George Hincapie's new Modern Adventure team: Renaissance or more of the same? - Opinion

This week, former Tour de France stage winner George Hincapie announced he and several partners are forming a new professional cycling team, Modern Adventure Pro Cycling, with an aim to race in the Tour de France in five years or less.

Hincapie said he hoped the project would be a "renaissance of American cycling" - but one has to wonder, exactly why does American cycling need a renaissance?

Think back to 2010, when Hincapie's former teammate Floyd Landis levelled some shocking doping accusations against Lance Armstrong and the rest of the former US Postal team that eventually led to the lifetime ban of Armstrong, and a sport-wide reckoning that led to doping confessions from Hincapie, Bobby Julich and others.

Hincapie and Julich are directly involved in this new team, as is Armstrong - albeit adjacently. The team lists "The Move" podcast as a sponsor, saying it "elevates our team with world-class analysis, thought leadership, and a community of deeply engaged fans" while ignoring the fact that this podcast's strapline is A Cycling Podcast (by) Lance Armstrong.

Armstrong's lifetime ban includes a prohibition on any involvement in pro cycling, yet here he is sponsoring America's renaissance.

While the UCI will have to work out the legalities, it's worth pondering what his involvement, however tertiary, means for the future of American pro cycling and asking whether the country really needs Armstrong's associates to rescue the sport.

The sport has undergone a massive transformation in the 15 years since Landis' accusations and, for a time, it appeared that the CIRC report, the biological passport and peer pressure had gone a long way to reverse decades of rampant abuse of performance-enhancing drugs in pro cycling.

In the past, new teams made a point of advertising an anti-doping ethos to distinguish themselves from their sullied predecessors, yet Modern Adventure avoided the topic entirely when announcing their launch.

Pro cycling has long ago moved on from Armstrong, and hasn't had to use his name to draw mainstream media and fans into the sport for years, thanks to new stars like Peter Sagan, Julian Alaphilippe, Mathieu van der Poel, Wout van Aert, Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard.

American cycling has also moved on from the Armstrong effect. Road cycling might not be as popular as an activity with the rise of gravel and the increasing numbers of enormous SUVs and trucks that make training on open roads dangerous in the US, but there is still a huge US audience for pro cycling.

Modern Adventure also made a big deal about their ambitions to make "America's Dream Team" and bring it to the Tour de France. Is that even novel?

The statement does a disservice to Jonathan Vaughters and his EF Education-EasyPost team. Slipstream started as a grassroots team in 2004 and raced their first Tour de France in 2008.

While the team now have a far more international line-up, they're still technically a US-registered team. Does that exclude them from being the country's "dream team"? What about hard-working lower-level teams like Project Echelon, Novo Nordisk, L3GION of LA and the slew of women's squads that have been slogging it out on tiny budgets?

Does America really even need a dream team? The whole idea smacks of nationalism, which, in the current climate, might appeal to a certain target audience, but cycling fans don't seem to care which team their compatriots are on.

American cycling fans went nuts over Sepp Kuss' unexpected 2023 Vuelta a España overall victory, and there are still legions of Visma-Lease a Bike fans in the country. I've seen dozens of non-US team jerseys worn by weekend warriors while out riding - UAE Team Emirates, Visma, Bahrain Victorious, and Ineos Grenadiers. US fans are not exclusively interested in US teams.

So, if American cycling has declined in the past 15 years even with EF-EasyPost (as Garmin) and Sepp Kuss winning Grand Tours, does the answer to the issue lie in a new team? It seems not.

The real renaissance of American cycling would come from the ground up, first off with an improved race calendar. The pro road calendar has shrunk dramatically over the past decade, with races like the Tour of California, Tour of Utah, and USA Pro Challenge evaporating.

There would need to be a deeper pool of talent and of course, more teams - the number of men's teams has fallen from a high of over 20 pro teams to only eight.

Yet even with a sparse calendar and few teams, the US still has two men's and two women's WorldTour teams - Lidl-Trek, ranked second in the world in 2025, and EF Education-EasyPost for the men, Lidl-Trek and Human Powered Health for the women.

Granted, those teams have only a grand total of six American riders between them this year, but that's mainly because other teams have taken an interest in signing riders from this country.

There is talent in the US, but the pathway from the development ranks to the WorldTour has changed in the last few years, with teams more closely scoping out the junior ranks. Arguably, teams like Hot Tubes and EF Education-ONTO are a more important stepping stone to the WorldTour than a domestic Continental or ProTeam - think Artem Shmidt, AJ August, and Magnus Sheffield.

Are there riders who are missing out on a pro cycling career because there aren't enough US pro teams? Probably - but half of them are women, and Modern Adventure made no mention of including a women's squad in the organisation.

So what does this team's renaissance actually look like? They'll need to choose from established pros or talented under-23s ageing up to be successful as a ProTeam. They'll do some European races, and they'll give some underdogs rare opportunities (but doesn't Novo Nordisk do this too?). How is Modern Adventure different?

A real renaissance for road cycling will need a lot more: safer roads, affordable police support and less opposition from drivers for road races, interest from sponsors, more people willing to sacrifice hard work and no pay for the pleasure of seeing riders succeed, and a better-funded USA Cycling.

I hope Modern Adventure Pro Cycling succeeds but I just don't see them changing anything - one team cannot be a movement.