still coming: Great Britain topped the table at the last Olympics and world championships. The enthusiasm is still there. The volunteers are still turning out every weekend. What has evaporated over recent years is the last and most important part of the equation: the institutional will to make the sport work, a public sector genuinely invested in cycling as a concept, rather than as an exercise in prestige or profit.

Instead, organisers already facing rising costs are coming up against austerity-starved local authorities no longer willing to foot the bill for bike races. The self-mutilation of Brexit has made it harder to attract from overseas riders and teams who now have to crawl through a bureaucratic sewage pipe simply to move their kit across the Channel. Now we have a Conservative government happy to incorporate cyclists into its soiled “pro‑motorist” culture war, led by a prime minister who if he ever saw an actual bike would probably be astonished to discover a Peloton that moved.

And really, this is a shift of tone as much as policy or polity. Perhaps this is just the nostalgia talking, but for all the weird cultish energy of Team GB and the annoying new-age blitheness of Team Sky, somehow the cycling boom also expressed some of the optimism of the age. A chance to live healthier and greener lives. A bold experiment in remaking an entire nation’s sporting culture. Perhaps even an attempt to dream ourselves a little more European.

Cycling will always endure here because there will always be people who want to sustain it. But this is a poorer country now, a meaner and more insular and more pecuniary place, obsessed with quick fixes and the bottom line. And perhaps for all its successes Britain has never really seemed to get cycling, a sport of collaboration and selflessness, a sport where people turn up and watch for free, where you can’t sell out a stadium or sell debentures, where the benefits are intangible and reveal themselves over generations. In this respect, too, cycling feels like a pretty good metaphor for the past decade.

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