Uncharted Territory

The months that end in -ber naturally bring cooler weather, at least here in the northern hemisphere. They provide a dose of rest and relaxation, although if your social media feed resembles mine, the off season is as short as ever. “I’m back at it!” and “Just like that, off season comes to a close!” are the captions to my friends and contemporaries getting back into the swing of things. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t in a similar situation. I didn’t have many goals after the UCI World Championships in early October, so my volume dropped a little bit and my intensity dropped dramatically over the next three weeks. A cross-country road trip also ensued, where my daily exercise for a week was capped at 60 second jogs around the gas station parking lot. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that the trip was punctuated with an intense 90 minute race across northern Michigan in the form of Iceman Cometh. But that was merely a race within a race as more lengthily summarized here.

On my “getting back at it!” ride today, I was thinking about the enormous chasm between how traditional professional sports — let’s say football, baseball, basketball, hockey — churn through revenue versus how cycling does. Ticket sales, broadcast deals, and merchandise all come to mind as success stories in major sports. I love watching cyclocross on my fall weekend mornings and it’s no wonder that one of the most successful ‘cross teams recently is title sponsored by Pauwels Sauces, literally a condiment company; you can’t fully embrace the Belgian frite experience without some curry ketchup and mayonnaise! My point being that concessions at major sporting events is also a massive revenue stream when you’re willing to pay $40 for a single beer and hot dog.

Meanwhile cycling seems to have always operated with a unique method towards sourcing their budget, which can largely be summarized as: a wealthy person at a big company likes bikes. James Murdoch is a keen cyclist and pulled the largest levers at Sky as the chairman of the company. Oleg Tinkoff loves cycling and is a once-upon-a-time owner of his eponymous team. Gerry Ryan has long been into cycling, owns Jayco, and I’m guessing has put more money into Australian cycling than anyone in… well, ever. Education First is spearheaded by cyclist and King of the Ride podcast guest(!) Eddie Hult. In summary, these power players in decision making positions don’t always support cycling purely because it’s earning them an impressive number of impressions or a handsome ROI. Instead, they’re cycling nuts and want a seat in the team car riding around France in July.

Moreover, professional sports teams are franchises, typically with ferocious animal names as their team titles as opposed to branded corporations. Bruins, Bears, Lions, Rams, and Predators (that last one hasn’t aged well) serve as examples. Meanwhile World Tour cycling’s title sponsors are typically big companies with the sometimes exception of oil rich countries in hot climates.

Besides the jersey or uniform itself in major sports, which is standardized across each league, players usually have a fair amount of leeway with which they can partner with personal sponsors to outfit the rest of their get-up. Hockey sticks, baseball gloves, basketball shoes (with which some individuals could buy other entire leagues with their shoe income), or football spikes are examples of outside income for the players themselves, less so the team.

Cycling does this to a lesser degree, but often just with shoes. In my experience, each rider being able to pick their shoes is new since whole teams formerly — and sometimes still do — cram their feet into the same company’s shoes, despite different types of fit. A wide foot in a narrow shoe is a square peg in a round hole. The touch points on the bike, most notably shoes and saddles, always befuddled me when it was mandatory to defer to the team sponsor despite not fitting like a Cinderella slipper since it’s hard to perform at your best when you’re uncomfortable. I digress.

That all said, this franchised animal name format versus company as title sponsor isn’t exactly an enormous loose end that needs to be tied up in cycling to fix some sort of error. Formula One capitalizes on companies as title sponsors just fine. If anyone has data on how many Mercedes are sold as a result of their support of F1 or cans of Red Bull sold courtesy of Max Verstappen, I’d really love to know. By my estimate, it’s sizable based on how much these global corporations are paying to have their brand whiz around a track at 200mph.

When a baseball player walks up to the plate, he’s trying to score a run. The pitcher is trying to earn an out. A running back set up on the seven yard line is trying to score a touchdown and a slapshot from the blueline is trying to light the lamp and tally a goal for that player’s team. Similarly, a domestique in cycling is trying to save his team leader as much energy as possible so that leader can go on to finish the bike race as quickly as possible.

Every player in any sport is fighting to advance his or her team. The subtle difference is that the major sports teams are trying to find success to bring more fans into a particular team’s realm which funnels money into that team via the aforementioned TV rights, ticket sales, merchandise, and hot dog sales. Whereas a rider is trying to win a race to earn eyes on that team’s sponsors through media coverage and drive sales of products. Money is at its root, but there are vastly different end goals.

Now let’s take the leap to gravel cycling. We, the athletes, are largely independent contractors, each acting as an individual microcosm representative of a cycling team. As such, just like a cycling team, we’re trying to earn media and sell more products.

Media can be achieved in a number of different ways. Winning a gravel race earns a lot of views, there’s no arguing that. What about second, third, tenth, twenty-fifth? Heck, all respectable results especially as these races are getting more and more stacked. Those positions earn views too, but an order of magnitude less than the person holding the trophy.

When I was racing in the World Tour it was a head scratcher to team management why I used Strava. Strava was created by friends-of-friends back home in New Hampshire and was the advent of sharing athletic exploits. Frankly, it was new and novel and fun. Here’s some trivia for you: there was a snippet of time when I had the title of most Strava followers on earth. I was in the realm of 20,000 and I think it was Michal Kwiatkowski who eventually passed me. He was a UCI world champion, I was a go-get’m hard worker. To this day, I get a kick out of that.

This very blog you’re reading was first pecked away at in 2006 to save time writing a dozen emails to friends and family back home and simplified with a single outlet. My Facebook account dates back in college when it was used to connect with friends — err, score dates — only among college students. X/Twitter tells me that I’ve been a user for fifteen years and my King of the Ride podcast recent went above 1 million all time downloads, first recorded in 2018.

I started using these different social media as a fun ways to connect with friends, family, and fans, and to share my ever evolving story of a cyclist traveling the world. My use of each of these different platforms is about as organic as it gets. They have since evolved into ways to reach an audience — that is, to achieve media viewership. I love racing a bike just like my 20 year old self. It’s crazy to me that I stopped racing in the World Tour in 2015 and now my “gravel career” is just one year shy of the ten year stretch that I logged on the road. As a byproduct of that span of time, it’s not lost on me that I’m not quite as speedy as my tip top World Tour days. I’ve lost some snap as I’m not operating on a timeless schedule of a bachelor bike racer. But I know there’s still a meaningful way to connect with an audience.

It pains me when someone says, “I’m trying to be a professional cyclist and I hate the idea of starting an Instagram account. What do I do now?” Again, the purity of bike racing is awesome. I want racers to be racers, but social media has lifted the bar so that you can’t just be good and hack it, you need to be a purebred bike racer if you want to live just off the merits of results. Looking at it another way, it’s no wonder that Tadej Pogicar has more followers than any other pro cyclist. He’s the world’s best and has a captivating personality. You could make the argument that Jonas Vingegaard is just as good of a cyclist when it comes to performing at the world’s most watched race, the Tour. He’s naturally more reserved and his social following reflects that in that he has about one-third of Tadej’s. My guess is neither of them have media bonuses, they’re much more performance based, but the rumors are that Jonas earns around 4 million Euro per year while Tadej is twice that. Yes, Tadej races and wins more races throughout the year than Jonas, but it’s still hard to believe that Tadej’s likability and watchability isn’t a factor here as well. The landscape is changing.

The whole discussion boils down to an existential question to those making a living in cycling because most of us are not Tadej, nor Jonas. That question is, what are you racing for?

I don’t have the answer here. I’d wager a guess there aren’t a lot of people who call themselves bike racers who say they’re in the professional arena of content creation. This whole idea is something that’s been churning around my mind ever since reading this column, Influencers versus Athletes. Whether or not your read it, hopefully you give it a glance.

In the world of privateer gravel racers, these months that end in -ber are also peak contract season. So I’m curious, what are your thoughts?