IN- DEPTH: DISAPPEARING TEAMS
While Britain is shining on the WorldTour stage, at home, two more teams folded in 2019. Procycling looks at what’s going wrong, and the impact it could have on the next generation
We investigate the disappearance of mid-level cycling teams in the British scene and beyond
An hour after finishing the time trial at the Tour of Britain, Erick Rowsell is sat inside the Madison-Genesis van in a car park alongside Pershore Abbey. He’s not stretching or resting, nor reading the road book to prepare for tomorrow’s stage, but is busy writing his CV. It’s the first time the 29-year-old has had to do one since he was at school. It’s all a bit daunting, even though Rowsell is one of the longest serving and most experienced riders on the British scene. “Can you just check it in a minute for me?” he asks with a smile.
Rowsell’s face is cheerful but he’s had time to get used to his fate, that the Tour of Britain would be his last race as a professional rider, after the Madison management confirmed in June that the team would fold at the end of 2019. For Rowsell, who is married and has a baby daughter, searching for a new contract, one he suspects wouldn’t pay him all that much, isn’t worth the hassle. Besides, finding another team that has space and a budget to take him on is no easy task. Not in this climate.
“It’s a massive loss to racing in the UK,” he tells Procycling. “From a sponsor’s point of view there’s no growth in the sport, if anything, its going downhill not uphill. Since the Olympics and London the domestic scene was always on the
rise, and probably hit its peak in 2015, 2016 and then since then it’s dipped a bit and the last two years you’ve really seen it go back down.”
Cycling teams come and go every year, at all levels of the sport. Sponsors have always moved in and and moved on, but Madison-Genesis’s closure is significant. Not only was the squad one of the mainstays of the British racing scene since it launched in 2013, but it’s also the fourth British Continental squad to fold in the past three years following One Pro Cycling in 2017, JLT-Condor last year and Team Wiggins, who are also closing at the end of 2019. By autumn, there’s no news of any new teams coming in to replace Madison and Wiggins, with only two Continental teams registered for 2020 – Canyon dhb p/b Floors and Ribble Pro Cycling.
“Catastrophic,” was the assessment of Roger Hammond, team manager at Madison-Genesis. “It’s been a storm that’s been building, and building and building and then got to a tipping point. I always like to call it the honeymoon period, where everybody doesn’t mind a few issues, we all know there’s an issue but there’s good at the end of it. But you have to see progression, you have to see movement towards the right direction. Otherwise those niggly things become major problems, and once they become major problems, it’s catastrophic.”
The contrast between the health of the racing scene in the UK and British cycling on the world stage couldn’t be more stark. In the WorldTour, three British riders won all three grand tours in 2018, while British team Ineos continues to be the most successful and wealthiest in the sport. In 2019 there were 19 male British riders in cycling’s top tier – an increase from 11 a decade ago, with another three riders already confirmed by October to be making the jump up next season. Among them are Gabriel Cullaigh and Mark Donovan, both graduates of Team Wiggins, and Jonathan Dibben and Connor Swift – the latter who joined Arkéa Samsic last summer – who both raced at Madison this year. After 2012 when Bradley Wiggins won the Tour de France and London hosted the Olympics, road cycling was booming. Participation levels jumped, while fans consistently still pack the roadside to watch the major international races – it’s a Thursday in early September but the Midlands market town of Pershore is full of people out to watch the Tour of Britain.
But trickle down the chain, outside the WorldTour to racing in the UK itself and it’s a different story.
“There’s just no money, no money at all,” was the summary of Simon Cope, directeur sportif at Team Wiggins. “You can get equipment to a certain extent, you can get clothing, everything to run a team but actual pound notes to go somewhere and pay for stuff, it just seems non-existent.
“It seems to be worse now. You do need more now than you did 20 years ago because money doesn’t go as far. It has always been a challenge but it always seemed to bubble along. Now it really seems difficult to gain actual hard cash.”
The team closures sit startlingly against a backdrop of limited to no road races in the UK. Britain is home to just four UCI ranked road races, with only one that Continental teams are guaranteed to contest – the 1.2-ranked Rutland Cicle Classic. The UK’s flagship races, those
“THERE’S JUST NO MONEY, NO MONEY AT ALL. YOU CAN GET EQUIPMENT, YOU CAN GET CLOTHING, EVERYTHING TO RUN A TEAM, BUT NOT ACTUAL POUND NOTES” SIMON COPE, DS TEAM WIGGINS
broadcast on television which attract sponsors and money, are not certainties for British teams outside of Ineos at WorldTour level - making it even harder to bring money in. Selection for the Tour de Yorkshire is at the organiser’s discretion; teams have to qualify for the four places available at the Tour of Britain by racing throughout the year in the UK; while since 2018 when RideLondon was given WorldTour status, Continental teams are no longer eligible. Added to that, of the 10 races on British Cycling’s flagship National Road Series in 2019, just seven were actually road races – and only two were stage races. For teams and riders who want to race, the options are limited.
Cycling’s popularity has always gone through ebbs and flows in Britain. During the 1990s the status quo was perhaps as bad as ever. By 1994 Britain had just four professional riders in the top echelons of the men’s peloton, its flagship race the Kelloggs Tour (later the Tour of Britain) was cancelled due to lack of sponsorship money and safety issues, and the only registered pro squad, Linda McCartney Racing Team, wasn’t launched until 1998 but quickly disbanded. Hammond was among those few young British riders in the 1990s trying to turn pro - combining studying at university with living in Belgium to race.
“In my day there were no teams. If you wanted to do it you ended up going abroad and getting on with it,” Hammond says. “Will the poor guy that suffered because he slipped through the net somewhere, the Harry Tanfields, the Connor Swifts, these guys - would they really have another chance? Maybe they would... you can’t say up front. Do I think that people won’t turn pro? Of course they won’t.”
With this in mind, rather than the racing status in the UK being the worst it’s ever been, perhaps it’s just that we’ve been spoiled with such a post-2012 peak, and all we’re seeing now is that plateau starting to tail off.
Regardless, the consensus has always been that riders need a thorough racing programme in Europe to really whip them into shape for the quality and standard required as a top level pro - few riders make it on a diet of only British-based racing. Therefore, with limited UCI racing on home soil, not only does it not attract international competition to come and compete here but it also means British teams have to travel abroad regularly. Belgium, for example, had 47 races ranked 1.2 or above in 2019 compared to the UK’s four. That constant back and forth across the Channel comes at an added expense that other nations don’t face, which is then made all the more difficult by funds drying up. “If there was more racing in the UK, it would just be more racing with the same guys. The problem with us is that we’re an island, and if there’s no influx of teams the racing never changes,” Cope explains. “It’s always the same guys just rising to the top really and that’s always been the same. Whether you throttled back on the amount of top events you have, and added four UCI races that teams came to, that maybe would make the standard better. But if you’ve only got one of those a month what do you do the rest of the time?”
Indeed, Rowsell raced just two UCI ranked races in the whole of 2019 prior to the Tour of Britain and only one of them was a stage race, the Tour de Normandie way back in March. Hardly the ideal preparation to get you ready to compete on the world stage at the Tour of Britain. By contrast, in 2012, his first season as a pro with Endura Racing, he racked up 13 UCI races, seven of which were stage races.
Riders on Vitus Procycling, Ribble and SwiftCarbon experienced a similar fate to those at Madison. James Shaw, of
SwiftCarbon, was Britain’s highest ranked domestic rider in 2019, in 563rd place according to Procyclingstats, and he raced abroad just three times. Only Canyon and Wiggins offered their riders more than a handful of race days in Europe, as they were the only with the budget that allowed them to do so, or a roster big enough to rotate between racing commitments in the UK and getting much-needed experience abroad - Canyon had 20 riders in 2019 compared to Madison’s 14.
The pressure of qualifying for the Tour of Britain also requires teams to commit to racing, with their best riders, in the UK throughout the spring and summer. The race is the high point of the year for the squads - eight stages on home roads, broadcast live on television against WorldTour competition, is a dream for sponsors, and riders. But in 2016 organisers introduced a points scoring process as a way of creating a “fair and transparent selection”, while also ensuring the domestic teams support home racing throughout the year at the British Road Series, National Circuit Series and Tour Series.
“Being in the Tour of Britain has become the be-all and end-all for some teams which has then meant teams trying to qualify haven’t maybe risked younger riders because they need to qualify,” Tim Elverson, manager of Canyon, says. “That is the issue for some of the other teams - they’ve not gone to Europe because they’ve been trying to qualify and in effect you stop being a Conti team because you’re not going to Europe.”
So where does this leave the next generation? Historically, it’s never been better to be a British rider than it has the past five years. Those with talent had more options than ever thanks to the wealth of Continental teams, the British Cycling Academy - which offered places to seven male riders this season - and independent support such as the Dave Rayner Fund, which has been financially
helping riders live and race in Europe for more than 20 years.
The worst-case scenario is that with fewer options available and fewer spaces on teams, the constant flow of British riders who have been turning professional will slowly start to dry up.
“Now we’ve got this whole system, where if you’re not picked up by a wellfunded professional feeder team you probably don’t get a chance to have a look in,” Hammond says. “And the age group of the people who are turning professional is getting younger, and younger and younger - we have to cater for those 19 to 21 year olds, otherwise they’ll miss out. They’re too old.”
Cope agrees. “If you’ve only got one team racing in Europe, like the BC Academy, that’s only six riders, you’ve got the Rayner Fund that places riders in teams so you could get the odd one or two coming through there. If Canyon go and their young riders haven’t got anywhere to go, where you had 25 riders racing in Europe you’re down to six. Of course the flow of riders is going to diminish.”
Robert Scott is among those riders looking for a new contract in 2020, having raced for Team Wiggins since 2017.
The 21-year-old was Britain’s U23 road champion in 2018 and has aims of reaching the WorldTour in the future. He calls Britain’s status “pretty dire”.
“When I was a junior I had quite a few options with the British teams but the juniors coming through now, they’ve not got anything really,” he says. “As good as the Premier Calendars are and as hard as they are as well - they’re great races and I love to ride them - but at the end of the day, none of these team managers care, basically. As mad as it sounds. That’s what these young junior lads need to be doing: racing in Europe. Whether it’s for a British team or a European team it doesn’t really matter as long as they’re doing the races.”
The crisis in Britain is not isolated. Across Europe and the world, teams and races are constantly disappearing, even in countries perceived as traditional cycling hotbeds. While Belgium might be an exception to the rule, other major superpowers are going through testing times. In the USA and North America teams and races have been folding rapidly; UnitedHealthcare, Jelly Belly-Maxxis and Holowesko-Citadel are just three teams that shut up shop in 2018, while stage races such as the USA Pro Challenge men’s race, Philadelphia International and Tour of Alberta were once staples of the scene but no longer exist, leaving the Tour of California as the only major constant. Italy has been without a WorldTour team since 2016, while the Netherlands had one ProConti level squad in 2019 and just six at Conti level, down from eight in 2018.
Sunweb coach Matt Winston believes Britain’s good reputation on the world stage means top teams do and will continue to scout for young British talent, pointing to the fact his team have signed Mark Donovan from Wiggins for 2020 and the Sunweb Development squad has recruited Leo Hayter from the BC Junior Academy. The consensus seems to be that British cycling has bounced back from tough times before, and it can do so again.
And crucially, while times might be testing, Britain’s success on the world cycling stage has changed the mindset of young riders for the better, in a way that generations before - and riders like Hammond - never enjoyed, and that’s critical. “We’ve progressed, everything has progressed. With all these guys winning the Tour de France, people believe now, the riders believe it’s possible,” Hammond says.
The cycling talent is here, and the riders have the belief they can do it. But how much the diminshing British scene will hamper them, still remains to be seen .
“I HAD QUITE A FEW OPTIONS... BUT THE JUNIORS COMING THROUGH NOW, THEY’VE NOT GOT ANYTHING” ROBERT SCOTT, TEAM WIGGINS