The Rapha Roadmap: Revisited

Professional cycling has never suffered from a lack of ideas, only a lack of courage to act on them. There are few sports as effortlessly beautiful as professional cycling, embodying movement, landscape, beauty, and suffering all wrapped into a single visceral experience. It sells a kind of romance that other modern sports fail to inspire or deliver. And that is what makes the current reality in professional cycling so frustrating – the business, economics, governance and the long-term vision for the sport often feels distant and disconnected from the very things that make the sport so compelling.

The need for reform is no longer a matter of opinion. In January, 2026, the UCI launched a formal request and consultation on the future of professional road cycling across both the men’s and women’s pelotons, acknowledging that media coverage and revenues “do not yet fully reflect its potential,” and that there remains “considerable potential for development.” The UCI asking for help is not just unusual, it is an acknowledgement that cycling badly needs new ideas and a new approach if it is to survive in the modern world of sports and entertainment.

In 2017, then-Rapha Chairman Simon Mottram and his U.S. operations chief Brendan Quirk approached us (Joe Harris and Steve Maxwell) and our colleague Professor Daam Van Reeth of KU Leuven University to prepare a broad-based review and analysis of the state of professional cycling. Rapha’s objective was not to dictate the future of racing, but to provide detailed background information and a platform to facilitate more informed debate about how to strengthen the sport.

We conducted in-depth analysis through research and interviews with a wide range of experts, and assembled a comprehensive set of recommendations to transform and modernise the sport of cycling. This effort resulted in the Rapha Roadmap report, published in 2019.

The Rapha Roadmap paved the way for Rapha’s relationship with EF Pro Cycling, and the birth of the by now well-known “Alternative Calendar” project. The original Roadmap stated that “Rapha will seek to engage millions of new fans by creating and publishing the most innovative portrayal of pro cycling. The approach will see riders race beyond the traditional confines of World Tour events, exploring the outskirts of the sport as it currently exists to expand its horizons.”

However, professional cycling has unfortunately regressed further since the publication of the Rapha Roadmap. Viewership numbers are down, financial inequality between teams is up, and we are seeing consolidation in key areas rather than expansion or diversification. While there are glimmers of light, especially with the boom of women’s racing, fundamental change is still badly needed.

In the Spring of 2026, Joe Laverick reviewed and updated several of the key suggestions and recommendations within the Rapha Roadmap in a complementary document entitled The Peloton Economy. The 25-year-old British racer and writer brings a next-generation perspective shaped by experience racing across multiple disciplines, media, and team management.

Unfortunately – and similar to virtually every other effort to strengthen, modernise or revitalise professional cycling – the original Rapha Roadmap had little success in moving the sport’s governance, leadership and management. Such studies, reports or recommendations are often debated within cycling’s circles, but rarely is there any focus on implementation. For this reason, cycling as a sporting enterprise is characterised today by a sense of despair or resignation – that nothing will ever, or can ever change.

However, out of adversity comes opportunity – and thus we are reissuing the original Rapha Roadmap with the same goal as before. We start with a simple and inarguable premise: there simply can not be a sport of professional cycling without a dedicated and expanding fan base.

Despite the sport’s broad spectrum of opinions, we believe there is one thing we can all agree on: we should all try to do whatever we can to make the sport more popular and accessible to a wider and more diverse audience. Many other sports – most recently, Formula One – have successfully demonstrated that growth, profitability, and the preservation of tradition can occur simultaneously.

Expanding a sport’s fanbase starts with content accessibility and affordability. This is one of the most important issues that we addressed in the original Roadmap: the need for the sport to build a consolidated broadcast portfolio covering all of its key events, and making that programming easily accessible, reasonably inexpensive, and with minimal geographic restrictions.

The distribution of other sports around the world, especially international soccer, has clearly demonstrated the power of globalisation. If anything, the accessibility and ease of watching pro cycling has gone backwards over the last few years. Figuring out where races are broadcast, or simply paying for the multitude of subscription services needed to view all the major events have discouraged or driven away even some of the most dedicated fans.

The most significant change in professional cycling since the Roadmap’s original publication has been the explosion in the popularity of women’s professional sport. There is a great opportunity today to put greater resources behind developing a new model for women’s racing - rather than blindly following the problematic men's WorldTour model.

Across a wide spectrum of women’s sports, levels of both fan interest and investment dollars have boomed. Women’s cycling stands on the precipice of huge growth and much wider popularity. We must work collaboratively to ensure that this opportunity is not lost.

We suggest moving the Women’s World Tour (WWT) to a franchise (closed-league) model. At the time of writing, there are 15 World Tour licenses available and only 14 World Tour teams. This alone demonstrates that the sport is not big enough to contemplate a promotion-relegation system. A closed league would allow teams to hold licences that provide economic predictability and therefore long-term stability. It would also create the first step toward a wider league system, and hopefully, the eventual opportunity for revenue sharing. Once participation in the top tier of the sport is guaranteed, teams and sponsors can plan beyond currently short sponsorship cycles.

Stronger financial controls will concurrently be needed with the implementation of this system. While growth of women’s racing is nothing but positive, growth at a rate that outstrips the commercial realities of the sport risks creating a bubble. Spending controls would help ensure that competition remains balanced, costs do not escalate uncontrollably, and encourages talent development investment. At the moment, teams operate in an environment where they do not know whether costs will rise by five percent or twenty five percent from one season to the next. That level of uncertainty is unsustainable.

A closed WWT does not signal the end of ambition for teams outside it. With economic stability guaranteed at the top, investment will flow more deliberately downwards. Teams will have no choice but to spend their budget on developing talent and supporting grassroots pathways - case studies like the F1 Academy have proven this. It has the added benefit that teams outside the league would have a clear goal to work towards, a league can always expand, and gives development riders a clear pathway to the top. Financial stability at the summit creates opportunity throughout the sport.

Women’s professional cycling is succeeding – we must now ensure a deep pool of talent comes through the next generation by investing resources in grass-roots development, while also equitably controlling team finances and spending.

Another key development over the last few years has been the gradual emergence of a handful of men’s “super-teams.” These are often backed by parastatal (government-funded) sponsors or ultra-high net worth individual patrons. The financial backing of these teams far outstrips almost all of the competition. This has led to competitive imbalance, where a small number of teams and riders tend to dominate the competition. In turn, this leads to less uncertainty or excitement in the outcome of races, and many fans claim that the sport is becoming too predictable or boring.

As suggested for the WWT, this situation demands that the sport finally considers equitable financial guardrails like a spending cap or other means to ensure a more level playing field between teams. While rarely popular with the biggest teams, almost all other sports have experienced surging popularity, market expansion, and greater value creation after instituting a system of budget caps leading to greater competitive parity. Cycling must seriously consider a system that does the same.

Cycling has fragile dependence upon external financial sponsors whose interests are often fickle. We emphasised both the need for cycling to strengthen its value proposition to sponsors, and to begin to better develop other supporting sources of revenue like merchandising, ticketing fees where appropriate, and mass participation events. In the intervening years, a handful of major new sponsors have entered the sport but most teams continue to run on a “break-even” or loss model, as opposed to a value-creation model. The recommendations in the Roadmap remain as relevant today as they were then: one of pro cycling’s most immediate and pressing needs must be to develop a stronger and more sustainable economic business model.

While high net-worth individuals undoubtedly have a positive impact on the sport, it does create questions about longer-term financial stability, and future growth. Long-term team owner Gerry Ryan recently indicated that he would be scaling back the funding for his team, saying that his family is tired of “watching their inheritance go out the door.” Teams are not assets that grow in value, and with the overall sport not growing in commercial terms, the situation has created an over-reliance on such wealthy benefactors, most of whom eventually leave the sport.

While there is significant financial investment currently happening in the sport, it has almost exclusively focused on human and technological performance rather than positioning and promoting cycling as a form of entertainment. The objective of elite sporting competition may be to win, but the business of elite sport is to entertain and inspire. We must make these goals co-exist to make pro cycling a more compelling, financially successful, and globally expansive sport.

The crowded and overlapping nature of pro cycling’s schedule is demonstrably counterproductive to the sport’s greater interests. Our original report called for a revised calendar. The implied scarcity value of a tighter and more exclusive calendar has been widely debated, but the clear lesson and experience from other sports is that event quality is more important than quantity. While traditionalists often consider these types of calendar changes to be blasphemy, it is time that cycling takes a harder look at this challenge and develops a more compelling and logical calendar. In the report, we suggest very specific ways of adopting a more logical and compelling season-long narrative.

Despite the UCI’s serious efforts to construct a points and rating scheme to more accurately rank and reward both teams and riders, the systems that have been put in place since the publication of the Roadmap have unfortunately created almost as many problems as they solved. The current system of promotion and relegation unintendedly causes teams to send their best riders to smaller races, maintaining or improving their WorldTour ranking by hoarding critical UCI points. This robs fans of the opportunity to see the best riders competing head-to-head as frequently as possible, diluting the competitive product and creating other unintended consequences. This is a complicated task, but the entire system needs to be carefully redesigned.

The growth of gravel riding and racing across the world has created an interesting juxtaposition to the situation on the road. Gravel racing is underpinned by a mass-participation business model that we see in marathon running or triathlon and the biggest gravel events not only exist, but are thriving – and without any input from the UCI.

It is telling that the discipline with the least regulation is seeing the largest growth in terms of participation and endemic financial investment. The lower barriers to entry in gravel racing – the fact that simply finishing a race is used as a yardstick – has only aided in its accessibility and growth. Perhaps most telling: many within the sport see the UCI’s own World Gravel Series as the weakest offering in the sport. There is a fear that the UCI will over-regulate the emerging discipline for its own gain in the same way that it pushed mountain bike racing – cycling’s fastest growing segment in the 1990s and early 2000s – into a long recession.

Finally, the pipeline of new talent development and new events needs to be strengthened and diversified. Grassroots development programs are still lacking, in terms of financial and community support, which severely limits talent identification. It is more expensive than ever to start a new elite or professional team, from the perspective of entry fees, equipment costs, rider salaries, and registration fees. Virtual or e-racing, which took off during COVID, has declined in relevance, although it does represent a positive path for riders entering the sport, though at later ages than typical in high-performance athlete programs.

It has become prohibitively expensive to sustain new events, as costs outpace funding. Lower tiers of UCI racing below the WorldTour and ProTour have declined. Even if some of the challenges at the elite level of the sport can be effectively addressed, there is still a fundamental requirement for the underlying levels of talent and competition to be strengthened – to ensure that the sport can evolve and continue stronger into the future.

These are just a few of the challenges that the original report addressed but which still hinder cycling’s long-term growth and diversification. Unfortunately, and is by now very well-known to all observers, virtually all efforts to implement significant change collide into the two powerful entities which effectively control modern cycling: the UCI, and Amaury Sports Organisation – the private family company that owns the Tour de France and many of the other top cycling events. Both of these organisations have a questionable record when it comes to bringing the sport into the modern era, understanding what the modern fan wants, and how to compete in today’s cut-throat sports and entertainment marketplace.

For example, the ASO has had several recent public spats with the Unibet Rose Rockets, a team whose ethos is fan interaction and introducing new people to the sport. It is telling that the sport’s most powerful body apparently feels threatened by a team which dares to think differently – indeed, a team that many in the sport credit as a model for the future. And the UCI – comprised of administrative officials and closed-door committees – is often at odds with team owners, who understandably question how it can effectively govern a sport in which it is also a competitive event organizer (in the form of the World Championships) and license holder.

It has long been accepted that any serious reform in pro cycling must run through the boardrooms of the ASO and UCI, and try to incorporate their respective interests. We recognise that both have valid historical and current incentives, and that the sport has to work within those parameters. It does, however, often feel as though these two organisations prioritise self-preserving narrow interests over the broader growth and diversification of the sport they serve.

In parallel, the sport has a distinct shortage of management and executive level talent professionally trained in business, economic, and organisational change. As in many sports, former pro riders often transition into leadership roles. However, if the sport is to thrive, it must recognise that success on the road does not equate to success in a boardroom, and find ways of attracting or developing new leaders.

Cycling has always tilted towards tradition – a characteristic which contributes to the unique charm and alluring nature of the sport in many ways. However, that fixation with legacy and history also tends to make the sport intransigent to change and hinders meaningful progress. The 2025 Tour de France showed what can happen when tradition is thrown to the wind; the final stage was moved away from traditional Champs Elysees sprint-finish to favour passage of Montmartre, heavily inspired by the Olympic Road Race course. While some riders were originally against it, it created an engaging TV product, and an incredible in-person spectacle for fans. It showed what can happen when the ASO dares to embrace change – and the potential of putting fan entertainment at the front of mind. Tradition should inform, but not dictate the future.

We understand that there are those who believe that cycling is just fine as it stands, that it should not necessarily try to follow the models employed in other sports, that tradition is part of its charm. The numbers paint a different reality: the sport’s demographics are skewing older, broadcast viewership is declining, and recreational cycling participants and the bicycle economy are diminishing. It is our belief that cycling must also welcome and embrace change if it is to survive in the modern sports-as-entertainment era.

A repetitive theme in the sport is to default to a “not invented here” mentality, and bicker internally about what, when, who and how to change cycling. Almost all past and formalised efforts to introduce actionable reforms have been met by a chorus of negativity from within the sport as well as from the media, particularly from those whose perceived economic or political prominence would be diluted by change. This kind of mutually destructive bickering over the size of their slice of the pie rather than building a larger and more profitable pie always sets the sport back further.

Although we acknowledge these differing points of view, we believe everyone ends up on the same page if we remain focused on the central question we began with in 2017: how can we bring all of cycling’s parties together to make the sport more popular and accessible to a broader range of both participants and fans? We implore the stakeholders and supporters of the sport to not just discuss and debate meaningful ways we might strengthen pro cycling, but to actually begin to enact and implement key changes for the greater good.

The time for endlessly debating over different proposals has passed. Stakeholders must stop focusing on their own narrow objectives or protecting perceived traditions and instead start building the sport for the future. Professional road racing has spent a decade talking in circles while inadvertently drifting backwards. This is not a call for overnight revolution, but for a commitment to start implementing straightforward and deliberate changes that can legitimately move the sport to a better place.

April 30, 2026

Steve Maxwell, The Outer Line - Boulder, Colorado

Joe Harris, The Outer Line - Portland, Oregon

Joe Laverick, Pullwood Consulting (Athlete and Writer) - Grimsby, Great Britain

The full compiled version of the Roadmap is now available to download.