Swift boss decries ‘stagnant’ UK scene as team folds
Revamp UK racing now or risk ‘pay to play’ cycling, Paul Lamb tells James Shrubsall
The domestic pro road scene needs a shot in the arm and fast if it’s to avoid dwindling to nothing. That’s the view of Team Swiftcarbon Pro boss Paul Lamb as he folds his team due to a lack of sponsorship funding.
The Yorkshire-based outfit has been a UCI team for three years and this season counted the likes of Alex Peters, Pete Williams and Will Bjergfelt among its riders. In 2019 it placed James Shaw fifth overall in the Tour de Yorkshire.
Swiftcarbon’s demise adds to the steady drip of top teams closing over recent years – others include Vitus, Madison, Onepro and JLT. It leaves the UK with four UCI teams this season: Ribble Pro Cycling, Wiv-sungod, Saint Piran and Trinity Racing.
Attempting to sell the idea of funding a cycling team to sponsors is becoming ever harder, explained Lamb, and teams are lucky to secure 20% of the £500,000 figure he puts on running a Continental team well, as the domestic scene gets continually less attractive. “The product is being watered down and diluted on a year-on-year basis,” he said. “So we’ve got less Premier Calendar [National Series] events on the road; we’ve got less TV coverage of those events because the funding for that’s been pulled.”
The loss of the Tour de Yorkshire was also a major blow to the scene, and future sponsorship prospects for domestic teams, said Lamb, who added that “Swift [the bike manufacturer] did cite the loss of the Tour de Yorkshire as significant for them.”
He said the pro scene in the UK risks becoming a ‘pay to play’ deal, where riders actually pay money to teams for the privilege of riding rather than the other way round, unless something was done soon. “We’ve gone from a situation where we had five or six UCI teams where riders could ride for that team and get a living wage, and you had permanent staff who could have a living wage,” said Lamb.
“Now we’ve got a situation where 90% of riders don’t get paid, and of those that do get paid, it’s a token gesture. Nobody in this country is getting a living wage,” Lamb said.
He also said he had invested a “significant amount” of his own money into the team to make up funding – far from the first time CW has heard of such a situation.
Half a million pounds – that’s the cost of running a UCI Continental team to a decent standard, Lamb said, and not so long ago, sponsors were willing to put that up. But he said he had seen sponsorship dwindle to under £100,000, and did not believe he was alone.
It would be easy to point to Covid-19, or Brexit, or an economic landscape that has been challenging and unpredictable for nearly 15 years. But Lamb insists that while Brexit and the pandemic haven’t helped things, neither is directly responsible for the closure of Swiftcarbon. And while the economic climate might be challenging for some, there is plenty of money around.
“I’ve been to companies who told me that they spend £150,000 a day on marketing,” he said. “[But] they don’t see cycling at the moment, particularly on the road, as something that’s a viable proposition – and the small companies are struggling to give you £50,000 in the current climate.”
“It’s being watered down and diluted on a year-on-year basis”
It’s a chicken and egg scenario, Lamb conceded, with no obvious easy solution. But he did say British Cycling needed to recognise that there was a problem and then step up and help rescue the situation.
“The organisers of all these events do a great job. And they’re all doing it, generally, voluntarily, so it’s difficult to ask them,” said Lamb. “But between British Cycling and these organisers, they need to become – I don’t know the answer specifically – but they need to get way more creative in terms of making these events bigger. So that sponsors look at it and go, ‘Wow, that’s something I want to invest in.’”
Another option, he suggested, would be to stop pretending Britain has a pro scene and be done with it.
“Other team managers might view it differently, but I speak to a lot of team managers, and until we start getting really good funding that’s worthy of teams riding in these big races, I think we’re just kidding ourselves. You know, we’re all calling [our teams] ‘pro cycling’ aren’t we. But it’s a big misnomer, because it’s just not the reality.”
Lamb said he had no regrets, and that he was proud of what the team had achieved. But, he said, “I’d be a fool to keep pumping money into a sport that is stagnating and not progressing.”
Responding to the points made by Lamb, British Cycling’s head of sport and major events Jonathan Day said it was “always incredibly sad” for a team to fold and thanked the riders and staff for their work.
He said: “Since the beginning of the pandemic British Cycling has worked incredibly hard to support domestic road racing, whether that be by working with the government to secure the return of racing last April, supporting event organisers to safeguard our National Series or delivering our first combined National Road Championships in Lincoln with full broadcast coverage.
“We are certainly not blind to the ongoing challenges facing the sport,” he insisted, adding that BC was already working on the long-term strategy it began last year, which sets out, among other things, to “revitalise” the road scene and to create “a strong portfolio of major UCI events, working collaboratively with commercial organisers to grow the status, reach and profile of events in the UK”.