In this week’s AIRmail newsletter, The Outer Line takes an in-depth look at trending cycling news: LTGP 2025 details announced, Liberty Media focuses on sports; “Enhanced Games” coming up, USAC grant; building the talent pool, comments from Rouleur Live Event….
# Catch up on pro cycling – and its context within the broader world of sports – with AIRmail … Analysis, Insight and Reflections from The Outer Line. You can subscribe to AIRmail here, and check out The Outer Line’s extensive library of articles on the governance and economics of cycling here. #
Key Takeaways:
- Life Time Announces Grand Prix Details for 2025
- More Restructuring at Liberty Media
- More Detail on the “Enhanced Games”
- USA Cycling Receives Big Grant
- The Talent Pool: Insights from Football
- Rouleur Live: Pidcock and Lemond Speak Up
Unbound
Life Time recently announced the participants in its Life Time Grand Prix presented by Mazda for 2025 – the world’s leading series of gravel races. It includes Unbound Gravel in Kansas, now generally considered to be the most important bike race of any kind in North America. The series titles this year were won by Sofia Gomez Villafañe and Keegan Swenson. Next year’s LTGP will feature $380,000 in prize money, divided equally between men and women. The field next year will include fifty total athletes – 25 men and 25 women – including six wild card spots to be announced after the second event. The series will also have fewer races in 2025, down to just six events, primarily in order to reduce athlete travel costs, particularly international racers. Life Time Senior Marketing Director Michelle Duffy Smith explained the importance of these changes to athletes who might make a living racing gravel. “We felt we could provide more exposure for the athletes with more focus on fewer events.” As part of that, the company is currently working on creating new channels to engage fans, perhaps to include a future Unbound race live stream. But funding these more costly content initiatives may require Life Time (much like cycling in general) to forge partnerships with more non-endemic brands – sponsorships from outside the sport which have decreased dramatically for teams and events in recent years. Nonetheless, the LTGP series is making impressive progress, and it will be interesting to watch its continued evolution in 2025.
Liberty Media + F1 + MotoGP
The changes continue to occur at powerhouse sports holding company Liberty Media. The company announced this week that it was restructuring its portfolio of operating companies to focus on its motor sports business. Long-time CEO Greg Maffei will leave the company at the end of the year, to be replaced by original Liberty founder and media mogul John Malone. The highly successful owner of both Formula 1 auto racing as well as MotoGP motorcycle racing league indicated that it would be spinning all of its other assets into a new and separate company to be named Liberty Live. Separately, Liberty Broadband, which was spun off from Liberty Media in 2014, said it would merge with Charter Communications in an all-stock deal. This all happens just a year and a half after the company spun its highly profitable Atlanta Braves operation in a separate company as well. The various corporate restructurings have been complex to follow but departing CEO Maffei said that “The split-off of Liberty Live Group into a separate public entity will simplify Liberty Media’s capital structure” and that all of the key Liberty acquisitions are now “in structures where (public) shareholders can have more direct ownership in their upside.”
“Enhanced Games”
There was another story this week about the upcoming “Enhanced Games” – whose date and location are now set to be announced next month. The proposed event, roughly similar in format to the Olympics but in which any and all performance enhancing drugs or techniques are allowed and encouraged. As to what sports will be included or which athletes might participate, there are still few details forthcoming. The President of the Games, Dr. Aron D’Souza, said “We’re reinventing the Olympics for the 21st century, for an era of science and technology, where we can push human achievement and boundaries.” He adds, “I don’t think of this as a company or as a business. I think of this as a social, political, and scientific movement that will inevitably lead to superhumanity.” Other observers see it differently. USADA chief Travis Tygart has publicly denounced the concept, questioning its legality, and saying that the idea is “a dangerous clown show, not real sport. No one really wants our children growing up idolizing unbridled drug use in sport.”
Where is US racing going?
Over the past few years, we’ve charted the declining participation and shrinking demographics in licensed amateur competitive cycling across almost every discipline, but USA Cycling recently announced a major funding investment that could pay dividends for women’s racing. A long-standing partnership with the Bay Area-based Hellman Foundation has resulted in a grant, through 2043, for USAC to fund women’s cycling programs, with $1 million immediately earmarked to support 2028 Los Angeles Olympics team preparations and $1.5 million to be released over the remainder of the commitment. Although the grant carries a 1:1 fund matching caveat, ultimately yielding a $3 million grant target, the near-term funding potentially erases shortfalls that USAC has experienced due to reduced membership and higher operational costs. On the surface, the immediate boost should benefit the high-performance programs, while the trailing dollars could potentially bolster early talent identification and development efforts. The U.S. women performed spectacularly at the 2024 Olympics, taking the coveted road race gold and numerous track medals, and the additional dollars should help keep the women’s high-performance program in lockstep with other top-tier cycling nations.
Do kids need the best kit to get started?
Regarding the broader scope of women’s and men’s cycling, are grants enough to fuel the participation pipeline in the U.S. and elsewhere? There are some interesting parallels in talent development to consider between the multi-billion dollar NFL “football pyramid” and pro cycling’s WorldTour. Cycling has unfortunately earned the reputation as a sport for the rich and privileged, and costs for new riders to start their journey in the sport (equipment, travel, event budgets even at the local level, etc.) have gone up exponentially. But there is a similar pattern affecting youth football participation, particularly for high school students. Setting aside the risks of traumatic brain injuries that many parents would rather their kids avoid, the sport has seen a participation decline each year since its 2008 peak and more than 350 high schools have ceased to field teams since the downturn. Many of the same factors now affect football, including the high cost for team equipment and game travel – which requires significant time and money investments for the families, with obviously greater impact on low-income households.
NCAA and the NFL
But NCAA football and the NFL have continued to gain popularity and globalization (including European games) such that it still supports nearly a million childhood players annually in the U.S. alone. Bluntly speaking, immense broadcast reach fuels the sport’s cultural dominance and participation incentives for kids and families such as upward mobility (an NCAA/college education) and a chance at generational wealth have offset declining participation pressures. But competitive cycling lacks that broadcast presence, which exacerbates its ability to reach new participants, and its perceived high cost of entry adds significant downward pressure on the recruitment and longevity of junior riders (as we’ve explored in the U.S. and U.K. racing scenes, for example). According to the UCI, global total licensed competitive participants today in all categories is approximately a million among over 200 national federations, and this represents a mere cross section of the sport’s real potential. Reinvestment in – or, better yet, reinvention of – our athlete development pipelines might unlock unrealized growth across cycling’s sporting and economic landscapes.
Rouleur Magazine’s live event guest Tom Pidcock
The 2024 edition of Rouleur Magazine’s live event ran this past weekend in London, pulling together many of the top consumer brands and star riders in pro racing. Perhaps the most anticipated appearance was Tom Pidcock, given the recent and widely-publicized clash between him and his Ineos team – and the apparently failed effort to find another team willing to take on his massive compensation package. However, things seemed to calm down in recent weeks, with Pidcock’s presence at the team’s recent off-season training camp in Manchester suggesting he would stay put through at least the 2025 season. However, when asked if he was now happy with the team given recent personnel changes (specifically the departure of former Director of Racing Steve Cummings, allegedly at the behest of Pidcock) he gave a somewhat shocking and undiplomatic answer: “no.” This seems to throw everything back into disarray, and it would appear that he is still looking for a move off; the issue seems far from settled.
Lemond and Kelly talk
Another intriguing discussion was with Greg Lemond, who painted two very different images of modern-day professional cycling. On the one hand, he strongly suggested that he had inside knowledge that motor-doping had occurred at the WorldTour level in the recent past. On the other hand, he made the point that in every generation, there are bound to be a few select genetic outlier athletes – and that Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard’s recent dominance over their peers is within the realm of believability. (For what it’s worth, this outlier theory seems to hold true in most other professional sports as well). Lemond attributed the current generation’s scorching-fast times on historic ascents to a combination of superior bike technology, nutrition, and, interestingly, rider weights. He went so far as to say that modern riders look like “a different species” compared to past generations, due to their extreme lack of body fat and upper body muscle. Lemond contends this extreme weight loss allows riders like Jonas Vingegaard to race at a full 10 kilograms lighter than he did, essentially allowing riders to generate a full additional watt per kilo.
Super light Vingegaard
# Catch up on pro cycling – and its context within the broader world of sports – with AIRmail … Analysis, Insight and Reflections from The Outer Line. You can subscribe to AIRmail here, and check out The Outer Line’s extensive library of articles on the governance and economics of cycling here. #
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