Bridging the gap
Mary Wittenberg, the president ofEF Education-Nip po, is the most senior female executive in the men’s World Tour. She tells Pro cycling about her journey into cycling, her background as an elite runner and her plans to make the sport bigger
When a corporate headhunter suggested to Mary Wittenberg that she go and talk to the people at the Boston headquarters of a firm which specialised in language and cultural education and exchange, it didn’t sound like what she was looking for. Sports executive Wittenberg, the former race director of the New York marathon, had been on a few months’ sabbatical after leaving her most recent job at Virgin Sport and was wondering what to do next. All she knew, as she had known almost her entire working life, was that she wanted to work in sport. She had never heard of EF Education First, but the combination of Boston, education and travel was interesting enough to her that she went anyway. The headhunter warned her not to say she was just going to see what happened, but that was what she was thinking.
In Boston she met with Eddie Hult, the chief exec of EF North America and son of EF’s founder Bertil Hult, and they talked about running and cycling. For all Wittenberg knew, she could have ended up running a travel business - Eddie’s modus operandi is to get to know people first and then work out what they can do for the company.
A short while later, Eddie called and said, “Why don’t you come and run the bike team?”
And that’s how Mary Wittenberg became the most senior female in the men’s WorldTour. She is EF Education-Nippo’s president, responsible for liaising between the company and the team staff and for working as a partner with team CEO Jonathan Vaughters.
“I love this team, and we are well suited for the ups and downs of life,” she says. “From the early days with JV and Doug [Ellis, the first financial backer] it’s always been scrappy, and built with a lot of heart, always finding ways to get things done.”
You get the sense that EF Education First might have been looking for a counterweight to Vaughters, who set up the team as a development squad in 2003 and gradually turned it into a reliable mid-table WorldTour team with some huge racing highlights - wins in four of the five monuments and the Giro, and two podium finishes at the Tour - and a USP of quirky characters, leftfield race calendars and fashion statements. EF Education-Nippo has a different ownership model to most WorldTour teams in that it belongs to the sponsors: Vaughters, Wittenberg, the riders and team staff are EF Education First employees. When they bought the team from Vaughters and Ellis, they restructured. Vaughters had been frazzling himself for years trying to find sponsors and funding, with seasons spent in various degrees of precarity. Once Wittenberg was hired, Vaughters could focus on the sport and Wittenberg the business.
However, whether by accident or design, EF Education First covered their bases twice. They not only had Vaughters, a former athlete who had over the years built up a strong business acumen, but Wittenberg, a former lawyer who had over the years built up strong sporting acumen.
“We have the business side and the sports side,” she says. “But I would say we overlap a lot more. I care
“We are serious about cycling and performance, but we let the riders be who they are. We try to be the bridge between the pros and regular people”
a lot about the sport, its structure, equality and cycling as a sport. Jonathan cares a lot about the business. We both have range but also highly complementary areas of focus and skills. Jonathan is very smart, and one of his greatest strengths is empowering his people.
“Increasingly I’m really focusing on the commercial side. Performance is really well covered already with Jonathan, and our sporting directors are great. Like, really great. But how do we open this up? It’s not about just racing to win. For us, it’s how do we open this to more people? Marketing and storytelling is an area of strength for us, but in the end the business model requires revenue, and it’s really clear that’s where I need my time and energy.
“This is not a win-at-all-costs team. We want to bring in partners that fit with the brand of EF and the team. I would define success as creating an amazing group of partners who are aligned in our mission to open cycling up to the world.
“We are serious about cycling and performance, but we let the riders be who they are, so Magnus Cort can put his [Instagram] hotel ratings up and Lachlan [Morton] can do GBDuro. We’re always trying to be the bridge between the pros and the regular people.”
Being the bridge between elite athletes and regular people is exactly what Wittenberg did at the New York marathon, which she ran for 17 years from 1998. It’s a mix of priorities which cycling has dabbled in but not fully exploited in the same way as running: EF Education-Nippo’s gravel programme and forays into non-UCI mass participation events is one attempt to bridge that gap.
Wittenberg grew up in Buffalo, New York, the eldest of seven children. Buffalo was a steel town, with a strong Irish and Italian catholic heritage, which had grown fast in the mid1800s with the construction of the Erie Canal across New York state. Though her mother took some time out to raise and educate the children, she was a teacher and her father was an accountant. Wittenberg wanted to go to law school because she wanted financial stability. “That meant being either a doctor or a lawyer, and I didn’t like the sight of blood,” she laughs.
But she also knew she wanted to work in sports, which she had seen in Buffalo, with its NFL and NHL teams, were the centre of the community.
“I played all the other sports - basketball, netball, softball,” she says. “No good at any of those. Then
I tried rowing, which I loved. All you have to do is work, and I can do that.”
The rowing went okay, but on a dare she entered a running race in her senior year at college. It was only a small race, but she won. She went to Notre Dame Law School in Indiana, which is where the running got serious. They only had a men’s cross country team, but she persuaded the coach to let her run with the men, then she entered a marathon, where she got inside the US Olympic trials qualifying time by running a 2:46.
Sport was now more than a hobby. Wittenberg weighed up her career choices by working out how they could fit in with running, and she found a law firm in Richmond, Virginia, where coincidentally the UCI World Road Race Championships would take place in 2015 and was the base for Medallist Sports, the organisers of the Tour de Trump and Tour Dupont in the 1980s and 1990s. The head of the corporate team was a runner, and lured Wittenberg to the firm by working out a deal where she could clock off at 3:30 and go to train with the Richmond University men’s cross country team in the afternoons.
She qualified again for the Olympic trials, with a 2:44, but then injuries started taking their toll. “I wasn’t going to make the Olympic team, let alone get a medal,” she says. But while the running career had peaked, she was doing almost too well as a lawyer.
“I found that not only did I like being a corporate lawyer, but I also really liked doing deals. Deals are a lot like sports,” she says. “You get on a deal, and you’re all in and you get a great feeling of finishing it before you start the next one. But she was still looking for a job that actually involved sports, and that didn’t get any easier when she was promoted to a partner, which tied her to the firm for a little while longer. “I committed to myself on that day that I would find a way to work in sports,” she says, and she spent the next year looking at sports companies.
That was when an opportunity at the New York Road Runners, organisers of the New York Marathon, came up.
In the 1970s, Fred Lebow, the chairman of the NYRR, caught the wave of the US running boom, setting up the New York marathon and growing it into the biggest event of its kind in the world. It was the original big city marathon. Lebow ran the event for over 20 years but retired with illness in 1993 and died the next year. His successor, Allan Steinfeld, was a brilliant logistical operator and organiser, but the event was starting to hit the buffers in terms of its vision, with rival big city marathons in London and Chicago taking over in prominence. Wittenberg came in, and while Steinberg could focus on the organisation, Wittenberg could work on the vision and the future. It almost looked like a practice run for her role at EF Education-Nippo.
“I wanted the marathon to be the greatest, most inspiring event in the world,” she says, and one of the biggest achievements in her time at the race was helping to launch the Marathon Majors in 2006, a tournament series of the five most prestigious marathons in the world - New York, Boston, London, Chicago and Berlin, plus the Olympic and World Championships marathons when they took place. Tokyo came on board in 2013.
For Wittenberg, combining the elite and the everyday was the thing and it is part of what EF Education-Nippo are trying to achieve now. “The beauty is that they fit together,” she says. “Track and field is just the pros. But the major marathons have the top of the game and the recreational side. The pro side isn’t as big as cycling, but the mass side made it a big happening. In cycling they are mostly separated but both are really important, and the future from a commercial perspective shows great benefits when they come together.”
But there is more to what Wittenberg wants to achieve in cycling. “It’s easy to work with great partners in the endemic space, like Rapha,” she says. “They’re really a part of it. It’s not a sponsorship. The challenge is getting out to the broader world of nonendemic companies, outside cycling, and saying, ‘This is an amazing sport for you!’ There are so few global marketing platforms in sport, certainly ones that are annual, like the Tour de France.
“We also want to have greater equality - we’re not all the way there. We’d have better racial diversity. We want equality in sport and access to it, and we can be a part of changing that.”
As arguably the most senior female employee of any men’s WorldTour team, Wittenberg also has a perspective on how EF Education-Nippo, which is one of a shrinking number of men’s WorldTour teams without a women’s team, can progress.
“We very much want a women’s team and are actively looking,” she says. “It’s a great opportunity for a partner because they want to be part of something new. That’s a big opportunity. Within the sport there is so much opportunity to use the men’s platform to weave the women’s story right in. Companies around the world are understanding the power of women’s sport and we’re just at the very start of that.
“Our goal would be next year. We don’t have to start a team from scratch. That would be one way to approach it. Ideally we find a way to support something that is already happening. There are many great women’s programmes right now that could use support so there are opportunities there, if we wanted to start with something already happening. If the timing was later we could look for 2023. But now is the time.”
Reaching true equality in cycling is going to be a marathon, rather than a sprint, but in Mary Wittenberg, the sport has somebody who is perfectly placed to help bring it about.
“We very much want a women’s team and are actively looking. It’s a great opportunity for a partner because they want to be part of something new”