The cycling boom is over – now the sport has a growth problem

When Sir Bradley Wiggins became the first British rider to win the Tour de France in 2012, The Sun published cut-out-and-keep sideburns for fans to wear roadside during the London Olympics. For a few heady weeks, Wiggo-mania took hold.

The new Tour champion opened those Games, of course; banging the gong at the Olympic stadium wearing a yellow jersey. A couple of years later nearly five million people turned up for the Tour’s Grand Depart in Yorkshire. Teams and races sprung up all over the place. Legacy events such as the Tour de Yorkshire were born. The Women’s Tour, set up in 2014, was hailed as one of the best and most progressive in the world.

Fast forward 10 years and the domestic cycling scene does not look so rosy. The Tour de Yorkshire is no more. The Tour Series will not run this year. The Women’s Tour has resorted to crowdfunding to try to save this year’s race and problem are mounting for SweetSpot, its promoter. A number of British teams have folded.

A couple of weeks ago, following the collapse of yet another British team, AT85 Pro Cycling, one of Britain’s top riders, Tao Geoghegan Hart, was moved to publish a lengthy series of tweets warning that we were entering dangerous territory.

“The sport of cycling in the UK is at a low that I’ve not seen during my time,” wrote Ineos Grenadiers’ 2020 Giro d’Italia. champion. “There are next to no pro races and those that exist, face dwindling fields due to Brexit. There is no domestic scene whatsoever. Bike shop shelves are empty, the roads are ever more dangerous and the sport is becoming increasingly less accessible due to soaring costs such as entry fees, the equipment arms race and the lack of opportunities to race for well-supported teams. More must be done to reset what has been a steady decline ever since the inspiration of the summer of 2012 began to dwindle.”

Geoghegan Hart’s call-to-arms prompted a number of questions. Has Britain fallen out of love with cycling? Were we ever really in love? Is the malaise confined to the professional side of the sport?

It was interesting to note that Geoghegan Hart’s tweets, and a subsequent article in Metro by the cycling presenter Orla Chennaoui, both sparked defensive responses from the grass-roots community, who pointed to the great work taking place at clubs up and down the country, where volunteers turn up in droves and numbers remain healthy.

Steve Fry of sports marketing agency M2 Sports, who has worked in cycling for many years, argues that all things can be true at once. “There’s no doubt cycling is in a weird state of flux at the moment, certainly in the UK,” he says. “But I think it’s easy to conflate lots of issues. Certainly I look at my local club in South Wales, Cymcarn Paragon, and the best attended races are in the youth age groups. Under-sixes, under-sevens... right up to under-18s. Girls and boys. You rock up on a Sunday morning and it’s absolutely vibrant. It’s the middle of winter, outdoors, snow, mud... they’re loving it. I see that replicated all over the country. So I don’t believe there’s a problem at grassroots.

“At the same time, if you look at the quality at the elite end – Mathieu van der Poel, Wout van Aert, Tom Pidcock, Primoz Roglic, Tadej Pogacar – I think we’re in a bit of a golden era.”

Fry refers to a “squeezed middle” – the domestic scene – which has been hugely impacted by the current economic downturn. With local councils and sponsors tightening their belts, race promoters and teams are struggling to make the numbers add up. It does not help, perhaps, that WorldTour teams are now going out and signing up top young talent.

“Look at Josh Tarling,” Fry says, “a local product who was smashing it out of the park on the time trial scene. He has already signed for Ineos at the age of 18. And they’re not alone in signing teenagers. It’s not surprising that there’s no role for a domestic Continental-level team, because the classic progression was if you were a decent junior you’d sign for a JLT-Condor or a Madison Genesis, and if you continued to impress you’d move on to WorldTour.”

‘The potential of our sport still burns just as brightly’

The question is whether the squeeze is a temporary issue. Will those races and teams return as the economy recovers? Or are we experiencing something longer lasting?

Jonathan Day, British Cycling’s acting cycling delivery director, is adamant it is the former. Despite membership at British Cycling having fallen by 20,000 – from 165,000 in July 2020 to around 145,00 now – he insists the foundations are strong. Indeed, British Cycling fear the current talking-down of the sport may be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“It’s clearly been a difficult few months for the sport, and the financial pressures being experienced by councils, the bike industry and the country at large have combined to create a really difficult environment for elite road race events and our domestic teams,” Day told Telegraph Sport in a statement.

“While we’re not immune to those pressures ourselves, we’ve worked to protect our domestic calendar and secure what will be another brilliant National Road Championships in Redcar and Cleveland in June, and had 111 women on the start line for the first race of the National Road Series.

“I remain hugely encouraged by the numbers of youth and junior riders on our start lines, the growth of our club and talent development networks, the millions invested into dedicated cycle-sport facilities, the success of riders like Tom Pidcock and Pfeiffer Georgi, and the opportunity presented by the UCI Cycling World Championships in Scotland this August. The potential of our sport still burns just as brightly, but we’re going to have to work hard and work together to seize it.”

Lizzie Deignan, the 2015 world road champion and 2012 Olympic silver medallist, agrees the future can be bright. Women’s cycling as a whole, she argues, continues to go from strength to strength. And actually, even allowing for the uncertain economic outlook, she says she is surprised to see the Women’s Tour struggling to plug an estimated £500,000 shortfall.

It’s not a good time to be looking for sponsors in any sport,” Deignan, who is hoping to return from the birth of her second child to ride in June, tells the Telegraph. “And yes, of course there are going to be casualties in the cost-of-living crisis that we're in at the moment. But I am quite surprised that it's such a struggle for them. The sums are relatively small and the Women’s Tour is such a prestigious event. It’s always well attended, there’s always good feedback about it.”

Fry believes a couple of issues are at play here. One is that a decent proportion of those who switched on to cycling during the golden years – when the likes of Chris Hoy, Victoria Pendleton, Deignan, Laura and Jason Kenny, Mark Cavendish, Wiggins, Chris Froome, Geraint Thomas and the rest were hoovering up gold medals in the velodrome or dominating the biggest road race in the world – have now switched off.

Britain still has some of the top riders in the world. Yorkshire-born Pidcock, an Olympic champion in mountain bike, a world champion in cyclo-cross, and a phenomenon on the road too, is arguably the most exciting of the lot.

“But unless you are literally winning the Tour de France or winning multiple gold medals at the Olympics, you are not going to be a household name in the UK,” Fry says. “Culturally we just aren’t a cycling nation. We don’t grow up with cyclosport. Not like countries such as Belgium, France, Spain and Italy, where it’s part of the fabric of the culture. The only time casual fans really get into cycling in the UK is via two things really – for the road it’s the Tour, and for the track it’s the Olympic Games. For everything else – and I’m talking [Tour of] Flanders, Paris-Roubaix, the worlds [world road championships] – it’s cycling badgers.”

Was 15 years of incredible success not enough to move the dial? Did we not do a good enough job of educating the public during those years to wean them off the diet of Tour winners every summer, which was obviously never going to last?

“It probably moved it a bit. But for something to be culturally embedded in a nation dominated by football it’s a hell of an ask. And that’s not unique to cycling. It’s a challenge for every minority sport. How to broaden the appeal?”

Fry cites a study done when his agency was doing all the sponsorship sales for SweetSpot a few years ago. “We found the average age for a Tour of Britain viewer was 57,” he says. “And I don’t think that’s changed. Fundamentally the sport appeals to an older, white, male demographic which is getting older. That is a problem.”

Can Netflix treatment revitalise cycling?

If you are into cycling in this country you almost certainly pay a subscription to get the GCN (Global Cycling Network)/Discovery app, where you can watch virtually every race live. It is a brilliant service, and there are enough ‘badgers’ to make it viable. But it probably does not help to grow the audience.

Again, this is far from unique to cycling, or even the UK. “There are very few sports that attract a really young demographic, certainly in terms of linear TV watching,” Fry says.

One that does is Formula One. The incredible appeal of the Netflix series Drive to Survive has completely changed the game for that sport. “It’s almost like they’ve now got two products which appeal to two different audiences,” Fry says. “They’ve got the racing, which is watched by your F1 badgers – older men basically. And then Drive to Survive, which attracts a younger, probably more gender-neutral, audience… Basically they’ve now got a proposition which they can take to sponsors; genuinely global, genuine gender balance, genuine age balance.”

It is a trick a lot of sports would like to pull off. Many have tried to emulate F1, going down the Netflix route. Cycling is no exception. The Netflix cameras followed the Tour peloton around France last summer and it will be interesting to see what impact that has when it comes out before the Tour this year.

Fry believes cycling also needs to look at its format, particularly in this country. And at the way it markets itself. He cites the example of The Hundred in cricket. “The Hundred has p----- off a lot of their traditional core cricket badgers,” he says, “but on the flip side, it has brought a load of people into the sport who never watched cricket before, never attended a cricket match before. And potentially now they have their data and they can get them to a county game, or an England international or whatever.”

He also cites the example of the new franchise-based National Cycling League in the United States as something which could be interesting. “There are very few people here innovating,” he says. “It’s the same with sponsorship. Fundamentally the proposition hasn’t changed since forever. It’s very much Sponsorship 1.0. You put your brand here, on the chest of this jersey or on these billboards, and you get y back.

“The sponsorship world has moved on significantly from that. Digital media, digital marketing… the landscape in which brands can now go and invest their marketing budget is a lot more diverse. Nobody in cycling in the UK in my opinion has really grasped what the cycling proposition needs to be for marketing directors to say ‘That is where I want my brand to be seen. That is a sport I want to be involved in.’”

It is a sobering note on which to end. Ultimately, Geoghegan Hart’s gloomy prognosis that the sport is “dying” and that he “does not see anyone coming to resuscitate it” is probably too strong. These are bleak times for the domestic scene, but there is still talent coming through, still plenty of elite riders to inspire the next generation, from Pidcock to Deignan to Cavendish, who lest we forget could become the Tour’s all-time most successful stage winner this summer. But until someone can figure this part of the equation out, cycling will struggle to grow.