End of the road?
British fortunes in races are at odds with its ability to host them
So Welshman Stevie Williams won the Tour Down Under. If, like me, you missed it because it takes place in the middle of the European night, then this may come as something of a surprise. But a wonderful one.
It’s quite a big deal, this race, despite the fact that it slips a little under the radar outside of its passionate host nation. It’s a hard race to win, and for this rider in particular, the victory will mean the world. Williams has been through a lot of setbacks and injuries over the last couple of years, but the signs that he is hitting his stride (as well as changing as a rider) have been there for a little over a year now.
This transformation started with his first WorldTour race win when he took a stage of the Tour de Suisse in 2022, winning from a group that came to the top of a climb together, containing riders such as Marc Hirschi, Alexey Lutsenko and Ilan Van Wilder. He did something similar in 2023, taking a stage and then the overall at the Arctic Race of Norway. That performance came just after his bronze medal in the British National Championships, when I remember thinking that I’d never seen him throw caution to the wind like that before. A naturally talented but cautious tactician, he had traditionally relied on his physical attributes (pure climber) to get him to the winning line. Now he has become a disrupter.
Which brings me to the final stage of the Tour of Britain last year, when, in front of home support in South Wales, he bit off more than he could chew and blew a gasket attacking too far out on the Caerphilly Mountain circuit finale. It was exciting racing, and, had he held on to take the stage, he’d probably have won the GC too, in what threatens to be the last Tour of Britain.
The race, which has boasted Julian Alaphilippe, Mathieu van der Poel and (twice) Wout van Aert among its most recent winners, is hanging by a thread, if it’s even hanging at all. And the same goes for the Women’s Tour and the Tour Series. The sticking point is the terrible relationship between Sweetspot (who are now in liquidation) and British Cycling.
To explain: Sweetspot actually run the race. They design the route, raise the money, make it happen. They also make a profit in doing so… or at least they used to when times were better. British Cycling sanction the event and charge the organisation a licence fee to claim that it is a nation tour; essentially for the use of the word “Britain”. That fee, renegotiated pre-Covid, is comfortably in six figures; closer, as I understand it, to half a million pounds per annum. Unable to attract a headline sponsor over the last couple of editions, the money has dried up. British Cycling are pursuing their unpaid fees, and no renegotiation has so far seemed possible, leaving the immediate future of the races extremely uncertain.
Unless there is a resolution to this stand-off, and a magic money tree corporation steps in to save the day, then there is every chance that the likes of Pfeiffer Georgi, Lizzie Deignan and Zoe Bäckstedt, Fred Wright, Tom Pidcock and Stevie Williams (to name just a very few) will have no national race in which to demonstrate to the passionate, and still enormous, home support what it is that they do across the world for the rest of the year. It would put the UK into a very small group of European nations without something that resembles a national tour. Albania is one, Liechtenstein another.
I am wise enough to understand that getting bike races off the ground, especially here, is nightmarishly hard. But it should be, in my opinion, the absolute top priority of the governing body in the country to ensure that the success of our riders against the odds in road racing is rewarded and celebrated. Pursuit of serial success on the track, brilliantly stewarded by British Cycling, will forever remain achievable. But it is niche: low-hanging fruit. The road is what matters. It brings racing to the world and takes it out of the cloisters of the velodrome.
Whatever pride needs to be swallowed by whichever stakeholders, then I urge them to get swallowing and start talking. If not, the sport’s governance in this country can be fairly accused of failing those riders who succeed as they do in the face of sustained adversity.