As I write this, online is abuzz with Jonas Vingegaard crashing out of this year’s Tour de France. The potential cause? Being awoken at 2 a.m. for an anti-doping test. Tadej Pogačar, wrote The Guardian’s Jeremy Whittle, said the disturbance could "be a small percentage in why he crashed because he probably didn’t sleep good", adding: "I know how it feels. They woke me up at five in the morning also, but at least I got my deep sleep. It’s better than if they come at two." Why were the Dane and Slovenian woken between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m., which is uncommon from the International Testing Agency (ITA), who roll out the anti-doping programme on behalf of the UCI? No official reasons have been given, and being selected for a test, including out of hours, is a standard part of anti-doping controls, and does not imply any suspicion of, or wrongdoing by, the riders concerned.

However, when WADA first permitted nighttime testing across all its sports in 2015, there was a reason for it. The Cycling Independent Reform Commission (CIRC) stated in 2015 that "the absence of nighttime testing [was] a weakness in the current system", specifically regarding the issue of micro-dosing.

Here, we delve deep into micro-dosing’s detection challenge, made harder by the issue of altitude…

The science says ‘no’

"In 2010, Carsten Lundby and I had a study published [in the European Journal of Applied Physiology] where we sent anonymous doped EPO [the blood-booster erythropoietin] samples to anti-doping laboratories in Cologne and Lausanne to see if the results would come back positive. The results were poor. Not because the technicians are poor, but the gaps in the test, especially the passport."

The words of Dr Paul Robach, who works in the department of biomedical research at the National School of Mountain Sports, Chamonix, France. Robach is a world-leading authority on the blood changes fuelled by either the needle or a mountain.

Back to his eye-opening 2010 research. Half of the subjects who were injected with a significant amount of EPO before moving into the micro-dosing maintenance phase tested negative. Concerning. The World Anti-Doping Agency would rightly counter that the sensitivity of doping tests has improved in the intervening 16 years. Still, in my new book Dope it became clear that the micro-dosing shortcomings remained, one of the major flaws being rapidly flushed-out markers.

"If a rider micro-dosed EPO at 11 p.m. and the doping control officer tested them at six the next morning, they’d catch them with a direct blood test," says Robach. "But the chances would be lower with the passport. It’s because EPO has a short half-life of a few hours."

A direct doping test looks for a prohibited substance or its metabolites in an athlete’s urine or blood, providing evidence that a banned drug has been used. The blood test doesn’t search for specific substances. Instead, it tracks an athlete’s blood markers over time and flags up unusual changes that may indicate doping. While direct tests aim to catch the substance itself, the blood passport is designed to detect the lasting biological effects of doping.

In search of more oxygen

Ultimately, no intelligence agency will communicate the reasons behind targeted or nocturnal testing. But the nighttime testing at the Tour does highlight a limitation of anti-doping procedures when it comes to micro-doping, which is exacerbated when trying to unpick the physiological changes accrued from synthetic EPO compared to altitude-stimulated EPO.

Which is perhaps not surprising, as the aim of each intervention is the same: to boost red blood cells, meaning the rider can tap into more oxygen to fuel working muscles. Achieving that goal by injection is prohibited. Heading high and forcing the oxygen-starved body to generate more EPO to create more red blood cells isn’t.

A 2022 paper by Jonas Saugy highlighted the problem, the researcher revealing that an athlete’s blood profile when micro-dosing was "hardly distinguishable from those identified after hypoxic exposure" without doping.

The similar blood profiles included haemoglobin mass, which is the total amount of haemoglobin (oxygen carrier) in a rider’s red blood cells. There’s a tight relationship between VO2 max and haemoglobin mass, with research revealing that a 1g increase in haemoglobin mass can increase VO2 max by around 4ml/min/kg. As VO2 max is one of the limiting factors when it comes to an endurance sport like road cycling, the benefits are clear.

Further separate research highlights similar benefits enjoyed from micro-dosing and training at altitude. A 2024 study revealed that injecting nine IU/kg of bodyweight of EPO three times weekly over four weeks boosted endurance by up to 6% in trained athletes, which would equate to around 2% in elites, who have less room to grow.

As for altitude training, a 2016 meta-analysis of elite athletes reported an average VO2max increase of around 2%, so similar to those micro-dosing results.

The variability of altitude training

It begs the question: why cheat when the legal means (altitude) deliver similar gains? "A rider’s response to altitude training is highly variable," says Robach. "We have an ongoing study that shows our group’s haematological response to one year at high altitude varies from 1% to 50%."

Robach’s results mirror earlier research charting how elite endurance athletes respond to altitude training camps and whether they can be reliably classified as "responders" or "non-responders." Researchers analysed 82 altitude camps involving 59 athletes and measured changes in haemoglobin mass.

Haemoglobin mass increased after 56% of camps, rising to 65% when athletes trained above 2,000 metres (we’ll come back to that height-related stimulus shortly). However, responses varied greatly both between athletes and within the same athlete across different camps.

"From the 15 athletes who participated in altitude training camps at least twice, 27% always had positive haemoglobin responses; 60% both positive and negative responses; and 13% only negative responses."

In other words, altitude training doesn’t always work. Worse than that for the rider and support staff, it might work for a rider at one camp but not at the next.

Exercise physiologist Inigo Mujika would suggest this variability’s down to sidestepping the five I’s. These are: Iron – inadequate iron intake may compromise adaptations to altitude; Intake – low energy diets don’t support adaptations; Injury – prolonged inflammatory responses associated with serious soft tissue injury can interfere with adaptation; Illness – viral and bacterial infections do the same; and Intensity – excessive workload at the start of an altitude camp can promote excessive fatigue and, again, impair adaptation.

But even with the best-laid plans, results from altitude training remain inconsistent. One reason why is limitations in how low each rider can go…

Triggering HIF-1

"Ultimately, optimising altitude training is around the amount that you can safely reduce your oxygen saturation level [SpO2], which you can measure with a pulse oximeter on the tip of your finger," says top coach and sport scientist Dan Healey, who formerly worked with Alberto Contador at Tinkoff-Saxo. A normal range at sea level is around 95 to 100%. When you train at altitude, the thinner air naturally means that [it] usually drops. "You’ll aim for the rider’s SpO2 to drop to 90 and into the 80s. The sweet spot for optimum EPO production is probably in the 70s."

Healey says you need that rarefied stimulus to trigger a protein complex called hypoxia-inducible factor-1 alpha (HIF-1 alpha). "Every day, HIF-1 alpha is produced but killed. It’s a really complex mechanism. But when you go to altitude, it’s free to do its thing. HIF-1 alpha will join with HIF-2. That’s when you get EPO production and why teams spend a lot of money on altitude camps. Basically, they’re spending top dollar to trigger HIF-1."

But even when ticking those five ‘I’ boxes of Mujika’s, how much HIF-1 alpha is triggered can vary greatly. In Dope, Rory Townsend told me that no matter what he does, his SpO2 levels remain well into the 90s. He’s seemingly a staunch non-responder. That said, he’s never hit the lofty heights of Healey’s recent research.

"The sweet spot for triggering HIF-1 is around 5,000m," he says. "You’ll need to do it in really short doses of extreme hypoxia – so SpO2 in the 70s for accelerated EPO release – though you must monitor the rider closely and ensure things are done safely."

Cyclingnews reiterates that this type of training should only be carried out under the supervision of expert medical guidance.

Robach agrees that adding a little more certainty from altitude training might require going higher than the 2-2,500m that most teams peak at. "But many coaches are concerned if they go too high the riders will be too fatigued or not sleep. I think it’d be okay at 3-3,500m. But 5,000m? That’s exploratory and yet to be scientifically proven."

Exercise physiologists and sports scientists love nothing more than consistency. That their research and applied practice delivers gains time and time again. It’s repeatable. That’s anathema to altitude training. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But with micro-dosing EPO? "Ultimately, you’ll have a higher chance of consistently boosting your haemoglobin mass with EPO than altitude," says Robach. "Altitude training is complicated."

What of the future?

So, there are compelling reasons why a rider might micro-dose, especially at altitude, as there’s evidence that you enjoy a double boost, again without testing negative unless tested close to injection time.

It’s also not solely about micro-dosing EPO. Both infusing your own blood and injecting human growth hormone at nominal levels deliver a physiological advantage and a small detection window.

Which is why a credible anti-doping system can’t rely so much on the biological blood passport. Sidestepping the cost implications of research and implementing a new test that’s legally watertight, are there new tests on the horizon that could actually solve the micro-dosing and altitude riddle?

Possibly. While much of the focus has been on changes in reticulocytes and other red blood cell markers, an alternative approach may be to examine shifts in plasma volume. One of the primary physiological responses to altitude exposure is a reduction in plasma volume – the liquid component of blood – which can influence many of the variables monitored by the biological passport.

WADA has already explored machine-learning models that estimate an athlete’s expected plasma volume over time, using artificial intelligence to distinguish normal physiological variation from patterns consistent with doping. Although this would require an additional blood measurement, incorporating plasma volume estimates could help differentiate the effects of altitude exposure from those of EPO micro-dosing.

"There’s also great potential in the area of omics," says Robach. This taps into the ongoing work of Professor Yannis Pitsiladis, a leading advocate for applying omics technologies – genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics – to anti-doping. By analysing thousands of biological markers simultaneously, these approaches could reveal subtle signatures of EPO use, blood manipulation and other forms of doping, potentially improving detection.

"Exploring iron metabolism could pay off, too," adds Robach, who along with colleagues has shown that even low doses of recombinant EPO stimulate the hormone erythroferrone and corresponding changes in iron regulation. Altitude doesn’t result in the same iron profile.

"But my dream is that EPO manufacturers put a tracer in their drugs," says Robach, "but I can’t see the likes of Novo Nordisk doing that. Their drugs are for therapeutic purposes. Understandably, sporting abuse isn’t top of their concerns."

It’s clear that anti-doping faces two fundamental challenges: how do you detect a performance-boosting substance that has such a short half-life? And how do you separate a rider’s legitimate adaptation to the mountains from an artificial attempt to recreate the same advantage? It’s also clear that the battle against micro-dosing will not be won by one breakthrough test. Altitude, EPO and blood manipulation all exploit the same physiological pathway: increasing oxygen delivery through red blood cells. As detection evolves, the future may lie in looking beyond traditional blood markers towards plasma volume, iron metabolism and omics. Until then, the flaws of micro-dosing mean athlete welfare will play second fiddle to the credibility of the anti-doping system.

"Secrets are poison. They suck the life out of you." Tyler Hamilton.

"I viewed this situation as one big lie that I repeated a lot of times." Lance Armstrong.

"This place has been my home. They liked me here. Not anymore. Now they will look the other way. Now I don't belong." David Millar.

Is doping worth it? To live everyday looking over your shoulder? To enhance performance but diminish character? Cheating equals high anxiety and, of course, little sympathy. The stress-free solution? Don't dope. It's simple. Or is it?

These days, the advanced anti-doping and testing system means athletes face 'strict liability' for every single substance they consume, vigilance so high that they can't even buy vitamin C at a pharmacy, and surveillance that requires them to provide their location at a specific time every single day.

Is adhering to an anti-doping system that monitors you every day of the year, where you're guilty until proven innocent, in need of reform for athlete sanity? Cyclingnews investigated the system, the rules, and the mental impact they have on riders who are just trying to stay clean, and prove it.

The contamination issue

Michael Woods enjoyed a stellar 13-year professional career, primarily for Cannondale (now EF Education-EasyPost) and Israel-PremierTech (now NSN Cycling Team). He won four Grand Tour stages – one at the Tour de France, three at the Vuelta a España– and the prestigious one-day race, Milan-Torino. Woods retired from the WorldTour at the end of 2025 but, like many modern-day pros, he soon swapped road for gravel. When we caught up, he'd just 'won' the Canadian gravel national championships. Possibly. Extreme heat led to the event being cancelled while riders were still out on the course, meaning Woods' result was in doubt. Unlike his stance on cheats.

"I'll start off by saying that dopers ruin the sport for all of us," he says. "I'm all for clean sport and forged a career from clean sport. But the anti-doping system, while a necessary burden, is a massive burden. It's a huge stress. During my entire career, I guarantee that I never intentionally took a performance-enhancing substance. But I couldn't guarantee that I wouldn't have tested positive for one."

That's not an admission of guilt or Machiavellian Armstrong wordplay – "I've been tested 500 times and I've never failed a drug test" – but an honest appraisal of a system that can end careers if an athlete's urine or blood sample shows traces of one of more than 400 prohibited substances.

According to WADA's (World Anti-Doping Agency) Athletes' Anti-Doping Rights Act, 'strict liability' means that the athlete is solely responsible for any "any banned substance you use, attempt to use or is found in your system, regardless of how it got there or whether there was any intention to cheat". In anti-doping, not knowing isn't an excuse. You must live pure in an impure world.

"Unless you live on a farm, isolated from the rest of the world, growing your own food and ensuring no-one touches it, can you guarantee that something isn't contaminated?" says Woods. "Whenever I took a drugs test, that played on my mind. It's stressful and it's the same throughout the peloton.

"One of the biggest stressors is that you're guilty unless you can prove your innocence. And even if you prove how you ended up consuming contaminated food, by virtue of how the media handles the story and how the sport deals with you, you're tainted. I have friends who tested positive but discovered the source of contamination and were exonerated. But the damage to their finances and reputations was irreparable.

"They're especially damning in Canada. I'm proud of the fact that our country is vehemently for anti-doping, but it means any positive test results in you being crucified. Arguably, this goes back to Ben Johnson and what happened in South Korea. We were burnt and embarrassed on an international scale."

For our younger readers, the muscular Johnson won the 100m men's race at the 1988 Seoul Olympics in a new world record, before ignominiously leaving the Games and being stripped of gold after testing positive for the steroid stanozolol. It was arguably the biggest story in Olympic history. A piece of graffiti in the Olympic village encapsulated the drama: "Hero to zero in 9.79 secs."

Hormone-fuelled food system

Johnson confessed to doping. Many banned athletes don't, blaming their positive test on contamination. In the monochrome world of doping, it's seen as a convenient excuse. But the evidence suggests many grey areas.

Take the steroid trenbolone, used in the American food industry to boost the efficiency and yield of meat production. It's legal in the USA. But trenbolone is on WADA's prohibited list. Maximum residue figures are set for how much trenbolone commonly remains in a slaughtered animal from farm to fork for anti-doping purposes. Several assumptions are made that impact these residue figures, including point of administration. Trenbolone is mixed into a compressed pellet and injected into the back of the cattle's ear. The steroid then dissolves into the bloodstream. After around 200 days, the animals are 'harvested', whereby the ears are removed to prevent potential contamination.

If the farmer follows standard practice and an athlete records an anti-doping violation, the contaminated meat excuse is flimsy. But not, many a defendant has argued, if the pellet was misplaced and entered muscles from which rib-eye and loin steaks are cut. Or oxtail. That was the defence of runner Erriyon Knighton, who tested positive for trenbolone in March 2024. An independent arbitrator initially cleared him after accepting that contaminated meat likely caused the result, allowing him to compete at the Paris Olympics where the American finished fourth in the 200m. However, the Court of Arbitration for Sport later ruled the contamination evidence was insufficient and imposed a four-year ban. Knighton continues to protest his innocence.

Clenbuterol is another WADA-prohibited substance used to increase meat yields, albeit it's banned around the world because residues are high enough to cause health issues. Despite that, there's a huge black market in many Latin American and South-east Asian countries.

Alberto Contador was handed a two-year ban and stripped of his 2010 Tour de France victory after testing positive for clenbuterol. The Spaniard's contamination defence – that it was down to eating meat brought across the border from Spain to Pau on the rest day – didn't hold up because the illegal clenbuterol farming practices are rare in Spain, despite Contador passing a lie detector test.

(As an aside, for my new book Dope I interviewed Morten Hostrup, associate professor of physiology at the University of Copenhagen, who'd recently undertaken human studies on clenbuterol. Hostrup told me it's great for muscle building but actually impairs endurance performance because it 'suppresses mitochondrial function' in the muscle. "It's one reason why the current regulations would have accepted Contador's explanation," he told me. "He wouldn't have been suspended.")

In short, contamination is a very real stressor for professional athletes. "I raced the Vuelta a Mexico [which last took place in 2015 but is scheduled for a return in 2027] and the Tour of Qinghai Lake in China and basically you eat rice and eggs," says Woods. "You have to be hyper-vigilant and it's an extra stressor."

Supplementary pressures

It's the same with supplements. According to a 2025 survey by Sport Integrity Australia, one in three sport supplements – around 35 per cent of 200 samples – bought online contained at least one substance prohibited by WADA. Why is down to two reasons: accidental (the equipment wasn't cleaned thoroughly) and intentional (the manufacturer purposely added a prohibited performance-enhancer to crank up its effectiveness and have the athlete coming back for more).

WADA recommends athletes take supplements that are third-party tested. These products will feature the testing company's respective logos, and include NSF Certified for Sport, Informed Choice and Informed Sport.

"You couldn't take anything not approved by the team," says Woods. "It makes sense, but if you're feeling under the weather and want to buy vitamin C, you can't go to the pharmacy and be an adult. You have to report to mom and dad and ask if it's OK. It's for the right reasons, but it becomes crazy. You lose any autonomy and it's something you're constantly thinking about."

"When I first started competing, I was proud of making sure I was doing everything right," Woods adds. "Come the end of my road career, I'd been on some form of anti-doping programme for nearly 15 years. After all that time, you start to think, ‘Fuck this. I am so over it!'"

Or I'm not just over this, but I'm over life, in the case of former British cyclist Lizzy Banks, whose contamination case left her battling suicidal thoughts. In July 2023, Banks tested positive for traces of the banned diuretic chlortalidone. April 2024, UK Anti-Doping (UKAD) cleared Banks, accepting that contamination likely stemmed from a tablet she took for asthma. June 2024, WADA appealed her case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, ruling that she'd failed to prove the source of the contamination despite overwhelming scientific and contextual evidence and so banned her for two years.

"This case demonstrates the high bar set by the application of the 'strict liability' principle," UKAD pronounced, "and the challenges in identifying and establishing unintentional violations."

The 'will they, won't they?' sanction left Banks in turmoil.

"I'm not sure yet whether I regret having carried on the fight," she wrote at the time. "I'm so empty right now that I barely know what I feel anymore. But this is what they do to people like me. They crush us. They expect that we will just walk away and they will never have any consequences. But there must be consequences."

Banks proposed a series of anti-doping changes to protect athlete welfare including easing the burden of proof – that athletes shouldn't be required to provide the exact source of contamination when strong scientific evidence shows the substance level is incompatible with intentional use. She sees the current system as creating prolonged uncertainty and psychological harm.

Whereabouts is the welfare?

As do a dozen professional tennis players, including Nick Kyrgios, who in January 2025 filed a legal case against tennis federations and the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) for a complete disregard of athlete well-being when enforcing anti-doping policing.

The case came off the back of doping allegations against the men's world number one, Jannik Sinner, who twice tested positive for the banned steroid clostebol. WADA accepted the Italian's story that he didn't cheat and exposure came via his fitness coach's massage cream. Both parties agreed to a three-month ban that some felt conveniently expired before the second Major of the year, the French Open. The civil class-action cited his preferential treatment due to potential financial implications and access to superior legal representation.

A team of academics – including Alex Smith, senior researcher at Bern University in Switzerland – examined the complaint in a paper entitled, 'Coercive compliance? Anti-doping systems in tennis and athlete mental health.' It's a fascinating read and draws attention to the need for fairness when enforcing anti-doping policy.

"The focus of most anti-doping bodies remains firmly on detection and deterrence, which is understandable, but the inadvertent psychological implications of compliance sits largely outside that frame," co-author Smith tells us. "Research has documented what some call ‘clean anxiety' among athletes, which is a persistent fear of inadvertent rule violations and the reputational damage that would follow.

"For younger athletes who are still developing, that could be particularly problematic. They're trying to establish themselves in elite sport, managing uncertain incomes, unpredictable travel, sometimes young families, and on top of all that they carry this background fear of making an administrative error that carries the same punishment as failing a drugs test."

For administrative error, read the Whereabouts system. This is a requirement in any sport signed up to the WADA Code and allows anti-doping authorities to conduct unannounced drug tests on athletes between 6am and 11pm (and, in some cases like targeted testing, also between 11pm and 6am) on any day of the year. Athletes must update their ADAMS (Anti-Doping Administration Management System) to give a specific 60-minute time slot each day when they guarantee they'll be available for testing. You can update it any time before that 60-minute time slot begins. If you miss three tests within a 12-month period, you're banned.

"Athletes have described the constant need to remain organised, available and compliant, particularly during periods of travel, family commitments, illness or other major life stressors," says Smith. "The concern is often less about being monitored and more about the possibility of making an administrative mistake that could carry significant professional consequences. In that respect, the psychological burden may be less visible than other stressors in elite sport, but it does remain present in the background of athletes' lives."

Smith stresses that the integrity of anti-doping testing is vitally important and out-of-competition testing is an effective tool. "However, athletes are required to disclose their whereabouts around the clock, submit to surprise testing and provide highly sensitive health data, including biometric identifiers and medical information," he says. "Nowhere else in a democratic society would we accept that level of surveillance as a condition of employment."

That's the academic viewpoint. What about the athletic one? "Of course, out-of-competition testing and monitoring is important," says Woods. "Dick Pound [former president of WADA] had a great saying that if you fail in competition, you've failed two tests: the doping control test and the IQ test!

"So, things like the Whereabouts system are useful but I'd actually have preferred a tracking device, especially in the off-season when you're looking to switch off from cycling mode. That's when your plans tend to change. You might head to your mate's for a couple of drinks and the last thing you're thinking of is logging into your phone to change the address on ADAMS. You then awake the next morning and panic that if the doping officer visited, you've messed up.

"Thankfully, I was pretty diligent and only had one out-of-competition miss, which I contested because the tester made fundamental errors and it was removed. The area – Andorra, where I was living – was unfamiliar to them and they went to the wrong building. But it was stressful."

Woods says he has friends who missed three tests in the 12-month period but fought the last one and won. "And I know others who missed three and were banned."

Nighttime testing

Between Whereabouts and in-competition testing, riders have to be available for testing every day of the year, but the extent of that availability was tested at this year's Tour de France when the two top-ranked riders, Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard, both faced tests in the middle of the night.

In theory, in-competition testing should only happen between the hours of 6am and 11pm, and the UCI rules state that out-of-hours testing will only be carried out based on "serious and specific suspicion."

"The UCI may require any Rider over whom it has Testing authority, who has not retired, including Riders serving a period of Ineligibility, to provide a Sample at any time and at any place," article 5.2 reads, before going on to outline the limits of 'at any time and at any place.'

"Unless the rider has identified a sixty minute testing window between the hours of 11:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m., or has otherwise consented to testing during that period, the UCI will not test a rider during that period unless it has a serious and specific suspicion that the Rider may be engaged in doping."

It is the International Testing Authority (ITA) that actually carries out the testing, on behalf of the UCI, and UCI rules state that "Any testing during the Event Period outside the Event Venues shall be coordinated with the UCI", suggesting the governing body approved the nighttime tests of cycling's two major Grand Tour stars.

In a statement released during the Tour, the ITA did not reference any "serious and specific suspicion" in their justification for the nighttime tests.

"The ITA is conscious that night-time testing may be disruptive to riders' rest and recovery. Due consideration has therefore been given to minimise as much as possible the impact testing activities have on riders," the statement read.

"However, the ITA, on behalf of the UCI, has the responsibility to ensure the effectiveness of the cycling anti-doping program and the integrity of cycling races. As such, effective testing must, in limited and justified circumstances, be capable to occur outside standard daytime hours.

"All testing activities conducted at the Tour de France and at any other international events, including decisions as to the specific timing of such tests, are carried out in accordance with the ITA’s testing strategy and subject to the safeguards established under the World Anti-Doping Code, the UCI Anti-Doping Rules and French law, with due consideration for riders’ welfare, equity and fundamental rights."

But despite the ITA's assertion that due care was taken, the riders involved, and indeed their riders, had mixed views about what happened. Given how much time and information riders give up to testers between Whereabouts and in-competition testing – especially the race leader, who is tested every day – there was criticism about disrupting their sleep - the night before a big stage - for further testing.

Tadej Pogačar said that the 2am wake up may have contributed to the crash that took Vingegaard out of the race only a few hours later, but added: "It's a little bit strange, but I accept it if this is necessary to prove that we are riding clean, then I totally accept it. I commit to it."

Remco Evenepoel was less diplomatic, saying: "It's pretty disrespectful. To be honest, if I had it, I would send my team to wake them up to feel how it is. It's something inhuman, it's something that we should not accept as athletes."

The flipside of the argument, however, is that if riders and teams know there are certain hours where they won't be tested, or expect not to be tested, they could be employing microdosing techniques or using substances with short half-lives to avoid positive tests, and the ITA's nighttime visits seek to make that more difficult.

Punished for neurology

Further pressure arises from the therapeutic usage exemption (TUE) system, which allows prohibited substances to be used for medical reasons. It's supposed to be performance-enabling rather than enhancing, though is perceived to be widely abused.

"The burden arises from the additional documentation and evidentiary requirements imposed by the anti-doping framework," says Smith. "For conditions such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), it's a challenge. Many cyclists take medication for ADHD, which is on the prohibited list, but the process of sorting a TUE is extremely involved. That's not great for a disorder associated with forgetfulness and disorganisation. You're almost punishing someone for having the disorder, which means many might not bother taking the medication to avoid form-filling. If you're in the middle of a peloton and you've got a disorder that's linked to hyperactivity and impulsivity, that has clear implications for you and your fellow riders."

"That's me," says Woods. "I've never been officially diagnosed but I was almost held back a grade and repeatedly told I had 'attention issues'. If I was younger, I'm confident I'd have been diagnosed with ADHD at school. Keeping on top of these forms and apps is a real issue and can kill careers. Miss tests and teams won't sign you. Sponsors won't sponsor you. You can't race."

Smith says British Cycling has delivered TUE courses specifically aimed at riders with ADHD, but suggests all levels of elite athletes should be better supported, as they can face considerable costs simply to demonstrate eligibility for a treatment that's medically needed. More broadly, he says that greater focus must centre on the daily strain of adhering to anti-doping policy.

"The argument is always that athletes consent to it, but that consent is functionally coerced," he says. "An athlete who refuses compliance faces immediate exclusion from international competition. The balance shifts when you build genuine welfare support into the framework. Right now, the obligations are clearly defined and the consequences of failure are clearly defined, but the psychological support available to athletes navigating that system remains largely absent. We believe that you can uphold rigorous testing and provide mental health resources."

"We'd suggest introducing mandatory welfare assessments as part of the anti-doping relationship as standard practice for any athlete in a registered testing pool," Smith continues. "Right now, the system is entirely focussed on compliance. There's no touchpoint where anyone asks how an athlete is actually doing. A welfare check-in, delivered through the existing infrastructure, would catch athletes who are struggling before they reach crisis point, and it would send a signal that anti-doping organisations view athletes as people with lives and health needs rather than just samples to be collected."

This humanising of the anti-doping system is picked up on by those dozen tennis players, who contested the ITIA policy of "requiring players selected for drug testing to shower under direct observation if they choose to wash before providing a sample".

Woods echoes the indignity. "I've had testers come straight after my morning coffee. Let's just say I'm regular after that first caffeine hit. The chaperone can't take their eyes off you once you've opened the door, so I've had times when I've taken a shit staring eyeball to eyeball with a tester. I get it because there are cases in the past of athletes passing off clean samples by using a prosthetic penis. But you don't want it, the tester certainly doesn't want it. I must admit, you do sit there thinking fuck the dopers."

Anti-doping remains essential. Few athletes and researchers would argue otherwise. Yet as sport pursues cheats with ever greater vigilance, it must also consider the cost borne by those playing by the rules. For every doper trying to evade detection, thousands of clean athletes are navigating surveillance, suspicion and the fear of inadvertent error. Protecting sport's integrity matters. Protecting the well-being of the people who uphold it matters, too.

Lighter + Stronger + Faster = Success. That's the impossible equation engineers face whenever they develop a new cycling product, and immense time, energy, research, and dollars go into every undertaking when those engineers get cooking. On rare occasions, the impossible equation becomes possible. Such was the case with hookless rims, which were, in fact, lighter, stronger, and faster than hooked rims.

Yet we're now watching hookless rims face a crucial inflection point. Pro riders fear hookless rims may not be safe, fueled by notable incidents such as Thomas De Gendt's 2024 UAE Tour crash; consumers want to know if they pose real benefits; and manufacturers are unsure if consumer sentiment will drive ridership right back where it came from, with hooked rims becoming de rigueur once again.

It's an important moment not only for hookless rims, but also for the bicycle industry as a whole, which has long struggled to provide narrative clarity on such issues. That's partly because these technologies are, well, quite complicated. But it also comes down to responsibility — and cooperation. We have seen such dissonance with bottom bracket standards time and time again (remember the creaks that came along with early Press-Fit bottom brackets?), headset standards (new sizes, new integrations, proprietary tools, etc), and even hub spacing (Boost, Boost 148, Super Boost, and many more hub spacings necessitating new frame designs and a lack of backward compatibility). These new technologies are not without benefits or sacrifices. And often they create heated debates as various segments of the bike industry struggle to catch up with new technology.

So when it comes to hookless rims, history repeats itself. "Nobody is addressing the real issues," said Jeff Schneider, Head of Product & Business Development at Cadex Cycling. "They are just pointing fingers."

And the real issue, Schneider believes, has less to do with a bicycle rim's retention system and more with system precision. For any wheel system to work reliably, tolerances between these two distinct products must be closely monitored and controlled.

Such precision requires extremely close collaboration between wheel and tyre manufacturers, or vertical product integration – one brand creating both the wheel and tyre – both of which are difficult business propositions. So what does the future hold for hookless rims? Let's take a closer look.

What is a hookless rim?

Simply put, a hooked rim features a protrusion on the inside of both rim walls that acts as a stop or retainer to keep the tyre affixed to the rim at full pressure. A hookless rim, as the name suggests, doesn't have this protrusion and instead features flat-faced rim walls. In theory, if the tyre bead and the hookless rim wall are both manufactured to precise specifications, the tyre should stay affixed to the rim using the air pressure alone, just as it would on a hooked rim - or more broadly in the automotive industry - but without the need for the extra material inherent in a bead hook.

More recently, micro-hooked rims have entered the market. These are essentially hooked rims, but the hook itself is much smaller. This is supposed to hit the middle ground between hookless and hooked rims (even though technically, a micro-hooked rim is just a hooked rim).

To ensure that tyres and rims are built to size with some consistency, the European Tyre and Rim Technical Organisation (ETRTO) defines specific dimensions in millimetres. Most tyre and rim manufacturers operate off ETRTO specifications, and those manufacturers that have taken tubeless and hookless systems very seriously often exceed ETRTO specifications to ensure tight tolerances that prevent tyre blow-offs.

In the 1970s, hooked rims became the standard to accommodate folding bead tyres, which were lighter and allowed riders to run higher pressures. To ensure these types of tyres stayed on the rim at higher pressures, manufacturers integrated hooks into the rim wall.

These hooks provided a mechanical support for the tyre beads so they didn't disconnect from the rim. The hook essentially protruded inward, 'hooking' the tyre bead and preventing it from sliding up and off the rim. This was necessary because the beads of these new tyre types could stretch, whereas older wire-bead tyres did not.

This was very new territory in those days. But it was also a welcome change from glueing tyres onto the rim, such was the necessity with tubular tyres. These are essentially self-contained units; to put it simply, the inner tube and the tyre itself are one unit. There’s no tyre bead on a tubular tyre; it is simply a circular tube, with the rubber tread on the outer face, and cotton (or nylon/polyester) on the inner face, and it must be glued to a tubular-specific rim with several layers of glue or mastic.

For consumers, the switch meant less time prepping and maintaining the bicycle, and more time riding it. Tyre construction also advanced, allowing new materials to be used in compounds, beads, and layers. Pro cyclists, however, stuck with glue-on tubular tyres for a variety of reasons. Primary among them: the rider could still ride the bike even if a tubular went flat. The tyre was likely to stay affixed to the rim longer than a hooked tyre would.

Fast-forward about 40 years, and a chain of events was coming to a head thanks to another set of trends: lower tyre pressures in road cycling and tubeless tyre adoption, as well as the advancement of tyre technology that meant their beads resisted stretching more successfully.

Hookless rims weren't brand new at this point. They had long been working well on the mountain bike side, where lower tyre pressures have long been the trend and tubeless tyres are more or less standard.

Tubeless tyres rely on an airtight seal between the rim and tyre, and they can mate more precisely with hookless rims. So, as study after study showed the benefits of lower tyre pressures in road cycling, and tubeless systems became more reliable and viable, hookless rims became worthy of exploration.

On top of that, eliminating the hooks from rims meant a simpler manufacturing process, which not only reduced cost but also weight in the rim. Simpler tooling also meant a more refined finished product, as carbon wheels had, at that point, become the wheel material of choice for a massive swathe of the cycling population.

"Several years ago, the hook of hooked rims was formed in the manufacturing process using a silicone mandrel, as it was flexible enough to be removed post-curing," Hunt Bike Wheels engineering tandem Robert Fields and Paddy Brown explained. "By contrast, hookless rims could be formed with a one-piece steel mandrel. The steel mandrel allowed for more accurate rim internals due to its rigidity, as the silicone could expand and move in curing. This accuracy and consistency allowed for higher strength-to-weight ratios in layups used to make the rims, as well as a lower discard rate.

"We now use three-piece steel mandrels to make the tyre channel of all our hooked rims. This tooling is more complicated and expensive, but allows for the same, more accurate rim internals as the hookless one-piece steel mandrel, and delivers the same accuracy and consistency. That means there isn't any strength and weight difference between two similar hooked and hookless rims."

And there was precedent for the move. Mountain bikers had been using hookless rims for years, as the transition to tubeless tyres had come to that segment of the sport much earlier than their road counterparts. The move to road tubeless, and the peloton’s (eventual) embrace of it, ushered in the opportunity for hookless rims to take hold on the road. The growing pains had hit the mountain bike world much earlier, too, allowing wheel manufacturers to solve the problem of 'burping', or the tyre momentarily dislodging from the rim and allowing air to escape. It all seemed poised for hookless success.

Hookless rims, it turned out, needed to work in close conjunction with high-quality tyres with beads that could form an airtight seal with the rim wall. And that's what happened: wheels and tyres worked together to create airtight seals that served mountain bikers well for years. But road adoption has been a bumpier ride.

A transition to pavement sparks controversy

The notion of implementing hookless rims in road wheels came about as tyre sizes started trending larger and air pressures lower. Test after test hit the media, extolling the rolling resistance advantages of going wider, at lower tyre pressures. Then came road tubeless, and the timing seemed perfect for hookless rims to make their pavement debut.

All of those trends played perfectly into the hookless paradigm. Improved efficiency, comfort, grip, puncture resistance, and control all come as part and parcel with hookless systems.

That, coupled with the growth of gravel racing, provided the spark wheel manufacturers needed to make hookless road wheels a reality. Since gravel tyres are generally wider and run at a lower pressure, the impacts of hookless rims weren't really felt widely one way or another. But on the pavement, in the peloton, hookless rims caused worry among racers.

Crashes are inevitable. But as the industry had seen when disc brakes were introduced to the pro peloton, it's easy to fixate on a scapegoat. Back then, any cut in a crash was attributed to the spinning blades of death, AKA disc brake rotors. Hookless rims took a beating in a similar fashion as a few high-profile crashes led to media coverage and rider complaints.

But crashes are complex things. "With any crash, there tend to be several variables that are in play," the engineering duo from Hunt Wheels highlighted. "So pinning a crash on one piece of the puzzle is always a bit dubious."

Lennard Zinn, framebuilder, author, and longtime VeloNews Magazine tech writer, recently wrote a series of newsletters on the subject of crashes that may or may not have been caused by hookless rims. And he noted a few key points:

"Where hookless versus hooked comes into play is a secondary effect from the reduced tyre pressure required on hookless wheels for safety, due to lower friction between the flat rim wall and the tyre sidewall (versus a hook-bead rim wall)," said Zinn.

"With lower tyre pressure, the cushioning of the rim from hard impacts is reduced, making cracking of the rim more likely. This is somewhat counterbalanced by hookless rim walls often being stronger than hook-bead ones due to being thicker, and having continuous fibres running up to and back down from the top of the rim wall, rather than ending at the edge of the rim hook. And we also now understand that lower tyre pressure often reduces rolling resistance, so riders might use lower tyre pressures on hook-bead rims for that reason, rather than being mandated to do so by the rim brand."

In other words, hookless rims work best in low-tyre-pressure setups, which can lead to harder direct impacts to the rim. But hookless rims are also built to be stronger than hooked rims in those high-impact areas. That said, a rider of a hooked rim can also run lower tyre pressures, leading to the same types of impacts. While brands are now starting to strengthen layups to match hookless rims, that's not always the case. And whenever a rim is subject to a large enough impact to take the wheel out of round, the tolerances are no longer consistent, which can lead to failures regardless of whether or not a hook is present.

"The problem in these crashes in which the tyre comes off of the rim hinges primarily on a carbon rim and a road tubeless tyre," said Zinn. "A hook-bead rim won't make it less likely for the tyre to come off than a hookless rim after an impact that cracks the rim. However, higher tyre pressure allowed on the hook-bead rim might prevent the rim from cracking in the first place."

Unfortunately, that runs counter to trends, in which riders are running lower tyre pressures to increase grip in corners and lower rolling resistance. It's one trade-off for another.

Cadex's Schneider agreed that the issue is far more complex than simply saying one type of rim is better than the other. "Rider concerns are understandable, but the discussion often oversimplifies what is, in fact, a systemic issue. The most credible position is not that concerns are imaginary, but that many incidents likely involve multiple contributing factors, such as tyre compatibility, bead stretch, pressure, installation, or use outside recommended limits, rather than hookless architecture alone. That is why blaming 'hookless' as a single root cause can be misleading."

There's a keyword there – systems – that perhaps owns an outsized heap of responsibility for the hookless debate we find ourselves in today.

The solution: compatibility and wheel systems

It's long been an inside joke in the bike industry: A new 'standard' comes along that's not standard at all. Company A develops a new technology, but companies B through Z don't offer complementary products that make adoption of the new tech easy for the consumer. It's happened over and over again, from bottom brackets to stems to headsets and even wheels and tyres.

Such is the saga with hookless rims. Wheel manufacturers were relatively quick to find a new way to make the wheel lighter, stronger, and more useful at low tyre pressures. The problem was that tyre development hadn't advanced just as quickly.

"The broader point is that hookless, hooked, and micro-hooked systems all rely on the same basic requirement: a precise rim–tyre interface and a tyre bead that remains within specification," said Schneider. "If the bead stretches beyond tolerance, retention can be compromised on any rim style. In that sense, this is more of a broader compatibility and standards conversation than a simple 'hookless is unsafe' conclusion."

It's no surprise then that Cadex has long promoted wheel 'systems' in which the tyres are developed to work specifically with the rims. That has never been as vital as it is now, with hookless systems. By controlling the tolerances and interface between both the rim and the tyre, a manufacturer can ensure the hookless system works reliably, and we don't find ourselves wondering if that tyre that blew off the rim at the most recent race somewhere in the mountains was due to a hookless rim, a pothole knocking a wheel out of round, or just pure dumb luck.

The problem is solved, right?

A few key problems are preventing widely adopted system integrations. First, few brands are set up for vertical integration – that is, wheel brands make wheels, and tyre brands make tyres. Few brands make both. That means various brands need to communicate with each other well to ensure tolerances are met or exceeded, often well beyond what ETRTO standards dictate. And while wheel company A may have the funds and desire to produce hookless rims, tyre company B may not be similarly enthused – or even able to produce a new-specification tyre to work with a system that may or may not end up sticking around long enough to provide a healthy return on investment.

The second problem is consumer sentiment. Interchangeable components have long been a part of cycling builds. Over the last decade or so, that has certainly changed, with the likes of integrated cockpits, internal cable routing, and other complexities making non-OEM parts less compatible with high-end bikes. Still, wheels and tyres have largely remained interchangeable.

Arguably, the debate around hookless rims might also be applied to hooked and micro-hooked rims. Tolerances must be tight for any of those systems to work. Hookless rims have brought that notion to the forefront.

Schneider summed it up nicely: "The industry has spent a lot of time debating hookless versus hooked, but the more important conversation is how precisely the rim, tyre, and pressure are engineered to work together as a system."

Systems require collaboration between wheel brands and tyre brands, or, for maximum consistency, vertical integration in which one brand controls the design and manufacture of both wheel and tyre. Easy peasy, right?

What if I told you that you could buy all the cycling products you love for a fraction of the regular price? The same shiny metal and sensuous carbon. The same tantalising weight figures and tasty anodising. That's obviously nonsense, but head over to behemoth Chinese retail platform AliExpress, and you might find yourself believing it's possible.

AliExpress, and to an extent, many other retail platforms, are awash with bike gear that looks eerily similar to familiar products but clearly isn't the real thing. Or it's so cheap that the chances of it being genuine are entirely far-fetched.

This murky world has long fascinated me. The products are sometimes interesting in their own right. But the inherent deceit, not to mention the shameless theft of intellectual property, is highly problematic, and that's before you get into the safety implications of using gear that isn't what it purports to be.

With all of that in mind, Cyclingnews tasked me with taking a closer look at some examples and considering the ramifications of actually buying this stuff.

Editor's note: We're not linking to any of these products because we don't want to promote counterfeit or suspected counterfeit goods, nor reward those stealing IP.

Welcome to the uncanny valley

"Speedplay Zero" pedals – £65 or $86

Some sellers say the quiet part loud. These intriguing pedals look a lot like the long-since discontinued Speedplay Zero Pavé.

This stripped-back version of the standard lollipop Zero was developed for Classics racing around the time Fabian Cancellara was winning everything. Standard Zeros were highly intolerant of filth, but the Pavé's cut-away design added some real mud-shedding ability. It was a niche version of an already niche product, but the WorldTour connection gave it special kudos, and the genuine article still commands high prices on eBay.

The clone here uses a cleat design identical to the old non-walkable cleat from the era before Wahoo took over the Speedplay brand. The sole (positive) review on the AliExpress listing says the pedals are compatible with genuine cleats.

The bearing design is quite different, however – the old Speedplays used serviceable needle bearings, while these have three tiny cartridge bearings inside the pedal body, one outboard and two inboard.

"Suitable for 3T" stem – £35

While this doesn't say 3T on the stem itself, "Arx" (an actual 3T model) is printed on the stem, and the listing title uses weaselly "suitable for" wording to give some plausible deniability to an obvious rip-off.

3T doesn't make the Arx stem anymore. The horizontal red stripe was a brand signature, denoting the 'Team' version of its premium road stems that usually came with titanium hardware rather than steel.

Branding aside, the AliExpress item is a pretty generic but nice enough-looking aluminium stem.

"Jeda" stem – £12 or $14

If you have really bad eyesight, you could, I suppose, misread the Deda logo as "Jeda."

That's the ploy this seller seems to be relying on, since they've plastered the actual Deda logo over a road stem that may or may not be partly made from carbon (it's probably a wrap at best).

The slight irony here is that a real Deda Zero stem is only about £25.

Shimano XT-adjacent SPD pedals – £19 or $25

Pedals seem to attract particular attention from brands looking for 'inspiration' from existing designs. I'd suggest they hit a sweet spot in the relationship between cost and complexity.

Pedals can be quite expensive, but their part count is low, they don't necessarily need custom tooling to manufacture, and they're small and light, making them economical to ship.

These jazzy pedals are shamelessly branded X-M8100, so there's little doubt about what they're imitating. There's no brand in the listing text, but the pedals pictured have an 'Rpantahi' logo, a name that crops up on a whole host of drivetrain components and finishing kit.

The listing variously claims a weight of 348g (6g more than actual XTs) and 336g (6g less) for a pair of pedals, and they are apparently "Shiman SPD" [sic] compatible – it's unclear if that's a typo or a bit of (im)plausible deniability.

The actual construction looks to be quite different to genuine Shimanos. Real XTs use rebuildable cup and cone bearings that form an assembly with the spindle. The Rpantahis look to be a simple two-cartridge design, likely with bearings pressed into the pedal body.

"San Marco" carbon saddle – £16 or $31

Is there any product category in bikes where price and substance feel more divorced from reality than saddles? Again, it's easy to see why they're an easy target for fakers looking to undercut big brands.

This handsome road saddle definitely isn't a Selle San Marco, but if it meets its claimed weight of 138g, it's astonishingly cheap.

The irony here is I wouldn't have a problem with this if it lacked the fake branding – saddles are so similar across different brands at this point that it's hard to make a good argument about IP theft.

There are only so many ways you can join rails to a shell and cover it in padding, and what matters to the rider is the specific shape. No brand has a monopoly on butt comfort.

"Dogma F" – £640 or $693

You can't write about fakes without mentioning Pinarello, and these wavy forked wonders have been around for as long as I can remember, often referred to as "Chinarellos".

A real Dogma F frameset is £5,500. That's all you need to know here.

"Scicon" sunglasses – £8.50

Marketed with a photo of Tadej Pogačar no less. Real Scicons are over £100 even with a healthy discount.

Sunglasses are one of those products that it might be fine to cheap out on, but how much faith would you place in the UV protection provided by a brand willing to steal another's name?

"MET" helmet – £15

A genuine MET Manta MIPS helmet retails at £230 in the UK, with a street price of around £160. You can decide for yourself if the AliExpress version is legit.

Where many fakes are just silly, dare I say even funny, the helmets really annoy me. We buy helmets for protection when the worst happens, and while most of us probably wouldn't take the chance on an oddly cheap AliExpress lid, there will be riders out there who genuinely don't realise they're not getting the real thing. There's simply no way of knowing how much protection a knock-off helmet will give you.

"V5Rs" – £830 or $916

This one comes from the amusingly named "Taiwan Red Bull Store", which uses the Red Bull–Bora Hansgrohe logo as its avatar. Confusing, since that particular team doesn't ride Colnagos, but a quick look at the store's inventory reveals a host of other lookalikes, including Specializeds, Treks and more.

It's not just AliExpress

Any working bike mechanic will tell you that certain categories of fake products are absolutely rife.

"The most common offender is fake Shimano brake pads, but we've also come across multiple fake chains," said Rob Borek, workshop manager at Pronto Bikes in Frome, England.

"I've witnessed the pad material separating from the backing plate of fake pads on numerous occasions, resulting in a total loss of braking."

How does the bike shop we spoke with handle fakes when confronted with them? "Our policy is not to work on or fit counterfeit components. If a customer is choosing to provide parts for a service or build, they must be authentic, or we will not fit them. Ideally, we provide parts to ensure they are correct, compatible, and authentic."

How to spot a fake

The reality is, when you're buying from overseas, from a platform that offers little recourse, and from sellers with virtually no online footprint and no obvious connection to bricks-and-mortar retail, you cannot guarantee that what you think you're buying is what you're actually getting.

"If you're buying parts online, make sure they are from a 'real' shop," explained Borek.

"Saving a couple of quid here and there by buying your brake pads on eBay or AliExpress is just not worth the risk."

With lookalike products that don't have a recognisable brand or model name, you at least know you're not buying the real thing. There are real brands out there that haven't filtered through to Western markets but are well-established elsewhere, and that have a following among riders in their home territory. To muddy the waters further, there could of course be fake versions of those brands too.

When it comes to more familiar brands like Shimano and SRAM, all bets are off. Perhaps some of the oddly affordable products are genuine, but there's simply no way of telling.

The big brands are well aware of the problem. Shimano Europe's communications team manager Bastian Ramler shared the following statement:

"Shimano takes a firm stance against counterfeit products. We actively monitor e-commerce platforms on a regular basis and take necessary measures, including requesting the removal of infringing listings. In addition, we take action against counterfeit sellers, such as issuing warning letters."

According to an unnamed legal representative for SRAM, the US brand is engaged in similar activity to fight against the counterfeiters. "The scale is significant, and the problem is persistent. These actors understand exactly what they are doing. They are attempting to free-ride on a reputation that SRAM has built through genuine innovation and decades of dedication to the rider experience. When listings come down, new ones appear. It is relentless."

Ramler pointed me to a page on Shimano's website that details some of the efforts the brand is undertaking in this area. Interestingly, these include a dedicated app that allows riders to scan a unique 2D code on Shimano products to authenticate them. However, the app appears to be available only in China and Japan at the moment.

Shimano's advice is pretty predictable here. "In order for consumers to avoid purchasing counterfeit products, Shimano highly recommends that consumers purchase genuine Shimano parts from authorised Shimano dealers and distributors."

SRAM says much the same, and warns riders to listen to their gut. "The simplest rule is also the most reliable one. If the price seems too good to be true, it probably is…We encourage riders to buy through authorized dealers and retailers, where they can be confident they are getting the genuine product and the full SRAM experience.

"That is not just marketing language. It is the difference between a component that was designed for them and one that was designed to deceive them."

Shimano declined to comment on how it views products that appear to 'borrow' from its designs, but which aren't outright fakes, while SRAM was refreshingly candid.

"SRAM welcomes competition. Our entire culture is built on raceday values and the belief that genuine competition makes everyone better. What we do not accept is a competitor that simply rides in the slipstream for hundreds of kilometers, waiting to edge into the frame at the finish line and claim some reflected status.

"Copying SRAM's branding, product appearance, or proprietary features is not competition. It is a shortcut, and it ultimately harms riders who may end up with an inferior or even dangerous experience." More on that last point in a bit.

Is it morally wrong to buy this stuff?

The short answer is yes. Straightforwardly ripping off real brands is obviously not OK; it's intellectual property theft. That's directly profiting from the hard work of others, freeloading on the considerable investment in R&D that it takes to bring a product to market.

But it's not always that clear-cut. In the world of wristwatches, so-called "homage" watches often bear a very strong resemblance to premium brands, but unapologetically wear their own brand name. You can buy a reasonably decent watch that looks a lot like a £9,000 Rolex Submariner for under £200. It won't say Rolex on it, and it wouldn't fool someone who knows watches, but it'll very obviously be Rolex-shaped, and it tells the time.

Is that taking anything away from Rolex? You could certainly argue it isn't. The people buying £200 watches aren't in the market for £9,000 ones, and vice versa.

I think the deceit (or lack thereof) is important here. If a non-Rolex says Rolex on it, that makes it a counterfeit. Making it look somewhat like a Rolex but labelling it as something else is arguably lame, but it's not an outright lie. And nobody is foolish enough to think the £200 watch will be manufactured to Rolex standards.

Back to bikes, there are both emotive and pragmatic reasons to avoid the imitators. "On a political level, buying from real brands is supporting the sport we love," argued Borek.

"Want to see brands or shops sponsoring events, races, riders, and teams? If we don't buy from them, they won't exist, and I'm sure AliExpress isn't putting back into your local cycling scene."

Safety is the real reason you shouldn't

Buying a fake watch isn't going to kill or injure you, but knock-off cycling gear could.

"Our components represent years of engineering investment and real-world validation at the highest levels of the sport," says SRAM. "A counterfeit may look similar in a listing photo, but it has not been through any of that."

In the event of catastrophic failure, your chances of pursuing redress from a random AliExpress seller are next to zero, and that's assuming you make it out alive and intact.

If that sounds melodramatic, take a moment to consider which bits of your bicycle are safety critical. Spoiler alert: it's most of them.

Pedal spindles, for example, are subject to enormous forces in the course of normal riding, and they need to be able to withstand not just ordinary pedalling, but immense peak loads when you hop off a kerb or smack into a rock off-road. The same goes for much of your drivetrain, while brake pads, as discussed above, are clearly of critical importance.

Frameset integrity is self-evidently essential. You might walk away from a cracked seat tube or a de-bonded bottom bracket shell, but if your fork snaps, you're going to have a very bad day.

No doubt many of the nameless framesets out there are built perfectly well; the problem is you just don't know, and the nature of carbon construction means that simply inspecting components visually won't tell you if they're safe to use – a lay-up can conceal a multitude of sins that only an X-ray would reveal.

If a bad batch of forks from a no-name maker is released into the wild, no one is going to be taking responsibility for them or issuing a recall.

It's a matter of personal judgment, but I don't want to ride a bike from a maker that won't stand behind its products with any kind of warranty. Manufacturers that don't fear liability have little incentive to act responsibly.

Perhaps the most alarming and depressing category of fakes is helmets. A bike helmet is actually a pretty simple object; it's usually just some foam co-moulded in a plastic shell. But when you buy a branded helmet from a known source, you're paying for the guarantee that the design has undergone actual lab testing and meets some basic standards.

A fake helmet might perform well in a crash, but you simply can't know if it will or not. Without provenance, it's just another fancy foam hat. Of all places to cut corners, helmets seem like the dumbest.

I'm not immune to temptation

While I have no desire to expose myself to unnecessary risks and I'm certainly not going to be buying outright fakes, the lure of cheap 'weight weenie' components is occasionally hard to ignore, particularly with lower-stakes parts such as bottle cages or saddles.

Shop mechanic Borek isn't totally immune either, but he's experienced the downside. "I've learned lessons buying sketchy lightweight parts for hill climb bikes in the past. One of them actually failed and cost me a result. I would never go there for anything remotely safety or performance critical."

I think tools deserve a special mention here, incidentally. Some components such as suspension forks need specialist tools for servicing. The OEM versions of these tools (I'm looking at you, Fox) can be astronomically expensive for something that's fundamentally very simple, i.e. just a small machined piece of metal.

A bike shop can amortise the cost of buying the genuine article because they'll use it hundreds or thousands of times, but for the individual rider who wants to service their own gear, that's difficult to justify.

There are plenty of no-name alternatives available for a fraction of the price, and I honestly don't have a problem with that. If I can buy a £20 version of a £100 tool that does the same job, I struggle to muster much moral outrage. Yes, I'd rather buy it from a shop based in my own country, but if that's not an option, I'll certainly consider looking elsewhere.

Late-stage capitalism beckons

Safety and quality concerns aside, the temptation to go spelunking in AliExpress's cave of dubious delights is tempered by middle-class guilt about the way I consume. I find the Temu-ification of online retail profoundly depressing, the idea that literally anything I could possibly want is available at an absurdly low price.

Never mind the sustainability implications, the question marks over labour and manufacturing practices, nor the knock-on effects of outsourcing every aspect of our consumption to foreign lands. Just buy, buy, buy and damn the consequences. Why not send it straight to landfill now and cut out the middleman?

Are you tempted by the shiny excesses of AliExpress? Where do you draw the line on fakes and homages? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.

Being a professional cyclist at the highest level and racing some of the biggest races in the world is a dream for many. For the lucky few who ride for WorldTour squads that we get to enjoy watching every year, this dream is a reality.

Riders race their bikes, deliver results or work hard for their teammates, get noticed by teams, and sign on the dotted line to ply their trade in any given squad for a few years. But what happens when that contract reaches its end and you haven’t been re-signed? What’s it like to be a pro cyclist without a contract? What happens to your bike and equipment? How do you earn money? Do you stop racing altogether or fight to keep the dream alive?

This is a situation some riders might never find themselves in, but many do every year, and there are several unexpected consequences and difficulties. It's a topic riders perhaps don't like to open up about much, preferring to focus on the search for a new team, or not wanting to lift the curtain on the tough reality of unemployment for an athlete.

When riders have opened up, the details are often surprising. Though he was later offered a contract after all, James Shaw was initially not renewed with EF Education-EasyPost last winter. He spoke in a YouTube video in December about losing access to things like subscription training apps and coaching resources at the end of the racing season, rather than the end of the year, leaving him in the lurch until he finally re-signed on December 1.

Other riders find themselves without even a bike to ride, having never owned their team-issue frame and without an actual bike of their own. Riders have to wear team kit and ride a team bike until December 31 of the year of their current contract, but many aspects of their employment are taken away sooner than that. They can be left floundering, trying to find a contract in January, February, March. Sometimes that happens, and a team comes along, yet sometimes the phone never rings.

In search of uncovering the reality for riders who are left without a team, I spoke to Sweden's Julia Borgström, who rode professionally for AG Insurance-Soudal from 2020 to 2025 – joining straight out of the junior ranks and staying there until she was 24. She competed at races like Paris-Roubaix, the World Championships, and the Tour de France Femmes, where she was a contender for the white jersey in 2022, and her career looked promising.

But in the spring of 2025, she learned through her agent that her contract wouldn’t be renewed and she didn’t have a place on the team in 2026.

"I got the answer in late spring, early summer, which is quite late, but I didn't ask them either. They were very clear that I didn't have a place on the team next year," she told me.

I asked Borgström if they gave her a reason for not offering a new contract. Her response was very pragmatic: "No. I don't blame them for it because I also understand that it's a business and they don't owe me an explanation. However, that doesn't take away that it's really, really hard. You put so much passion into developing something, and – even though they don't owe me anything – it's really hard because you just want to know what to do better."

At this point in her season, Borgström and her agent had already started speaking to other teams in search of another contract.

"I actually thought I had a good chance of moving elsewhere. But then I realised it was clear people wanted numbers. I could see my training was going well, but I hadn't done proper testing because I was busy trying to race. We started doing some tests again and could see that my numbers are getting there; they're not great, but they're still not bad."

Throughout 2023 and 2024, Borgström experienced RED-S (Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport), a condition caused by low energy availability, where athletes don’t consume sufficient calories to support their training, causing issues like reduced bone density, hormonal imbalances and fatigue. After a long and arduous period of treatment, recovery, and a return to normal training, she was able to continue racing. However, her results and training data didn’t accurately reflect her full potential as an athlete, which, in a competitive market, is a massive hurdle to overcome.

I asked her why she thought Pro-level or Continental teams didn’t offer her a ride, which is often the landing spot for riders who drop out of the WorldTour, but it isn't always as straightforward as it seems.

"I think people assume that you are a very demanding rider as a WorldTour rider coming down to a Conti team, but I was desperate to just keep on racing, so I think I would be the least demanding rider. Some people would have assumed that I had a conflict with AG, which I definitely didn't have."

The practicalities

One of the most coveted parts of being a pro cyclist is the equipment. Multiple bikes and all the equipment you could ask for is the dream for any bike rider. But when a contract reaches its end, what happens to it all?

Borgström continued to be employed by AG Insurance-Soudal until December 31, 2025, two and a half months after her final race with the team. Pro riders typically don’t travel to races with bikes, as these are moved around by the team, and keep a training bike at home. But even though contracts last until the end of December, teams often try to recall equipment earlier than that.

"This team asked for all bikes and even some helmets and wheels to be returned. I pushed to be allowed to keep my training bike until the end of the year, and they agreed on me sending it back by mail. It turns out it's really hard from Sweden to Belgium, so it got bounced back a couple of times, but now it is with the team," Borgström explained.

With her AG Insurance-Soudal spec bikes returned to the team’s service course, she had to bite the bullet and invest in her own race machine to continue riding. "I got really, really good help from a bike shop and a few people I know. I got the best price you absolutely can get, but I have paid for the bike."

It’s not uncommon for riders to sell or donate their clothing and spare equipment from previous seasons to clear out space for new kit, and I wondered if Borgström had used this to generate some income.

"According to my contract, they can ask for everything back. Usually they don't want old clothes and stuff like that back, but they could ask in theory. I tried to donate as much as possible to people that need it," she said.

What to do next

Despite no longer having a pro contract at only 24, Borgström clearly still had a real passion for racing her bike. Towards the end of 2025, she was offered a ride on a club-level team in Belgium, Kassein Feits Huis. Belgian law stipulates that club-level teams cannot pay their riders, so she was racing without a salary.

"My savings account is taking a big hit," she said. "I was preparing myself to close the chapter of racing. I got over the shame, and then I realised that the only thing that's left is just being sad because I wasn't allowed to race my bike anymore. That was where Jess and Jake called [owners/managers of Kassein Feits Huis]."

From the outside, the step down from the WorldTour to a club-level team appears severe, but Borgström was humble and honest in her outlook.

"At first I thought, 'No, I can't, I can't do that. I cannot go to a team house anymore. That chapter is done.' And then every time I spoke to them, I just had this really, really good feeling in my gut. It was the first time I’d spoken to someone in so long and felt like I really wanted to race for them."

Although she wouldn’t be receiving payment, she was presented with an opportunity to keep racing.

"I had a chat with my partner, and I looked at how long I can survive out of my savings. How much could we actually do? We realised that I can get one season out of my savings. We decided that we will give it one more year and see what happens."

She spent the start of 2026 splitting her time between Meulebeke in Belgium, where the team is based, and her home in Sweden, paying for all her own flights and travel and coming across for a month or so at a time to compete in kermesse races, and the occasional UCI race against her former colleagues.

Borgström was still represented by The Team, formerly Wasserman – the same agency that manages the likes of Julian Alaphilippe, Lotte Kopecky, and dozens more top-level riders – in the hope that, through consistent racing on the Belgian circuit, she could find a space on a UCI team once more - a hope that’s backed by her contract at Kassein. "As long as it’s a move to a team at a level higher than this, I can break my contract if I’m offered one elsewhere."

As it turned out, that chance came along soon after our conversation. Borgström was offered a contract with Norwegian high-level Continental outfit Hitec Products-Fluid Control, based in her native Scandinavia, and she officially joined their ranks on Tuesday. It's not quite a return to the WorldTour, but it will give her opportunities to race higher-level races and access to equipment and resources that she doesn't have to pay for herself.

Despite this chance, and a contract for the rest of 2026, when we spoke, Borgström was still thinking ahead to the future and the possibility of a life without bike racing, having come face to face with the precarity of this sport once already.

"I am studying a little bit to get my grades up to apply for university. It's not taking away any time from my cycling, so the training I do is actually the same as I would have done if I was still a WorldTour pro," she explained.

"In Sweden, you get paid to study, or you can take a loan, so studying means a really, really small income, which is also why I'm hoping to get into a university at the end of the season, because that will also mean that I have a small salary. I'm really trying to get some money in as well, but getting prize money is proving to be a bit harder than I thought."

The difference mindset makes

Borgström's passion for racing remains, and it’s clear that – despite the financial challenges – her heart is set on the road, whilst some other athletes are turning to gravel racing and the privateer lifestyle.

"I was a bit naive in searching for sponsors because I was really hoping to get on a Conti team or something right up until the last minute at the end of 2025, and I didn't want to bring on a sponsor and then have to cancel it later if it conflicted with a potential team sponsor," she explained.

"I've done one gravel race, and I really loved that. But comparing how much I love road racing to how fun it is racing the gravel, I really want to race road. For me, the cool thing about cycling is the tactics and understanding the game, and positioning in the bunch is one of my traits that I actually am quite proud of. Road is where my big passion in cycling lies."

However, in a bittersweet twist of fate, the acceleration in growth of women’s cycling could be more of a hindrance than a help for riders who find themselves in Borgström's situation.

"I think women's cycling is growing so fast that if you struggle with your health or if you have a problem, no one can wait for you," she said.

Two things really struck me throughout my conversation with Borgström. Firstly, her incredibly calm, pragmatic demeanour about the realities of being left without a job and the struggle of trying to forge a career in bike racing with the odds stacked against her. She was incredibly professional with how she approached the situation, which is a testament to her quality as a pro rider.

Secondly, her obvious passion for racing and ability to still find joy in the sport that would have left others jaded and maybe even bitter were they in her shoes. It's probably down to this outlook and determination that she was able to do what all free agents are trying to do: find a new team, no matter how late in the season.

"It's really cool to be in races having no clue what I'm doing anymore and trying to figure that out together with my teammates. It's also really scary because I know how to race a WorldTour or a UCI race, but I have no idea how to race an interclub or a kermesse," she said.

"It's quite inspiring to be reminded of the early days of elite racing where you didn't know how to race, and you learned. I think mentally for me it's been really important to focus on where I am at the moment and trying to see it as I'm here for this one year. If something else happens, we will take it when that comes – but that's not a problem for now."

Professional cycling finds itself in a fairly unique situation when it comes to environmental sustainability. There are no stadiums to power, no pitches to maintain and the bicycle itself is increasingly promoted as a method of low-carbon mobility. Yet the reality of the modern WorldTour, with its sprawling logistics, global calendar and a continued reliance on sponsorship linked to fossil fuels, tells a more complicated story.

Race organisers are facing growing scrutiny. Pressure is coming from multiple directions: governing bodies' targets, teams working towards net-zero commitments, and a fanbase that is increasingly aware of their sport's environmental impact. For much of its recent history, the professional side of cycling has leaned on its obvious connection to cycling as a low-carbon activity. That position is becoming harder to defend.

As other sports begin to make more coordinated progress, not only in reducing emissions but in influencing fan lifestyle behaviours, Cyclingnews explores what professional race organisers are doing today and what they could learn from other sporting events.

What is being done already?

One of the most visible and measurable shifts across professional cycling has come through the electrification of the race convoy. The sheer number of vehicles following a WorldTour race has long been one of its defining images and increasingly, one of its most scrutinised.

The clearest benchmark is the Arctic Race of Norway, which has emerged as a testbed for what electrified race logistics might look like. Since 2023, the race has operated with a fully electric fleet of support vehicles, covering everything from team cars to race officials. Around 120 to 130 electric vehicles are deployed, supported by temporary charging infrastructure that travels with the event.

Crucially, the organiser provides teams with these vehicles. That not only ensures consistency across the fleet but also removes the need to transport team cars into what is, geographically, one of the more remote races on the calendar. It is a small but significant intervention that highlights the influence organisers can exert when they control the logistics.

There are caveats. The model relies on sufficient charging infrastructure and on ensuring that electricity supply does not simply shift emissions elsewhere through diesel-powered generators. According to a recent report, 95.9% of all new Norwegian passenger cars bought in 2025 were electric and therefore, Norway's position as a global leader in electric vehicle adoption gives the race a natural advantage. However, expanding charging networks across Europe suggests this model may become easier to replicate in the coming years.

Elsewhere, progress has been more incremental. Many of the sport's biggest races, including all three Grand Tours, have introduced a mix of electric and hybrid vehicles through manufacturer partnerships. But details remain vague, making it difficult to assess how far the transition has really gone.

For now, hybridisation appears to be a stepping stone rather than an end point. As fully electric vehicles become more viable across longer distances, the expectation is that combustion engines will gradually be phased out. The pace of that transition, however, remains uncertain.

Another element that organisers have within their control is the distance race routes cover and the length of transfers during stage races. The Tour de Suisse is one of the more progressive events in this area. Organisers have explored shorter stages and a more compact format, alongside plans to align men's and women's events. The logic is straightforward with fewer transfers, shared infrastructure and less duplication. It is a relatively simple adjustment and not environmentally motivated per se, but one that points towards a more efficient model.

Elsewhere, similar efficiencies already exist. Many of the sport's biggest one-day races, from Paris–Roubaix to Strade Bianche, effectively share infrastructure across men's and women's events. Whether driven by logistics, cost or broadcast considerations, the environmental benefits are a by-product rather than the primary aim.

At the other end of the spectrum sit the Grand Tours. Their global reach, from foreign Grand Départs - highlighted in the last week by the Giro d'Italia's Bulgarian start - to increasingly extreme stage locations, remains central to their appeal, but also raises questions. Long transfers are a routine part of modern stage racing, and while teams are restricted in how they move between stages, it is not uncommon for support staff, equipment and race infrastructure to rely on air travel.

There is also a growing conversation around where races take place. Mountain stages often produce many of a stage race's defining images, but they can take place in environmentally sensitive regions. Research into the impact of large-scale sporting events in alpine areas has highlighted pressures on fragile ecosystems, particularly when large numbers of spectators travel to remote locations. Race organisers have made efforts to mitigate this by creating green zones for riders, deploying clean-up crews once the race has passed, and imposing restrictions on vehicle access, but the tension remains.

A middle ground may be possible in most situations. Few would push for the removal of iconic summit finishes, but there is scope to rethink how spectators access them. Transport hubs in nearby towns or cities could act as gateways, with public transport provision helping limit the number of vehicles on sensitive climbs. Other sports have experimented with offering free public transport to ticket holders, such as both of the most recent men's and women's UEFA Euro 2024 & 2025 tournaments; although road cycling's free-to-attend roadside model makes this more challenging. Without ticketing, any incentive scheme would need to be free to all on the day.

Beyond individual races, the structure of the calendar itself comes into focus. On paper, cycling already follows a loose geographic flow: early-season racing in Australia and the Middle East, a European core through spring and summer, before a shift towards North America and Asia later in the year. In practice, however, teams often criss-cross continents in search of ranking points, especially those sitting below WorldTour level. This is less an issue for individual organisers than for the sport's governing structure. A more coordinated calendar could reduce travel demands significantly. Other sports have begun to move in this direction. In motorsport, recent calendar reforms in Formula One have grouped races into regional blocks; while Extreme E has gone as far as using its own dedicated ship, the St. Helena, to transport the cars, equipment and series infrastructure by sea from round to round.

Cycling's greatest power (and responsibility?)

Whilst race organisers can influence how events are run, their greatest impact may lie elsewhere, in how they influence people to travel in their everyday lives.

Few sports are as closely tied to a real-world solution as cycling. The same machine used in competition is also one of the most accessible forms of low-carbon transport. The opportunity, then, is obvious. To use the platform of professional racing to shift everyday behaviour.

The 2023 UCI Cycling World Championships offered a glimpse of what that might look like in practice. In the build-up, organisers developed a 'Power of the Bike' strategy that positioned the event as more than elite sport, with a clear focus on participation and everyday cycling. The results were notable. Post-event data suggested that 82 per cent of visitors travelled via active modes, while 79 per cent of surveyed Scottish residents said they intended to cycle more.

It is a rare example of a cycling event measuring its influence beyond the race itself. Without clear targets or data, it becomes difficult to separate genuine impact from well-intentioned messaging. Glasgow 2023 demonstrated a more deliberate approach, one that could be replicated elsewhere and embedded into event strategies, key performance indicators and even sponsor agreements.

For a sport built around the bicycle, the potential reach is enormous. The question is whether organisers are prepared to treat behavioural change not as a by-product of racing, but as a central objective.

Turning fans into participants

Other sports have begun to move beyond simply reducing their own footprint and are instead focusing on influencing their audiences' behaviour. Football has started to treat fans not just as spectators, but as participants in climate action.

Initiatives such as Green Football Weekend are built around that idea. Supporters are encouraged to make practical changes, from how they travel to what they eat, with their actions tracked and converted into measurable impact. Fans effectively compete on behalf of their clubs, earning points and climbing league tables, often with incentives such as match tickets, a signed shirt or other prizes.

The model taps into both competition and collective identity. It has also attracted coverage and attention from TNT and Sky Sports, albeit not without criticism. Questions around greenwashing persist, and the long-term impact of such campaigns is difficult to quantify. Even so, the shift in approach is commendable.

Cycling, arguably, is better placed than most to adopt a similar model. Spectators are already embedded within the landscape of the race, often arriving on foot or by bike. Yet there is little in the way of coordinated, large-scale activation. The opportunity is there, but largely untapped.

Making sustainability part of the competition

Sailing offers a different, but equally pioneering, example. SailGP has introduced an 'Impact League' that runs alongside its racing series, embedding sustainability directly into the competitive structure.

Teams are awarded points based on a range of criteria, including emissions reduction, waste management and community engagement. Performances are independently assessed and publicly ranked, with prize money and prestige up for grabs. While separate from the racing standings, the system creates a clear incentive for teams to consider environmental sustainability seriously.

The principle is transferable. A framework that rewards measurable environmental progress, whether through UCI points, prize money or rankings, would mark a significant shift from the current approach largely reliant upon morality.

The sponsorship question

Professional cycling continues to rely heavily on partners with links to fossil fuels. Seven teams in the 2025 Tour de France were sponsored by companies or nation-states tied to fossil fuel production. The race's organisers, ASO, entered a partnership with TotalEnergies for the 2026 edition, a company whose annual carbon emissions are roughly equivalent to those of the entire United Kingdom. The contradiction is difficult to ignore. A sport centred on the bicycle, often framed as a solution to low-carbon transport, remains financially tied to some of the world's worst polluters.

Cycling, like many other sports, finds itself in a tricky situation. Accept the fossil fuel sponsorship money and continue the status quo, or pass it up and risk not being able to find another willing sponsor. Australian gas giant Santos has seen its title sponsorship of the Tour Down Under come under fire in recent months, but this criticism appears to have been brushed aside. In contrast, Tennis Australia ended its sponsorship agreement with the fossil fuel company in 2022 after just one year as a result of a targeted anti-sportswashing campaign on social media. Likewise, in a similar vein, ExxonMobil were reportedly turned down by the English Rugby Union to the tune of £2.5m. Some may read this and wonder why British Cycling didn't do the same when it came to entering a long-term partnership with Shell in 2023. These decisions remain the exception rather than the rule, but they point to a shifting landscape.

The bike is a clear climate solution, but the authenticity of this message quickly collapses if the sponsors and their values contradict this. It is difficult to promote cycling as sustainable mobility when sponsorship values appear to pull in the opposite direction.

Where does all this leave us?

It is fair to question whether it is the responsibility of race organisers to drive this change in the first place. The UCI has set emissions reduction targets for both itself and WorldTour teams, but events have avoided the same level of scrutiny. The largest organisers, like ASO, will soon be, or are already, required to measure and disclose their emissions by European legislation, albeit yet to be required by law to reduce emissions.

However, events are already being affected by the climate crisis. The Santos Tour Down Under is very much the proverbial canary in the cage, with extreme heat and wildfire risk regularly shaping the race and forcing stage modifications, as it did this year with the removal of Willunga Hill on Stage 4. Similarly, an academic study published earlier this year concluded that dangerous heat for the Tour de France is only a matter of time, as summers in Europe grow hotter. It's not just the heat that races will need to worry about, either. More extreme and unpredictable wind, rain and snowfall can jeopardise the safe passage of races at worst and, at best, make it a miserable day out for spectators and riders alike.

In that context, the role of organisers becomes harder to ignore. Events sit at the centre of the sport. They are its most visible expression and, in many cases, the point at which its environmental impact is most concentrated. While teams, governing bodies and sponsors all have a role to play, organisers retain significant control over logistics, route design and delivery.

There is also an opportunity. Few sports are as closely linked to a well-known climate solution as cycling. That gives its events a chance not only to reduce their own impact, but to influence behaviour more widely. Whether they choose to take this opportunity may help define the sport's trajectory in the years ahead.

For the 15th time in its 109 editions, the Giro d'Italia will start on foreign soil in 2026, this time heading east to the Balkan nation of Bulgaria. A surprising choice at first glance, and this has not been a Grande Partenza without challenges, but Bulgaria is a nation with a history in the sport as long as the Giro itself.

With its Black Sea coastal plains to the east and high mountains to the west, Bulgaria will provide a varied opening three stages to kick off the Giro d'Italia, but the story of this start goes far beyond the route itself.

The 2026 Giro d'Italia will begin some 1,400km east of where it finishes in Rome, in the historic town of Nessebar, known as the ‘Pearl of the Black Sea’. The peloton will travel a short distance down the coast to Burgas on the opening day, where a sprinter can be expected to pull on the first maglia rosa before the race cuts inland towards the hills and finishes its Bulgarian appetiser in the capital of Sofia.

There's plenty of racing excitement surrounding this particular Grande Partenza, but there has also been a fair share of controversy and instability off the road; from an unhappy dispute over team participation fees to a political crisis in Bulgaria and a cycling federation in turmoil.

Ahead of the international peloton and media descending on Nessebar this week, Cyclingnews set out to investigate how the Giro got here, what it means for Bulgaria, and the impact of the complications along the way.

Team dissatisfaction threatened to derail Bulgarian start

There is an increasing trend in professional cycling of Grand Tours choosing to stage starts abroad more and more regularly, with organisers often pocketing significant sums from national governments for the privilege. Bulgaria is the Giro’s eighth foreign start since 2010.

Bulgaria is inexperienced when it comes to hosting major sporting events, and the Giro will be the first cycling race above UCI .2 level ever to be staged in the country. The 2018 Men’s World Championships in volleyball is the biggest sporting event held in the country over the last decade. There was some concern about whether the Bulgarians would be able to pull the Grande Partenza off, but all signs from Sofia are sounding positive.

"Last year, when the talks were in [an] advanced phase, I was not concerned, but I was also not so sure if Bulgaria could host this kind of event and such a big event like the Giro d'Italia," Bulgarian cycling commentator Simeon Kichukov told Cyclingnews, fresh from a four-day press trip held by Giro organisers RCS to show off the organisation of the event.

"The last four days, I'm very impressed with the readiness, the motivation of the people and their passion to do it. In every municipality, in every small town, they know about the Giro. They try to tell the people to be ready."

While the organisation of the Grande Partenza itself appears to be in place, several other major issues have threatened to thwart its success over the last year, including a dispute between teams and RCS.

Whenever a Grand Tour start takes place outside of the race’s host country, race organisers will offer teams a one-off participation fee in order to cover the additional costs of travel for each squad’s growing armada of vehicles and staff. That fee is usually in the region of €50,000. However, according to reports by Escape Collective, additional travel outgoings for this Grande Partenza have led teams to request participation fees more than triple the normal amount.

The challenge for teams, according to Escape Collective, is that with more than 1,000 kilometres between stage 3’s finish in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia and stage 4’s start in Catanzaro in the south of Italy, teams require two fleets of vehicles to be able to compete in the race – one to cover the three days in Bulgaria, and another for the rest of the Giro – adding to the overall cost and potentially forcing some teams to withdraw from other races taking place at the same time.

Cyclingnews understands that the AIGCP, the International Association of Professional Cycling Teams, has engaged in negotiations with RCS Sport since the start of the year in an attempt to secure a more appropriate participation fee to cover the costs.

The AIGCP’s Managing Director, Marc Chovelon, told Cyclingnews that teams had "requested financial support to help offset the major impacts" of the Grande Partenza. The AIGCP and RCS were able to come to an arrangement, but according to Chovelon, the final figure "fell below the level requested by the majority of our teams," leaving many of the Giro’s squads unhappy and out of pocket, though they are all expected to start the race.

Political turmoil, inside and outside cycling

Adding to the issues surrounding this Grand Tour start has been Bulgaria’s state of political insecurity, which dates back three decades but came to a head in the last few months.

In December, the sitting Bulgarian government collapsed after a wave of anti-corruption protests in which 100,000 people lined the streets of the country’s biggest cities in a show of opposition to the government.

On April 19, just three weeks ahead of the start of the Giro, Bulgaria held its eighth snap election in five years, illustrating the political crisis that grips this nation. Unexpectedly, and for the first time in 29 years, one party won an overall majority, possibly bringing to an end a long period of political uncertainty.

The Giro itself was far from being in danger; however, the government's collapse would have caused nervousness for the race organisation and teams alike.

While things are settling on the political front nationally, the same cannot be said for Bulgaria’s national cycling governing body. Last year, both the president and vice president of the Bulgarian Cycling Federation were fined and suspended by the UCI’s Ethics Commission. Both President Evgeniy Gerganov and Vice President Danail Angelov were found by the commission to be in breach of several articles of the UCI’s Code of Ethics.

A UCI statement in August 2025 said that both Gerganov and Angelov had been guilty of "abuse of authority due to repeated actions aimed at consolidating personal control over the National Federation, in particular, by modifying internal structures and retaliating against opponents, and, generally, placing their own interests above the applicable rules."

Both were also found to have breached conflicts of interest and engaged in verbal assault and intimidation, while Angelov additionally modified start lists to grant undue advantages to certain athletes. Gerganov was fined CHF 10,000 and Angelov CHF 5,000, and both were suspended from any involvement with the Bulgarian Cycling Federation for two years.

The incident has had an impact on Bulgarian cycling, with sponsors pulling out support for the federation. The pair have been temporarily replaced by other sitting members of the Bulgarian Cycling Federation Council, with permanent replacements being sought.

All negotiations for the Giro took place between RCS and the previous national government, with the federation only playing a small part in the organisation of the three stages.

"It was a big, big hit for the reputation of Bulgarian cycling," said Kichukov. "It's not a good image, and it could make problems in the future… We still don't know when the Tour of Bulgaria will be and in which cities it will come."

"The [temporary replacements] are good professionals, but they're limited by some factors, like a lack of money. The federation itself doesn't have the power to transform everything, but I know that the people love cycling," Kichukov added, hoping that fresh leadership and the impact of the Giro can begin a new dawn for cycling in Bulgaria.

‘This will have a positive benefit for Bulgarian cycling’

All that said, Bulgaria has a long and storied cycling tradition which belies its current status in the sport. The Balkans’ easternmost nation’s cycling federation is one of the world’s oldest, founded in 1902.

In 1909, the same year of the first Giro, there are records of Bulgaria’s earliest road race named the Tour of Vitosha, which took place in the mountainous region south of Sofia. The Tour of Bulgaria was founded in 1924, and remains one of the longest-running stage races anywhere in the world.

Despite its long history in the sport, Bulgaria has never produced cyclists of the very highest levels, and there are no current Bulgarian professional riders at WorldTour or ProTeam level. Only one rider from the country has ever competed in a Grand Tour: Nikolay Mihaylov, who raced the Giro d’Italia in 2015 as part of the Polish CCC Sprandi Polkowice team. Nentcho Christov is perhaps the nation’s most successful cyclist in its history, as the winner of the Peace Race in 1957.

"Bulgaria has a rich history in cycling," Kichukov said. "It’s not like countries like Belgium or Spain, but from between the countries in this region, Eastern Europe, we were one of the best."

There may be a long tradition of cycling in Bulgaria, but the sport lags behind football and other sports in popularity. Traffic and negative attitudes towards cyclists on the roads also hold the sport back.

Prominent figures within the Bulgarian cycling community are hopeful that the Giro’s visit will have a positive impact.

"It was unexpected for me to start [the Giro] from Bulgaria, but I'm really happy this is happening and I think this will have a positive benefit for Bulgarian cycling as well," said Martin Papanov, the 2022 men’s national road race champion. "Cycling could become a little bit more popular in Bulgaria and maybe the drivers will be a little bit more patient when they see some cyclists on the road."

"A lot of people start asking me, ‘What is this Giro d'Italia? What's happening in our country?' They're curious about the race," Papanov added.

A varied route from the Black Sea to Sofia

The route for the first three days of the 2026 Giro d’Italia will show off the country’s vast array of differing landscapes, with a mixture of riders potentially able to grab some glory.

The opening day will be one for the sprinters, taking in a beautiful stretch of Black Sea coastline around some of Bulgaria’s most popular holiday destinations. The roads are familiar to Papanov, who previously raced for a team based in the city of Nessebar. He suggests that under the correct conditions, the opening stage could pose questions.

"I'm excited to see the first stage. It is nearby the coast. I used to ride there and I know that it is always windy so it could be interesting, but depends on how the peloton decides to ride," he said.

Stage 2 will head west and inland for a hilly 221km from Burgas to Veliko Tarnovo with three categorised climbs, the final one finishing with 11km to go before a drag to the line. Several technical descents will make this stage one to be aware of.

The third and final stage in Bulgaria goes between the country’s two biggest cities, Plovdiv and Sofia. It’s on this day that the Grande Partenza will reach its highest peak, the Borovets Pass. This climb reaches up to 1,334 metres of altitude with a maximum gradient of 11%. Its distance from the line means that fireworks are unlikely, but it will provide one final display of what cycling in Bulgaria has to offer. "I'm looking forward to seeing what will happen there," said Papanov, who knows the Borovets Pass well.

Against significant headwinds, both on and off the road, the Giro’s Grande Partenza in Bulgaria will set the scene for the season's first three-week race, as Jonas Vingegaard sets out on his quest to claim all three Grand Tours.

This is a Grand Tour start that many will be puzzled at how it happened at all, but scratch below the surface and there is plenty to be intrigued by on the roads between Nessbar and Sofia.

Data. It’s a big, all-encompassing buzzword that is everywhere you turn in cycling nowadays, controlling the narrative and generating discussion. Power passports, GPS trackers, and even Tadej Pogačar inadvertently – or deliberately? – sharing his power files on Strava. Numbers are everywhere.

But this proliferation of data is causing a problem. Or better said, numerous problems, spawning ever more political footballs. Something that ought to be relatively uncomplex – harvest the data, crunch it into something digestible, and then use it to enhance understanding of performance or the storytelling of a race – is being bogged down by concerns over ownership, privacy and fears over who would profit from monetising it. Data is now even being used to find possible dopers.

A really quite geeky area of technology is blowing up into one of cycling’s trickiest dilemmas for both the sport’s governors and protagonists. The expectation is that things aren’t going to be settled any time soon.

What is data?

Over the past two decades, especially as cycling computers and wearables like sports watches have become ubiquitous, performance data has evolved from laboratory figures mostly available only to the professionals to something that every single amateur now has easy access to.

Power numbers, heart rate and cadence are data points that form the basis of objectively analysing performance, with heart rate variability, glucose monitoring and analysis of sleep considered as the next step-up in performance metrics. Then there are more advanced data points that tend to only concern professional athletes or the most hardcore of racing amateurs: coefficient of aerodynamic drag (CdA) and rolling resistance of tyres.

More basic than any of the above is location, better known as GPS data: where a rider is physically at – it's so simple, but it's causing one of the biggest headaches right now. But before we get into that, Cyclingnews has seen a copy of a rider contract from a WorldTour team which highlights what a rider’s ‘personal data’ refers to. Beyond generic identity and contact information, data includes “laboratory test results for evaluation of physical potential, race data through platforms like TrainingPeaks and Strava and 3D Scanning results to evaluate aerodynamic potential.”

Medical data is also listed, but can only be collected and processed by the team and the UCI, cycling’s governing body, if it’s “pertinent to the rider’s health and necessary for the purpose of the ‘Programme of obligatory tests for UCI medical monitoring’ – the objective of which is to safeguard the health and safety of riders.”

Who owns data?

Who owns all this data depends on each individual team. “A lot of rider contracts hand data over to the team so the teams own all of the data,” said Adam Hansen, the president of the riders’ union, the CPA. “But if data is not signed across, then riders own their private data.”

Ask a rider who owns their data, though, and they’ll likely not know. “The sad thing is most riders aren’t interested,” Hansen laments. “Some care, but most aren’t aware who owns their data.” To illustrate the point, UAE Team Emirates-XRG’s Pavel Sivakov – one of a few elite riders who openly and regularly shares his power files online to the masses – said: “I’m not so sure if the team completely owns my data or not.”

This probably shouldn’t be viewed as naive on the riders’ part – it’s more representative of the fact that riders have no reason to believe that teams would exploit their data or use it maliciously. After all, they’re paid employees. Indeed, Sivakov said that “it’s not really a topic. What riders are more concerned about is privacy, in that you don’t want people to see where you live via Strava.”

That aforementioned contract (similar to most other WorldTour contracts but not replicated across the board) states that the team “uses personal data for the purpose of reviewing and evaluating the rider’s physical potential.” It adds that the team will “process and store the personal data securely, for no longer than necessary… and in no event longer than the duration of this contract.”

Crucially, a rider can remove consent “at any time” and can “object to the paying agent [team - ed] using their personal data for direct marketing purposes”. They can also request that their data be restricted or that the team delete the data. In summary, the rider gives teams access to and ownership of their data, but they have the ultimate authority on whether that data is used.

As in certain broadcasts of races, it’s not uncommon for a rider’s speed, cadence, and power to be shown on TV. This is only possible with a small 60-gram device from Velon – an organisation owned by nine teams. Each of the 15 WorldTeams and the number of ProTeams who have an agreement with Velon consent to the use of “live power data” (power figures) on behalf of the rider, and they – not anyone else, including the broadcaster – continue to own that data. ASO, the promoters of the Tour de France, have its own partnership with Capgemini, but their speeds are approximated using the following motorbikes.

How that data is monetised is a topic of debate within the sport. “It’s not that we don’t want data to be shared, we just want to be sure that the revenue goes to the right people,” Hansen said. “What we don’t want is for the organisers to supply the trackers, and then they own all the data and teams and riders are again on the back foot and not making money from it.” Sivakov concurs with Hansen. “If teams own our data, we don’t want to just give it away for free. It’s a way for the teams to earn some money, and some guys would be keen to do that.”

Who shares data?

Aside from the odd power file shared on TV, most riders don’t tend to make their performance data public information. Although most male and female WorldTour riders have public Strava accounts and upload files from racing and possibly training rides, most restrict what data is visible to location and speed.

The main reason for this is that riders – often at the request (or demand) of their employers – don’t wish to give away what could be termed ‘team secrets’. By publishing their physiological files, people can analyse their performance, look for signs of fatigue or weakness during a race setting that could dictate rival tactics, or pull apart a rider’s training plan.

For the most part, the risks of performance data being used advantageously by third parties (read: rival teams) are probably slightly overblown: training plans are mostly the same across the board with a few small exceptions, and it’s easy enough to estimate a rider’s watts per kilogram figures going off their speed and weight. But the fear of giving too much away certainly prevails.

Sivakov, along with a number of riders from EF Education-EasyPost like Ben Healy and Neilson Powless, does share his physiological data on Strava – though since this year, due "to team protocols", he only does so in races. “They don’t want everyone to copy or look too much into what we do [in training],” he explained.

“It’s a personal choice to make it open during races, and I don’t mind, really,” he said. “From my perspective, it’s a chance to show the amateurs and fans what it takes to be a pro, what type of power we are pushing, all that kind of stuff.”

The demand from fans for more transparency and to see rider data remains high, and there has long been a call in some quarters to use power files to determine possible cases of doping. This past winter, the International Testing Agency (ITA), the organisation that oversees anti-doping control in cycling and Olympic sports, began a two-year trial of a ‘power data passport’ with four WorldTour teams. But the initial response to the pilot scheme has been largely negative.

What is the power data passport?

Outlining the defence of its project, the ITA said that “power data is at the core of professional road cycling” and highlighted how it is routinely “scrutinised” by riders and fans alike. “Paradoxically,” the Switzerland-based organisation added, “the ITA does not have access to it.”

Its venture, therefore, is aimed at using data as a “supplementary [intelligence] tool to help identify potential indicators of doping.” It added that the tools, if deployed on a wide-scale basis at a later date, would “only be used if they prove to be reliable… The analysis is simply intended to highlight performance progressions or gains that fall outside the statistically expected ‘normal’ range for that rider and compared with their peers.”

If anomalies were found in the data, a rider wouldn’t be sanctioned for doping as there “may be entirely legitimate reasons for their performance change,” but rather the ITA would “follow up by reviewing additional data” to build a more complete picture of whether a rider is potentially using performance-enhancing substances and methods.

CPA president Hansen is strictly against power data passports. “Speak to any mechanic, and they’ll tell you how unreliable power meters are – some brands can be 10% off. And now we’re using this unbelievably unreliable device to monitor possible doping,” he fumed.

Hypothetically speaking, if the accuracy of power meters was improved to within one per cent, would Hansen support the passport’s rollout? “Even if it’s super reliable, what then happens if a rider forgets to upload their training ride? They [the ITA] might think if I’ve not uploaded my data for two days, I must be cheating, but the reality can be so different. It’s not the rider going against the system, but there could be multiple factors why they’ve not uploaded the data. You also need the coaching plan to go alongside the data, and all other details to make sure the power files are in line.”

Sivakov is also not in favour, for similar reasons. “There’s always a margin of error with power meters – sometimes an overreading, other times an underreading. That’s why it doesn’t make sense,” the Frenchman said. “If someone is good in training, it doesn't matter – it only matters in races. If a guy is suddenly performing out of their normal range, you see it during the race; you don’t need power files to see that kind of stuff.

“It’s not like we’ve got something to hide. But what you’d need is for everyone to have the same power meter and to use that same device throughout the whole season. I think they’re looking in the wrong place. There are better issues to think about in cycling at the moment.”

Nevertheless, Hansen fears that the ITA, with the blessing of the UCI, will push for this project to become mandatory at the end of the trial period. “I really believe they’re going to do this,” he said.

What’s the latest on GPS trackers?

The other contentious matter right now relates to GPS trackers. Not because riders don’t agree that they are necessary for safety purposes. They do, especially since the tragic death of Muriel Furrer at the 2024 World Championships. “We should have them and the technology is there – it’s not something crazy,” Sivakov said.

So what’s the issue? Politics, of course. Or partly. ASO uses the most reliable location tracking device from a coverage point of view at the Tour de France, but its system of requiring a high-altitude plane to transmit an uninterrupted signal at all times is the most expensive, said to cost €500,000 over the course of a three-week Grand Tour. That can clearly not be rolled out across all WorldTour races where organisers already face a battle just to break even.

Velon’s SAVE system, as well as the UCI’s own device, relies on mobile phone coverage that can be patchy in the mountains, but they are far cheaper to operate and have been successfully used at a number of races in the past year.

In March, the UCI said that it would make the use of GPS trackers mandatory in the near future (without setting out a timeline), calling on all stakeholders to present possible options. At present, 15 of the 18 men’s WorldTour teams use the Velon device, but the UCI said that “if a reasonable and satisfactory solution is not accepted by all stakeholders in the context of our upcoming discussion, the UCI will have no option but to enforce effective GPS tracking for the safety of the riders as shall be deemed the most appropriate.”

“All we do is talk about it, but we don’t do anything,” Hansen said. “This prompted the UCI to send this letter to say we have to work on it. Some teams are saying that they control what they put on their bikes, but this shouldn’t block safety. It should be possible for teams to decide what tracking system they use. Every rider has to submit [their] location, and if they want to submit heart rate and power too, they can. All the CPA wants is for riders to be tracked.”

What’s the future?

Guessing how these various ongoing debates will be settled is a brave man’s game – cycling politics is notoriously complicated and fiercely divided. GPS trackers will likely have to be mandatorily installed on every rider’s bike within the next year, but what system – or systems – will be used is up for discussion.

Will riders and teams profit from selling their data? TeamCo, the latest team-led attempt at economic reform, certainly hopes to do so, with its leaders believing that rider power and heart rate data can significantly enhance the broadcast spectacle. The likelihood, however, is that the landscape remains fragmented, with no universal strategy imposed.

It’s often said that amateur and professional riders alike shouldn’t get too hung up on the numbers and data, and let their training and racing be more influenced by how they feel. It’s a piece of advice that the sport’s governors could do with heeding, too. They’re stuck in various quagmires over something seemingly so easy to solve: make GPS trackers mandatory, and let riders and teams profit from selling their own personal data. In cycling, though, nothing is ever straightforward. Not even a bunch of easily understandable numbers on a screen.

How do you grow the sport of cycling and improve its overall appeal? That's the question that cycling's governing body, the UCI, is currently trying to answer.

In a bid to take cycling to the next level and achieve "greater stability, more growth and improved overall appeal," according to UCI president David Lappartient, a consultation process was recently launched, inviting contributions and proposals from stakeholders across the sport by April 30.

Anticipating the UCI's reform process, Cyclingnews has taken it upon itself to kick off the debate on some of cycling's most pressing issues and offer suggestions on how to revolutionise pro cycling, with inspiration from other professional sports and speaking to some of the most progressive voices within cycling.

Be sure to read part one of this deep dive feature here.

The sport's overall governance, potential benefits of budget caps, and the power of the Tour de France were all discussed, with input from EF Pro Cycling boss Jonathan Vaughters and insight from F1 and soccer on developments that cycling could strive towards.

For the second part of our in-depth analysis, the spotlight is on racing schedules, rider safety and fan engagement, and how changes to all three could drastically benefit cycling.

Improving the race calendar, improving the narrative for new fans

The 2026 UCI WorldTour men's calendar comprises 36 races across 13 countries and four continents, spanning 168 days of racing from January in Australia to late October in China. It includes three-week Grand Tours, stage races and 21 one-day races of varying importance and prestige. The Women's WorldTour includes many of the same races, totalling 77 days of racing, with the three Grand Tours lasting between seven and nine days.

Underneath that are lower-level races around the globe, with teams constantly chasing success, sponsor visibility, and UCI ranking points to survive, despite the risk of rider burnout and an often illogical narrative to follow.

"I think the calendar definitely has to be refined," former rider turned gravel privateer and respected blogger Michael Woods told Cyclingnews.

"From a narrative perspective, you want the best racers to be at the best races as much as possible. I want to watch Tadej Pogačar race against Mathieu van der Poel, and Demi Vollering against Kasia Niewiadoma. I want to see them battling regularly and on different terrain, as opposed to them doing separate races programmes and only clashing perhaps at the Tour de France or a few Classics."

Cyclingnews understands that the One Cycling project included a calendar strategy where teams would send their best riders to specific races, so that the sport's big stars competed in 70% of the biggest races.

Other sports have far better seasonal narratives due to far simpler formats and calendars.

Professional tennis also has far too many tournaments and different playing surfaces for most fans to keep up with, but it has a logical structure and flow. Centred around the four Grand Slams, the calendar takes in the Australian summer and the sunshine states of the USA in the spring, before European clay and grass tournaments in the summer, including the French Open and Wimbledon. Then onto the US Open, before tournaments in East Asia and the end-of-season ATP and WTA Finals. Importantly, the biggest players frequently go head-to-head in the final rounds of the most prestigious tournaments.

The professional cycling calendar was built on similar traditions, but is now bloated and out of touch. It needs to change to reflect the demands of modern-day cycling and the fans.

Woods sees several reasons for major change and benefits for the sporting narrative. First of all, he would get rid of the battle for UCI ranking points and, in turn, the risk of relegation from the WorldTour.

"We should focus on the race winners, not the losers chasing points," Woods said.

"Riders are sprinting for 10th place, and that's creating a lot more stress and a lot more crashing. There's a never-ending pressure because of the need to score points.

"WorldTour races should be reserved for WorldTour riders. So there would be a reduced calendar, without the problems of lower-level one-day races offering more points than a Tour de France stage win," added Woods, keen to create a sport that is easier to follow and for new fans to understand.

'Sport is entertainment' and why fan engagement matters

Bas Tietema raced as a pro before building a cycling YouTube channel, which spiralled into the ProTeam Unibet Rose Rockets. Alongside his two co-owners, they have done more in three years to boost the appeal of pro cycling to a new, younger generation than some teams have in three decades.

Their team employs almost as many video and social media staff as it does riders. Their success, engagement with their fans, and visibility for their sponsors is not just about winning races. It takes fans behind the scenes and inside the team, offering a constant flow of content about the races, riders, and both their successes and failures.

When the US company Liberty Media bought Formula 1 in 2017, it began a similar but highly strategic revolution in F1, rejuvenating a sport focused on an older demographic and pay-per-view TV rights into a social media-driven, digital-first fan-engagement sport. Love it or hate it, the strategy is working, just look at how many other sports have launched documentary series, off the back of Netflix's 'Drive to Survive'. Cycling's 'Tour de France: Unchained' failed to reach similar heights.

In 2026, Apple TV opted to end its streaming of Major League Soccer (MLS) in the USA and instead became the US home of Formula 1 under a five-year deal worth approximately $750 million.

Pro Cycling arguably needs a similar reset or transformation if it is to attract a new generation of fans to replace those who fell in love with the sport in the 1960s in Europe, and, thanks to Lance Armstrong and Bradley Wiggins, in the USA and the UK.

"The fans in any sport are super important because, in my opinion, sport is entertainment, and you are doing it for the fans," Bas Tietema told Cyclingnews, his opinions as bright as the blue, purple and pink Unibet Rose Rockets jersey.

"Three of us own the team, and we're all between 30 and 35, so we've grown up with social media content and, of course, our YouTube channel. We try to project what we love about the sport to people like us."

Tietema has a clear business strategy and logic regarding what his team is doing. They took a risk by signing Dylan Groenwegen, but then secured sponsorship and created the visibility needed to make it economically viable.

They already have over 110,000 YouTube subscribers, a sign of the interest in the team and a measure of their value. Unibet Rose Rockets have more YouTube subscribers than the biggest WorldTour teams.

Similarly, the official Formula 1 YouTube channel has 14.5 million subscribers, while the Tour de France has just 626,000. Pro cycling can clearly do better and is missing out on social media, digital visibility and its value.

"We generate both external media value because a lot of people are interested in our team, and so the media report about us. Then we have the benefit of having our 'owned media' that we create and can control ourselves," Tietema said.

"I love how Tadej Pogačar, Mathieu van der Poel and Remco Evenepoel interact on social media. I think everyone, including a lot of potential new cycling fans, would love to see more of that," he continued.

Unibet Rose Rockets were surprisingly snubbed for a wild card invitation to this year's Tour de France, but are now scoring enough points to secure an automatic wildcard for 2027. However, they will make their Grand Tour debut at the Giro d'Italia in May, with Rose bikes becoming an RCS Sport race sponsor as part of a deal that will benefit both sides.

'We're boiling the frog, people are getting injured without it being a major scandal'

Rider and race safety has become a major topic in recent years as the number of crashes and the apparent severity of rider injuries increase.

Professional cycling is held on open roads, in almost any weather, with riders taking risks to win, while dressed only in Lycra. Helmets were made obligatory after the tragic death of Andrei Kivilev at Paris-Nice in 2003, but two decades on, so much more can and should be done to protect the riders, who are arguably the stars of the show.

Cycling now has the SafeR project, but terrible crashes are still occurring, as we saw in the latest edition of the Milan-San Remo Women's race. Other dangerous sports have long put athlete safety first.

There were several Formula 1 driver deaths in the early days of the sport, but it has learned from the past to improve the designs of circuits and the cars to protect the drivers. Head and neck support (HANS) devices have become obligatory with structural Halo designs protecting the drivers if the cars flip over in a collision.

The Grand Prix Drivers' Association (GPDA) is very active in defending the rights and safety of the Formula 1 drivers, with Carlos Sainz elected as their new director. The GPDA has threatened to go on strike in the past regarding safety and often speaks out, such as on the crash risk posed by slow-moving drivers as they recharge the batteries of the new 2026 power unit.

The Cyclistes Professionnels Associés (CPA) represents pro riders, with their mission to "defend their interests, see their rights respected, and demand improved working conditions."

Australia's Adam Hansen was elected President in 2023 and has worked hard to try to improve rider contracts and safety, but some riders are still sceptical about the CPA and the idea of rider unity, and often come under pressure from their teams.

Jules Bianchi is the last Formula 1 driver to die from injuries sustained in a Grand Prix in 2015. Sadly, several cyclists have died in the last decade, including Muriel Fürrer at the 2024 Road World Championships and Gino Mäder at the 2023 Tour de Suisse. Each time the sport promises to do more, but the intrinsic risks remain high.

Last year, Woods was critical of the Tour de France using crashes in video content to 'sell the drama' of pro cycling. He is supportive of Hansen's work and the SafeR projects, but believes cycling can improve safety as other sports have done.

"The tacit acceptance of injury in the sport is insane," Woods pointed out.

"In every race I raced or now watch, somebody has a cataclysmic crash, with at least one person going to the hospital. In pro cycling, if you just suffer road rash in a crash, you're expected to continue the race. In what other work environment does that happen in modern-day life? It's insane.

"We're boiling the frog; people are getting injured without it being a major scandal. It's actually crazy.

"Rider contracts are so precarious that they fight for every result and so every inch of the road," he added.

"That creates less stability and so less respect in the peloton. There is also less unity, and so riders are less willing to protest together to make the UCI and race organisers improve safety."

Woods believes reducing the size of the peloton is a way to improve race safety. The current UCI rules allow a 176-rider peloton, with 184 riders (23 teams of 8 riders) permitted to race in Grand Tours.

"I think we should reduce field sizes by reducing team sizes. Why not have 20 teams of six riders in WorldTour races? A 120-rider peloton would, in theory, be safer," said Woods.

"Of course, safety is a tough issue. A lot of things also snuck up on race organisers and the sport. No one could have anticipated how much road infrastructure and road furniture would change in the last 20 years and how much that would impact cycling. Global warming is moving incredibly fast, and it's hard for the sport to adapt to that too."

Woods hopes the riders will soon stand up more for their own safety, as we have seen in Formula 1.

"I was really excited when I heard that airbags could soon be implemented. A lot needs to be done to make the sports safer, but it does take time to make these adjustments," he said.

The UCI reforms and a wider consideration of the dangers and values of the sport could lead to far better rider safety, so the sport protects its biggest assets: the riders who race out on the roads.

"I think everybody's got to work together, right?" Woods said. "Instead of competing against each other, everyone in the sport has got to come together and create some kind of new model or project, which benefits everybody, that makes the sport better for everyone.

"That way, pro cycling can compete with other sports for sponsorship and revenue and also attract new fans. It's a complex task to work out, but it is in everybody's benefit."

Professional cycling is a thrilling, entertaining sport, packed with drama and intrigue, contested by incredible athletes on spectacular roads and mountains around the world. Yet at the same time, it is often dangerous, financially precarious as a business and reluctant to innovate, living on its history rather than building a new future.

Many fans and those within the sport know that professional cycling must evolve or risk further decline. Various projects, ideas and reforms to every aspect of the sport have been proposed over the years, but divisions, power struggles and arguments have hindered change.

The UCI has recently launched a consultation process, with a stated aim to "develop the sector's organisational model in order to strengthen its long-term appeal."

"The consultation aims to bring together stakeholders of road cycling to reflect jointly on its evolution," UCI President David Lappartient said.

Last year, Lappartient and the sport's governing body blocked the One Cycling project, which aimed to shake up the sport by having several leading teams and race organisers unite to create new events and generate new revenue. Lappartient wants the UCI to control the reform process and, by extension, the future of pro cycling.

"It is only together, under the auspices of the UCI, that we will take our sport to the next level: for greater stability, more growth and improved overall appeal," the Frenchman said.

Cyclingnews understands that Lappartient's call-out for reform ideas was sent to over six thousand emails, entities, federations and members of the sport's official stakeholders (race organisers, teams and riders' associations) with a deadline of April 30 for contributions and proposals from across the sport.

Cyclingnews has decided to anticipate the UCI's reform process and kick off the debate by offering suggestions on how to make pro cycling better, by looking at what other sports have done.

Formula 1, North American sports like the NBA and NFL, professional tennis and soccer all have their own problems, but do not appear afraid of change. Importantly, they are run as sports-entertainment businesses, generating profits for their owners and generally satisfying the desire of new and old fans.

Of course, the pursuit of higher revenue and profit means someone has to pay, and that is usually the sport's fans. Professional cycling is seen as a free spectator sport, with a general reluctance to charge fans to watch a race from the roadside. Instead, cycling fans indirectly 'fund' the sport through advertising, broadcasting, buying the tech that teams use, and spending money on the local economy at races. Other sports are becoming increasingly expensive to follow, but cycling's business model and the power struggles slow the development of new revenue streams, while team budgets and riders' salaries increase year on year.

To understand what might come from this consultation process and how pro cycling can learn from other sports, across a two-part in-depth feature, Cyclingnews spoke to several stakeholders within the sport, all of whom are adamant that cycling needs to evolve if it wants to avoid being left behind.

"Sports are constantly evolving. Anybody who's a traditionalist and thinks we have to keep doing as we have always done is a fool," former rider turned gravel privateer and respected blogger Michael Woods told Cyclingnews.

"We need to realise that everything constantly changes, so we as a sport have to change too. If we don't evolve, then the sport will become a relic."

The importance of good governance

People often ask me why I write about the governance of professional cycling for Cyclingnews, suggesting it is boring and that nobody really cares about the sport's politics. "Nobody wants to see how the sausage is made" is an often-used idiom.

However, I believe they are the foundation on which the sport is built. If the sport's principles and rules are weak, the whole sport loses out and will never reach its full potential.

The UCI – which is part of the International Olympic Committee and benefits from Olympic Games profits – governs the whole sport, including professional cycling, and sets rules and regulations on everything from team sizes and the race calendar to sock height, rider contracts, and the sport's business model.

Most other major professional sports are run more like a business, with all key stakeholders serving as part-owners and investors in the project and commercial entity that runs the business. This includes sports with Olympic origins that have developed and grown commercially and economically over time, massively boosting the sport's revenue and turnover.

However, cycling has developed a different, more fractional and frictional business model over the last 120 years, which has changed little, even as other sports boom. Long-standing race organisers like Tour de France owner, ASO, are especially influential, both economically because they own the biggest race in the sport and politically because they dominate the AIOCC race organisers association.

The teams come and go and are largely funded by sponsorship from brands seeking a return on investment, or, more recently, from state entities and their sovereign-fund-controlled companies. Riders usually sign short-term contracts with teams and so have a precarious, almost mercenary role in the sport.

"The UCI is not really designed to govern a professional team sport. The UCI president is elected by national governing bodies worldwide, many of whom have never been to a true high-level professional bike race," EF Education Pro Cycling team manager Jonathan Vaughters told Cyclingnews.

"It’s not that the UCI is bad at what they were built to do. It’s that they are not purposely built for professional team sports.

"The teams don't elect the president, we don't really have legislative power, we don’t have the power to vote. We're just like a little kid screaming in the corner. That's why David doesn't like us very much..."

In the early 1990s, the leading English football clubs sparked a revolution by breaking away from the Football League, the traditional governing body in Britain, and launching the Premier League. They agreed to follow the national and international rules of the sport, but created a commercially independent company, agreed a revolutionary broadcasting deal with Sky television and have since grown exponentially. It was British soccer's big bang moment.

The Premier League has become the wealthiest division in the world, attracting the best players, with its top teams regularly fighting for the biggest trophies, allowing them to generate more wealth and offer higher salaries. These clubs have also been able to invest in new stadiums, offering better facilities to their fans. However, some supporters argue that their love of the sport and their club loyalty have been squeezed for every penny of possible revenue by the teams, sponsors and broadcasters.

Premier League football is now watched and followed around the world and generates huge global revenues. The division's 20 clubs generated an aggregate revenue of approximately £6.3 billion in the 2023/24 season, with Gross Value Added to the UK economy (the value of goods and services of a sector) calculated at £9.8 billion.

Vaughters is a former president of the AIGCP teams association and has been a team manager for 20 years. He is convinced that professional cycling needs to be run by an independent company, like the Premier League and the NFL, with every stakeholder a shareholder, working together for the good of the sport, or at least to grow the revenue of the sport.

However, that has never happened in professional cycling.

"The UCI doesn't want that to happen. They don't like it, and ASO certainly doesn't like that," Vaughters said. "The UCI should realise that they would be much more financially healthy if they created a separate arm or body to deal with the professional side of the sport."

A change in the governance of professional cycling and the creation of a new, commercially driven company to manage the business of pro cycling could spark a new era and create a new business model. However, that is the least likely to happen in the coming months under the UCI's reform process.

Making a billion-dollar business benefit everyone

Professional cycling is a billion-dollar business built on sand, as the tide rises and the global economy whips up the waves.

The biggest race organisers are profitable companies, with ASO, which also runs non-cycling events such as the Dakar Rally, generating at least €250 million per year from cycling and posting a profit margin of close to 40%. Smaller organisers struggle and often only survive thanks to state and regional funding, volunteers and the grassroots love for the sport.

The average team budget has risen to €33 million for 2026, with the median salary for a self-employed WorldTour rider up to €350,000. However, teams do not generate a profit and often overspend as they try to win races, score UCI ranking points, and retain their three-year WorldTour licences.

The biggest North American professional sports, such as the NBA, the NFL, and the NHL, are collectively owned by the teams, with a CEO or Commissioner to manage the business. A new business model for professional cycling could be similar, with race organisers and teams working together as investors and shareholders, leaving the UCI to play a regulatory role.

European sports are historically rooted in sporting merit, promotion and relegation and the inherent financial risks of that system. North American sports have permanent franchises, salary caps and are run as profitable businesses. They are two very different business models.

Formula 1 also has a franchise structure, with team values surging in recent years, with the average team valuation at $3.4 billion. In comparison, Ralph Denk reportedly sold his successful WorldTour team to Red Bull for just €10 million.

"There's no intrinsic value to the asset in cycling because the asset is only a three-year license, controlled by the UCI and their rules. It's worth nothing," Vaughters said.

"Some of the biggest franchises have negative cash flow and debt. Yet, they are worth billions. Why? Because the franchise itself has value. It has permanency.

"In pro cycling, we seem to think that we are all in competition with each other. The teams are fighting each other on the road, the organisers are fighting the teams, the teams are fighting with the UCI, it's just a constant battle. But we are not each other's competition.

"Fighting for victory out on the road is healthy. Where it’s not healthy is on the business side, in the boardroom. Our competition is F1, our competition is Netflix. Our competition is any other sport and any other form of entertainment. Competing against each other is stupid and short-sighted."

F1 has boomed under the ownership of US company Liberty Media, doubling revenue to $3.41 billion in 2024, with reported profits of $791 million, according to sports business media reports. As revenue increased, Liberty Media convinced the teams to accept a budget cap to try to limit spending and level the playing field.

Top constructors like Ferrari were historically paid a higher share of television rights, but the F1 budget cap limited that, with exceptions for driver salaries, engine costs and some other costs. The 2026 cap is €199 million. New rules on car design and racing have sparked debate and push-back from drivers and die-hard fans, but F1 continues to innovate and modernise, growing its profitability and wider appeal.

The UCI said in 2024 that it was considering some form of budget cap to level the playing field between the so-called super teams, like UAE Team Emirates-XRG, with budgets close to €50 million per season, and those who struggle to compete on half that figure.

The biggest, wealthiest team and their riders are against a budget cap because they do not want any limitations on their spending and the dominance it brings. They claim the sport should welcome more major sponsors, not limit spending, often forgetting that they were once a small team struggling to compete or desperately looking for sponsors to cover their budget.

Late last year, Lappartient claimed that the teams voted against the idea of a pro cycling budget cap, saying they demanded a better 'model' for the sport before accepting any change.

It was another example of the power struggle and how the fight for control of the sport slows business development. Like in a hectic, high-speed sprint finish, nobody is willing to give an inch, fearful of helping a rival find a way through to victory.

The Tour de France dominance

It is widely acknowledged that the Tour de France generates 80% of a team's television exposure and sponsor visibility. A team's annual sponsor visibility, and so the funding is justified based on their results each July.

The Tour de France is what Wimbledon is to tennis: the Super Bowl of cycling. Without the global visibility of the Tour de France, pro cycling would be a niche sport. But that imbalance and near-monopoly over the sport's wealth have shackled the growth of professional cycling.

"Let them eat cake," Tour de France race director Christian Prudhomme and ASO CEO Yann Le Moenner perhaps say whenever teams ask about revenue sharing and complain about rising costs. ASO believes they created the current revenue and value of professional cycling and so deserve to control the business model.

Vaughters accepts that a shake-up of pro cycling and the adoption of a more commercially driven, franchise model would have to involve ASO, perhaps even giving them a majority stake.

It would be more revolutionary than the storming of the Bastille, but it could see the sport grow commercially and compete against other sports and forms of entertainment.

"Fundamentally, if you're going to change the entire business model of cycling, it really needs the Tour de France to be part of that," Vaughters admitted.

"Sadly, I don't see it happening. Nobody is getting along, but that's a really dumb place to be, and unfortunately, the sport has pretty much been in that dumb place since about 2006."

Despite the UCI blocking the One Cycling project, Vaughters believes in the underlying strategy of cycling's stakeholders working together.

"Essentially, there have to be enough teams to just come together, create a corporation and put on a race and sort of demonstrate that the unified model works, then we might see some changes," he concluded.

It's the race behind the race, a secretive scientific battle between the richest and most technologically advanced teams in professional cycling.

Suffering on the road remains a core part of cycling, but training, nutrition and performance physiology have advanced massively in the last three decades, and especially the last ten years.

As cycling performance nears its physiological limit, teams are looking to push the scientific boundaries of the sport. Behind the scenes, scientists, engineers and PhD researchers are working in wind tunnels and laboratories, aided by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and artificial intelligence (AI), as they hunt for new marginal – or even maximal – gains.

"Cycling wants to believe it's a pure form [of sport], but when it comes down to it, technology has a massive bearing," Dan Bigham, the Head of Engineering at Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe, said in a recent Just Ride Red Bull podcast.

"If you don't understand the physics of the sport, you can't move it forward. You might know that A is faster than B, but do you know why A is faster than B? As soon as you know that, you can make something that's faster and so continually move forward."

Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe hired Bigham last year as Red Bull's team ownership fueled their ambitions to become the best team in the sport. Bigham was previously part of a similar, smaller programme at Ineos Grenadiers, and other super teams are also investing in science, prioritising the hiring of wind tunnel experts and performance engineers, even over star riders who can earn UCI ranking points.

Teams are leveraging support from their owners and major sponsors to advance the science of pro cycling. Those who are unable to do so risk being left behind in the innovation race.

Bigham works within the Red Bull Advanced Technologies unit, allowing him to brainstorm with staff from the brand's Formula 1 team and other sports and science disciplines. The WorldTour squad are also supported by manufacturer Specialized, providing wind tunnel testing facilities and a design team, thanks to its position as both bike and race clothing supplier.

Lidl-Trek are another outfit focusing far more funding on research and development (R&D), after the supermarket chain bought the team from Trek. AI software platform ServiceNow has become a jersey sponsor, and the Schwarz Group, which owns Lidl, provides massive digital support. The team is building a new headquarters in Germany that will boost the team's logistics and performance.

While UAE Team Emirates-XRG may seem like a traditional squad, managed by former rider Mauro Gianetti, the team has used their large budget to hire expertise in coaching, nutrition, altitude training and aerodynamics. Their demand for excellence encouraged Colnago to design them the best possible bikes at their disposal after the team reportedly tested all of their WorldTour rivals' bikes in the wind tunnel.

Visma-Lease a Bike also don't shy away from innovation and reportedly have a new 'secret advantage' ready for the 2026 season. Lease a Bike owner Pon also owns bike sponsor Cervélo and high-end Italian shoe brand Nimbl, which now provides the team with race clothing developed using thermal mapping and aerodynamic modelling.

"We're not blind to what's happening around us, and we understand that we won't separate ourselves from the rest by copying what others are doing. We try to stay ahead with our own original developments," said Visma-Lease a Bike head coach Jacco Verhaeren, who joined the team in 2025 after a successful career as a swimming coach with Australia and France.

Why innovation can be worth more than a star rider

Professional cycling's super teams have the financial backing and sponsors to develop their performance arm while simultaneously paying some of the sport's biggest names to compete for Grand Tour titles. But what about those teams further down the pecking order?

Tudor Pro Cycling, a ProTeam since only 2023, have opted to invest in innovation rather than solely bulking out their roster with extra team leaders.

At their recent pre-season media day in Spain, new signing Stefan Küng praised the Swiss team's focus on performance. It immediately sparked Cyclingnews' interest in what Tudor are secretly doing off the bike and in the laboratory.

Their Head of Performance, Ricardo Scheidecker, confirmed to Cyclingnews that the Swiss team has a group of scientists and researchers hunting down the next potential marginal gains via applied science. They are known as the Innovation Team.

Long-term financial support from the Tudor watch brand, a Rolex sister company, provides the team with the resources to make immediate performance and technological improvements while also developing a long-term, strategic approach. Few other teams in professional cycling have the same resources and vision.

They prioritised long-term scientific improvement, which can benefit everyone in the team and inspire an innovative culture, ahead of signing a rider who can score 1,000 UCI ranking points per season. Being one of the most scientifically advanced teams in the sport also helps attract the next generation of young talent.

"We are quite discreet about this. We don't put out photographs of riders in a [wind] tunnel in press releases, that's not our style," Scheidecker told Cyclingnews, in what seems like a dig at rivals Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe and their Particle Image Velocimetry test in the darkness of the Catesby tunnel.

"Innovation is about being ahead of the game; it's a non-stop process. To lead the way, you need very competent people, competent technical sponsors, and a synergy to put it all together so we can help the riders go as fast as they can."

If Julian Alaphilippe is Tudor's team leader and cycling's James Bond, then Scheidecker is M, the Head of Performance working for team owner Fabian Cancellara. Kurt Bergin-Taylor, Tudor's Head of Innovation, is Q, the scientist in charge of the research, which is then applied to cycling, like the secret devices or sports car given to James Bond.

Bergin-Taylor, who is from near Manchester, England, is part of the team's senior management group and has embraced the Swiss team's aptitude and motto of 'Swiss, Human, Performance.'

He studied Nutrition and Physiology at Loughborough University and has recently completed a PhD. He cut his teeth with Bigham and the British 'boys from Derbados' track team that used innovative physiology and technology to win World Cup events.

Bergin-Taylor worked with the Canadian track team before the Tokyo Olympics, providing the science that helped win gold and bronze medals and elevated the men's team pursuit squad to fifth place. After the COVID-19 pandemic, he worked as a coach for Team DSM, but then in 2023 he jumped at the chance for a more central, innovation and applied science role at Tudor.

"The team really allows innovation to be a key theme of our philosophy. It gives us a big strategic direction, that is perhaps quite different to other teams," Bergin-Taylor told Cyclingnews during an exclusive interview.

"A lot of teams have to think about winning now, but we're really fortunate at Tudor. We have a long-term vision and believe that we'll gain a competitive advantage on our competitors over the long-term.

"With Tudor, we talked about build or buy, and they really want to build their team for the long-term, which says 'This is us'."

Tudor have an office near the Silverstone wind tunnel, and their innovation team is packed with scientists, not former pro riders, including David Ogg, who worked for skinsuit expert Vorteq in the past. Another engineer is mentored by Neil Ashton, the British engineer who was part of Team GB's 'secret squirrel club' - the technical brains behind the nation's unparalleled track cycling success in recent decades. Ashton is now a renowned computational engineer and works for Nvidia.

"Over the last two years and particularly in the last year, we've built out the innovation team," Bergin-Taylor said.

"There are now seven of us: three full-time engineers, an industrial designer, a data scientist and PhD students too. We really work with our partners, making better products based on our demands. We also make a lot of internal tools and systems, and we have our own intellectual property."

One engineer in the Innovation Team focuses on applying the results of their work out on the road with the team. Jonny Wale, who was also part of the Derby-based track squad and the Huub-WattBike team, has a similar role at Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe.

Working with sponsors to uncover the next performance gems

Tudor has already benefitted from Bergin-Taylor's applied science, just like Remco Evenepoel and Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe are starting to benefit from Bigham's talents.

Tudor's work with Oakley in late 2024, to design new road racing and time trial helmets, was the innovation team's first key project.

Most bike and equipment brands carry out their own research and development and then offer their products and sponsorship cash to teams in exchange for visibility.

At Tudor, R&D is a two-way street, with the team happy to cover part of the costs and push the science and development. The equipment is perhaps designed firstly for professional performance needs, with the brands benefiting from any trickle-down technology for their wider product range.

"Both the team and Oakley took responsibility for developing the helmets, which I think is quite unique in pro cycling, but it's what we do with all our partners now," Bergin-Taylor said.

"Rather than simply asking Oakley to make us a better helmet and waiting for them to deliver it, we offered our internal resources on aerodynamics, on wind tunnel testing, CFD and computer parametric design. Oakley brought their expertise in helmet design and manufacturing. Together, we made a better product which was more aligned to our demands and in a shorter timeline. We developed the three helmets we use now in just seven months. We're super happy with the results, and some independent testing has validated our work."

Indeed, a Cyclingnews Labs test showed that the Oakley Velo Mach helmet saved at least seven watts compared to other less aerodynamic road race helmets in the wind tunnel.

During 2025, the Tudor Innovation Team worked intensely with BMC to design a new innovative time trial bike.

Escape Collective's Ronan McLaughlin recently published an insider look at the bike's developments with Stefan Küng racing on it for the first time at the early-season Challenge Mallorca team time trial. More Tudor riders will use the bike in the months ahead, with Tudor hoping to see the combined benefits as every time trial goes by, and especially in the team time trial stage at the Tour de France.

"A normal timeline for bike development is maybe four years, but we were able to do it in just over 12 months, even with a UCI rule change during the process," Bergin-Taylor said with pride.

Tudor have other applied science projects underway, with wheel sponsor DT Swiss, tyre sponsor Schwalbe and saddle sponsor Selle Italia. All to provide scientific advantages for the riders.

For the 2026 season, Tudor changed race clothing partner, with Sportful replacing Assos, who in turn replaced Rapha at EF Education-EasyPost. Sportful and Tudor are carrying out combined research and development as skinsuits become ever more personal and weather-dependent.

Where will the science take cycling next?

Tudor is a ProTeam in 2026 but intends to grow, improve and score enough UCI ranking points to secure WorldTour status in 2029, when the next team licences are awarded.

They hope the long-term view of their innovation strategy will help them to achieve this major goal.

"We have staff who work on innovation for what we call 'tomorrow', working on the products and science for the next 12 months, with the information, knowledge and tools we have now. We also have staff who work on three to five-year projects, including PhD students and their professors," Bergin-Taylor said.

"If you don't do that, you're not going to crack the really complex stuff. Some of the questions we're asking and performance aspects we're looking at are going to take a lot of research and understanding. They take time and investment, but once we have done the hard work, we can hopefully take a big jump in performance, not just small incremental gains."

Bigham applies the same research philosophy at Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe. He loves to ask questions based on his past as an elite track rider and Hour Record holder, and is curious about how science and technology are used in other sports.

"The fun I enjoy is in unearthing those new gems," Bigham said, admitting he is fascinated by the discoveries of Graeme Obree, one of the sport's true mavericks and innovators.

"I'm really interested in understanding a piece of knowledge that maybe nobody else knows, and how I can use that to win more bike races. You've got to research it. If you don't, someone else will, and you won't be ahead."

Performance nutrition and increased carbohydrate digestion have transformed the sport in recent years, fueling more aggressive racing during the Tadej Pogacar era. However, riders have reached the limit of how many carbohydrates they can ingest and assimilate. Training techniques and other performance improvements have also plateaued.

Innovative applied science, especially around improving aerodynamics and thermal dynamics, appears to offer the next improvement in performance. Whoever develops them first will have an advantage on the road.

"To take the next step, you really have to take everything as a whole system, but then focus on rider individualisation," Bergin-Taylor suggested.

"The peloton is going faster and faster, perhaps even 10% faster. But that's not because they're 10 per cent fitter, much of that is because of aerodynamic reduction.

"The rider is now the biggest unknown and creates about 80 per cent of the aerodynamic drag. Reducing that is going to get you the biggest gains, and that means clothing is really important and a fascinating area to develop.

"The flow structures of road racing, even in time trials, are super complicated, they're really hard to understand and so to model. It's hard for everyone in the sport, but at Tudor, we tell each other that if we crack it, we'll have even more of an advantage."

Every rider's clothing will be optimised based on each race and their role in it, balancing aerodynamics with heat dissipation.

"In the long term, I think we'll see fully individualised aerodynamic development, even for individual races, when the environmental demands are different but have a big impact. That's where I think the frontier of cycling development will be," Bergin-Taylor predicted.

Bigham sees the same kind of individualisation offering the improvements of the future. Thanks to the Red Bull Formula 1 team, he already has access to an app that predicts the speed profile and power distribution of a race, indicating the best wheel, tyre, and chainring/cassette combination to use based on the team's race strategy.

"The question everyone looking at the science of pro cycling is trying to answer is how do we predict what's going to happen in a race," Bigham admitted.

"Then we can decide what the optimal setup is for this rider to do the optimal strategy for those conditions, against whoever we're racing against."

Bigham revealed how he is enjoying working with Remco Evenepoel, due to the Belgian's open-minded, progressive and motivated attitude.

Evenepoel's performance at the UAE Tour was perhaps a surprise step backwards, but he won the time trial and will likely come back stronger after an altitude training camp.

"When you're testing with him in the wind tunnel, he's always willing to try new things. Sometimes I encounter riders who are completely the opposite, which is frustrating. As an engineer, you're always trying to push the boundaries a little, and Remco pulls you in the right direction," Bigham recently told Belgian newspaper Het Nieuwsblad.

Bigham, like Bergin-Taylor and everyone in the Tudor Innovation Team, gets a kick from applying their scientific knowledge and curiosity to professional cycling.

"I simply try to make riders go faster without them having to put in any extra effort," said Bigham, explaining pro cycling's innovation race in just a few words.

The science behind training and performance has advanced significantly in women's cycling over the last decade, including a deeper understanding of how athletes fuel their bodies for training and racing.

As the peloton gets stronger, race distances get longer, and the competition season extends to nearly 10 months, it's more important than ever for athletes to dial in their nutrition and hydration strategies. And what athletes intake as fuel sources, and when, must also align with the physical demands of high-performance training, menstrual cycles and hormone fluctuations, changes in body temperature, sweat loss and potential supplementation needs - all have a major impact on an athlete's ability to adapt to the physical demands of sport.

In an in-depth interview with Cyclingnews, Dr Heather Logan Sprenger, a researcher and scientific advisor specializing in physiology, nutrition and exercise science, highlights the key nutritional factors female cyclists should consider when training and racing at the highest level to optimise adaptation, performance and health.

"Metabolism hasn't really changed so much over time, and so the fundamentals, such as our macro nutrients needs - proteins, carbohydrates, fats and nucleic acids - the major biomolecules are the same, and you have to fuel with these things. What has changed are the recommendations and the awareness, which is more present now," says Dr Logan Sprenger, who has worked directly on nutrition and performance with individual athletes and teams, zeroing in on the importance of adequate fuelling to help avoid symptoms of Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S).

RED-S occurs when the body doesn’t get enough energy from food to fuel both the demands of exercise and essential daily functions like breathing, digestion, and repairing tissues and can lead to serious physical and mental health problems, according to Project RED-S. Physical symptoms include unexplained fatigue, low energy, and persistent illness and injuries.

"Energy availability is really the cornerstone of female performance. So chronic under-fuelling has always been around. It quietly erodes power, recovery, and endocrine health. What I've seen working with lots of different sports teams on is that low energy availability is one of the most under-recognised threats in women's cycling; it disrupts the menstrual cycle before affecting body weight."

"Your menstrual cycle is really important because it's one of the earliest warning signs of under-fuelling; you lose your menstrual cycle. If the focus on nutrition is about female physiology, then there are a number of key areas that are important to consider for athletes."

Iron status - a key performance factor

At the top of Dr Logan Sprenger's list is iron status, which she says is a key performance factor for female endurance athletes, not just a health concern. Regularly monitoring serum ferritin and iron levels can be essential for proper oxygen delivery, which directly affects training consistency and performance.

Ultimately, she says, athletes need an optimised internal physiological environment to adapt to training loads effectively; without it, even well-structured training will not lead to meaningful improvements.

"Iron status is not just a health issue, it's a performance limiter for female endurance athletes," she says. "It is highly overlooked, in my opinion, and yet, it could be having two or three blood samples a year to make sure an athlete's serum ferritin is within a range that will allow them to adapt to the training load."

What is an optimal serum ferritin range? Dr Logan Sprenger says there are ranges for female endurance athletes; however, it's important for each individual to discuss them in consultation with their sports physician and sports dietician.

"Iron does fluctuate during the menstrual cycle. However, it is more of the consistency of making sure an athlete is getting samples on a regular basis to track those levels, to make sure the serum ferritin is in their [optimal] range. An athlete's checklist should include getting serum ferritin levels checked routinely at least twice a year, maybe more."

She suggests maintaining a diet rich in iron helps support performance and adaptation, but nutrition alone may not always be enough. Understanding your serum ferritin levels is important for athletes to determine whether supplementation or other interventions might be needed.

Carbohydrates intake

Eating enough carbohydrates is the second key consideration that Dr Logan Sprenger says endurance athletes should aim for, with the recommended intake of 5-10g/kg of body weight daily. However, she explained that while many endurance athletes consume enough protein for muscle repair, they often fall short on carbohydrates, which are essential for fuelling performance.

"Most endurance athletes don't have a protein problem; they have more of a carbohydrate problem. They're eating enough to repair muscle, but not enough to fuel performance," she says.

"We live in a culture where protein is overemphasised in terms of recovery, being lean, and being strong, so athletes tend to prioritise protein, and then they deflect carbohydrate off the plate, so to speak. Yet, most of the endurance athletes and cyclists that I've worked with don't get enough carbohydrates, and so that's where carbohydrates are chronically under-consumed."

Dr Logan Sprenger lists some of the health concerns that can arise from inadequate carbohydrate intake, including impaired performance and overall health, reduced training quality, increased stress hormones, disrupted sleep, hindered recovery and immune function, and an increased risk of low energy availability.

She stresses the importance of protein intake, too, but says that many female cyclists and endurance athletes she has worked with usually eat enough protein. However, she suggests that the timing of protein intake around exercise is crucial and that athletes, in general, need to be aware of pre- and post-exercise protein intake.

Menstrual cycles and phase-based nutrition

Let's go back to the basics. The menstrual cycle begins on the first day of your period, which is considered day one. It is divided into four phases: menses, follicular, ovulation, and luteal. The luteal phase runs from ovulation to the start of the next period, usually around days 14–28/30, and is marked by a rise in basal body temperature.

However, because the baseline core temperature is higher in the luteal phase, this can reduce heat tolerance. Dr Logan Sprenger says that this is when hydration and cooling strategies matter more than most women realise.

Whether training or racing, it's important to have a performance plan to ensure an athlete can thermoregulate, or tolerate heat better. She says it's this rise in body temperature that explains why some indoor sessions and or training and racing in the heat can feel harder later in the menstrual cycle.

"Essentially, proactive management is needed, just to be aware. I say this with the caveat that every female is different. Some people don't notice, while other people feel hotter and can't tolerate the heat as well in the luteal phase," says Dr Logan Sprenger.

She says that athletes often find ways to stay cooler before races and exercise by implementing proactive heat and hydration management. Dr Logan Sprenger cautioned that while some women feel bloated in the luteal phase, that doesn't equate to being hydrated; in fact, it can often be a sign of beginning exercise dehydrated.

"What I've noticed in the female cyclists I've worked with is that in the luteal phase, they can start rides more hypo-hydrated, meaning they are more dehydrated because they feel bloated, so they don't drink as much," she says.

"Most of that fluid has moved from their blood and from their plasma to the interstitial space, between tissues and within cells. And so, their actual hydration needs increase during the luteal phase. This all helps with thermoregulation."

What is sweat rate and why is it important?

Sweating is one of the most important byproducts of training, and the rate at which an athlete sweats increases with metabolic rate, so the harder they work, the more heat their bodies produce.

Dr Logan Sprenger explains that since the body must maintain a core temperature of 37°C, it activates sweating as a cooling mechanism when the temperature rises above this point. However, sweating leads to fluid, electrolyte, and other essential nutrient losses that need to be replenished.

"I believe that every endurance athlete needs to do a sweat analysis to find out their sweat rate; assessing your body mass changes over an hour of exercise to see how much body mass you're losing based on fluid loss, and making sure you're drinking to your sweat rate," she says.

"Sweat rate is individually variable, it's genetically determined, it can change with training and acclimation or acclimatization to different environments. How much you sweat is different from how much I sweat, and so you can't do a generic, 'drink this much', to the entire cycling team."

She advises athletes to know their individual sweat rate so they can implement a hydration performance plan for training or racing. She cautioned that showing up to training or a competition dehydrated can cause a range of problems, including exacerbating the core temperature response, raising heart rate, increasing fatigue, and making the rating of perceived exertion feel heightened.

"First, arriving hydrated, making sure you're drinking 500ml, at least, in the hour before exercise. Second, knowing your sweat rate by doing a sweat loss analysis. And then, you know exactly how much, what your performance plan is for hydration, and drinking to minimise your body mass losses," she says.

"Lastly, post-exercise, whatever you've lost in sweat losses, you should replace 150% of your sweat losses. For example, if you lose a litre of fluid during a race, you should drink 1.5 litres in the few hours during recovery to ensure you replenish your body's water losses. This is really important, especially for subsequent days of racing or a Grand Tour."

She recommends athletes do a sweat analysis to determine their sweat rate once a year or at the beginning of the season. However, the analysis can also be done during the hot summer months to ensure athletes are dialled in, because as they become more trained or more acclimatised to their environment, their sweat rate can change.

"Having that sweat analysis and knowing your sweat rate is a fundamental that every athlete should know because it significantly affects performance," she says.

"You can't supplement your way out of a poor diet"

There is a lot of discussion about the use of supplementation in sports, but Dr Logan Sprenger argues for the benefits of adequate nutrition and stresses the importance of athletes consulting their physician to determine whether additional supplements are needed.

"You need to dial in your nutrition; that's the foundation, before you're adding or layering on supplements," she says.

She explained that, in some cases, supplements such as Vitamin D to support metabolism, Omega-3 fatty acids to support myelination of neurons, and increased iron intake to support serum ferritin levels are carefully considered based on blood sample analysis.

"To me, those are fundamentals, and besides that, it depends, but supplements are not a cover-up for a bad diet. You can't supplement your way out of a poor diet," she says.

"It's really important to eat whole foods and make sure you're getting all the biological molecules. It's important to have a wide range of food groups and make sure your nutrition is dialled in before you add on supplements."

As Dr Logan Sprenger emphasises, the fundamentals of metabolism have not changed, but the sport's understanding of how female athletes apply them has continued to grow over the last five to seven years.

Adequate energy availability through a well-constructed, whole-food diet helps athletes adapt to training, along with iron status, carbohydrate intake, menstrual cycle awareness, hydration strategy, and sweat rate analysis, which have become key performance considerations for athletes to perform at their peak.

Developed for people with type 2 diabetes and those living with obesity, nearly 12% of US adults have used weight loss injections according to a 2025 study, with another report claiming that 3.3 million UK adults are expected to use them in 2026.

Cycling has a longstanding and uneasy relationship with body image and weight, forged by a culture that's trickled down from the pro ranks, where every kilogram matters and diet is continuously under the microscope.

However, some cyclists have highlighted how taking weight loss drugs has benefited their health, revealing that it allowed them to get back on their bikes, renewed their sense of happiness, reenergised their energy levels, or, in some cases, simply helped them to start cycling in the first place.

Of course, there are potential health risks posed by under-fuelling, too, with research still in its early stages and cultural stigmas aplenty. But for certain cyclists – several of whom we've spoken to, alongside experts, but did not want to go on the record or would only speak on condition of anonymity – could the benefits outweigh the risks when it comes to weight loss drugs?

How the drugs work

The drugs inhibit appetite and slow digestion, meaning people feel fuller for longer and eat less. They are called GLP-1 receptor agonists, which stands for Glucagon-like peptide-1.

Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro are key brand names, with Semaglutide the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy, and tirzepatide in Mounjaro. The latter works slightly differently as it acts on two receptors, GLP-1 and GIP, which further reduce appetite.

Anecdotally, Ozempic and Wegovy are both produced by Danish Pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, which has sponsored an all-diabetic UCI ProTeam since 2013.

They are typically injected weekly, although pill form is now available in the US and is expected soon in the UK.

"Most of the people we're seeing aren't necessarily high performing or recreational athletes; it's people who are obese or overweight, possibly with other co-morbidities like pre-diabetes or metabolic syndrome," said Tom Williams, Head of Performance and Strength & Conditioning Coach at Pure Sports Medicine.

"Their GPs have suggested they get on it, and our job has been working with them to increase their exercise and their activity."

Life-changing health boost

For those overweight or living with obesity, GLP-1s offer a lifeline and can enable them to get back into cycling.

A PT and cycling coach was struggling with weight gain as a side effect of long Covid and started using Mounjaro in July 2025. She was prescribed by a chemist as her BMI was in the overweight category and has since lost 17kg.

"It has been a game changer for me," she said. "I eat well, I've had to change nothing except now that I use the GLP-1, it's shifted something in my body, and I have so much more energy, I have so much more focus and clarity."

It’s given her a renewed sense of joy on the bike.

"I was really struggling to get out on the bike, but when I went out on my bike for the first time, having lost that weight, it was just a game-changer. I did a hill session, and I could do it. I did the hill twice, I had the energy, and I got a PB."

There have been other health benefits, too.

"I think it's helped with inflammation, and all the markers in my blood tests have been amazing the past few months. I've suffered with anaemia my whole life, and that's reduced; I've suffered with ethnic neutropenia, which seems to have gone too."

In a similar vein, a person I spoke to who took Ozempic said she noticed inflammation and water retention dropped, better energy levels, walking was easier, portion control was better, she lost the desire to drink alcohol, and the food noise went away.

She called the drug "life-changing."

Under-fuelling

It could come at a risk, however, because the drugs reduce appetite, which means cyclists may not be able to fuel adequately and be in a low-energy deficit.

"The risk is undernourishment as you're not able to eat as much as you were prior to being on the drugs," said Williams.

"People on these drugs need to ensure they are getting enough carbohydrates, fats and nutrients needed to sustain the workload they are doing. If you are hardly eating, you will fatigue quicker and your endurance will reduce as well."

RED-S (relative energy deficiency syndrome) is also a potential risk that can lead to a series of health concerns.

"The risk of low energy availability will be more immediate which can be a long term issue, alongside picking up illnesses, not responding to training as well, longer recovery times, and the quality of your riding won’t be as good," said said Dr Sam Impey, a performance nutritionist and co-founder of nutrition app Hexis, currently used by eight WorldTour teams.

At the WorldTour level, it’s a battle for riders to eat enough as it is, Dr Impey explained.

"There's almost a trade-off now of whether a rider can physically get enough calories in on the key days and in a WorldTour race. For these athletes to perform, the physical amount of calories they need is already at the limit of what they're happy to ingest."

However, the PT and cycling coach on Mounjaro is conscious of adequate fuelling and hasn’t seen any negative impact.

"I make sure I eat three meals a day, I focus on my protein first and foremost, and if I’m going to be doing extra workouts, I have an extra snack," she said. "I also take collagen to ensure I’m hitting my protein goals."

Muscle and bone density loss

Exactly how much muscle mass and bone density loss GLP-1s cause is up for debate, with varied research thus far. One study reported up to 40%, while another has found it to be around 10% of the weight lost. Regardless, the loss can negatively affect performance on the bike.

"Total mass may come down, but you'll probably lose as much muscle as you will fat, so whilst you might get a very temporary, and this is only speculative, increase in watts per kilo that will shortly be followed by a big drop in total capacity to produce watts," said Impey.

"Your durability will also go down, so your ability to do longer stages, particularly back-to-back days of riding, is going to be impaired as well."

Cycling is already known to negatively impact bone density, and with the addition of GLP-1s, the risk becomes greater. This is particularly significant for cyclists over 50 due to sarcopenia, an age-related decline in muscle mass, as well as female cyclists who are post-menopausal due to higher rates of osteoporosis.

Weight resistance training and a healthy diet are important to mitigate this.

"On these drugs, up to 40% of the weight you lose can be from muscle mass and bone density, which means you need to be in the gym two or three times a week and you need to make sure that what you're eating is correct," said Williams.

Performance enhancing?

GLP-1s are not currently banned by WADA, but they are being monitored.

"I don't see it as a performance-enhancing drug because of the risks of under-fuelling and energy requirements, as well as the loss of bone and muscle mass," said Williams.

"Base volume is king, and you can't shortcut it," added Impey. "There's no HIIT protocol, sprint interval, or any chamber you can get into that will shortcut doing 15 hours a week of low intensity training."

However, a researcher I spoke to suggested that independent components of the drugs could have anabolic qualities, although hard to separate, and the cognitive benefits could also be a consideration. Some research has shown that GLP-1 users have a lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s and overall improved cognitive function.

Body image

Research claims that cycling has a high prevalence of eating disorders, and adding weight loss drugs into the mix could increase this while also perpetuating damaging body image ideals.

"The use of weight loss jabs in a context where thinness is already put on a pedestal and where eating disorders and disordered eating is already a concern, is a recipe for disaster," said Dr Garcia Ashdown-Franks, research fellow at York St John University.

"I think the introduction of weight loss jabs is going to perpetuate those norms and expectations around having the lowest possible body weight."

Williams emphasises that the drugs are not appropriate for people who do not fit the prescribed category.

"There will be people who already have a history of eating disorders or body image issues, or people who want to shed a few kilos, and that's where the risks come in. It’s not appropriate for them," said Williams.

However, the drugs have been criticised for being easy to access, and one source based in the US said, "getting prescribed is easier than getting a bag of sweets from the shops."

Weighing it up

For those overweight or living with obesity, weight loss drugs offer a way to improve health and quality of life. It could also enable people to get back into cycling and others to discover it.

However, for amateur and elite cyclists, it’s hard to see many benefits to the drugs amid the risks of under-fuelling and muscle and bone density loss.

More research is also needed to further understand the impact of these drugs too, and there are significant concerns over the potential for these drugs to lead to damaging body image norms.

As Impey said: "I don't see how the combination of cycling and weight loss drugs is a good thing for someone's long-term health unless there's a clinical requirement."

Menstruation and cycling have a complicated history. Not that long ago, professional cycling was seen as largely a man's domain, so little attention was ever paid to female health. In recent years, the status of women's cycling has grown, but the conversation around health still had a way to go – not having a period at all was seen by some as a badge of honour, a sign you were lean and light, rather than a cause for concern.

Fast forward to now, though, and the growing focus on women's sport has also helped to improve and amplify the conversation and understanding around women's health, be that periods, pregnancy or anything else.

We now have Demi Vollering talking openly about her period after races, several riders opening up about Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S) and eating disorders, and figures like Lizzie Deignan and Ellen van Dijk pioneering performance during and after pregnancy. The taboo around women's health, or the idea that women experience sport exactly the same as men, is slowly but surely dissipating.

However, for all that things have improved in many areas, there are still many, many aspects of female athlete health that have hardly been researched or understood at all, and where athletes don't always know enough about their own bodies, and how to manage these conditions alongside cycling.

One of these areas is reproductive or menstrual disorders, things like endometriosis and PCOS.

What are menstrual disorders?

'Menstrual disorder' is a wide, very generalised term that we can use to describe a whole host of problems that may be experienced by people born female, relating generally to their period, menstrual cycle, female hormones, or reproductive organs.

These disorders can be anything from unexplained, irregular or heavy periods (menorrhagia), to more specific and diagnosable problems like endometriosis, polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), fibroids and adenomyosis.

If you don't know what any of those words mean, or the specifics of the conditions, don't worry, you aren't alone. More than one in 10 women suffer from some kind of condition relating to their period, and at least 30% of reproductive-age women experience some kind of irregularity, but period health – or poor period health – is still an under-researched, under-discussed and often misunderstood topic.

So what are these conditions, and what do we know about how they affect women, particularly athletes? Whilst research is still sparse – and we'll get onto that next – Cyclingnews spoke to Jo Perkins from The Well HQ, a British-based project that works with various organisations to consult on and assist with understanding and coaching around female health for athletes, about how some of these conditions can manifest in the world of performance sport.

Endometriosis is a condition where cells and tissue that should grow in the lining of the uterus (the endometrium) grow elsewhere in the pelvis and abdomen, including around the reproductive organs, but also on the bowel or bladder, which can cause severe pain and heavy periods. It can be difficult to diagnose, and the only treatment is surgery to remove additional tissue, which can lessen symptoms in the short term but is not a permanent cure.

For athletes, the persistent pain of endometriosis can be at most debilitating, and at least performance-hindering at times. Whilst there is little to be done at present in terms of treatment, The Well are working to identify how athletes with endometriosis can be better supported, or at least make the conversation around it more constructive.

"Endometriosis is highly under-reported, especially with female athletes. It is common to see minimisation of their extreme pain, or the 'just push through' culture," Perkins explained. "Some of the ways it affects athletes are missing training sessions, having sub-optimal performance and feeling fatigued, but the psychological impacts cannot be dismissed: anxiety around races, selection and contracts, fear of heavy bleeding, bloating or that extreme pain on training or race day, [and] being perceived as unreliable."

PCOS, or polycystic ovary syndrome, is a hormonal condition where women experience higher levels of hormones, including testosterone, and multiple cysts on the ovaries. It can cause heavy periods, weight issues and excess body hair, as well as fertility issues.

In men's sport, higher testosterone is often associated with improved performance, with athletes even unnaturally elevating their levels (which is illegal); that doesn't mean hormone imbalances in women should be seen as a positive, though.

"Some studies show that increased androgens, normally testosterone, could present some benefits in terms of maximum oxygen uptake, better performance and some endurance tests, and that women with PCOS have higher muscle mass and better performance in certain tests, compared to women who don’t have it," Perkins said.

"However, having PCOS is far from being a positive thing – it’s a health condition that negatively affects many areas of these athletes’ lives. There are metabolic, reproductive and psychological challenges that come with it, such as insulin resistance, irregular cycles, fertility issues, and mood changes. The focus should be on health and managing the symptoms and the condition with specialised support."

Adenomyosis is described by the NHS as "a condition where the lining of the womb (uterus) starts growing into the muscle in the wall of the womb" and can be a cause for heavy or painful periods. Fibroids are benign growths that can grow in or around the uterus and can again cause heavy or painful menstruation.

Of course, there's also the problem of missing or losing periods altogether, which is all too common in elite athletes, and can have severe consequences, from RED-S to bone density problems caused by hormone deficiencies. We'll explore those elsewhere in this series.

Problems like these are wide-ranging, and all have different symptoms and treatments, so they shouldn't be treated as one or lumped together. For this article, we've focused on two of the most common and well-known conditions, endometriosis and PCOS.

There are not many cyclists – or athletes in general – who have openly spoken about having these conditions, but they do certainly affect women in the peloton.

"My understanding is that conditions such as endometriosis and PCOS absolutely exist within sport, including at elite level, but they are significantly under-recognised and under-diagnosed," said Meg Smith, a doctoral researcher at Loughborough University and Female Athlete Health Consultant at AG Insurance-Soudal.

"They’re often perceived as being rare in elite athletes, but I don’t think that reflects true prevalence. Instead, it reflects a combination of delayed diagnosis, symptom masking (particularly through hormonal contraception) and a sporting culture in which pain, fatigue and discomfort are frequently normalised. Many of the symptoms associated with these conditions, such as low energy availability, gastrointestinal issues, pelvic or lower back pain, and fluctuations in performance, can easily be attributed to training load or competition stress rather than an underlying medical condition.

"There’s also likely a degree of selection bias. Athletes whose symptoms are more severe may drop out earlier in development pathways, meaning elite sport can appear healthier than the wider population, even though that doesn’t reflect the full picture."

A dearth of research

Whilst organisations like The Well HQ and individual coaches and researchers are working hard to improve understanding of female athlete health and conditions that affect women, scientific or academic research is still very difficult to find.

Even in 2026, research into the effect of the regular menstrual cycle on performance is limited, with little conclusive evidence – there is not a widely agreed upon consensus on if and how the different stages of the cycle impact performance, either physiologically or perceptually.

With so little out there, even on the foundational level around period health and performance, sports-related studies around conditions like endometriosis and PCOS are nearly non-existent. A quick search will return some useful resources and articles on the subject – some anecdotal, some more academic – but still relatively little information, especially for athletes above the amateur level.

"Historically, sports science has been built around male physiological models. Female athletes were often excluded from research due to the perceived complexity of the menstrual cycle, which was seen as a confounding variable rather than something to be understood," Smith added.

"There has also been long-standing discomfort around discussing menstrual health, alongside practical challenges in funding, study design and longitudinal hormone measurement. As a result, it was often considered easier to control or suppress the cycle than to study it properly. That is changing, but we’re still catching up after decades of under-representation. The growing interest we’re seeing now reflects a recognition that female physiology isn’t a problem to work around but rather, it’s something fundamental to performance that deserves equal scientific attention."

Another possible barrier is that these conditions are highly individual, and do not necessarily affect all women in exactly the same way. Sports science often favours repeatability and consistent results, which can be hard to ascertain when it comes to women's health conditions – a study may not reliably prove or disprove a certain hypothesis.

This also means that it can be harder for athletes with disrupted periods to apply any of the current knowledge around the menstrual cycle, hormones and performance to their own lives.

"It can be more complex, largely because much of the existing research is based on relatively narrow models: typically, athletes with regular, ovulatory cycles and no diagnosed gynaecological conditions. In reality, many athletes don’t fit neatly into those categories," Smith said.

"When conditions such as PCOS or endometriosis are present, hormonal profiles can be less predictable, ovulation may not occur consistently, and symptoms may fluctuate independently of the traditional menstrual-cycle phases that are often discussed in research or applied practice. That doesn’t mean these athletes are ‘too complicated’ to understand, it means our current models don’t yet reflect the diversity of real-world female physiology. In those cases, support often needs to be far more individualised, focusing not just on cycle phase, but on symptoms, recovery, perception of effort and overall wellbeing."

The true number of riders racing with one of these conditions, whether they know it or not, may be inline with the number in the general population, but it's also likely that these conditions are underrepresented in sport, because they may act as a barrier to starting, participating in or sticking with a sport.

"It definitely does," Perkins said when asked if period problems can get in the way of sporting success. "It affects participation in terms of logistics, pain and fear of bleeding, stress. We have some studies that prove that 7 in 10 girls avoid being active during their period. In elite British track and field athletes, 76.8% reported that their menstrual cycle negatively affected their performance at some point during training or competition. And, among professional female rugby players in the UK, 87.8% perceived the menstrual cycle to negatively impact performance."

"If young athletes are repeatedly told that severe symptoms are ‘normal’ or something they simply have to push through, many will disengage before appropriate support is ever put in place," Smith added. "We often talk about increasing female participation in sport, but we rarely address the physiological experiences that can quietly push girls out."

If these are the numbers among female athletes in general, it's not hard to imagine that pain from endometriosis or consistently heavy or irregular periods caused by PCOS could only amplify the problem. So if there is a lack of these problems in the pro peloton, it may well be because riders stopped or faltered before they got there.

In the pro peloton

However, just because there may not be conclusive evidence or studies on the topic of conditions like PCOS or endometriosis, that doesn't mean there aren't anecdotal stories of how they can affect female cyclists.

The topic is far from a main talking point in women's cycling, but a small number of pros have spoken out about being diagnosed with conditions including PCOS and endometriosis. In 2019, Welsh track and road rider Elinor Barker spoke for the first time about her struggles with endometriosis, and how severe pain almost stopped her from competing. Dutch ProTeam rider Quinty Schoens is a former triathlete, but quit the discipline to focus on cycling after struggling with injuries and PCOS.

"I was also diagnosed with PCOS earlier this year. An abnormality on my ovaries, what still affects me on a regular basis," Schoens wrote on Instagram at the time. "This makes it hard to be at my highest level sometimes."

More recently, Spanish veteran Ane Santesteban made headlines for her candid comments about being diagnosed with endometriosis and ovarian cysts, and how long it took to understand the problem, with her coaches putting her performance dip down to mental factors.

"In 2024, I felt unwell all year; a lot of lower back pain, pain in one leg, and general discomfort," Santesteban explained to Cyclingnews. "I visited many doctors and had blood tests done, but we couldn’t find the cause of the pain. Many told me it was psychological, and after so many visits, I even started to doubt myself. But I still felt unwell.

"During a visit to the gynaecologist, they saw that I had a cyst on my right ovary, and that’s when they started asking questions, and we identified the problem. Everything stemmed from the fact that in December 2023, I had my hormonal IUD removed, and that’s when the pain began."

The reasons why riders like Santesteban sometimes struggle to find answers seem to stem from the fact that these conditions are misunderstood in the general population, let alone in sport. In researching for this article, I heard more than once from people working in performance at pro teams tell me they simply don't know enough about this topic, and therefore, it's probably not surprising that problems aren't being identified or managed appropriately.

"In my case, before every important race, I had to make certain visits to an osteopath, a pelvic floor physiotherapist, and do INDIBA treatment [a non-invasive radiofrequency therapy used in sports rehab to treat pain and inflammation]. That helped me a lot so my body could perform at 100%. Of course, I also made certain changes to my diet," Santesteban said about how she managed her condition.

But there is no easy fix, and riders may not always find the support they need at their first port of call – perhaps their coach or team doctor.

"In my experience, understanding varies hugely. Some coaches and practitioners are very engaged and keen to learn, while others feel unsure or uncomfortable, often because they’ve never received formal education on the topic," says Smith, who is one of a small number of female health specialists working in professional cycling.

"As a result, responsibility often falls on the athlete to raise issues themselves, which isn’t always easy in high-performance environments. Education is improving, but it’s still inconsistent, and much of the knowledge currently comes from individual interest rather than structured coach education systems."

"Many team doctors are excellent clinicians, but most will not have received formal training in female-specific sport endocrinology or menstrual health in performance contexts. As a result, menstrual and hormonal health can sometimes fall into a grey area – not quite medical in the traditional sense, and not quite performance – meaning it isn’t always fully owned by anyone," Smith continues.

"This can leave athletes feeling unsure about where to seek support. Improving this doesn’t require every practitioner to become a specialist, but it does require education, clearer pathways, and greater collaboration between medical and performance staff."

As for what riders themselves can do? "Visit the doctor and don't normalise menstrual pain or even amenorrhea [not having a period]," Santesteban said.

Will understanding grow?

In the medical world in general – let alone the sporting world – conditions like PCOS and endometriosis are still in a relatively nascent phase when it comes to diagnosis and treatment, so it's perhaps not surprising that the understanding is even less when it comes to athletes.

However, no matter how slow or belated the progress may be, the depth of knowledge around women's health conditions and how female athletes' bodies are different from their male counterparts is growing.

A rider like Santesteban, who has been racing since 2008, has seen the understanding around women's health in cycling grow and change, even before having her own experiences with more complicated conditions.

"I think that more and more importance is being given to women’s health in cycling. Before, it seemed that not having a period was a sign of good performance, when in fact it’s the complete opposite," she said.

"Fortunately, that has changed, and in recent years, one of the first things the team doctor and nutritionist ask you about is your menstrual cycle. Progress has been made. It’s true that endometriosis is still not talked about that much in general, but this too will change over time."

However, for her, her own diagnosis and the gradually improving situation in women's sport, it came too late. She called time on her career at the end of 2025.

"It has changed me a lot, both as a woman and as a professional cyclist," she said. "Living with pain and having to make so many doctor’s visits greatly affected my mental health, and I saw it as unfeasible to continue down that path for another year."

Organisations like The Well HQ are working specifically to improve the situation for women in sport – at all levels, from recreational to professional – by working with various federations, coaches and stakeholders, and change is slowly coming, though barriers remain.

Teams like AG Insurance-Soudal, where Meg Smith works specifically with riders and staff to focus on female athlete health, are leading the way in incorporating the menstrual cycle and more into their performance, coaching and culture.

"There’s more openness around conversations, greater interest in cycle tracking, and increasing recognition that athlete health can exist in parallel to performance. That said, progress is still uneven," Smith explained.

"In many cases, improvements are driven by specific individuals rather than embedded systems. At the moment, how well an athlete is supported often depends on whether the right people happen to be in the room, rather than on consistent organisational structures. This is an important aspect of performance at AG Insurance-Soudal, and we are working hard to find innovative ways to think about female physiology in order to best support our riders."

For all that things are far from ideal – the lack of research and understanding we found just in trying to write this article showed that knowledge on this topic remains minimal in professional cycling – there is a feeling that women's sport is on the right path.

"Things are definitely improving," Perkins said. "We are seeing more and more coaches and organisations committed to not only understanding the unique needs of female athletes, but to creating environments that truly support these women. They are seeking knowledge and guidance on how to properly train female athletes, and the ones who have already started to do this work have been seeing incredible results."

Just this month, Smith launched a survey on female athlete health in cycling, helping her team at Loughborough University to originate research into menstruation and performance in cycling. Other sports, like athletics, football and rugby, are taking women's health and female-specific training more seriously every year, with tangibly positive results.

As the focus on women's health improves, research into menstrual disorders will surely eventually follow, and riders who find themselves in the same position as Ane Santesteban or Quinty Schoens will find the support and knowledge they need sooner.

Exercise is supposed to be good for you - and by most measures, it is. However, cycling has a little secret: too much of it is bad for your bones, and you might never know you're doing damage until it's too late.

What makes it so dangerous is that there are few to no symptoms of low bone density, it can occur at any age, and it is notoriously difficult to reverse, especially later in life. Demanding endurance sports like cycling and swimming are increasingly being studied to understand how they can negatively affect bone health.

In 2023, Spanish researchers published a paper entitled, 'One Season in Professional Cycling Is Enough to Negatively Affect Bone Health'. They followed 18 male professional cyclists aged 20 to 40 at the top level of the sport who had raced at least one Grand Tour in recent years, measuring their bone health using various tests during the pre-seasons of 2018 and 2019.

They found that over a single season, there was an overall decline in bone mineral density in these men, which followed previous studies on youth, masters and amateur cyclists and swimmers that showed similar results.

Although bone density can be a serious concern for men, it is even more so for women who face a normal drop in bone density during menopause when estrogen levels drop.

Osteoporosis can predispose sufferers to fractures, especially of the wrist, hip and spine, which can be debilitating and not what active adults who want to keep exercising for their health want. But to truly understand why cycling can harm our bones, and how to combat these negative effects, we first need to go back to basics.

What's in our bones?

Your skeleton isn't just minerals. They're made of hardened tissue containing living cells that constantly break down and form new bone. In the more porous core is the cancellous/spongy bone (trabecular bone) that includes your bone marrow, where your red and white blood cells are produced.

Around 80% of your bones are a hard exterior of 'cortical' or compact bone - it's what holds you upright and lets your muscles lever off them to move you around. Inside are microscopic tubes full of the cells called osteoblasts, which make new bone, and osteoclasts that break down bone tissue.

The strength of your bones starts early in life, with bone density peaking in a woman's early 20s or a man's late 20s. How at risk you are for low bone density (osteopenia) or osteoporosis depends on how strong a start you're given - a good diet and weight-bearing exercise are important factors in building strong bones.

Because your bones are a massive store of calcium, when you exercise, you need that calcium to fuel muscle contractions, and the calcium stored in your bones is critical for 'calcium homeostasis' - your body keeping up with the muscles' demands.

In women, estrogen appears to be important for maintaining bone health. Once women reach menopause and their hormone levels drop, bone density can decline rapidly. Hormone replacement can slow the decline, so it's important for women to speak to their doctors about bone density and get professional advice as early as their mid-30s.

Pro cycling and bone health are a not-so-perfect match

When you lift heavy weights, run, jump, or do other impact- or weight-bearing exercises, the strain stimulates osteoblasts to strengthen the bones. Conversely, long periods of inactivity, weightlessness like in space, certain drugs like glucocorticosteroids, age, and, for women, menopause, can shift the bones into breakdown mode.

Unfortunately, bike riding or racing isn't in the bone-promoting category and, according to research, can do just the opposite.

Even when riders are stomping on the pedals in a sprint or dancing up a mountain, the force on the bones isn't enough to stimulate bone growth, as it is with jumping or weightlifting, and intense aerobic efforts can cause the body to break down bone to fuel demand for its minerals elsewhere.

Professional cycling historically has embraced practices that put riders' bone health at risk: encouraging riders to be very light by restricting calories and discouraging weight training or impact sports during the season. The culture is slowly improving, thankfully, according to Therese Hammerschmith, the Head of Performance at Human Powered Health.

She explained how the team uses all the resources of the Human Powered Health labs to ensure the riders address all risks to bone health.

"That's something I'm really proud of our team for prioritising the health of the athletes first," Hammerschmith said. "We're powering human potential and health and performance by doing baseline assessments [on the team] every year just to see where they're at across the strength side, bone mineral density, resting metabolic rate, and the aerobic side of things as well. Then we can tailor the specific needs of each athlete, as well as the team overall, with what they need not only to be able to perform on the bike during the races, but off the bike as well."

Thanks to greater awareness of bone health, most pro teams have added bone density tests, such as DEXA scans, to their annual assessments to ensure riders aren't at risk of osteopenia or worse, osteoporosis.

"I think, because the conversation is getting louder and more prevalent, that we are moving in the right direction," Hammerschmith added. "When it comes to cycling overall, I would say that there's more attention being brought to this specific topic.

"The cycling season is so long that it wouldn't be uncommon to see some [bone density] decrease. I've seen the decreases happen year over year, but more so in those athletes that aren't prioritising also doing things off of the bike, such as [weight] lifting, even some Plyometrics, or even going for a run, maybe even once a week - things like that can really help offset some of those implications with lower bone mineral density.

"For us on the Performance Lab side of things, being able to give actionable data insights that can then be addressed by the medical staff, the nutritionist, and the sports coaches, to make sure that we are providing the appropriate training regimens as well as any other insights that we see that could guide those specific professions to serve the athletes really well."

The risks you can and can't mitigate

Some osteoporosis risk factors can be fixed, and some can't. A poor diet as a child can start you off with a lower baseline of bone density and set you up for problems later in life, especially if controllable factors like smoking tobacco, drinking alcohol and an adult poor diet aren't corrected.

Chronic use of glucocorticosteroids can increase the risk of osteoporosis, as can celiac disease, which, if untreated by a gluten-free diet, can prevent absorption of important nutrients like calcium and vitamin B12. There is also a risk in cutting calories or, as experts call it, 'low energy availability', which can disrupt hormones that help keep bones in balance.

Other aspects of bone health aren't easily remedied: being female poses a higher risk because of the potential for a rapid drop in bone mineral density during menopause. Ethnicity - especially for Europeans and Asians - and heredity can predispose athletes to bone loss, and small stature is also associated with osteoporosis. These are physical profiles of many pro cyclists.

Women are also generally smaller with less bone mass, making them more at risk for osteoporosis.

If you have untreated celiac disease, inflammatory bowel disease, kidney or liver disease, cancer or rheumatoid arthritis, you're also at higher risk for osteoporosis regardless of gender.

What can we learn from pro cycling?

First, according to Hammerschmith, athletes need to pay careful attention to their diet, not only ensuring they get all of the essential vitamins and minerals but also eating enough calories.

"If we don't have enough of the other fuel sources that help power our body, it's hard to have a well-functioning body," Hammerschmith said.

"We don't want people to go into low energy availability - because it doesn't matter, if you have enough calcium, you're not going to be able to perform at your best [in calorie deficit]. You want to make sure you're getting enough fuel overall - not taking in enough overall fuel can cause hormone imbalances."

Those imbalances can lead to RED-S (relative energy deficiency syndrome). It was originally referred to as 'the female triad', but severe caloric restriction can lead to RED-S in both men and women. While women have an easy early warning if menstruation stops, symptoms of RED-S in men are more vague - decreased performance, irritability, insomnia, depression or low libido. RED-S is linked to low bone density in both genders.

Other steps to maintain bone health include adding some impact exercise to an athlete's routine - add a few runs, plyometrics and weights into the weekly schedule. Some studies have shown that eating calcium-rich food or a calcium supplement before exercise can reduce how much your body mines your bones for calcium during efforts.

Human Powered Health take an approach of tailoring each rider's diet and training to their physiology, and Hammerschmith suggests that this can go a long way toward preventing a pro cycling career from negatively impacting bone health.

"I think that we're moving in the right direction, one, by talking about it and two, having more teams and more individuals screening for [bone density]. It shows care for the athlete and putting them first, and helping them have strong bones or putting on a little bit of muscle mass, which can be beneficial to them in performing.

"We need to take each individual as they are and make sure that we're fueling their individual physiology for their best outcomes, for success, both on the performance side as well as the health side."

Designed to be worn all the time, a health tracker can provide a comprehensive view of a rider’s health, offering data on lifestyle and recovery metrics. They can be useful for everyone, but when it comes to female athletes, where your monthly hormone cycle and vital stats can play a key part in performance, using tracking technology to really get in touch with your health can be a training superpower, but there are limitations, too.

The most significant factors for female riders are heart rate, heart rate variability (HRV), body temperature, and the menstrual cycle, many of which can be linked to hormonal fluctuations.

Health trackers are hugely popular and come in many forms, including smart rings, watches, and bands. In October last year, Oura, the leading smart ring company, reported revenue of over $500 million in 2024 as well as expectations for this to double in 2025. There are several other leading health tracker brands too, including Ultra human, WHOOP and Garmin.

However, while the metrics can be beneficial for female riders to understand their health, do these trackers also encourage an over-reliance on data rather than feeling, and pressure from constantly monitoring performance?

Training strain and pregnancy indicators

Let's start with two commonly used health metrics which can illustrate strain, training readiness and spot signs of illness: HRV and resting heart rate. For female cyclists, HRV data can help indicate signs of pregnancy and hormonal fluctuations, making it particularly useful.

Research on how wearables could monitor hormonal changes in pregnancy has shown that health tracker data could help identify abnormalities, especially heart rate.

Scientists at Scripps Research found ‘compelling’ evidence that heart rate data from devices such as the Apple Watch, Garmin and Fitbit correlated with hormonal fluctuations.

The team concluded that these wearables could offer methods to monitor pregnancy-related physiological and behavioural changes and could also enable early risk assessment for adverse pregnancy outcomes, including miscarriage and preterm birth.

I’ve also seen how a wearable can indicate the first signs of pregnancy: a friend was trying to conceive saw her HRV drop significantly into the red zone on her Garmin, tested and discovered she was pregnant.

Alongside hormonal fluctuations, heart rate data has also proven useful for identifying trends in a rider’s training strain and general health.

World champion track cyclist Neah Evans predominantly has used HRV data to keep tabs on her training and overall health.

"I export that data into a different app called HRV4U because it gives you the minute snapshot just before you wake up, and that's more accurate for measuring your trend," said Evans.

"It then automatically uploads onto my Training Peaks, which is also nice because it's available for my coaches to see if they so wish."

However, Evans doesn’t let the HRV data dictate her sessions, nor is over reliant on the data.

"I think the apps try to convince you to use that number as a dictator of how refreshed and how ready you are for a big session," she added.

"That doesn't work for me because my training is set, and although we have adjustability, I'm not going to turn around to my coach and say I'm not going to do those intervals because my HRV is compromised.

"But it will then mean I'm more aware of why my HRV is compromised, for instance, I know if I do a gym session, the next day it'll be compromised.

"If it’s down randomly, I'll spend a little bit more time checking in with myself. I'm not overly reactive to a one-off, but it's more the trends and understanding where I am in the training block and what it's going to tell me."

'Menstrual cycle tracking apps assume everyone's got a normal cycle'

Another key area where female riders could benefit from tracking their health data is with the menstrual cycle. Meg Smith is a doctoral researcher at Loughborough University and is writing a PhD on understanding the physiological and perceptual effects of the menstrual cycle in female cyclists.

Smith is currently running a survey exploring the effects of The Menstrual Cycle on Training, Performance and Health in Female Cyclists, and is also a female athlete health consultant for AG Insurance-Soudal, where she encourages riders to track their menstrual cycles.

"At World Tour level, riders have such an incredibly high training demand, and because cycling is so energy demanding they can struggle a lot with energy balance,” explained Smith.

"I think a lot of it is unintentional, but it's led to several riders suffering from chronic RED-S and amenorrhoea, which is the absence of periods, all of which makes menstrual cycle tracking very important."

RED-S, also known as relative energy deficiency in sport, was the reason for Veronica Ewers announcing at the end of last year that she was stepping back from pro cycling to focus on her recovery.

Health trackers typically use body temperature to help users track their menstrual cycle, while apps, such as Flo or Clue, rely on user input on cycle dates, as well as options to track many other cycles. Most wearable tracker apps also allow users to input data about their period, which can then be analysed against other stats.

"I've had issues previously, with RED-S, some irregular episodes and my body temperature used to just be like a bit all over the place,” said Evans, whose Oura ring helps her predict her period.

"Now, when it gets more regular, I've started to see a pattern again, so I know that my body temperature is going to increase and then drop, and then the next day, likelihood is I'll probably get my period.

"I'm not always the most regular with how long my cycles are, but I can see if I've had five or six days of increased body temperature, my period is probably going to come, whereas if my body temperature hasn't increased, I'm going to be late."

Smith agrees that body temperature can be a good indicator.

"We had a rider who wasn't tracking her menstrual cycle or any of the symptoms around it, but she started complaining that at certain points she was feeling really hot," explained Smith.

"When we realised the points at which she's feeling hot, it was always two to three days before her cycle. We've put something in place to support that, and if she has a race in that phase, we ensure that recovery is slightly different for her compared to the other riders."

However, she says to get the most accurate data, athletes need to use ovulation strips to show which menstrual cycle phase they are in. This is because women can bleed but not ovulate, which can lead to this being misinterpreted as a normal cycle.

"Menstrual cycle tracking apps assume everyone's got a normal menstrual cycle, everyone’s different," added Smith.

"For those who don’t have a normal cycle, and so who may be bleeding but actually going through a menstrual disturbance, the app tells them they've ovulated and that they’re in a phase which they aren’t. Without ovulation detection, you're never going to know that."

The number one metric to improve

Research has shown that sleep and hormonal fluctuations have a direct relationship, with the menstrual cycle affecting sleep and vice versa. Tracking sleep can also help show a rider’s recovery trends.

Evans has been tracking her sleep patterns since using an Oura ring.

"When I first started with these metrics, one of the biggest things that shifted for me was seeing the tracking of when I was going to bed and when I was waking up," she said.

"It’s interesting seeing how it shifts with different patterns like time zones and training camps. It’s something I’ve then worked on and found a real positive."

"It is the number one metric that everyone should try to improve," added Henry Latimer, cycling coach and coaching partner at Vekta.

"I don't think people quite understand how much you're supposed to have and how much they really get so sleep trackers are great as they can help you spot trends and identify where it relates to training."

Finding a balance

For a health tracker to work best, many brands say you need to wear them all the time to capture an accurate snapshot. They also send notifications and, much like a phone, are addictive to check but this constant surveillance and data output can put pressure on riders.

"I know athletes who will take off their device when they come to major competitions,” said Evans. “They don't want to know because at that point if you're two days out from competition, it's just going to build stress."

Latimer takes a similar approach and advises all riders to take a balanced view of them.

"These wearables can make extra noise and take away from the clarity of what an athlete is trying to achieve," explained Latimer.

"From a mental health perspective, removing or not using a tracker can relieve a bit of pressure because it is one less thing to focus on."

Just part of a wider toolkit

It’s also not just about managing how often riders look at the metrics but also their reliance on them.

"We've got so much data, and we live in such a data-rich society, it's so easy to be over-reliant on these trackers," said Latimer.

“Health trackers are part of a toolkit, and it’s important to put them in the context of how someone is actually feeling and to inform their training.

"My advice is to use them as a tool and as part of giving context to the way you're feeling but always use your feeling first."

Evans agrees and is mindful of over-reliance on her Oura ring.

"I tend to look at it in the morning because otherwise life happens and I won't go back to it, but I'll try and check in with myself first and see how I’m feeling," she said.

"Metrics like HRV are useful but not the definitive. I'll let them indicate certain things and use them as an extra tool, but I’m not going to let them dictate my life. I always trust what my body's telling me first."

"I have never won such a big race," said cyclist Cédrine Kerbaol in 2024, beaming in a post-race interview. She had just won a stage of the Tour de France Femmes after a 15km solo attack, making history as the event's first-ever French stage winner, and securing her team Ceratizit-WNT Pro Cycling's most prestigious victory. "It's crazy."

A lot can change in a year. Kerbaol left for EF Education-Oatly at the end of the season, activating a get-out clause after the team had some hiccups registering for their WorldTour license. Then, in September 2025, Ceratizit Pro Cycling's general manager Claude Sun was forced to close the team he'd spent more than a decade building. "It's your baby," he tells Cyclingnews. "You've got a good relationship with all the riders – it's like your family. And from the sports point of view, it's not a good thing."

The irony is that women's cycling has never been bigger: the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift is broadcast in 190 different countries, with 7.7 million viewers watching the final stage last year, according to France TV. There is more money, more professionalism. The Women's WorldTour level was introduced in 2020, the average WorldTour team budget has risen to €4.67 million, and the UCI's minimum salary requirements are almost in line with the men's. But with costs soaring, teams like Ceratizit are struggling to stay afloat. Is women's cycling becoming a victim of its own success?

Sun, who was previously sales manager for the B2B cutting and machining tools company, launched the team, then known as WNT, in 2014. The aim was to promote the business – diluting the brand's masculine image by sponsoring a women's team – and, he says, to "develop new talent, very important for us, and have an international team." In 2019, the team moved from Sheffield to Germany, signing riders like Kirsten Wild, Clara Koppenburg and Lisa Brennauer. It joined the WorldTour in 2024, and, over its 11 seasons, achieved 65 road victories – 13 in the WorldTour – and four Olympic medals, hardly poor results.

The Ceratizit Group had made a 10-year commitment to sponsor the team, intending to extend it. But after the pandemic, the company closed two factories in Germany, making 600 redundancies, which made it impossible to justify continued sponsorship of the cycling team. "We never [planned to stop]. It was the economic situation," says Sun. "The question was: what can we do with the team?"

Sun approached five different teams in 2024 and 2025 – including Lotto, Ineos Grenadiers, Cofidis and Decathlon – to discuss a potential merger. He initially targeted men's teams without a women's counterpart, as well as Lotto, with whom Ceratizit shared Orbea as a bike sponsor.

"I was very optimistic, because we had a WorldTour team which was number 10 worldwide at the time," says Sun. "But unfortunately, the economic situation for the men's teams was the same… They had no budget, or no interest in women's [cycling], because the costs have exploded."

For a year and a half, Sun contacted potential title sponsors, only to receive the same answer. "We always thought we'd find a solution… We had so many discussions," he says. "It was always the same: no budget."

Sun is not alone in having to close his team in the last 12 months. US-based Continental team Cynisca announced a "strategic hiatus" last year after falling short of its $1 million sponsorship goal, while Arkéa-B&B Hotels folded both its men's and women's teams at the end of 2025.

"In my opinion, the development of women's cycling over the last four years was too fast," says Sun. "I can imagine that the UCI wanted to achieve the same level [as men] for women: teams, culture, budget. But they forgot one thing: the sponsor. The sponsors give the money. The sponsors pay the UCI… When the budget increases, the sponsors have to pay. I know, because I was the sponsor."

Rising costs, but not rising investment?

It is a perfect storm: a combination of rapidly multiplying costs and revenue from sponsorship unable to keep up. In 2014, Sun had a budget of €400,000 for the team. By the time Ceratizit closed in 2025, this had risen to €3.2 million, an increase of 700 per cent. And it still wasn't enough. According to Sun, it costs around €5 million a year to run a women's WorldTour team now; the average had been €2.4 million in 2022. "It's like in a company: you've got the same turnover, but your personnel costs double. If you do not find a new sponsor or increase your budget somewhere, you've got a big issue."

Cycling's problem, of course, is its dependence on sponsorship. Approximately 85 per cent of an average team's revenue comes from its sponsors. With costs ballooning, teams have two options: persuade their sponsors to pay more, or find more sponsors. This is easier said than done. At the team's inception, Sun says the return on investment was 1:10, meaning the sponsor earned €10 for every Euro invested. Now, though, he believes this has fallen to 1:7. "The sponsor's value has not increased by 100 per cent [since 2022]," says Sun. "In terms of the money to pay for a team, you've got only the sponsorship. This is dangerous."

For team managers, it is outgoings like travel, accommodation, staff, food and, increasingly, altitude camps, which have risen most. Holding a WorldTour licence carries its own price tag, and new rules are making it even more expensive: as of this season, there is an obligation to compete in more races – including all three Grand Tours – with teams only able to skip one of the remaining 24 WorldTour races. This means more riders, more transport, more staff, more bikes – and more money.

For some teams, the costs attached to a WorldTour licence are simply too high to compete in what was once every team's target league. Last year, Basque outfit Laboral Kutxa-Fundacion Euskadi were the 15th-ranked team in the world – enough to earn a WorldTour license – but decided to remain a ProTeam, despite its long-held goal of joining the WorldTour.

"Three years ago, we set up a budget to be a WorldTour team. Today, we have that budget, but the reality is that it's not enough to be a top WorldTour team," general manager Aitor Galdos told Cyclingnews in November. "We're keeping our current category."

Likewise, rising salaries in the sport are rightly hailed as a step toward gender parity. The majority of women's WorldTour riders now earn between €80,000 and €100,000 a year, with Demi Vollering rumoured to earn up to €1 million. The introduction of big agents to women's sport is inflating salaries further, managers say.

"It's good for the rider," says Sun. "But the development of the riders' agent is a big issue, because they smell money. It's like if you have a lake with some fish in it, and everybody wants to have the same fish. If you take the same fish for two or three times more money, the agent can take the money, 10 per cent, but the fish will not go faster."

Without the budget to pay larger salaries, it is harder to retain talent, with some riders trading leadership at a smaller team in favour of a higher-paid domestique role elsewhere. Kerbaol, for example, terminated her Ceratizit contract a year early to join EF Education-Oatly, despite it being – at that point – a step down from the WorldTour to ProTeam level, though likely for a higher salary.

Unlike sports like football, there are no transfer or development fees for teams that have invested in and developed young riders. As a result, the ever-increasing gap between the richest "superteams" at the top of the WorldTour, like Lidl-Trek, SD Worx-Protime and UAE Team ADQ, and those at the bottom, like Ceratizit, is widening. "The bigger teams are becoming bigger, and the smaller teams are in difficulties," says Sun. "In my opinion, the small women's teams have no future anymore. Financially, you cannot survive in the WorldTour."

Pragmatic decisions to survive

FDJ United-Suez finished last season as the top-ranked women's team, and, with riders like Demi Vollering, Juliette Berthet (née Labous), Évita Muzic and Elise Chabbey, is now one of the sport's 'superteams'. But they too are under pressure. The team is understood to have a budget of around €5 million, compared to the €7 to €8 million budgets of the richest teams. For over a decade, manager-owner Stephen Delcourt has factored in an annual budget increase of between 5 and 10 per cent – but in the last year alone, his costs have increased by 29 per cent.

"We are like a start-up without funds," he says. "We play with money that we don't have in our pockets. That's dangerous. The consequence is that we have 15 WorldTour spots, and only 14 [teams] apply. We need to analyse that. We go too fast because we have no rules. There is space for the big teams, but for the others, there is no place."

Like Sun, Delcourt has been struck by the rise in personnel costs, with participation in the WorldTour calendar becoming increasingly expensive. Race organisers typically subsidise travel for teams to compete in races. But one of the problems, says Delcourt, is that despite having similar expenditure, this contribution is much smaller for women's teams. For the Santos Tour Down Under, men's teams received €60,000, while women's outfits were paid only €25,000, despite participation costing FDJ €31,000.

"How can we continue in 2026 to have a difference like this?" he asks. "In cycling, we pay to work. When we go to Paris-Roubaix or Flèche, the cost of the travel is more expensive than the fees I get back."

As a result, Delcourt has had to make pragmatic, budget-conscious decisions about the coming season. He has slimmed his team down from 18 to 16 riders, and is planning a reduced racing calendar with more focused goals. "There is a budget decision and a sport decision," he says. "I really feel that if [costs] continue to increase at 29 per cent, I need to be calm and not go too fast. And with the new UCI rules, I want to be careful."

Nevertheless, the sport's growing profile and FDJ United-Suez's roster of star riders have helped to entice new sponsors. When the team signed Vollering in 2024, it led to high-profile collaborations with both Nike and Specialized, which replaced long-term partner Lapierre as the team’s bike sponsor and is understood to contribute to Vollering’s salary. And mid-season last year, FDJ United-Suez signed new deals with aparthotel brand Adagio and insurance company Gan Assurances. As a team, they seem to regularly add new sponsors. Interest in sponsoring women's teams is booming, says Delcourt, but it remains harder than ever to close partnership deals.

"When we started the team in 2006, it was hard, because nobody knew [about women's cycling]. Now, it's easier to gain the attention of bigger brands because we have visibility, we have numbers – and we are number one in the world. It is hard to conclude the deal now, because of the worldwide economy. Everybody is afraid that tomorrow Trump will put a tax on Europe. I feel that everybody wants a women's team – everybody wants to be involved in my team, especially – but they say they need to wait."

Zwift is one of women's cycling's most prominent sponsors, funding both Canyon-SRAM and Fenix-Premier Tech as well as races like Paris-Roubaix and the Tour de France Femmes, which represents the company's single biggest marketing investment. It is keen to encourage other potential sponsors to follow suit. "We want to be a part of the solution, says Kate Veronneau, director of women's strategy. "We recognise that the sport is growing really fast, and we want to ensure that more investors are coming to the table, so we try to share as much as possible that this has been a positive move for us on so many levels – not just pure return on investment, but on sentiment, on brand value, on who we are and our community feeling good about being Zwifters."

The sponsorship landscape has changed since Zwift started supporting Canyon-SRAM in 2016, and Veronneau says return on investment has increased. Athletes are no longer as accessible, but audiences are bigger than ever. "The way that the sport is growing, and the increase of fans just means more exposure for us, and that we're reaching bigger global audiences," says Veronneau. "To see how much further those sponsorship dollars go now, because more people have access and visibility into women's cycling – that's seen all of us get a lot more return on investment."

On the surface, the sport appears to be thriving – thanks in part to companies like Zwift. But while some teams are buoyed up by the wave, others are borne down under it, unable to stay afloat. Sun has terminated his contracts with his sponsors, shut down his facilities, and is in the process of selling off Ceratizit's old stock.

"This is not negative," he says, listing the team's achievements. "We had 70 different riders, we've got good contact with all of them, we love them, and we pushed women's cycling. Perhaps our time is over. It's not a bad thing. It was a good time. The future will tell us what will happen next."

Cast your mind back to March 17, 2013. On the northwest coast of Italy, somewhere between Milan and San Remo, 200 professional cyclists were facing torrid racing conditions as they battled on to win – or even just finish – La Classicisima against wind, ice, sleet, and snow.

Watching the race back now or looking through epic images of Peter Sagan, Fabian Cancellara, Mark Cavendish, and eventual winner Gerald Ciolek facing all the elements Mother Nature could throw at them, you’ll see – amongst the mass of old school rain capes flapping in the wind and doing little to protect the riders from the wintery conditions – tens of riders wearing a sleek, black jersey which cuts a remarkably aero profile for a rain jacket.

In most cases, the logo was scribbled out with a black Sharpie, but after the race, it became clear that throngs of pro teams had gone out and purchased Castelli’s new foul-weather racing Gabba jersey to keep their riders warm whilst maintaining an aerodynamic advantage.

This is one of the most high-profile examples of professional cyclists eschewing, en masse, their 'sponsor correct' kit allocation in favour of a product that, in their eyes, did a better job.

In the years since the 2013 'Gabba-gate' at Milan-San Remo, such blatant examples of brand disloyalty have been few and far between, at least to the uninformed. Either teams are doing a much better job of concealing the use of non-sponsor correct equipment, or brands are doing a better job of making kit that meets the riders' standards to use in the first place.

But does it still happen? Why do teams stray, and what do brands think when they do? How does a team’s relationship with a sponsor actually work? We spoke to people from every side of the conversation to find out.

"Up until that day, we had only sold about a thousand Gabbas in the whole world, and 150 of them showed up in that stupid race," Steve Smith, Global Brand Manager for Castelli, told me, recalling that infamous Milan-San Remo moment.

"But it wasn’t just San Remo. The entire spring that year was super wet. If you watch Tirreno [the week before Milan-San Remo], you can see [Matteo] Montaguti on AG2R [not a Castelli-sponsored team] off the front all the time wearing a Gabba."

I asked Smith, who was integral to the design of the original Gabba in 2011, if – given the relatively small quantities of Gabbas that were sold before that San Remo – he was aware that the pros had been buying them, or if they’d been out unbeknownst to Castelli.

"We sold some to Team Sky because Gabriel Rasch [AKA Gabba - the primary co-conspirator in the development of the garment] went there after he left Cervélo Test Team. But then we had reports of Thomas Voeckler going into a dealer in France and buying 30 jackets for his entire team. I’ve got photos of Cancellara at the start, getting ready with two Gabbas in the back of his car that he’d bought on the drive down from Bern. Of those thousand Gabbas that we had sold by then, probably 400 of them ended up on pros."

The team-sponsor relationship

These days, it seems teams and sponsors alike are much sharper on ensuring their riders have equipment that meets the required standards whilst also upholding their contracts.

However, I spoke to one pro cyclist who, while remaining anonymous, was happy to speak fairly candidly about the relationship between the team and their sponsors, and his own personal equipment preferences.

"This year we tested the [sponsor's] new road suit. The team did a track day testing all the different skinsuits offered by different brands. We had UAE's, Movistar's, and a few others to test ours against and, to be fair, it actually stacked up pretty well," the rider told me.

"It was just that curiosity thing. The quickest was UAE's – the Pissei product – but against ours, it was only two watts quicker. So we're actually in a decent place. You can't complain too much. I think they would have tried to tweak it and copy a little bit if it was like miles off."

Of course, sponsorship is partly about advertising your product in the pro peloton, but this kind of feedback coming from pro riders is also a large part of what brands want out of a partnership with a team. In some cases, riders using the equipment they're given without complaining can therefore be less helpful for brands.

"Very, very, very few cyclists I’ve met over the years can really do that blue-sky thinking of ‘here's something nobody's ever thought of before’.
A lot of the feedback is nuance, small stuff to make an existing product a little bit better," said Smith.

"The riders are super engaged in giving that kind of feedback. In fact, we have to work hard to get ourselves integrated into a team so that the riders will look at us as a partner. At first, the riders look at their sponsors and say, 'OK, these guys pay the bill. Let's not piss them off' and just tell us what they think we want to hear, but if all we get is 'yeah, the stuff is great' then that's not very useful."

But what about if the equipment riders are given isn’t up to their standards? This is usually touted as the reason why we see riders and teams purchasing off-brand gear in the first instance.

"Certainly, last year we definitely did feel that [the clothing wasn’t up to scratch]," continues the rider. "When we were with our previous brand, you could just sort of tell. We never tested it, but you just knew it was like really dated stuff, and that is frustrating. The margins are so fine, and then you're losing more on things that literally just need a bit of R&D. It's just a bit frustrating."

Straying from the sponsor

I was curious to know if any of the gear the rider in question has used in races has ever been off-brand, and how the team felt about it. His response surprised me.

"Two years ago, our previous sponsor's rain jacket was absolutely dreadful. You'd get colder wearing it than if you weren't wearing it. So everyone started buying Castelli stuff and blacking out the logos," he revealed.

"The team doctors had to step in and say, 'This is not right. We're doing all these races, and everyone's getting sick because they're getting too cold', so I was advised to buy one [a Castelli Gabba] by the doctor. I was racing GP Monseré, and it was just gritty, awful conditions. I abandoned it because I was so cold, and I literally ordered this jacket before the race had even finished."

Ironically, Castelli actually has a ‘pro shop’ page on their website, where they sell a few key foul-weather garments completely free of any logos.

"The blacked out logo is best for us, but a lot of riders don't want to go there with the team and the teams don't want the rider to do that, so we have the pro shop. Decathlon CMA CGM bought Gabbas and rain jackets for the entire team," Smith added.

"Van Rysel doesn't really try to play in that space, so I'm sure the team had the okay from Van Rysel. But the individual riders can get their secret kit – we don't push it too hard because the riders that need that kind of stuff should seek us out."

The average male WorldTour professional raced somewhere around 60-70 days in 2025, but what about the other 300 days of the year? Are riders strictly using sponsored gear when they’re out training, putting in the hard graft away from the cameras?

"I've got jackets that I use instead of the team kit when I’m training, and tights as well. I find the teams give you winter tights, but they're like European winter tights – for when it's slightly cold in the South of France or something," the rider tells me. "But where I live, it’s just not cutting it, so I've got Assos tights, and an Assos jacket that's quite good."

In case it wasn’t obvious, the rider’s kit sponsor is not Assos.

Whilst it might be easy to spot the 'wrong' jacket or shoes on a rider, or detect a discrepancy in tyres if you get a closer look at a pro's bike, what about the things that are harder to spot, like sports nutrition?

Despite their team having a nutrition sponsor (that isn't SIS), the rider said: "I'm basically purely SIS. SIS, and then sweets and stuff like that.

"I find nothing really compares to SIS, and it's what I've always done well off of. I'll mix and match, but the Nootropics gel, for example, I find there's nothing really that comes close to that."

How to mitigate against brand disloyalty

Stretching back to the early days of the Slipstream team, when their riders were among the first to wear aero helmets and skin suits in road races, EF Pro Cycling has long been a team at the forefront of looking for competitive advantages through material. One of the team's sports directors, Tom Southam, explained how they and the team's partners managed to stay ahead of the curve without looking elsewhere.

"Everyone wants to go faster, and keep improving – teams and sponsors alike," said Southam.

"These days the approach is to work that bit closer and much more in depth with your own sponsors and have them on board wanting to push the tech forward, than it is to just run off and buy a load of kit from somewhere else."

"I don’t think a team could legitimately take a lot of money and a dramatically inferior product these days, as the riders just wouldn’t buy it and you’d pretty soon end up in trouble if people started trying their own thing."

Alongside his tenacity and enormous engine, in 2025, the team’s star rider, Ben Healy, relied on an equipment setup that left no stone unturned in the quest for speed. Optimised to the nines, he often used POC’s divisive-looking Procen TT/road racing aero helmet, Vittoria Corsa Pro Speed TLR tyres, and a heavily modified Rapha TT skinsuit (complete with cut-off long sleeves safety pinned in place to ensure maximum aerodynamic efficiency).

The thing that stands out is that, amidst the customisation, Healy has ensured every single piece of equipment is sponsor correct. Only a few years ago, this kind of hyper-optimised setup would have been a surefire opportunity for a rider to look at brands outside their usual sponsor roster to make sure they have the fastest possible setup.

For example, in 2017 British team Bike Channel-Canyon – who were sponsored by Le Col clothing for that season – turned heads when they rolled up to the start of a team time trial in the Netherlands in team-branded VeloTec aero skinsuits. Le Col terminated their sponsorship at the end of the season.

Bike Channel-Canyon had obviously gone to that race looking to mix it up with the bigger teams, and saw a result there as more important than remaining 100% sponsor correct.

"I feel like there was this fetishised idea back in the day that if a team went and bought 'something else', it was this hidden secret that would move the needle for them," continued Southam. "You know, riding tyres at Paris-Roubaix with just a black marker pen masking their real branding. That whole 'if you know you know, wink, wink' secret thing. But that is sort of dead in the water now."

It's clear that one of the major reasons these sorts of transgressions don’t occur as often as they used to is the ease of detection and accountability in this age of social media and seemingly infinite streams of 'content creation' across all platforms.

"Every seam, line, bit of ribbing, shoe lace, rain jacket or prototype helmet is catalogued on the internet within moments of it existing and some rider taking a selfie in it, which as young people they cannot not do, it's impossible," Southam added. "Whatever piece of kit that may be is then scrutinised endlessly by people who are really ‘into that kind of thing’. In this world, you just wouldn’t think you could get away with riding on different tyres or wearing a different rain jacket, two of the most common and obvious sins we’ve all read about in the past."

The world of sponsorship has layers to it. From the brands at the top, through team staff, down to the riders – every stakeholder has a different objective when it comes to equipment.

"No sponsor just wants to open a newspaper and be happy that a rider in a team they pay for has their arms aloft in a black and white photo. Teams and sponsors have cottoned on to the fact that what they are paying for isn’t all about winning, but about the story that is created alongside the wins or highlights," Southam concluded.

"Cycling is a high-performance sport, so the technical suppliers and partners of the teams need to be a part of the success of the team based on the quality of the equipment they sell. That is their story. That is why they sponsor. It’s not just plonking a name on a shirt or an iron-on patch on a polo."

It’s not feasible for every single brand that sponsors a cycling team to expect win after win after win. In the age of Pogačar, Van der Poel, Kopecky, and the handful of other generational talents mopping up the vast majority of race victories, brands are more than aware that a large part of the value they can expect to extract from teams comes from the exposure, the content, and the stories.

"If we talked to a hundred amateur cyclists, I'm not sure how many of those would be able to tell me that Pogačar’s kit sponsor is Pissei," Smith remarked.

"Just having a logo on the kit doesn't really do much for you – the benefits come when you're actually engaged with the team and you really build a story around it. It’s two-fold because you also get the product feedback; these kids are out there in all sorts of weather and conditions, and they do in a year what some of us do in a lifetime of testing."

From a team's perspective, the scope of budgets across the men's and women's WorldTours is broad, with teams at the top financially secure enough to be more discerning in the brands they chose to work with, whereas the teams at the lower end of the spectrum are more beholden to the brands who can offer a financial contribution, even if their product isn’t up to scratch.

From speaking to various interested parties, as well as looking out for this sort of thing in the peloton with a keen eye over a number of years, it seems like the defining contributor – at least these days – in whether or not teams use non-sponsored products is budget. The biggest teams with the biggest budgets can afford the best riders and, therefore, attract the best sponsors who have the facilities and budget to research, test, and develop products that meet the standards expected by the riders. Lower-level teams with smaller budgets simply do not have the buying power to bring on the best riders (who are winning massive races and boosting the team's profile), so they are more beholden to the whim of lesser sponsors who, in turn, cannot offer the same level of product.

There's no one party to blame for when riders go astray, and the reasons for doing so are clearly varied, but for whatever reason, everyone involved is definitely making sure that it's happening less, or at least less obviously than on that rainy day in Northern Italy.

There has never been a better time to become rich from cycling, with an estimated 65 millionaires racing the world’s biggest races. But away from the heights of the Grand Tours and the Monuments are 178 third-division men’s UCI Continental teams, stacked full of riders trying to work their way up the ladder and veterans looking to extend their careers, all riding races with next to little fanfare. Million-Euro contracts are not a pipedream, but an impossibility – many of them essentially pay to race.

Cyclingnews has spoken with managers, riders and agents across the globe to understand the working conditions of male Continental riders in 2025. The third-tier is the breeding ground of many young talents – 17 professional teams now have their own Continental teams which operate as development squads – but there remains an overriding sense of desperate athletes, many of them students or working part-time jobs, being preyed upon, sucked into the trap of being promised a world that doesn’t exist.

“So many teams say that they have plans to be a [second-tier] ProTeam, but most of it is nonsense,” said one rider who wished to remain anonymous. “It comes from people who seem like legitimate businessmen, giving their speech to young riders who haven’t had the life lessons to know anything different. I often feel like riders are exploited for the love of sport and sold a dream that isn’t a reality. It’s really unfair.”

Bound by the rules

There are 91 registered Continental teams across Europe in 2025, with traditional cycling nations France (12) and Italy (10) boasting the most. Riders on third-tier teams will occasionally rub shoulders with riders from professional teams in lesser-ranked events, but they are not allowed to compete in WorldTour races – it’s for this reason that some races, like the Tour of Britain, have never applied for WorldTour status as then it would exclude the host country’s Continental teams.

Unlike with WorldTeam and ProTeam squads that are registered with the UCI, all Continental teams are regulated by their national federations. What that means is that they are bound by the rules of their respective countries, as opposed to the UCI. And that explains why wages and conditions vary greatly depending on the country.

In most Western European countries – the heartlands of cycling – there is a minimum wage that Continental teams have to pay their riders, as set by each national federation. In France, where riders are treated as professionals and not amateurs, the minimum salary in 2024 was €25,000; and in Belgium, it’s €24,674 for full-time riders, and €12,337 for riders under-25, students or those deemed as part-time employees. Not all federations make that amount publicly available, but Cyclingnews has been told that the figure in the Netherlands, which has eight teams, is €600 per month, and in Italy it’s closer to €300.

Of the several sources that Cyclingnews spoke to, the consensus was that riders on European Continental teams outside of France and Belgium are generally paid between €11,000 and €22,000 a year, with the mean salary being somewhere around €14-15,000. Development teams, which have grown in popularity and tend to scoop up the best young talent, will pay less – often not much more than €12,000.

Minimum wages in the 22 of the 27 European Union member states who have one range from €551 per month in Bulgaria to €2,704 in Luxembourg. The Netherlands, Germany, Belgium and France – countries with a combined total of 35 Continental teams – all have minimum monthly salaries between €1,802 and €2,193. Typical Continental cycling wages, then, are clearly inferior.

It wasn’t too long ago that top riders in Portugal – home to a thriving domestic scene, including the Volta a Portugal which is sometimes referred to as the ‘fourth Grand Tour’ – could command wages of between €60,000 and €70,000. Similarly, at the height of the UK scene between 2015 and 2019, the biggest names were said to be pocketing up to £50,000 a year, roughly the equivalent of €70,000 back then.

Those extraordinary amounts are partly to blame for the collapse of domestic UK racing, with the number of British Conti teams reducing from seven to zero. “That destroyed the British scene,” commented one rider who rode in the UK at the time. “They blew their budgets, and it wasn’t sustainable.”

One thing that hasn’t changed from a decade ago is that younger riders on teams not affiliated to professional outfits often race without being remunerated. “In Estonia, the minimum salary is around €800 a month, but in our team we have many youngsters who don't receive a salary,” said Mihkel Räim, of Quick Pro Team.

The 32-year-old has been racing mostly for Continental teams for the past 12 years, though he did ride in the WorldTour for Israel Start-Up Nation in 2020. “There is no rule we have to pay them, and they agree to that. They get expenses paid, of course, so we give them a bike, a place to live if they need it, food and prize money. This is the deal for most young riders on European teams.”

Some things are covered, other things are not

Expenses: Some things are covered, other things are not. British rider Harrison Wood, who spent two years at Cofidis until his release last season, is racing for one of Portugal’s nine Conti teams this year, Anicolor-Tien 21.

The 25-year-old earns around €12,000 a year, a minimum wage that “four to five riders on all the Portuguese teams will be getting,” he said. Highlighting just how tight finances are, though, Wood has had to secure three sponsors for the team to participate in the Tour of Britain.

“We lost a main sponsor at the start of the year, so we haven’t got the budget we anticipated,” he said. “Without the sponsors I got for the Tour of Britain, we wouldn’t have been able to make it to the start line.”

Wood always has his expenses covered when with the team, but he has to pay his own way to races – a policy that is common among most teams. On some teams, riders are given a set fee each month, often around €500, to cover their expenses. If there’s a shortfall, they have to pay it themselves.

Many riders report issues with delayed wages or being reimbursed for expenses, and it’s not uncommon for money to be paid to a rider from different bank accounts, as teams scramble around to find the necessary amount.

One rider, who did not wish to be named, said that they had a “pile of receipts from this year of what the team owes me, plus prize money from races, but I have no idea when – or if – it’ll ever get paid.”

South African rider Callum Ormiston rode for the now-defunct Global 6 United team in 2023 and 2024. The team, which was first registered in New Zealand and then Luxembourg, had a number of serious financial problems, leading riders like Ormiston to seek out additional sources of income.

“I didn’t get paid at all by Global 6, so had to find personal sponsors throughout the year,” he said. “I had my flights paid for the year and hotels at races thanks to the organisers, but that was it. The rest of the travel I covered myself, and I bought my own food if we needed stuff. I only stayed because the calendar was good.”

'Word is spreading that there is good money to be made from racing in China'

Ormiston is now riding for The Hurricane & Thunder Cycling Team, one of 15 Continental teams in China. The country has a thriving and developing cycling scene, counting 13 UCI races and a strong domestic competition, the highlight being the China Pro Cycling League. “They’re throwing money at the sport and it's only going to keep on growing,” Ormiston predicted.

The situation in China for younger riders is similar to that in Europe: many will have their essential expenses covered, but won’t receive payment for riding. Older, more experienced and better riders, however, will get paid between €1,000 and €4,000 a month. The best in China are earning more than the minimum salary of ProTeam riders, which is set at €35,392 for employed riders, and €58,043 for self-employed riders. It’s little surprise that riders from across the globe are moving to China in increasing numbers.

“China is super cheap – you can have a good meal for €1-€2 – so I’m able to save most of my wages. Word is spreading that there is good money to be made from racing there,” Ormiston said. “The racing is also really good – the Pro League is strong, and there’s loads of UCI races. It’s the first time I’ve really felt like a professional rider.”

Prize money is also good. Räim and the Estonian-registered team Quick Pro have a Chinese backer and therefore race frequently in Asia. “We raced the Trans-Himalaya [in August] and you got $5,000 USD for a stage win, and $20,000 USD for winning the GC,” Räim said. “That’s way better in Europe, where you basically pay to race. If you win, you might get €800, but after tax, UCI fees, and splitting it with other riders, you might only get €100. which is honestly nothing nowadays in Europe.”

Räim cautions against the idea, though, of Chinese teams being willing to pay over the odds. “The prize money is good, and they have money to spend, but they don’t waste it,” he said. “It’s not a paradise. Some guys are on €4,000 a month, but not many guys get that type of money. You get some riders who have been on ProTeams asking for minimum WorldTour salaries but they’re not going to receive that.”

In total, there are 61 Continental teams in Asia and Oceania, with Japan (10) and South Korea (6) being the other hotspots. There are seven African teams and 19 teams in the Americas, but it is China that is making the biggest moves and attempting to take a slice of the European-dominated pie. “I think in the next five years it’s going to get even bigger,” Räim said.

Impressive racing calendar pitted against low wages

As the 2025 season nears its completion and preparations for the next one start to begin, the outlook for riders on Continental teams in most countries, with the exception of France and Belgium where there are more stringent labour laws, is unlikely to differ too much.

By agreeing to ride for third division teams, a rider is taking advantage of a potentially impressive racing calendar that pits them against professional riders, while accepting a life of low wages and very possibly even dipping into their own savings to get by. It’s certainly not an existence that promises wealth.

“You’re constantly battling to keep your head above the water, and it can have a serious mental toll on you,” one rider said. “For many years, it was definitely costing me more than I was making.”

Räim would like to see the UCI enforce a ruling on each of its national federations to instigate a minimum salary policy, but he has little faith it’d ever happen.

“It’s unfair because we’re in the same race, riding the same kilometres, and have the same risks as ProTeam or WorldTour guys. OK, one might be a superstar who is better, but a job is a job,” he said. “It would be nice if one day all Conti guys got at least something, but I don’t see it happening, not with the prices of everything going up. It’s never been harder to run a Conti team.”

Gran Fondos: you’ve possibly raced one, and almost certainly heard of them. Big events, essentially timed sportives, that take place most weekends across Europe, and increasingly more so across the rest of the world. The biggest ones bring thousands of riders together, and can generate significant revenues for organisers. It’s little wonder that each year there are more of them, and that the UCI have jumped on the bandwagon – the sport’s world governing body now has a successful Gran Fondo World Series of 25-35 qualifier events that culminate in the UCI Gran Fondo World Championships.

Just one problem: doping. And a lot of it. Second problem: almost all of it goes undetected.

While professional cycling appears to have a grip on doping, with the number of positive tests among UCI-registered riders hovering around the 15-25 range for most of the past decade, doping cases at age-category amateur levels are becoming more and more prevalent.

Just this summer alone there has been a spate of athletes, many of them successful on the amateur scene, who have been charged with anti-doping violations and been provisionally suspended: French rider Stephane Cognet, who won the 2024 edition of the Fausto Coppi Gran Fondo, tested positive for the steroid Betamethasone; an Italian Masters champion returned a positive test for seven banned drugs, as did another Masters winner for EPO; and one other Italian rider who finished second at the Gran Fondo Sestriere Colle delle Finestre failed to provide an anti-doping sample.

But with the costs of tests north of €1,000, and no mandatory testing place other than at the aforementioned UCI Gran Fondo World Championships, few organisers have the desire to invest significant sums into their events to deter the cheaters. It has led to a situation where, according to one Gran Fondo organiser in Italy, “every weekend we just know that there are people on the start grid of these events who are doping. We just know it.”

What, if anything, can be done about it?

Reward often outweighs the risks

According to the website CycloWorld, which tracks mass participation events across the world, there were over 700 road bike Gran Fondos slated to take place in 2025. Of those, France (116), Italy (96), the United States (93), and Spain (82) lead the way. An estimated 444 of those events – or 62.5% – were in Europe, where world-famous events like the Marmotte, Maratona, Mallorca 312 and Quebrantahuesos are held.

Major race organisers have stepped into the landscape in recent years, too, with the Tour de France promoters ASO now running in excess of 30 events across the globe as part of their L’Étape Series. Gran Fondos linked to races like the Tour of Flanders and Strade Bianche are also big revenue drivers, and have been singled out by the sport’s powerbrokers as essential to the sport’s economy in future years.

In almost all Gran Fondo events, riders are given an overall time and an age group time, with riders finishing in the top three in each category presented on the podium afterwards. In most events, however, prize money is limited – if it even exists. There are some exceptions, though, such as the Levi’s Gran Fondo in the United States that had a total prize pot of $156,000 USD this year, and the Gran Fondo World Tour that had a payout of $36,000 USD until it stopped financially rewarding competitors in 2020. Most incredible is the Abu Dhabi Gran Fondo in the UAE that has a prize purse of AED 2 million, roughly €465,000 – that’s five times more than the prize money on offer at the men’s Paris-Roubaix.

'It's a wild west'

There appears to be an omertà in place when it comes to doping within Gran Fondo racing. Cyclingnews contacted multiple male and female athletes who have finished on the podium of UCI Gran Fondo World Series events in the past two years to discuss the presence of doping, but no one wanted to speak.

John Woodson has been writing about amateur doping for Gran Fondo Daily since 2019. He started to do so after he participated in the UCI Gran Fondo World Championships in 2018, where Spanish rider Raúl Portillo, who won two gold medals at the event, tested positive for doping. “It piqued my interest as to how prevalent it is, and the more I dug into it, the more I realised that amateur doping is this dirty little secret behind the scenes that has been happening all along but is barely communicated,” Woodson said. “You get into the age category events, Masters and Gran Fondos, and it’s a wild west of doping activity.”

Through his years of reporting and research, Woodson has established that three categories of performance-enhancing drugs are most common among amateur athletes: EPO and human growth hormones; testosterone; and contaminated supplements, such as dietary medication and off-label products. “Some of them are taking medication which they’re unaware might contain products that are on the prohibited list,” Woodson said. EPO and testosterone, however, is not a mistake – that is blatant and knowing cheating. “Cases of EPO have been increasing as it’s easily available – there’s definitely a trend of people gravitating towards that,” Woodson added.

Gran Fondos attract riders of all demographics, with age categories starting at 19-34, and then going up every five years. Sources who Cyclingnews spoke to all said that the majority of people who dope are aged between 40 and 60. In 2024, Woodson spoke with an Italian amateur rider who was banned for failing an anti-doping test. Asked how he obtained the prohibited products, the rider – who wished to remain anonymous – said: “I would prefer not to answer how I found the products. [But] not from people in the [cycling] group, even if at the time it was not difficult to find [products] in the group.” The rider’s words speak of a doping epidemic in the amateur ranks.

Cyclingnews contacted both the UCI and the International Testing Agency for this article to gauge how concerned they are about amateur doping and what they’re doing to combat the problem, but both organisations referred the request to the other. “We focus on international-level cyclists,” the ITA said.

It therefore falls to the national anti-doping federations (NADAs) to administer and process tests of amateur athletes in their own countries. But with NADAs being poorly funded – UK Anti-doping (UKAD) recorded a total expenditure of £11.7m in 2023-24 – and the priority being on testing professional athletes, most amateur riders know that the chances of evading detection for doping are high. “It’s like whack-a-mole,” Woodson said. “Think about how many amateur events there are, and each one has thousands of riders. It’s simply impossible for NADAs to get around and test even every winner of each category.”

Allegations of technological fraud – or motor doping – have also surfaced in the past decade. In 2022, the winner of the Maratona, Stefano Stagni, was accused of having a concealed motor, something he denied. But Italian newspaper Corriera Della Sera went in hard. “Stagni had a motor in his bike and cheated… the climbing times on the great Dolomite passes are surreal,” they wrote. Stagni refuted the accusation.

One person with extensive insider knowledge of motor doping told Cyclingnews: “It’s common, it’s everywhere. There is a lot of money in Gran Fondo racing, and people are happy to pay €5,000 to €10,000 for a motor or some assistance. The producers have a lot of clients riding these events.”

The level at some of these Gran Fondo events is high – it’s not uncommon for the average speed of the winners to be similar to what would be expected in WorldTour racing. The top 10% are all fit athletes, many of whom have previously competed in Continental or even professional teams. Knowing that the standard is high is one incentive to dope for some.

“Riders treat each Gran Fondo like a World Championships – they’re all out to compete,” Woodson said. “For whatever reason, they have this overarching need to win, even if there is no money involved. It’s not like a pro whose career depends on results – it’s purely for their ego. And in Italy especially, you’re presented on the podium, with podium girls hugging you, flowers, and then your picture is in the paper the next day. You’d think it was a World Tour-level race.”

Separating competitiveness from cheating

Marco Pavarini is the organiser of the L’Étape Parma Gran Fondo, which takes place in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy in May. He concurs with Woodson. “I was hopeful that after Covid, people’s competitiveness would have decreased, and for a few years this did happen, but now the level of competitiveness among amateurs is very, very high," Pavarini said. “And this is a problem for us because we know there are a lot of athletes pushing their limits, doping, using too many supplements.” Pavarini and his team trialled a new approach at the 2025 event to encourage less aggressive racing. “We didn’t have a starting grid based on a rider’s previous ranking, and we only took times on the climbs, not for the whole course,” he said.

Italy has one of the largest numbers of confirmed cases of amateur doping, but that is largely because it’s one of the few countries that takes the issue seriously. Indeed, wrote the Movement for Credible Cycling in September 2024, “Italy’s standing deserves particular attention… its amateur circuit raises questions since, according to the Italian Federation, more than 700 people (amateur and professional athletes, club officials) are serving [doping - ed] suspensions, from Gran Fondos to professional UCI events and local road races.”

In a bid to clamp down on dopers and to deter them, the Federazione Ciclistica Italiana – or the Italian Cycling Federation – have instructed all Gran Fondos that want support from them that they have to insert a clause in the subscription that states any rider who is caught doping within six months of the event could be fined up to €50,000 for the damage done to the brand. Most Italian events now test up to 10 athletes on event day.

“We need to have these rules and penalties to give the message clearly that doping is a big problem and isn’t tolerated,” Pavarini said. “You cannot delete the past if your event is associated with doping. And events lose sponsors because companies don’t want to be linked with these kinds of athletes.”

Pavarini believes – and certainly hopes – that the deterrent is working. “You agree to the rule when you sign up, and if there’s evidence that you doped, it is simple: we write you a legal letter and ask you to pay this amount for the damage you have done to our brand awareness. Afterwards, there is a judge who makes the final decision.”

Cyclingnews reached out to the Federazione Ciclistica Italiana to confirm if any Gran Fondos have ever taken action against riders suspended for doping, but did not receive a response in time for publication.

Fighting a battle that's already lost?

Deterrence might not be enough, however. And neither is the reality of so little prize money being up for grabs. The simple truth is that there are a lot of highly competitive amateur cyclists who are prepared to go to extremes to reach their own personal goals. They are not ashamed to dope and show no remorse if caught. When they also know that most NADAs won’t even bother sending anti-doping testers to events, many understandably presume that they’ll never get caught.

The unidentified rider whom Woodson interviewed spoke about how “I want to race again because I am a masochist. I love competing.” And one race organiser told Cyclingnews that even banned athletes find a way around the rules. “They participate in races with other federations, or even turn up with their own electronic chip. They don’t want to stop racing.”

Unless significant funds are invested into stopping doping in amateur races – and the UCI nor national governing bodies, with the exception of Italy’s, have shown any desire to do so – then the omertà will persist: doping in amateur cycling will remain an unspoken epidemic.

UK broadcasting rights in cycling have changed dramatically in recent years, since the closure of GCN+ in December 2023 and Eurosport earlier this year, as well as the end of 40 years of free-to-air Tour de France coverage on ITV.

The landscape now looks very different as Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) owns the exclusive rights to cycling coverage in the UK under TNT Sports, nestled within its platform discovery+.

It costs £30.99 per month, a sting compared to the previous £6.99 a month GCN+ subscription, or Eurosport at £39.99 per year.

This has caused furore amongst fans, with discontent rife not just with the price hike, but also coverage quality and race options for the cost. This is leading some fans to choose between paying up, turning off, or finding illegal pirate streams.

However, while the rights changes are negatively impacting core cycling fans, the broader effect could be paramount for cycling’s future. The wider WBD network, and those like it in other nations, could open opportunities, capture new fans and lead to a greater audience overall.

The appeal of piracy

UK searches for the illegal pirate platform Tiz Cycling are at a five-year high, and grievances over the cost of a TNT Sports subscription and the actual cycling coverage on offer appear to be the drivers for this. TNT Sports is just one example, as in other regions around the world, high-cost subscriptions such as Flobikes in Canada and Peacock in the US, have become some of the only options to watching top-tier cycling.

Tiz Cycling is the most popular illegal streaming platform, and while not possible to attain exact growth figures from the platform, as Tiz did not respond to Cyclingnews for comment, we can assume this growth from the rise in Google searches.

Reasons for this primarily appear to hinge on the price increases that have hit various subscribers around the world, but peaking at a 343% increase for discovery+ subscribers after cycling moved into the TNT Sports package.

Previously BT Sport, TNT Sports broadcast a range of sports, with Champions League and Premier League football being the prime assets, which explains the price tag.

"I cancelled because TNT is pricing out a significant portion of cycling fans by charging people £31 per month, and I refuse to support that," said cycling YouTuber Benji Naesen, who recently ended his subscription.

"Reality is, TNT paid a lot of money for football licenses and is trying to offset that cost by charging everyone this pricing. In doing so, they’re going to lose their one-sport-only customers like myself."

Moreover, fans used to be able to watch ad-free coverage of most races via the discovery+ digital platform – the linear TV coverage always had ads – but ad breaks were added to all streams during the Tour de France this year, which led to further discontent for fans paying a lot for what previously was an ad-free service.

"Appreciate there’s no right to follow it uninterrupted, and it sounds entitled, but when that option has been removed, especially with the cost having risen, it’s a poor showing," wrote one user on a Reddit forum.

One X user wrote, "I want to complain to TNT about the adverts on the TdF men's & women's coverage when I paid for ad free. They are getting my revenue and that of the advertisers. It's not right when I paid in good faith for advert free."

On the TNT Sports subscription sign-up page, it says some live sports streams may include ads.

Though TNT and discovery+ show a wide range of races, it's still not every televised race – leading many to feel like they're missing out despite the premium packaging.

Several cycling fans said they watch races on Tiz, which are not broadcast on services which they pay for; these are often women’s cycling races and non-European races, as there are a small number of races that are produced for broadcast, but for which TNT does not own the rights.

Others are simply turning cycling off. One X user said, "Been watching the Tour [de France] since the mid-1980s, currently watching the highlights on ITV, when it goes behind a paywall I'll stop watching."

Though it's hard to pinpoint exact numbers for road cycling, the mountain bike site Pinkbike recently polled their users, and the results were stark. Mountain bike World Cups used to be free to watch on Red Bull TV before it moved to WBD – who own and broadcast the Mountain Bike World Series – meaning the sport went through arguably the biggest price increase of them all, from zero to over £30 a month.

Pinkbike's poll is still open, but when 6,000 people had responded, the results showed that 3,500 people said they used to watch full races on Red Bull, but only 800 said the same of the current coverage – 3,000 people answered "not at all" when asked if they watch the WBD coverage. "Access/paywall issues" was by far the most selected reason for not watching, so it's clear the viewers are turning off, and in significant numbers.

However, for some, it’s the price to pay to watch their favourite sport, and many have just absorbed the price increase. "I’m not happy to pay the extra but it’s my favourite sport and I pay up," another X user commented.

The rise in piracy is also not limited to cycling. The latest report by UK anti-piracy firm MUSO and Kearney revealed that global piracy levels have risen by 12% since 2019, with live sports and anime seeing the fastest growth rate.

Risks of piracy

While pirate streams are free to watch, they are illegal and involve taking considerable risks.

Accessing pirate streams can lead users to be more vulnerable to data theft, identity theft, malware and fraud. The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 also protects broadcasters and rights owners from other people using their content.

"Sports fans need to know that, if they use a piracy app, they’re jeopardizing their security and privacy through malware, phishing, and data theft," said Larissa Knapp, Executive Vice President and Chief Content Protection Officer for the Motion Picture Association.

"Piracy sites – including illegal streaming platforms, peer-to-peer networks, IPTV services, scam portals, anime piracy sites, and manga repositories – carry a cyber risk more than 22 times higher than mainstream websites.

"Using pirated websites to watch cycling undercuts the future of cycling as it’s no longer an investment in the future of the sport; it’s funnelling money to criminal piracy rings."

Several fans acknowledged these risks, and many said they use a VPN when watching Tiz. Another said, "Generally prefer not to use illegal streaming sites, but also definitely prefer to watch than not."

Illegal streaming and copyright infringement is both a civil and criminal offense, meaning rights holders can make civil claims against perpetrators, but the police can pursue criminal prosecution, too. Two men were jailed this year in the UK for running illegal streaming websites and associated money laundering.

Does free = more accessible?

Illegal streaming services do not offer perfect viewing, with reports of low quality, drops in coverage and the aforementioned risks, but they do offer access to the sport for those who could otherwise not afford big-cost subscription services.

Though watching most cycling in the UK has never been free, TNT Sports' £30.99 monthly subscription is not affordable for everyone and prices some people out. This makes the sport less accessible than when it is free-to-air, for example, and arguably less likely to capture new fans.

"The biggest race in the sport is not going to be as accessible, and it’s the one that funnels a lot of fans into the sport," said Dan Lloyd, ex-pro cyclist and GCN presenter, referring to the loss of free-to-air Tour de France coverage in the UK.

"Undoubtedly, the viewership will be lower than it was this year and years gone past in the UK."

While ASO does not set the subscription prices, it did agree to an exclusive sale of Tour de France rights to TNT Sports. Naesen noted that, "ASO are hurting themselves in the long-term because a sport that’s less accessible to follow is a sport that will end up with less fans in the future."

In an email exchange with BikeBiz several years ago, Tiz, the founder of Tiz Cycling, wrote, "I’m trying to spread cycling as much as I can and make it accessible worldwide for anyone."

Disparity per country

What’s also noticeable is that subscription prices for watching cycling vary per country. TNT Sports is the UK option, while in other countries, cycling is under discovery+, also owned by WBD.

In Germany, on the other hand, it costs just €4.99 a month, in Italy €7.99, while in the Netherlands, HBO Max and the necessary sports add-on to watch cycling cost €14.99 per month.

This is where VPNs come in, which disguise a user’s location and theoretically allow fans to purchase a cheaper subscription from a different country.

Several fans said they use a VPN to watch coverage through services in other countries that have reasonable pricing. While general use of a VPN is legal in the UK, this practice is often against the terms and conditions of broadcasters, and doing so to dishonestly avoid paying a subscription fee could also be a criminal offence.

Others watch Tiz Cycling when travelling and when they cannot access races in other countries due to broadcasting restrictions, with the subscription they have already paid for.

What’s more, many European countries offer free cycling coverage through public broadcasters, and Eurosport 1 and 2 still exist in 50 countries, although these don’t include coverage of every race.

Notably, while the UK ceased free coverage this summer, the Tour is free to watch in 14 countries, including France and Belgium, while Australia's public broadcaster SBS offers many races for free, including the Grand Tours.

Across the Atlantic, Canadian fans can watch cycling on FloBikes for $29.99 per month, with a saving if you pay annually, while in the US, Peacock costs $16.99 per month for ad-free, and HBO Max (also owned by WBD) is $20.99 for premium, which includes cycling.

Prices for HBO Max, much like TNT, vary per country, and don't show every race – you would need a subscription to both Peacock and HBO Max to watch everything, which could also be leading fans to look for free-to-view and illegal platforms instead.

Distilling the impact

Given the rise in searches for pirate platforms and the constant money issues in cycling's economic model, there is a question of whether the sport itself is directly impacted by decisions not to pay to watch.

"Its effect on the teams is zero because they don't get any of the money from the rights that the likes of TNT pay to ASO and other race organisers to be able to show the races on their platform," said Lloyd.

"The only effect is on TNT because they're trying to get people to part with money for a subscription to multiple sports, including cycling. They've been aware of Tiz Cycling for many years. It's something we were aware of when we had GCN+ and we were owned by Warner Bros Discovery, and one that they did try to shut down, but obviously unsuccessfully."

A Warner Bros. Discovery spokesperson said: "Unauthorised platforms undermine and threaten the revenues that support broadcasters’ investment in sport and events, including cycling — revenues that are shared throughout cycling and help to sustain the sport’s future."

However, despite this claim of revenue share and to Lloyd’s point, the benefit to cycling teams is indirect, as they do not get a revenue share of the broadcasting, unlike in other sports such as the Premier League.

Broadcast revenue of Premier League clubs in 2023/24 was £3.3 billion, of which the teams are guaranteed an equal 50% split, shared among them, and the rest is split dependent on TV appearances and position in the league table. This has seen teams flourish and be able to spend huge amounts on new players.

Should revenue share be introduced?

Despite many people's concerns, cycling data expert Cillian Kelly crunched the numbers for the 2024 season and concluded that men’s pro cycling is more stable than ever.

He revealed that only one team at this year’s Tour will have existed for less than 10 years, while the rest have surpassed 15 years, with some having existed for more than 40 years.

"The average lifespan of a current Tour de France team has never been longer in the history of the sport, so it is still working, but I think a lot of teams and managers think it could be better," said Lloyd.

"It's been a big subject for quite a long time that if you divided some of the rights money amongst the teams, then it might help them have a bit more stability and therefore fans will have teams that they can support for decades as opposed to less time than that.

"I think that there would be a different outlook from many fans if they knew that the money was, in part, going towards the teams and sustaining them."

How cycling compares to other sports

Requiring a subscription to watch sports is becoming more common as streaming giants are entering the sports industry. While there is discontent about cycling’s situation, some sports have succeeded behind paywalls.

"If you look at the big boxing matches or even UFC, people are prepared to pay a lot of money for one single fight, and they're prepared to pay quite a lot of money to watch football month in, month out," said Lloyd.

"The problem cycling's got is it's not at that level in the UK, and also because it's been free for so long, people are much more reluctant to pay for it."

However, UFC just ended pay-per-view after signing a seven-year deal with Paramount in the US.

Women’s football is an example of a sport which has grown exponentially in recent years, with a 56% increase in participation in four years. While some matches are behind paywalls, the biggest ones currently aren’t – though the premier competition in the UK, the Women's Super League, has secured its biggest-ever commercial TV deal to put many more games on Sky, which is a paid channel.

"Women’s football just saw a newly signed deal for the Women's World Cup in 2027, which will be free-to-air on the BBC and ITV," said Charlie Edwards, sports lawyer at media and entertainment law firm Simkins LLP.

"Women’s football is a great example of a rapidly growing sport, and implementing untimely paywalls could negatively impact that growth."

In the UK, certain sporting events are protected under the Media Act 2024 as being in the national interest and thus must be available on "fair and reasonable terms" to the free-to-air channels.

These events include the Olympics, men’s and women’s FIFA World Cup and Euros finals, Wimbledon finals, FA Cup Final, and the Grand National.

Cycling is not included despite a motion in the UK Parliament which argued for free-to-air coverage.

Changing viewer habits

Capturing the attention of new cycling fans is not just a challenge for monthly subscription numbers; viewership habits are changing.

Amidst the streaming and social media giants, traditional broadcast channels continue to see a downturn as young generations prefer to choose what to watch whenever they want to watch it.

In Ofcom’s most recent annual report on UK media habits, broadcast TV viewing was down 4% in 2024 compared to 2023. YouTube is becoming more popular, with the platform increasingly showcasing long-form content and mirroring that of a standard broadcasting platform with adverts.

According to research, two-thirds of global sports executives are concerned about the relevance of live sports as more young fans gravitate towards highlights, documentaries, and short-form video.

What the backlash around the TNT subscription cost has shown us is that some fans are moving to other media forms to follow cycling, like podcasts, and, as our attention spans dwindle, short-form video is becoming more popular too.

An X user wrote: "Not watching it this year, for the first time in a long time. Following it through Lanterne Rouge podcast and highlights. I'm happy I can get the overall picture, but it's a shame and I'm not watching the big stages/climbs and seeing the big moments as they unfold."

"We could see broadcasters developing their services so it's more interactive, more personalised and more akin to the streaming platform," said Edwards.

"There’s also the potential for a cross-pollination of industries, as we’ve seen in LIV Golf, where music licences have allowed them to play music on the course and interact and engage fans in different ways."

The ever-increasing value of sports rights

On a wider level, sports broadcasting rights are constantly changing, and so too are the streaming giants’ offerings. WBD recently revealed they’re looking to launch Max in the UK in 2026, which would add another option to an already fragmented landscape of subscriptions.

This is compounded by the news that Warner Bros. and Discovery will split into two separate, publicly traded companies by mid-2026.

What isn’t changing is the value of sports broadcasting rights.

"TV rights in sport are becoming more and more lucrative," said Edwards.

"The sports industry is growing in value exponentially, which is why we're now seeing a shift with tech giants wanting to make their way into this landscape. For instance, the likes of Amazon and Netflix streaming live events such as wrestling and the NFL.

"Rights holders within sport will need to tread cautiously when diversifying who they're selling their rights to. Ultimately, the consumers (i.e. fans) could be the ones who pay the price for a new, fragmented service as they will have to maintain various subscriptions to keep watching their team."

The future of cycling under Warner Bros Discovery and TNT

As cycling settles under its new owner, amidst a cloud of illegal streaming and furore, there is a greater impact that being a part of WBD affords cycling.

The broadcaster has made financial decisions which have positively impacted the growth of women’s cycling.

WBD showed the Tour de France Femmes from the outset in 2022, first on Eurosport and now on TNT Sports, whilst free-to-air men's Tour broadcaster ITV opted not to buy the rights to the race, and has never shown it.

"The opportunity that's in front of us now is greater than we've ever seen before as Warner Bros. has a broader account base of 1.5 billion people around the world," said Josh Carlson, TNT Sports commentator and ex-pro mountain bike racer, meaning that there is the potential for new audiences to cycling from this platform.

"Obviously not that many people are going to see people on bikes but if there's 110 million TNT Sports accounts or Max accounts around the world and that sport is on those channels, maybe 3 million accounts might click on and watch it and 1 million might stay and all of a sudden that's a dramatically different amount of people watching and that's just on television.

"That's not including all the social media, all the YouTube, all the work that the social team is doing, there's now so much content to draw those viewers in."

This opportunity presents a difficult scenario where some of the core cycling audience are being left behind.

"The tough reality is if the core doesn't want to pay, they'll figure it out because they're our core audience and they'll want to watch it," added Carlson.

"They'll watch the YouTube channels, they'll find an illegal stream, they'll do what they need to do. There are still 110 million TNT Sports accounts out there that already have this channel and are already paying.

"Warner Bros. has a platform to showcase cycling to so many more people than we ever could imagine. There’s the opportunity to turn our athletes into superstars and household names, get families, get people, get kids, get everybody on bikes, and then we're moving in the right direction."

Moving forward

Sports broadcasting rights are constantly changing and remain incredibly important for funnelling both money and fans into a sport. For cycling, with higher subscription costs under TNT Sports, and the like, and without a revenue share scheme, this impact may not immediately be evident.

The £30.99 TNT Sports subscription service means that watching cycling has become more expensive than ever in the UK, impacting some core cycling fans by pricing them out, and as such, some are choosing illegal pirate platforms, despite the risks involved.

How we consume cycling races is also evolving, with YouTube and short-form content thriving, which opens up new possibilities for cycling content which captures new generations of fans.

There’s also an opportunity for cycling to be part of such a huge broadcaster as WBD, and it will be instructive to see how this plays out in the next few years.

Ultimately, we want more people watching cycling, more people on bikes, and we want growth for years to come. If a higher-priced services can guarantee this, many will pay up.

The latest sponsor of the WorldTour cycling pro team XDS is not just a brand but also a Chinese bike manufacturing company that makes bikes for multiple bike brands.

In fact, many bicycle brands do not own factories and instead outsource manufacturing to third-party companies, of which a huge number of these are based in Asia. 

According to EU data, the majority of bikes imported to the EU come from Taiwan, Cambodia, China and Bangladesh, while another data set shows the UK imports the majority of its bikes from Taiwan, Germany, Cambodia and China. 

It is uncommon for a brand to acknowledge the factory in which its bikes are made unless it owns the factory, like Merida and Factor. 

So how does it work and who makes what? 

How it works

Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) agreements are contracts where a company manufactures products or components for another company to sell under its own brand name. 

It's commonplace in multiple industries and is prevalent in cycling as it enables brands to reduce costs by outsourcing frame manufacturing and production. 

While multiple brands have OEM agreements with the same factory, this does not mean that the bikes are the same minus the logos, as each brand retains complete authority over design specifications. 

The main countries for third-party manufacturing of bicycles are Taiwan, China, Vietnam and Cambodia, and these factories tend to operate within special economic zones. 

These are specific areas within countries which aim to promote companies to manufacture there, often incentivised by lower tax rates and simplified customs procedures to boost exports. 

Like everything in life, however, there are different levels of quality and the same goes for OEM factories, a topic discussed by BikeBiz a few years ago. 

Made in China

Many third-party manufacturers are based in China, including the aforementioned title sponsor of the XDS Astana team, XDS Carbon Tech.

Also called Xidesheng, XDS operates as an OEM and documents seen by Cyclingnews indicate that it makes bicycles for Trek, Haro Bikes, Lime bikes, and BH bikes. Documentation around UK-based bike brands using XDS (and other OEMs) is severely limited due to data privacy regulations, which means companies do not have to disclose import information. 

XDS does not have any information on its website about which brands it manufactures and did not respond to Cyclingnews for comment.

What makes XDS stand out is that it also makes bikes under its own brand, X-Lab, a well-known label in China. 

However, most crucial of all is that these bikes are now ridden by the XDS-Astana team marking the first time a fully Chinese-branded bike has made it into the WorldTour.

It's not uncommon for OEMs to make their own bikes, but these rarely take centre stage. 

Unveiling secrets

While XDS keeps its OEM agreements as a closely guarded secret, other OEMs based in China are keen to share their successes.

Ten-Tech Composites is an OEM based in Guangdong, China, which purports to produce "world-class brand bicycle frames, front forks, rims and accessories, and the products are exported to developed countries such as Europe and the United States."

The company's website is not very up to date, but it does list some of the OEM's key accolades, which gives a strong indicator of which brands the factory produces:

"The world's lightest bicycle frame (700g) comes from our company; the competition bicycles of many countries in the 2008 Olympic Games were manufactured by our company; in the 2008 World Tour de France, the bicycles produced by our company took the top three places in the Tour de France."

This means that the Cervelo, Specialized and Ridley bikes ridden in the 2008 Tour were all made by Ten-Tech, which corroborates with documents seen by Cyclingnews, whereby Cervelo is listed as a top trading partner for Ten-Tech Composites. 

Also bucking the trend of secrecy is Quest Composite Technology, which operates in both China and Taiwan. The OEM has pictures of Trek and Canyon bicycles on its website, readily showcasing that it manufactures these two brands, which is quite remarkable. 

Similarly, Topkey, which makes bike frames and components in China and Vietnam, proudly declares on its website that it works "with customers such as 'Specialized' and 'Cannondale'" and claims to have more than 25% of the market share in carbon bicycle manufacturing. 

It also notes that in 2010, Alberto Contador used a Specialized bike made by Topkey and won the Tour de France (although he was later stripped of his title).

What's more, Keentech Composite Technology is a subsidiary of Topkey based in Xiamen, China, and documents show that it also manufactures for Specialized.

Cambodian exports 

A report by the General Department of Customs and Excise of Cambodia last year showed that the country exported $278 million (€256 million) worth of bicycles and e-bikes in the first eight months of this year, a 30% decrease year-on-year.

Despite this decrease, Cambodia is still one of the top five bike exporters in the world.

A&J is a key OEM in the region, with multiple manufacturing facilities in Cambodia and Vietnam. It produces bicycle frames for gravel, road, full-suspension mountain and e-bikes for global bike brands. 

"Our production capabilities are robust, with the capacity to manufacture over 1.3 million frames annually," said Fraser Young of A&J. 

"This volume reflects our commitment to meeting the varying demands of our clients and the global market. Production volumes are adjusted based on market trends and customer requirements, allowing us to maintain flexibility and responsiveness."

Records show that A&J manufactures products for Scott, Trek, Canyon, Bianchi, Kona, and Specialized, although A&J would not confirm this. 

"We collaborate with numerous esteemed bicycle brands worldwide, providing OEM and ODM [Original Design Manufacturer] services that uphold the highest standards of quality and confidentiality," said Young.  

"Each partnership is unique, and we tailor our manufacturing processes to align with the specific requirements of our clients. Due to confidentiality agreements, we do not disclose the exact number or identities of our partners. 

"In our facilities, each brand's products are manufactured on the same lines, based on the product specification. Frame and bikes are produced to each brand’s specific requests and standards. This approach guarantees the integrity of each brand's identity and product excellence."

Taiwan hotspot 

Taiwan is another hotspot for mass-manufacturing bicycles.  

Factor Bikes has carbon fibre manufacturing facilities in both Taiwan and China, where it makes over 12,000 frames per year. The most recent Factor models were made in the Taiwan facility.

"We are one of the very few brands that actually make their own bikes, especially at scale," said Rob Gitelis, CEO of Factor Bikes, who has been living in Taiwan since 1996. 

"We have about 120 people in Taiwan who cover assembly and manufacturing."

Gitelis is well versed in the country's bike manufacturing industry, as previously he was involved in manufacturing bikes for other brands. 18 months ago he decided to stop offering OEM and now everything in the facility is purely the Factor brand. 

"We don't want to be manufacturing products for other companies because it gets a little confusing, and we don't want to ever have a situation where we have to make a decision inside of our own factory based off of any sort of capacity constraints," he said. 

Despite the perception, Gitelis says much of the carbon manufacturing industry has actually left Taiwan. 

"Other than Factor and perhaps some very small factories, there is no carbon fibre manufacturing really left in Taiwan," he said. 

"While the factories in China, Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar all have Taiwanese ownership, they're no longer based here in Taiwan."

"The industry matured in China, and as soon as the industry got to any scale everybody knew we needed to move it to China because it's not really feasible to be making these carbon frames in Taiwan."

Merida powerhouse 

Also based in Taiwan, Merida is a very large bicycle manufacturer and currently employs 3,000 people in the country. It produces bikes for its own brands and in the past has been known to produce bikes for other companies under OEM agreements. 

"We are very proud of the fact that we are one of the very few major brands that design, test and manufacture our bikes in-house, giving us full control of the process, from design concept to delivered product," said Jon Woodhouse of Merida. 

"We always have and will continue to evolve and innovate, with investment in production technology as well as bicycle design, so we aim to always stay at the cutting edge of the industry. We also focus on keeping very high standards of worker and environmental protection so that we can continue to sustainably create high-quality bicycles in Taiwan, long into the future."

Previously, Merida had been known for producing bikes for multiple brands, but it says it no longer has any significant OEM agreements. 

"Making bikes for multiple brands is a story we left behind around 25 years ago to focus on our own brand," added Woodhouse. 

However, while Merida says it does not operate in the OEM market anymore, it owns 49% of Specialized and records show it is a top shipping partner for the US brand, suggesting that its OEM arm still exists with Specialized.

According to US import data, Specialized appears to have a diverse supply chain, partnering with multiple OEM manufacturers, including Merida, Speedtech (also based in Cambodia) and Topkey. When pressed, Specialized would not give out further information and offered this comment on the topic. 

“To protect our product innovation leadership, we prefer to not disclose in-depth information on this topic. We are proud to partner with manufacturers all over the world who share our dedication in crafting innovative, premium products for riders. Our focus is on quality, safety, and performance, ensuring that every bike meets the high standards that riders expect from Specialized.”

Specialized was not the only brand reluctant to talk about their OEM operations. 

No comment 

Giant started in Taiwan in 1972 and gained global recognition as the largest bike manufacturer, making bikes for third parties as well as its own brands. 

However, Giant's company policy is not to comment on anything related to third-party manufacturing, despite being a huge OEM manufacturer itself.

It's well known that Giant has manufactured bikes for brands like Trek, Scott, Colnago, and Specialized in the past, and a series of photos taken during a Giant factory tour in 2012 showed products for Scott, Bontrager, Colnago and Giant all being made in the same factory. 

Despite Giant not wanting to chat, we can deduce some information on its current OEM functions. 

According to the Group's most recent annual report, 70% of the company's products are Giant's own brand products (GIANT, Liv, Cadex and Momentum), which leaves the remaining 30% likely earmarked for OEM. 

The company writes it "devised the strategy of equal importance on OEM/ODM and proprietary brands more than a decade ago. It designs and manufactures for reputable global brands as well as operates a global distribution network for its proprietary brands.

"OEM/ODM customers consist of reputable brands around the world, and there is no sign of concentration to any particular customer"

The group says it sells its own-branded products "through its marketing subsidiary". 

Why do some brands not want to talk about it? 

Giant's reluctance to comment on third-party manufacturing was noteworthy, given the group's well-known enormous manufacturing capabilities. Ribble also refused to comment, while Trek did not respond. 

"I think that some people just try to protect their intellectual secrets and I think that a lot of companies don't want to let their customers know that really they are a design and development company and not a manufacturer," said Gitelis. 

"People are always very surprised to find out that most bicycle companies are really marketing companies with design and development, not manufacturers. There's still a little bit of smoke and mirrors when it comes to that."

In the case of Giant, perhaps the reluctance comes from the potential consumer confusion of a huge, well-known brand producing other brands, and for it to be seen as a conflict of interest. 

Elsewhere, brands might not want to talk due to certain perceptions. For example, delve into a few bike forums, and it's easy to find people worried about their Cannondale SuperSix having a sticker saying Made in China.

The phrase has in the past had a stigma attached to it because of connotations around cheap low-quality labour, but the emergence of XDS Carbon Tech onto the WorldTour scene could dispel that. 

At the same time, the emergence of XDS and the X-Lab brand as a big player in the UK and European cycling scene could negatively impact premium brands that use XDS as an OEM, as the supplier becomes a major competitor. 

Homemade matters 

While many bikes are made in Asia, there is a strong handful of brands that have localised production. To name a few, Basso manufactures in Italy, Orbea in Spain and Portugal, Massacan in Italy, and Stinner Frameworks in the US. 

Stinner Frameworks has an OEM arm which, since the threat and introduction of Donald Trump's tariffs, has seen an increase in demand from both US and European brands interested in moving their production to the Santa Barbara facility. 

Called Stinner Manufacturing, the OEM facility will officially launch in April, although it has been accepting work and operating for over a year.

"We are becoming as competitive as overseas, especially when you factor in shipping container costs and minimum quantities needed," said Aaron Stinner, founder of Stinner Frameworks. 

"We operate under a lot of NDAs, mostly non-compete clauses, to ensure our clients have the utmost protection when it comes to their designs."

Stinner consumes a lot less carbon as the brand focuses on manufacturing steel, titanium and aluminium bikes, which it sources domestically, rather than carbon fibre.

The ethical choice

Should consumers care where their bike comes from? 

Third-party manufacturing has long been the subject of accusations of poor working conditions and modern slavery, and it turns out the OEM bicycle industry is no different.

Le Monde diplomatique published a piece earlier this year on the working conditions in Taiwanese bicycle factories, reporting that indicators of forced labour were rife, especially debt bondage. In response, the Taiwan Bicycle Association said the Bicycling Alliance for Sustainability (BAS) will release the ‘Human Rights Code of Conduct’ for all BAS members and following action plan. Members include Giant, Topkey and Merida.

There have also been reports of modern slavery at bike factories in Malaysia and Cambodia.

While much has been reported on the conditions of other industries, like fast fashion workers in China, information on bike factory conditions in the country is hard to come by.

"I don't think it's particularly important to know where but I do think it's important as a consumer to trust the brand," said Gitelis. 

"There are bikes being made in Bangladesh and Myanmar at the moment, and I don't feel like those countries have the best human rights records.

"It's funny as you often hear about the sweatshops of China, there's no sweatshop in China, what a Chinese person is now making is on par with what a European person is making in a factory. 

"But in places like Myanmar, Bangladesh, I still have some concern about the conditions that people are working in, so I think to that extent, people should know what they're buying and I think you should buy from trusted brands." 

Cyclingnews could not verify Gitelis's claims but while not bike industry specific, worker safety and justice is an ongoing issue within both Bangladesh and Myanmar .

Stinner agreed, pointing to the example of Columbus which makes steel tubing.

"It's an easy choice to source from them as they are so transparent and welcome factory visits," said Stinner. 

"There's a lot of smoke and mirrors in this industry, especially when it comes to the country of origin of a bike."

But how can we make an ethical choice if brands won't be transparent about where their bike frames are made? 

Sensitive topic 

The phenomenal and largely silent OEM supply chain based in Asia is evidently at the helm of the bike industry, but due to operating under strict NDAs, many details are closely guarded secrets. 

I think it's intriguing to know where a bike was made, regardless of what the brand's marketing team wants you to think, and as consumers that information could help us make better, ethical decisions. 

I could speculate the reasons for the silence - an indicator of a brand's confidence in their supply chain or issues around sustainability or ethics - either way, it's a sensitive topic. 

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When looking for perspective in cycling, Tao Geoghegan Hart is often a good voice to turn to. Recently, as he met the media ahead of the 2025 season, the conversation turned to the push for reform in the sport. The Lidl-Trek rider was mostly in favour of evolution but cautioned that the status quo isn’t as bad as some are making out. “I have friends in many different endurance sports, and there’s not 1,000 people making a very good living [from those sports], but in cycling there are. And it’s easy to forget that,” the Londoner said.

Part of the sport’s millionaire club, an ever-growing list of riders whose annual salary is at least one million euros, Geoghegan Hart’s comments reflected the reality on the ground: professional cycling, men and women, has never been richer. Team budgets have risen exponentially – the median among men’s WorldTour teams in 2024 was €25m, up from €18m in 2019 – and the average male rider salary, according to the UCI’s official figures presented at the WorldTour seminar in late November, stands at €501,000. In the women’s peloton, it won’t be long before a rider(s) joins the millionaire club – and some think that watermark has already been breached. 

We wanted to dig a little deeper into the numbers and the trends to find out just how profitable a career as a pro cyclist really is in 2025.

More and more seven figure salaries

In an official UCI document seen by Cyclingnews, the 18 men’s WorldTour teams collectively spent €226.5m on rider salaries in 2024, with teams spending on average €12.6m on their maximum quota of 30 riders. One team, thought to be UAE Team Emirates XRG, had an outlay of €27.3m on salaries, and at the bottom end of the scale, assumed to be Intermarché-Wanty, total salaries amounted to €5.2m.

In 2025, that figure has risen further, with several superstars improving their contracts substantially: Cyclingnews has been able to confirm that Tadej Pogačar’s wage has grown from around €6m to north of €8m, while Remco Evenepoel’s previous salary of around €2m (excluding bonuses) has swelled to between €4.5 and €5m. Jonas Vingegaard earns around €5m, Mathieu van der Poel €4m, and both Wout van Aert and Primož Roglič pocket €3.5m from their respective teams annually. They’re at the top end of the earning charts, but each year more riders join the millionaire ranks.

“Every team has, at a minimum, two riders on a million – some even have seven to eight,” agent João Correia, who runs the Corso management company, said. “If you go through each team’s roster and quickly add that up, I imagine there’s 75-100 on at least million euro contracts. There’s definitely 50, at the very least.” Of those surpassing the two million benchmark, Correia speculates there are more than 30.

His counterpart, Alex Carera of A&J All Sports, shares the same thought: “There are 22 big teams, and I’d say the median is three riders earning a million per team. So there are more or less 65 riders on a million or more,” the Italian said. Other agents estimated 70.

The average salary of €500,000 is bloated by the millionaires – that’s not a true representation of what the typical domestique earns. Cyclingnews spoke with six agents and the general consensus among them was that the median wage is between €250,000 and €300,000.

“Teams are realising that it’s no longer enough to have two or three star riders and then just fill the rest of the team with whoever else – you also need a very good midfield, whether that’s a leadout train for a sprinter or climbers for a GC leader. And that’s working in the favour of those mid-ranking riders because it costs more and more to sign them,” said Dries Smets, a Belgian agent for Wasserman.

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Historically, neo-pros – first year seniors – would be put straight on a minimum wage: in 2025, that figure for self-employed riders (explained below) in the men’s WorldTour is €58,582, and €35,721 for employed riders; those amounts respectively rise to €72,404 and €44,150 for non-neo-pros.

The youth revolution, however, has upended the rulebook – even if there are still many on around €80,000 contracts. “In the past, neo-pros signed for the minimum contract, but cycling’s changed. The best neo-pros, the ones who win Tour de l’Avenir or the World Championships, can now earn between €150,000 and €500,000,” Carera said. Cyclingnews is aware of some neo-pros earning significantly more than half-a-million.

One agent added: “Until Covid, if a neo-pro managed to get up to €100,000, it was considered a lot, but nowadays, and especially in the last two or three years, young and very talented riders are very sought after on the market and can go as high as €200,000. That’s triple the minimum wage.”

On the wider subject of minimum wage, all agents agreed that very few riders were on minimum contracts. “I haven’t seen a lot of teams paying minimum wages for riders for a long time because it’s hard for riders to live on that salary,” Correia said.

Cycling's gender pay gap

When looking at the women’s peloton, the story is somewhat different: minimum wages are far more common. “There aren’t many men on minimum wage, but there are lots of women,” Carera said. Only introduced in 2020 with a minimum salary of €15,000, Women’s WorldTour riders now must earn a minimum of €62,320 if they’re self-employed, and €38,000 if they’re contracted. The amounts for neo-pros drop to €52,000 and €31,768, respectively. 

The median team budget of the 15 women’s WorldTour teams is €3.6m, Cyclingnews understands, with teams typically averaging a roster of 17-18 riders. The majority of riders in the women’s field earn between €80,000 to €100,000, with more important domestiques and occasional race winners earning between €150,000 and €250,000. A top-10 rider takes home between €300,000 and €500,000, with the biggest champions nudging towards €850,000.

When Vollering, widely regarded as the best current female GC rider, announced that she was leaving SD Worx last spring, there were various reports that UAE Team ADQ had tabled an offer to make the Dutchwoman the first female rider to earn an annual salary of €1m. Vollering instead went to FDJ-Suez.

Among the various agents Cyclingnews spoke to, there was disagreement over the salaries of the current highest female earners. “I think we’re already seeing million euro contracts in the women’s field – I believe that’s been broken,” Correia said. “We don’t represent any of them, but I’m fairly sure two or three of women earn over a million. And if not, they’re pretty damn close to it.” Other agents, however, dismissed Correia’s belief. “I don’t think there’s three that make over €1m,” one said. “I think they’re just below that mark.” Carrera said: “In two or three years, for sure we’ll see women on over one million, but right now they’re not earning that.”

Win bonuses, sponsorship deals and appearance fees

As a rule of thumb, the higher the salary, the less a rider’s win bonus. There are outliers, though: Evenepoel received big winning bonuses from Soudal Quick-Step for winning his world and Olympic titles, as well as the 2022 Vuelta a España, while Cyclingnews understands that Tom Pidcock earned €1m for each WorldTour race or Olympic or world title victory when competing for Ineos Grenadiers.

Most riders can expect to receive between a few thousand euros and €15,000 if they win a stage of a WorldTour race, rising to €20,000-€100,000 for a Grand Tour stage, and €50k to €500,000 for winning a Monument, depending on the team and rider’s base salary. French teams pay out a big bonus for the French National Championships. But not everyone can be so lucky. “There are teams who say we don't give bonuses because riders get paid to race and score results,” Smets said. “Big name riders especially are on good salaries and might not get a bonus for a race that they’d be expected to do well in.”

Performance-related bonuses are common for younger riders and can work in various ways, Correia explained: “Quite a lot of contracts have salary triggers, whereby if an athlete does this performance their salary improves. And nowadays with UCI points more important, we’re seeing riders get rewarded based on how many UCI points they have earned.”

Typically, a team will exclusively own the image rights of a rider, but exceptions can be made for certain riders who seek external sponsorships. “There’s a bigger battle between male riders and their teams over non-team sponsors, but in female cycling, it’s becoming more popular,” Smets said. “There’s less history, and teams are more open to thinking: if it's good for the rider and doesn't hurt the team, why not?”

Demi Vollering signed a personal sponsorship deal with Nike last year, while the likes of Van Aert and Pidcock are both individually sponsored by Red Bull. Some riders have watch or car deals that can exceed €100,000, and others have partnerships with domestic businesses that are usually worth between €20,000 and €30,000. 

“It’s very country-specific,” explained Correia. “A Belgian rider has more sponsorship opportunities because they’re cycling mad, even though Belgium’s advertising market isn’t huge, while Pidcock being British has more opportunities than riders from small countries do. Some marquee riders can negotiate terms on image rights with their teams, but usually teams own the image rights and can say yes or no to these endorsements. Usually they’ll say yes if it’s a national company and isn’t a competitor to the team’s own sponsors.” Most riders have personal deals with shoe brands that provide a few free pairs of shoes, but some riders might receive a few thousand euros on top. “The best riders will receive €50,000 or more for a shoe deal,” one agent said.

Riders can often make additional money competing in end-of-season and/or post-Tour de France criteriums in Belgium and the Netherlands, but because of the additional travel involved, appearance fees are at a premium. “To participate in one crit is minimum €100,000 for the best riders,” one said.

Where a rider (and their team) can really earn big money is if big races pay for their participation. RCS, the organisers of the Giro d’Italia, has a long history of paying appearance fees, and reportedly handed Bora-hansgrohe a cheque of €1m for Peter Sagan race the 2020 edition of the Corsa Rosa. They also committed to paying Soudal Quick-Step for Remco Evenepoel’s involvement in 2023 but didn’t pay out, according to the team’s boss Patrick Lefevere. “Because Remco did not finish the Giro, they [RCS] did not want to pay the agreed starting fee,” Lefevere said. “Remco’s starting money in the Giro – in practice a sum for a package of RCS races - can ensure that we have a budget for an extra rider.”

Agent fees, self-employed riders and annual leave

The structure of a rider contract varies from team to team, with Smets revealing that “some teams have the standard UCI contract of seven pages which doesn’t contain much complicated language, to some teams who have 45-page contracts which are more complex and have a lot more clauses.” One mandatory inclusion is that teams cannot object to their riders beginning or continuing studying. 

French and Belgian teams by law must employ their riders, accounting for around 40% of the men’s peloton. In an employed contract, teams must provide health, life and permanent disability insurance, and a pension that equates to a minimum of 12% of the gross annual salary. Self-employed riders have to cover all of the above themselves. Agents typically take between 5-7.5% in commission of all rider earnings.

Of the various clauses and obligations, if a rider is injured or falls ill through no fault of their own, they are entitled to 100% of their wages for the first three months, reduced to 50% thereafter. “But I’ve never seen that enforced,” Correia stated. “And either way, there are insurance policies athletes can take out that cover them in the event that they get injured and they lose part of their salary.” Riders are also permitted 35 days of annual leave per year, but Correia said that “no one really looks at that, either. It’s in every contract but it’s not monitored. Riders only go on vacation in the off-season.”

Most contracts include a clause prohibiting riders from taking part in sports that are deemed dangerous, such as car racing, parachuting or skiing; teams have begun to loosen the last regulation, though, with cross-country skiing and ski mountaineering more accepted as beneficial cross-training.

As discussions over One Cycling continue apace, and the sport hopes to continue attracting additional investment, that’s all good news for the protagonists and those representing them. “When a team’s budget grows, so too does the rider’s salary,” Smets said. “Of course, the teams have service courses and vehicles, but their real assets are the riders. We’ve seen a big increase in budget since Covid and it looks likely to continue.”

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At the recent WorldTour seminar in Nice, cycling’s biggest stakeholders sat through a presentation on the ongoing threat of technological fraud. At one point, the former Homeland criminal investigator Nick Raudenski turned to a screen where a carefully curated video depicted how the UCI is tackling the risk of concealed motors in bikes. 

UCI technicians were shown inserting a camera inside the frame of Jonas Vingegaard’s Cervélo at the Tour de France; Lotto Dstny’s Victor Campenaerts was shown watching an inspection of his own bike; and then Raudenski delivered a line that was intended to remind those watching that though not one single rider has been found with a hidden motor in their bike at a professional race since 2016, the danger remains as real as ever. 

"We’ve come across a lot of allegations, a lot of beliefs, a lot of suspicions, and a lot of suspicious performances," said Raudenski, who has headed up the UCI’s fight against technological fraud team since May. "I don’t think anything is impossible. I think we always have to be awake to what potentially could happen."

Raudenski’s speech, sources present at the seminar told Cyclingnews, was met largely with a shrug of the shoulders. While there is widespread acceptance that motors were present in the peloton in the early 2010s, there have been few rumours or allegations about the practice since the Belgian cyclocross rider Femke van den Driessche was caught in 2016, and there is therefore deep scepticism that motor doping may be happening today. 

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But the UCI are insistent that they must continue to pour resources into combatting the possibility of sophisticated hidden technology in bikes. Because if they don’t, according to the UCI’s president, David Lappartient, someone will definitely cheat. "I believe that if we do nothing, this will happen," the Frenchman told the Ghost in the Machine podcast in the summer.

"We can’t be an organisation that says: ‘ok, this doesn’t exist and we won’t spend a lot of energy on this’. I believe with new technologies, with engines becoming smaller and smaller [and] maybe less easy to detect, we have to invest more in the technology and also in investigations.

Staying one step ahead

The UCI first developed a specific test for concealed motors in early 2016: a magnetic scanner attached to an iPad. On its very first outing, it located the Vivax Assist motor hidden in Van den Driessche’s spare cyclocross bike. Nearly a decade on, the scanner remains the UCI’s most-used prevention method, with around 30-40 bikes tested every day at WorldTour, World Championships and Olympic races.

Despite its speediness and omnipresence around team paddocks, the tablet has regularly been accused of not being able to detect all types of motors, or distinguish between a concealed motor designed to propel the drivetrain and a battery for electronic shifting. Even Lappartient himself expressed concerns about the magnetic scanner to the Ghost in the Machine podcast. "You can cheat even with a tablet," he said. "I don’t trust that the tablets are strong enough to fight against technological fraud. It’s better than nothing, but it’s not consistent enough."

The UCI also has a €600,000 x-ray machine which typically tests around eight bikes per day at the biggest races, including the stage winner and race leader, as well as a €45,000 handheld backscatter device which can deliver x-ray and density images. If anything that appears untoward is undiscovered, then the bike can be dismantled and inspected. The governing body has previously trialled but dismissed thermal imaging cameras.

As part of Raudenski’s remit, he has been tasked with researching new potential detection methods to go alongside the current trio of systems. "We have to stay in advance of how much is being developed, and so we have to make sure that we’re keeping pace with that innovation," the American added in the video shown at the seminar.

Cyclingnews understands that private enterprises unaffiliated with the UCI are also working on new detection methods, with the issue having made it to the attention of senior European politicians. Using power and cadence data to produce a ‘power passport’ similar to the Athlete Biological Passport has previously been mooted by some, as well as embracing artificial intelligence. "We have to investigate in which way AI can help us," Lappartient said in the summer.

Electromagnetism and 'special wheels'

A motor inside a professional’s bike today wouldn’t be anything like those inside commercially available e-bikes: they’d be much smaller and nimble, capable of producing between 20 and 50 watts, enough power to produce a race-winning attack, but not so extravagant to immediately arouse suspicion.

The big question everyone has is how even tiny motors and batteries could be concealed inside a bike’s frame, a rear hub or inside the wheels and still evade detection, especially an X-ray scan. Could they be camouflaged inside the Shimano Di2 batteries, for instance? "If you’re using a good quality battery that can reach 30 to 35 watts, you can hide it," Stefano Varjas, the most notorious and controversial producer of concealed motors, told Cyclingnews recently. "But you can’t hide the engine: you need manual contact on the drivetrain somewhere."

The Hungarian, who once said that he received $2m from an unnamed leading Tour de France team in 1998 for exclusive rights to his motors, added that "with money anything is possible – the only limit is budget." Though most have dismissed his boasts as fantasy and self-publication, Varjas has famously claimed to produce electromagnetic wheels that cannot be detected with any scanner; he says the permanent magnets hidden around the wheel are only detectable when in use. "Once the wheel stops, there is no proof," he said. "A hub system isn’t difficult to detect, but an electromagnetic wheel is much more difficult." He has previously said that such an innovation, if even possible, is "considered as a real tool for enhancing the power of a racer."

Whether or not ‘special wheels’, as they have been dubbed, exist, there is concern at the UCI that wireless groupsets are vulnerable to being hacked, as was proven in the summer. The fear is that if gears can be altered remotely, small motors can also be activated externally. This would tie into the school of thought some have that, as outlandish as it seems, a rider wouldn’t even need to know that their bike was mechanically assisted.

Motor doping's underworld

A decade ago, just before the e-bike market boomed into a $50 billion business, there were a number of hidden motor producers across Europe, each subtly squeezing motors and batteries into road bikes for higher-end clients with a lot of disposable income.

Today, however, with the exception of Varjas and his E-powers brand, those same producers are no longer part of the electrical bike business – whether formally or informally. Vivax Assist, the company that made the type of motor that Van den Driessche had in her bike, closed down in 2020, and operations in Italy and Monaco have also closed. The rapid expansion of e-bikes has rendered their crafty and expensive work more or less redundant; rich clientele no longer need to fork out thousands on a modified bike with technological assistance when they could walk to their local bike shop and pick up a sophisticated and sleek design for much less.

That’s not to say, though, that there’s no one left in this niche space. "There are a lot, not one, two or five, more like 20," Varjas told Cyclingnews when asked how many competitors he has. "The world is very huge, and I think there are a lot of other producers," he told the Ghost in the Machine podcast earlier in the year. "If they have their own clients and if they want to hide, they don’t need advertising."

The common perception among those in the know is that while Varjas was probably at the cutting edge of this innovation a few decades ago, he no longer is. Identifying those who may now be the kingpins of the concealed motors business is a big part of Raudenski’s job. "I think the technology is out there," Raudenski said. "I think it exists, and I think if there is enough money to throw at a problem or at a situation then there is enough money to provide a solution that will likely not be so easy to detect."

Is the UCI chasing a red herring?

Snooping out the cheaters and the people behind them is very slow and drawn-out. It’s the same as trying to uncover proof of doping or a sportsperson match-fixing: they’re typically several steps ahead of comparatively underfunded governing bodies and institutions working to catch them.

It’s entirely plausible – and most in the sport think this is the case – that Raudenski and the UCI are chasing a red herring; the motor threat, largely because of the trio of prevention methods in place that act as a deterrent, has ceased to exist. But so grave is the possibility of someone committing technological fraud – Lappartient has said it would "destroy the sport" – that the UCI insists that maximum surveillance is required, hence the appointment of Raudenski.

"It’s why someone of my profile was brought in, that focus on intelligence and investigations," Raudenski said, a nod to the rewards scheme the UCI launched in September, designed to incentivise people with critical information to come forward. "Developing sources, finding new analytic means… working with people in the field, and also conducting those investigations robustly and swiftly. We’re not going to be testing everybody, but be much more focused and [test] based on specific information."

That last line is key. In 2023, an investigation by the RadioCycling podcast found that no bikes were tested for technological fraud in two of the three Giro d’Italia time trials, while neither the magnetic scanners nor X-ray machines were in use at several WorldTour races. Figures markedly improved in 2024, but the UCI admits that there are still flaws in its system, and fears that riders’ bikes can still avoid detection.

"I want to be sure that the bike that will be tested at the end is the bike that has been used," Lappartient said. "And it seems to be that the process is not 100% completely secure. When somebody wants to cheat they will always try to find the small details [like] where they can do this."

Bike changes, which have become increasingly more frequent since the universal adoption of disc brakes made wheel changes slower and more complicated, are highlighted by Lappartient. "I saw some videos on social media and sometimes you don’t know why at 10k to go they change their bike," he said. "Maybe there are some real reasons, but how can we be sure that they [UCI officials] will check the bike on the roof of the car and they will not change it or remove the bike? In addition to this, how can we ensure that some bikes and equipment that were not checked before [the race] can’t be used? All these kinds of things have to be secure, very high-level processes, and at the date of today I do not believe it is completely 100% secure."

Raudenski sides with his boss when it comes to maintaining a stance of perpetual vigilance. "If people are crazy enough to try it, and if we’re not there watching, not trying to deter and detect, then they are going to try it, and then the sport becomes a farce and you watch them riding up with motorbikes," he said. "There are two aspects: the deterrent aspect and the enforcement aspect when it happens."

As the 10th anniversary of Van den Driessche’s sanction approaches, success for the UCI today is deterring would-be motor dopers and strengthening what they admit is currently a fallible prevention system, rather than solely busting the cheats. "What we want to do is not to find some cheater but to ensure that nobody will cheat," Lappartient said. Van den Driessche might very possibly remain the only ever convicted motor doper.

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It’s one of cycling’s greatest mysteries – or conspiracies, depending on who or what you believe: have professional cycling races been won with concealed motors? 

The most high-profile accusations of motor-doping at some of the sport's biggest events happened between 2010 and 2014, in which you will be well-versed. They are among many unproven and strenuously denied allegations, but they are rumours that have only had their fans flamed by the fact that the UCI, cycling’s world governing body, didn’t have any specific tests in place to detect motors until January 2016 (save for the odd roll out of an x-ray machine and occasional dismantling of bikes), meaning riders could have had motorised assistance without fear of such cheating being uncovered.

But no one, except the young Belgian cyclocross rider Femke Van den Driessche in 2016 – coincidently or not, on the first day the UCI introduced a magnetic scanner that is still in use today – has ever been caught with a motor in their bike. 

For the past two years, I have been investigating technological fraud – or motor doping, as the topic is commonly referred to –  and in early 2024 I, alongside podcast company Stak, released Ghost in the Machine, a seven-part podcast documentary examining the issue. Among many things that I’ve learned, the most striking is that, though not everyone will admit it for fear of reproach, there is near-universal acceptance within the sport that motor doping was happening more widely pre-2016; Van den Driessche was not the only one – she was just the unlucky one to be caught. A scapegoat, some say.

Which begs the question: will we ever find out the ‘truth’ about past motor doping? And is the UCI, despite giving “carte blanche” to the American former criminal investigator Nick Raudenski, the man responsible for dealing with the threat since May, really willing to dig up the past and potentially unresolved trauma?

Hard evidence, hearsay, or both?

You’re probably wondering: what makes me so certain that motors were used in the past? Without conclusive evidence or whistleblowers' testimonies, surely I’m just another conspiracist. My conviction stems from the countless conversations I continue to have with people in the sport, allied to double- and triple-sourced anecdotes and videos shared with me which appear to point towards possible past motor doping. I don’t have a smoking gun, but I am in possession of a lot of circumstantial evidence, covering the late 1990s to as recently as the 2024 season.

And speak to anyone in the sport, and no one can confidently say that the whole thing is a big myth; to the contrary, in fact. “Motor in the bike was not a big thing, but there were more rumours in the past, like five, six, 10 years ago,” Tadej Pogačar told me last December, hinting at the period when suspicions were most prominent. In the mid-2010s that Pogačar referred to, Jean-Pierre Verdy, the founder of the French Anti-Doping Agency, famously said 12 riders had a motor in the 2015 Tour de France during an interview with US television show CBS '60 Minutes', while former Italian rider Davide Cassani claimed that some riders were using motors as far back as 2004. No evidence, however, has ever been forthcoming.

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At the time of Van den Driessche’s sanction in 2016, the president of the sport was Brian Cookson. “It’s hard to deny that there were some inexplicable things in certain performances,” the Englishman told me recently. “I don’t have any evidence to support anything that could be counted as solid proof… and the fact remains that no one has been caught other than the first case when we developed a method of testing that was practical enough to use regularly. But were there people before? It was less difficult [to get away with it] because there was no particular testing. But if there was some evidence, then we would have acted upon it at the time, and I’m reasonably confident my successor David Lappartient would do the same thing, and that’s why he has increased the tech fraud fight and brought in newer methods of detection.”

Cookson, who succeeded the Irishman Pat McQuaid in 2013, was ousted as the UCI’s president in 2017 largely because of the motor scandal, with Lappartient alleging that Cookson never took the matter seriously. Speaking to me in late May for the Ghost in the Machine podcast, I asked Lappartient if Van den Driessche was the only one to ever be brazen enough to ride with a motor. “The first time we really used these tablets we were able to catch somebody, [but] it doesn’t mean there weren’t other riders using these kinds of things,” the Frenchman said.

Upping the stakes as time runs out

In September, the UCI announced the introduction of a rewards programme, whereby people who provide the governing body with information about hidden propulsion methods could be given a financial or material reward in return. “This initiative aims to… encourage persons who would otherwise not voluntarily come forward and/or provide the UCI with critical information about technological fraud,” the governing body said in a statement. This form of incentivisation was the biggest public indicator yet of what multiple UCI sources have been telling me in the past few years: the organisation seriously believes that motors were and could still be afflicting the sport.

If evidence came to light of mechanical fraud from the early 2010s, or at any other point in the past few decades, what would Lappartient do? “If we have information about facts in the past, we will also investigate,” he said. “At a mass participation [amateur] level, it is sure that this has probably happened. At the highest level, I don’t know. I want to be an institution that knows whether it’s black or white, so my job is to focus on the future and also any information we have from the past we will take it [forward] also.”

While Raudenski was firmer on the point, adding: "In the fight against technological fraud, it is clear that we must navigate challenges from the past while progressing forward. We are concerned by each and every allegation of technological fraud and our position is firm, whether the cases are past or present, our mandate is to prove innocence, disprove allegations, and pursue further investigations when necessary, in order to guarantee the credibility and fairness of our sport."

Former staff in Cookson’s administration have told me that the only way to prosecute previous offenders is if a motor is literally found in a bike, and Cookson’s view is not so dissimilar. “You’re going to need very substantial evidence, otherwise they are going to deny it and it’ll be a case of hearsay,” he said. “If they can prove that someone paid someone, then maybe. As they say, follow the money, the paper trail, look for transfers and receipts. But for something clandestine, people will cover everything as much as they can, hide payments or deal in cash transfers.”

The most probable scenario is that a whistleblower emerges – and the rewards scheme was partly designed to encourage such people, should they exist. “If someone has a crisis of consciousness of what they did all those years ago, they might be ashamed of it and it’s weighing on their mind so much that they admit it,” Cookson added. “Would it ever happen? I doubt it, but I’ve been in pro cycling for many, many years and nothing would surprise me.”

In a statement to Cyclingnews, the UCI said of its rewards programme: “Although we cannot discuss specific cases, we can confirm that we continue to receive information through various channels, including the UCI’s SpeakUp platform and directly via TechFraud@uci.ch.”

Three-time Tour de France winner Greg LeMond has been one of the most outspoken voices on the topic, saying recently that “I truly believe motors were used to win a lot of big races.” He has used data, in particular power numbers and high cadence figures, to point towards possible motorised assistance. Though that doesn’t count as proof per se, it does classify as circumstantial evidence.

What could prove a sticking point for the UCI is its own rules. Article 12.4.003 of the UCI regulations states that “technological fraud is subject to a statute of limitation of 10 years from the date of the offence”, the result being that the UCI could not legally bring proceedings against riders/teams for an incident that happened a decade before; the same rule applies when it comes to biological doping cases. So in theory any cheating from the 2013 Tour de France can now not be pursued by the UCI.

“We’re not far off 10 years from 2016 when we introduced these regulations, so anything before then is difficult to prosecute, even if there are witnesses and evidence. I can’t see it being an easy process to sanction someone from the past,” Cookson said. Yet that doesn’t mean the UCI has to take a literal view of its own ruling: though the governing body is technically prohibited from prosecuting cases a decade or more older, it is not prohibited from investigating suspicions.

Optics, integrity, and 'the truth'

As Lappartient said on the podcast, “If we have a case of cheating with a motor in the bike, sorry but it will destroy our sport.” It’s therefore understandable to ask: Why should the UCI and I continue to chase this opinion-splitting topic? “If there is fraud and fixing, the damage could be very substantial, but I would never want to stop anyone investigating something they consider is wrongdoing that took place in our sport,” Cookson said. “We’ve had enough damage over the years to understand the sport needs to have integrity and be believable. But equally, there must come a time when a line should be drawn under that – and I guess that was what was intended by the 10 years statute of limitations.”

It might also be natural for people to assume that with Lappartient being one of seven candidates to become the next International Olympic Committee president in March, a role that would make him the biggest name in sports governance, he would be reluctant to bring a new stain on the sport he has led since 2017 for fear of it negatively affecting his own career aspirations.

But there is another way of looking at it: if the UCI uncovers proof of motor doping before Lappartient’s tenure began, he could claim that he is righting the wrongs of the past, thus seizing the moment to claim that sport, not just cycling, is safer, cleaner and fairer under his watch; the narrative he’d opt for is that he can be relied on to root out corruption and fraud, and that cheaters have nowhere to hide. Additionally, historical cases would be less damaging than current cases – and Lappartient, a media-savvy and career politician, would be aware of such optics. “The worst thing for the institution would be if we are informed of a case of technological fraud and we do nothing,” he said in the summer. “Then of course it will completely not only destroy cycling but the institution itself.”

The message, if you dig beneath the layers and the corporate speak, is actually quite unambiguous: the UCI, led by the well-respected Raudenski, is willing to go after past offenders of motor doping if it has enough evidence, and the information-for-rewards scheme points towards an increased focus on bringing possible past offenders to justice. But Cookson speaks for everyone when he assesses the probability of a smoking gun ever being found. “Whether you or anyone else ever discovers the ‘truth’ about the notorious allegations, I don’t know,” he said. Perhaps we’ll never know. Perhaps motor doping will always remain a mystery, a literal ghost in the machine.

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Performance cycling sits in a rather unique place among vehicular sports. Nobody can buy a Formula 1 race car, and neither can any Tom, Dick, or Harry rock up to a marina and put a down payment on an America’s Cup boat. With cycling though, thanks to the Union Cycliste International governing body insisting that every piece of equipment used in the professional peloton also be available for sale publicly, one can, with deep enough pockets, order the same bike as the pros use.

There are of course some loopholes and grey areas; no sport is without these and they make for an interesting narrative for gear nerds. It’s not unusual to see equipment, especially at the Olympic level, priced so outlandishly that nobody of sound mind would ever think of pressing the ‘buy now’ button, hidden at the centre of a maze of menus and sub-menus to make things even more tricky. Sometimes equipment is simply ‘price on request’, or in the case of custom gear lead times of many years are quoted as a deterrent to ensure only the national team in question retains access.

Ignoring the murky world of Olympic track cycling though, it is relatively easy to work out how much a WorldTour bike costs. You simply google all the constituent parts, find the prices for each, and do a bit of adding up. We’ve already done that bit before though for Tour de France bikes. The short version is that a WorldTour bike costs anywhere between £12-13k, or $15-17k in freedom currency. 

There’s more to cost than just the price tag however. There’s the cost of production and transport, not just of the bike and the components, but of the raw materials too. There’s middlemen, dealerships, and sponsors, meaning there’s essentially three different costs: Cost of a produced bike, cost of a retail bike, cost of a bike to a team. 

In the coming sections, I’m going to attempt to demystify just why bikes cost as much as they do, drawing on some of my own experience - I am a mining geologist by training with a lot of background in raw materials, believe it or not - and calling in experts and those in the industry to help steer get as clear a picture as I can. Broadly speaking I'm going to use the Pinarello Dogma F as an example throughout. It's fabulously expensive, raced at the WorldTour level, and I've reviewed it recently. Moreover, Pinarello was happy to put someone up to chat with me about the costs involved. 

The figures I’m presenting here are not by any means meant to be gospel, but simply a best estimate taking in all the information I can find. There will undoubtedly be areas where I under- or over-estimate, and some costs I cannot account for. The aim is simply to find out the costs involved with producing such expensive bikes, and whether they can justify their price. 

Raw materials

Bikes, and bicycle components, are more or less entirely made of five things: Carbon, aluminium, steel, titanium, and rubber. I've written a primer on how bicycles are made for each of these materials besides rubber already if you want a bit of homework. There are undoubtedly more, but that’s very much the lion’s share now that nobody is racing magnesium Pinarello Dogmas anymore. If you want a fun fact, the last non-carbon bike to win the Tour de France (if you ignore Floyd Landis' actually winning it at the time) was a magnesium Pinarello Dogma in 2006. 

Carbon fibre makes up the bulk of high-end frames, forks, cockpits, rims, and a fair few crank arms, brake levers, and other small tech too like bottle cages. It is entirely produced from oil. The chemistry is a little complex for the scope of this article, but in essence, a stable polymer thread similar to nylon is spun out and then passed through a furnace or two to carbonise it - literally turn it into carbon. These fibres can then be bundled together to create a carbon weave, covered in a bit of resin in a mould, baked, and there you have it. 

It’s relatively simple, and at its most basic the raw material (taking Brent Crude as the oil price) is worth about 77 dollars a barrel.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that 4kg of a 6.8kg race bike is comprised of oil-derived products. One barrel of oil is approximately 300lbs, or 136kg of oil. You need roughly two kilos of polyacrylonitrile (that nylon-esque fibre I mentioned earlier) to get one kilo of carbon fibre, so each barrel has in very rough terms the potential to make 68 bicycles worth of carbon fibre.

More quick and dirty maths using the Brent Crude price makes a WorldTour bike’s worth of carbon fibre worth approximately $1. This is a hilariously small number, but remember that’s just the raw carbon fibres themselves. There’s the cost to run the furnaces to make them, and the associated chemistry of the resin, and the shipping of these raw materials to factories to turn them into carbon weave before we even get to making a product.

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Metals are different, and a little easier to comprehend. Aluminium, steel, and titanium all occur as deposits of minerals in the earth’s crust, and all need extracting, a great degree of mineral processing, and smelting before you get to saleable metal. I’ve explained this in more detail in my piece on how bikes are made if you’re curious about the actual production of raw materials. Steel is usually sold as steel products rather than ingots (rebar, big coils, that sort of thing) which slightly complicates things but if we roughly equate ‘Structural Steel’ from the stock market to the high-quality steel used in some ball bearings, chains, and sprockets then we’re looking at £1,300 per tonne, or £1.30 per kilogram. Again, the raw material cost of steel in a bike is tiny, a matter of £1-2, or a similar amount in dollars. You’re looking at the same sort of raw material cost for aluminium too, and while titanium is a much higher material cost - in the region of $35-50 per kilogram - there’s far less of it utilised on a WorldTour bike.

Rubber is a different kettle of fish entirely, derived as it is from tree sap. The average rubber price last year was around $1.50 per kilogram, which is more than enough for a pair of tyres. All in all, just looking at the raw materials, a WorldTour bike can cost little more than £30/$40. How, then, do we end up with a price tag north of £12,000?

Production of carbon fibre

Producing carbon fibres, both the fibres themselves and the pre-woven sheets, from the raw materials essentially involves running a series of giant furnaces. In general the higher the modulus of carbon (the stiffer it is) the more expensive it is to produce. Toray is the biggest carbon fibre producer on the market, and it produces a wide variety of fibre options, all labelled with handy numbers. 

T700 is a general purpose, do-it-all fibre and something like this will make up the majority of a bike frame. Higher performance frames may go up to something like T1000 or higher, but while the frame may show a higher modulus carbon on the frame, such as Toray’s M40X in the case of the Pinarello Dogma, this doesn’t mean the entirety of the frame is made using such fibres. They will be reserved for specific areas like the bottom bracket. The stiffer the fibres the more brittle they are, and so are less well suited to being placed in complex areas of the frame. 

Sadly the main player in the carbon fibre world, Toray, declined to be interviewed for this piece, and brands weren’t forthcoming either. We can still make some educated guesses here though, as it is possible to buy carbon fibre in small quantities as a consumer. A bike frame needs about 1kg of carbon fibre once you account for the offcuts wasted as part of the production process. 

Small scale sheets of T700 carbon weave work out at around €15/m2 and weigh about 150g/m2. Taking a full bike at 1000g for easy maths that means a bike frame utilises roughly 10m2 of weave in ballpark terms, or around €100 in carbon cost. Higher modulus carbon like T1000 or M40X as is used in higher spec frames can be 2-3x as expensive, but only makes up a small (5-10%) portion of the frame by mass, and this increase in cost would likely be offset by the far cheaper wholesale cost for brands using vastly greater quantities of carbon fibre than single consumers can purchase.

Speaking to Andrew Juskaitis, Giant Bicycle’s worldwide Senior Product Marketing Manager I was told that a bike like the Giant TCR involves 36m2 of carbon fibre sheet. At €15/m2 this would mean it’s about €540 in carbon, but Giant, being the biggest producer of carbon bicycles, is naturally not going to be paying the same rate as you or I would if we wanted to buy the odd bit of Toray off eBay. For the sake of argument, let’s round this €100 figure up to £200 to cover not just the carbon in the frame, but the resins too.

Research and development

Speaking with Federico Sbrissa, the Chief Marketing Officer at Pinarello I asked him how much development resource goes into something like the new Dogma. While the team won’t work solely on one thing all the time, I was told that the latest Dogma took the equivalent of the whole R&D team of seven people one full year of work, not including any external consultant costs like outsourcing wind tunnel testing. 

According to payscale.com, the average salary for an Italian Design Engineer is €40,000/yr, meaning that in R&D costs alone a new top-end road bike costs in the region of €280,000 (approximately £230,000 or $300,000) in salary costs alone. Factor in some time in the wind tunnel, which are commercial units as we know from our own wind tunnel tests and you’re looking at something in the realm of £300,000. A brand like Specialized can cut the cost of commercial wind tunnel usage by simply building its own wind tunnel, but the cost of building a wind tunnel isn’t exactly small…

A big number for sure, but it all depends on how thin you spread the jam. If the brand in question makes more frames this cost is spread more thinly across each individual frame. Fewer bikes, greater cost per frame. Sbrissa, while being extremely helpful, declined to tell me how many Dogmas Pinarello produces so let’s ballpark it at 2,000 frames a year over a three year product life, broadly in line with a figure Rob Gitelis of Factor Bikes provided to Escape Collective in a recent article, that’s £50 per frame. 

Cost of production

Recently I took a visit up to the National Composites Centre, just north of Bristol here in the UK. It was a fact finding mission for another piece I was working on, but while I was there I picked up a lot of bonus information about how carbon fibre products are made. I am going to focus in on carbon fibre primarily here for a bit, as the manufacturing is slightly more complex, and other than small scale titanium outfits and deep custom steel, most of the very expensive bikes on the market are carbon. 

Every carbon fibre product needs what’s known as ‘tooling’, which is the industry term for the mould in which the raw fibre sheets are laid before going into the pressure cooker. For a frame, you’re looking at something in the region of £30-50,000/$65,000 for a single size (not necessarily a single mould, but multiples of the same size mould to allow more than one frame to be produced at once. If you’re a company making an all-new model in a run of six sizes that’s £300,000/$400,000 just in the cost of the moulds. With this alone in mind, it’s now a little easier to conceive of why the difference between the raw material cost and the cost of a finished product is so great. If you take a bike like the Pinarello Dogma, which is available in 11 sizes, that could add up to over half a million pounds just in the cost of the moulds. 

Taking a conservative figure of £300,000 for the outlay for the cost of the tooling and dividing that total cost by our ballpark figure of 6,000 frames (2,000 per year for three years) that’s £50 per frame. 

Not a huge cost on a per-frame basis, but a massive outlay up front, and so some brands get around it by using what's known as an 'open mould' system. Bike factories have off-the-peg moulds ready, and the brand can then just spec the carbon it wants to be used, the layup, and crucially the level of quality control. Using this system means no outlay for moulds, and if it isn't trying to make a class-leading superbike a relatively simple layup will be easier and require lower levels of QC to make sure it is safe. 

It's this last point that is a real differentiator between cheap and expensive carbon bikes. A fake frame from AliExpress, or even a no-brand open mould option has no brand associated with it. No brand means nobody to point to and potentially sue if or when it fails. No risk, so no real need to invest time and money into rigorous QC procedures. 

This is compounded by the fact that it’s nearly impossible to mechanise the production once you have the moulds. Producing a carbon fibre frame involves pieces of pre-cut carbon weave being placed by hand into the right place, in the right sequence, without any wrinkles or shears. It’s incredibly labour intensive, and this is why almost all production takes place in the Far East, where wages are lower. The more complicated the shape the longer it takes to layup, and with increasingly stiff carbon fibre (higher modulus, as it is called) the difficulty is compounded as these are more prone to cracking. Stiffer carbon makes for stiffer bikes, but with this increased stiffness comes an increase in brittleness too.

Things are a little more simple when it comes to the production of high-end metal parts. Titanium and even aluminium can be 3D printed now. Colnago uses a factory in northern Italy that normally produces medical implants. The machines are already there making something else and just need a new model loaded into them. Machining, forging, all can be mechanised more easily and at small scale and as such you can find far more small scale component manufacturers using metal than you will with carbon. Tactic, White Industries, Raketa, Paul. Economies of scale still come into play though, which is why the little-produced £1,000 tactic hubs are more expensive than more widely seen equivalents from the likes of DTSwiss and others.

There is an assumption among many that carbon fibre bikes are all more or less the same. Many people question why one carbon fibre bike can cost £12,000 and another can cost a fraction of that. The tooling cost is one thing, with more intricate shapes costing more, but the use of higher strength and stiffness carbon fibres to reduce the overall frame weight comes with added manufacturing complexity. On this point, I consulted the National Composites Centre directly.

In general, lower-end frames use "mostly intermediate modulus fibres like T700 with some areas using industrial grades (T300 and similar) with extensive use of woven fabrics across all parts of the frame." This means the carbon itself is cheaper, but it’s also more forgiving to work with and "requires less design time to make a decent frame." The flip side to this is that you need more of it to get the desired frame properties, and so it cannot be made as light, or as stiff without becoming excessively bulky.

At the mid range I’m told that "frames seem to have settled on spending money on design and using a single grade of fibre" - generally T700-800 or so - but with a greater emphasis on layup quality. "This more careful use of fibres means they extract better performance from a mid-range material than less careful use of fancy carbon."

When you get to the top end, utilising very high modulus fibres and aiming for the lowest weight while maintaining strength the manufacturing gets more tricky. ‘The trade off is more complexity (and so cost) in manufacture and as you optimise the structure you rely more heavily on these small quantities of high performance materials to have a safe frame. That is why quality control is more important on high-end frames because these materials need to be right so they take the loads they are capable of and spare the lower spec materials from excess load.’

So while on the surface two carbon fibre frames may appear the same, underneath the paint there are differences in materials, manufacturing time, and quality control. In order to get a handle on how many man hours go into a carbon frame I called upon Andrew Juskaitis again, Giant Bicycle’s worldwide Senior Product Marketing Manager:

“From creation of the composite sheet to placing the completed bike in a box, it takes approximately 25 hours of hand work to build a TCR Advanced SL.”

With this in mind, especially considering Giant is the biggest producer of carbon bikes, producing frames for other brands in its factories, it’s possible to build a pretty representative per-frame cost in wages.

According to Bicycle Retailer and Industry News, the average annual salary for a Taiwanese manufacturing employee in 2022 was $23,697, or roughly $11/hr. That means each frame has a cost of $275 in wages, or £213.

This doesn’t include the extra cost of what can be a high-intensity manufacturing plant. Water use, electricity to run not only general power but the autoclave, regular maintenance, and rent all add to this cost but are impossible to pin down to a general expenditure across the industry.

When a high-end bicycle can easily cost more than a motorbike it can be a little hard to fathom why. Racing bicycles are made to be as light and efficient as possible because the rider is the power source. A cyclist can push about 0.3 horsepower, which is dwarfed by the output of even a modest motorbike, and as such motorbikes aren't made to be so light. What's more, if you made many parts of a motorbike out of carbon it would melt. 

The structural parts of a motorbike are, in general, forged and machined to tolerance. This uses relatively cheap raw materials, and is easy to mechanise. The non-structural bits can be made of carbon for high-end race bicycles, but they needn't be load bearing and so require less R&D, and more often than not are injection moulded plastic, which is again easy to mechanise and uses extremely cheap materials. 

Paint

Paint can vary wildly in cost, and this was something I quizzed Sbrissa about regarding the Pinarello Dogma, primarily because I have tested it recently and it comes in a particularly lustrous paint scheme. 

The classic black with white, or block colour, logos I’m told can cost as little as €50 per frame, or even less. When I visited the Colnago factory I saw first hand how little paint is applied to a bike like the Colnago V4Rs in its UAE Team Emirates livery, but if we take something like the Dogma in its pearlescent blue then costs begin to spiral wildly. 

I am told the paint itself costs €2,500/kg, or €2.5 per gram. Each frame requires a pair of colours to achieve the pearlescent effect, adding more up front costs, but on a per frame basis it takes around 350g per frame, meaning the cost in paint alone is €875 (approx. £730/$940).

On top of this, paint is a skilled job involving a lot of prep time. Sbrissa was naturally unwilling to divulge the salary of the Pinarello paint technicians, but did indicate that they were on a higher wage than those in the R&D department. Taking a ballpark figure of €55,000/yr, or around €25/hr, a frame that takes 5 hours of work to complete (what I’m told is involved for the most complex paint schemes) this adds an extra €125 to the total cost of high-end paint, making the total cost essentially a cool, round, €1,000, or £830/$1,080 in other currencies.

Pinarello, it must be said, doesn’t charge extra for this paint, and I have been told in the past that the simple black paint schemes are always the best sellers, and so the cheaper cost to produce these subsidises the expensive pearlescent options. In the name of rough estimation let's simply halve that incredible £830 figure to £415 to create an average cost. Without knowing the number of black frames versus pearlescent ones it’s impossible to do otherwise.

Components

Continuing with the example of the Pinarello Dogma for now, the model I recently reviewed was about as top flight as it’s possible to be. Shimano Dura-Ace groupset, Princeton Carbonworks wheels, an integrated cockpit. The works. 

Speaking to Sbrissa again I was told there really isn’t much difference between what consumers pay for build kit setups versus what a brand like Pinarello would pay, especially taking into account the sale prices the industry is seeing across the board. 

The frameset accounts for only about 35-40% of the cost of the bike, which by our calculations so far is just shy of £2,000. This doesn’t account for any profit the brand in question is perfectly entitled to take, as well as the costs associated with running a business which all have to be realised by the sale of its products, so this number is so far a vast, and very generalised underestimate. 

Once you add in the componentry cost, say £2,000 for Dura-Ace, A further £2,300 for the wheels, and maybe £70 for a really decent set of tyres you’re adding £4,370 to the total cost without even blinking.

While brands will often spec in-house componentry too, as Pinarello does with its Most cockpit, that componentry still requires R&D, raw materials, and manufacturing, which do still add to the cost.

High-end components especially have become more expensive. Inflationary costs are one thing, but the simple fact is that hydraulic braking systems and in particular electronic groupsets are more expensive to produce than their cable-and-spring mechanised forebears.

Shipping

If we thought about bikes as a bulk commodity in the same vein as iron ore and wheat the cost per frame to ship all over the world would effectively be zero. Giant container ships can carry loads of 400,000 tonnes, or roughly 57 million 7kg superbikes.

Fortunately for anyone buying a superbike, things are shipped a little differently for commercial cargo. I am lucky in many ways to have a wonderful partner, but for the purposes of this article I am also lucky in that her father is Capt. George, a former commercial tanker Captain, who I quizzed about shipping.

“Most stuff is moved by container these days,” he tells me, “either a 40ft or a 20ft container. Economies of scale dictate that a 40ft container is cheaper. Costs are per container type, with a basic box being the cheapest, and more for refrigeration (unnecessary for bicycles).”

There will be an upper weight limit for each container, though as I’ll get into a lot of bikes packaged in boxes is empty space for protection, and the bikes are extremely lightweight, it’s unlikely that a container even rammed full of bikes is going to hit the weight limit.

Interestingly the cost isn’t necessarily a case of getting it from A to B:

“Cost will be dictated by the route and the timeline. Cheaper will be a longer timeline, stopping at multiple ports en route, with direct shipping more expensive. Prices can be heavily impacted by political issues, with ships having to change routes to avoid piracy or war zones, but actual rates can be found by digging around online: You’ll have roughly 56m3 of space to play with in one container.”

Armed with that info, plus what I know about bike boxes (given that one turns up at the office more or less weekly) we can do some more quick maths.

A bike box is roughly 1560x30x80cm. Some come shipped in my more compact boxes, but this is a pretty good approximation. This is a total volume of 0.36m3, meaning in a 56m3 container you could pack 155 bike boxes in. Palletising makes things easier, so let's knock that down to 120 bikes for the sake of argument.

Google is a wonderful tool, and was swiftly able to tell me the current going rate for one 40 ft container from Taiwan to Rotterdam in the Netherlands would take around 35 days and between $5.0-$5.5k, or almost exactly £4,000 to keep our running total neatly in the same currency.

Breaking that down to a per-bike basis, dividing that by 120 gives us a cost of shipping of around £33. This doesn’t account for all the other shipping that goes on. Bikes are often sent from the factory in Taiwan to Europe for painting, and components and raw materials are also transported by ship, but you can fit an awful lot more unpainted, unbuilt bike frames in a 40ft container than you can complete bicycles, so the costs are spread more thinly per item.

This doesn’t take into account the journey on either side of the seaports though, as road and air freight are vastly more expensive. Air freight, according to Juskaitis of Giant Bicycles, is reserved for only the most desirable parts:

“Shipping is, by no means, cheap (certainly true during the pandemic)). Most goods travel via ocean freight but a few, highly desirable products, are air freighted to their destination (which is extremely expensive).”

Distribution and dealerships

Traditionally the bike industry worked like this: Brand makes bike. Brand sells bike to distributor or dealer (distributor then sells to dealer if needs be). Dealer sells bike to customer. Each step in this process involves people making money, which is primarily why so many brands have gone direct to consumer. Canyon is the big player in this space, but even Specialized has gone direct to consumer recently. 

Sbrissa from Pinarello was extremely candid with me when we spoke about dealership costs, telling me up front that 40-45% of the cost of one of its bikes is the dealer margin. That means for a £12,500 Dogma F, £5,625 of that is the retailer’s margin. This goes towards all the running costs associated with a fleet of brick-and-mortar dealerships, staff costs within them, as well as aftersales, servicing, and warranty, plus things like import and sales taxes which vary from country to country. That is not to say that £5k or so of a top-end race bike is dealer profit, that value will be a lot smaller. This value will of course vary from brand to brand. 

Brands like Canyon get around this by just shipping bikes directly to you from their warehouses. Interestingly a Dura-Ace equipped Canyon Aeroad is cheaper than a Dogma F, but not by the same amount as the dealer margin I was quoted by Sbrissa. The retail cost is ultimately what consumers care about as that’s the value that gets deducted from their bank balance, but it does sort of stack up that the Canyon is more expensive than a Dogma in a weird sort of way. 

There are undoubtedly more extraneous business costs wrapped up in the cost of a bicycle. Sponsorship of a WorldTour team like Ineos is undoubtedly a huge cost for a brand like Pinarello, but that cost is borne across the brand’s entire range of bicycles - assuming, in general, that pro sponsorship drives sales at all levels of the business. 

Conclusions

I do want to make it clear that these figures are simply my best, educated guesses for these figures based on the information I’ve been given from a good few helpful and reliable sources. They are not intended to be exact, and there are simply too many costs involved in running an international bicycle brand for me to encompass in a few thousand words. 

That being said, there is a common thread of comments under every high-end bike all across the media landscape: How on earth can you charge £XXX for a bicycle??

Well, given my running total for a top end bicycle, that I only totted up once I had all the approximate figures in for each stage, came in at £10,996, I hope this has in some way shed some light on that particular question. 

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Why do we ban certain substances in sports and not others? It may seem like a technical question, but the principle behind it underpins the core values of anti-doping.

A substance is placed on WADA’s prohibited list if it meets two of these three criteria: it enhances, or has the potential to enhance performance; it may pose a risk to the athlete’s health; or it violates the ‘spirit of sport’. The third criterion is nebulous, but the first two are factual.

Health alone was once the solid footing of anti-doping, and prominent Grand Tour champions will still cite health concerns as proof of their aversion to doping. However, sports and medicine have changed dramatically since the era of doping tragedies such as Tom Simpson. Most recent doping controversies have unveiled intricate systems powered by close medical supervision, and infamous abusers of banned substances live out their retirements in seemingly enviable health.

Doping is also, unfortunately, a widespread phenomenon in professional sports, with historical data (2011) suggesting up to 60% of athletes dope, while a more recent study (2022) in Frontiers cut that to a still high 21%. The medical fallout of that endemic use is not overly obvious.

Nothing frames the confidence with which some athletes are open to embracing doping more than the mooted Enhanced Games, where drugs on the WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency) Prohibited List will be allowed.

Posing a threat to athletes’ health is certainly the most concerning aspect of this would-be event, especially when you reflect on, in our case, cycling’s dark past.

So is the willingness to dope a reflection of pure brazen ambition, or a reflection of a landscape where the health risks aren't as frightening, or perhaps the data no longer suggests the health risks are there?

Revisiting doping's dark legacy

In 2007, research in the journal Sports Medicine revealed that “EPO use is a suspect in nearly 20 deaths in four years in European cyclists”. Between 2003 and 2004 alone these allegedly included eight deaths including 21-year-old Belgian amateur Johan Sermon, who died of a heart attack and 16-year-old Italian Marco Ceriani, who experienced a heart attack during a race, fell into a coma and never recovered consciousness.

As William Fotheringham wrote in the Guardian at the time, "Although there is no evidence directly linking the recent spate of fatalities to banned drug use, a similar cluster of deaths – mainly in the Low Countries – in the early 1990s is now held to have marked the arrival in cycling of the banned blood-booster erythropoietin (EPO)."

Despite Fotheringham suggesting that "there is no evidence directly linking the recent spate of fatalities to banned drug use", the EPO link seemed tragically persuasive, especially as deaths like these are rare in cycling in 2024 – we can’t list one such cardiac attack in the sport in the year – with much of the credit down to the Athlete Biological Passport, which has been used in cycling since 2008.

So what is the actual evidence that substances like EPO are dangerous and should be on the Prohibited List? When it comes to EPO, hold that thought. We’ll come back to that. For now, let’s take a bird’s eye view of doping and examine the evidence. And, in all honesty, it doesn’t look that clear from up here…

Certainly not when you read 2023 research by Jo Morrison, professor of kinesiology at Longwood University in America. The title of her study, featured in the journal Performance Enhancement & Health, says it all: "Lack of evidence that doping is harmful to the health of elite athletes."

A snapshot of Morrison’s research…

"There is evidence that the pattern of banned substance use in elite athletes is high, yet morbidity and mortality of elite athletes is not greater than the general population, and former elite athletes live longer and healthier lives than age-matched controls."

"This sweeping claim [that the use of performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) is harmful to the health of the athlete] assumes that PEDs are specifically harmful to athletes, despite many of these substances being approved for human use in patient populations that are of less robust health than athletes."

"While anti-doping authorities often rely on the mantra that PEDs are dangerous and can harm the athlete’s health, this is a claim that’s based on anecdotal reports of misuse, absence of qualified medical guidance, black market PEDs, and preferential selection of substances that have not been approved for human use but are easier for the user to obtain and may have a better chance of evading anti-doping testing. The assertion that PEDs harm the health of the elite performers who are subject to testing and sanction is not evidence-based."

Morrison also cites a 2019 review that examined the "evidence of performance enhancement of the 23 classes of substances on the prohibited list and concluded there was no evidence of performance enhancement for the majority of classes of substances on the list. Either there were no studies available or studies showed no positive effect. For the five classes of substances that did show performance enhancement in trained athletes, the evidence is based on 11 studies with 266 participants."

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The study, which featured in the journal Sports Medicine, was co-authored by Jules Heuberger, of the Centre for Human Drug Research in Leiden, Netherlands, where he undertakes clinical trials for pharmaceutical and biotech companies for developing new drugs for diseases. We contacted Heuberger to reflect on his findings that not only looked at the performance-enhancing aspect but the potential health risks, too.

"My CEO and I thought that the drugs on the Prohibited List are obviously pharmaceutical drugs, intended to help some kind of disease, so it’d only make sense to apply the same reasoning, the same scientific rigour, to drugs like these to test whether they actually enhance its performance or whether they are harmful," he says. "To apply the same standards as we do for drugs that we take to the market, as if we were testing a treatment for a disease called cycling slowly!"

When it came to the health-risk aspect, the paper suggested that while any substance can jeopardise an athlete’s health and that there could be side effects to all substances, the "requirement that a substance specifically may affect the health of an athlete is not supported by evidence."

And without scientific evidence, the application of this criterion is equally arbitrary to that for enhancement.

Why Meldonium?

"One of the problems is that the process WADA follows is not transparent," he says. "After a series of discussions and meetings, it’s decided to either put a substance on the list or to monitor it. But the whole process and what evidence is required is muddy."

And political. "In that paper, we wrote about meldonium," he continues. "It was put on the monitoring list because there was a large proportion of Eastern European athletes allegedly using it. It sounds like there was much lobbying and it finally hit the prohibited list."

Meldonium is used to treat ischemia: a lack of blood flow to parts of the body, particularly in cases of angina or heart failure. It’s manufactured in Latvia and only distributed in Baltic countries and Russia. WADA found "evidence of its use by athletes with the intention of enhancing performance" by virtue of carrying more oxygen to muscle tissue, while a 2015 study showed that 17% of Russian athletes (724 of 4,316) tested were found to have meldonium in their system. It was banned in 2016, and classed as an S4 substance under the WADA code, which addresses hormone and metabolic modulators. In that same year, tennis player Maria Sharapova was banned for two years after testing positive for meldonium at the Australian Open.

"But if you look at the scientific evidence behind what meldonium does for treating disease, that’s almost non-existent," says Heuberger. "That’s why it’s not authorised in Western Europe or the United States [by the Food and Drug Administration]. So, if there’s little evidence in a medical arena, there’s certainly less evidence of improving performance of it being detrimental to health.

"Our point is that it’s not clear how a substance ends up on the Prohibited List. Of course, if you take too much of a substance, it could be unhealthy and dangerous. If that’s the case, you’d have to put sandwiches on the list as too many of those can be unhealthy and harm your health!"

The drugs don't work

We couldn’t discern if Heuberger was being flippant with that last point. But if the perception is that there’s an arbitrary nature to substances on the Prohibited List, the scientific rigour and openness Heuberger questioned is arguably constrained by the WADA Code and regulation 19.5 that states, "Research efforts should avoid the administration of prohibited substances or prohibited methods to athletes", while 19.6 reads, "Adequate precautions should be taken so that the results of anti-doping research are not misused and applied for doping purposes."

So, don’t test on athletes (makes sense with the elites as they could then be banned) and, if you do, don’t publicise the fact. Of course, research still happens, including ground-breaking and headline-making research by Heuberger and Professor Adam Cohen in 2017 when a study of theirs featured in The Lancet Haematology.

In that study, forty-eight participants were injected with EPO or a placebo for eight weeks, during which time they completed seven endurance tests in the laboratory. They then faced the final challenge, a 130km rider that finished with a race up Mont Ventoux in the summer of 2016. The winner, a lawyer, took an hour and 12 minutes to reach the summit. On average, riders on EPO were 38 seconds slower than the control group.

The study's findings that EPO didn’t super-charge cyclists swept the internet like worldwide wildfire. "It’s indisputable that the new red blood cells spawned by EPO increase the body’s maximum oxygen uptake (VO2 Max)," Cohen said at the time. "But such an increase may not boost cycling performance." In long-distance races like the Tour, he argued, riders rarely performed at maximum uptake. Yet in a review of 13 previous EPO studies, Cohen found that all focused on VO2 Max instead of performance. Critics argued this was too simplistic, that EPO’s a proven performance-enhancer and not just because it raises VO2 Max.

But were there health consequences in the study? "There were two markers in the blood that were elevated, both tied in with coagulation," Heuberger says. "But we didn’t observe clinical side-effects, so we couldn’t conclude that there’s an absolute health risk.

"However, we do know in patients with low haematocrit values – for example, kidney or cancer patients – that are being treated with EPO to boost their red blood cells, if you try to push them to normal haematocrit levels, the incidence of stroke and serious cardiovascular issues increases. 

"So, one part of the answer is it depends on the dose, but something like EPO is not immediately dangerous, otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to do the trial. And we wouldn’t have done it if we didn’t think it was ethical."

Clearly, the dose is important. The higher the dose, the higher the potential benefit, and the higher the health risk. But, certainly with EPO, there’s evidence that even slight skews in blood levels can cause health problems.

A 2012 meta-analysis into the adverse effects of erythropoiesis-stimulating agents, including EPO, found an increased risk of stroke, venous thromboembolism and mortality in patients treated with these agents, particularly when used to achieve higher-than-normal haemoglobin levels.

There’s also evidence that EPO stimulates the growth of cancer tumours; can lead to the body’s immune system attacking red blood cell precursors, resulting in anaemia; and increases the chances of hypertension.

For Heuberger, there are substances "I’d think twice about [taking]. That includes growth hormone and drugs that influence the immune system. Then you have drugs like anabolic steroids that have clear side-effects detrimental to health."

With over 400 substances on the Prohibited List, that’s not a lot, which is Heuberger’s point. For too many of the substances, he says, there simply isn’t evidence of performance enhancement or health risk. 

It’s something we posed to WADA, a spokesperson responding: "The inclusion of ‘it may pose a risk to the athlete’s health’ as one of the three criteria speaks to a central element of WADA’s mission to lead a collaborative worldwide campaign for doping-free sport. A key feature of our work is to monitor scientific and medical developments in sport with the aim to safeguard not just the level playing field but also the health of athletes.

"Not all substances and methods that are included on the Prohibited List necessarily pose a risk to the health of athletes, which is why a substance/method will be included in the List if it satisfies any two of the three criteria."

As a reminder, the other two criteria are the potential to enhance performance and violating the spirit of sport. Seen through an academic lens, this makes things even blurrier as Heuberger’s paper revealed that there’s limited evidence behind many of the Prohibited List’s substances’ performance benefits. If there’s little evidence of a health risk, too, that’s not violating the spirit of the sport. Then again, you might ask, why would an athlete take a substance that didn’t benefit performance?

A decent reason not to dope

But would you risk it? Let’s take the substances Heuberger would think twice about: growth hormones and drugs that influence the immune system. According to the Mayo Clinic, side effects linked to human growth hormone may include pain in joints; cause diabetes; increased heart size in a condition known as cardiomegaly; raised blood pressure; and lead to eyesight problems.

A 2008 review of the growth hormone athletic literature showed that lean body mass increased in growth hormone recipients compared with participants who didn’t receive growth hormone. On the downside, "hormone-treated participants more frequently experienced soft tissue oedema and fatigue than did those not treated with growth hormone."

Further research referenced by Harvard Health Publishing, albeit in older individuals, showed that growth hormone recipients experienced a high rate of side effects, including fluid retention, joint pain, breast enlargement and carpal tunnel syndrome. The studies were too short to detect any change in the risk of cancer, but other research suggests an increased risk of cancer in general and prostate cancer in particular.

Heuberger would also veer away from drugs that influence the immune system. According to Heuberger’s 2019 paper,  one example is glucocorticoids, which "act on metabolism and the immune system, and, through that mechanism, potentially affect performance."

There’s clear evidence that prolonged use can damage health with a 2013 study in the journal Neurohospitalist revealing an increase in osteoporosis, osteonecrosis (death of bone tissue due to the interruption of blood supply) and even heart disease.

Beyond the dangers of health, there’s also the riders’ ethical responsibility to not cheat. In ethics, the concept of fairness involves treating everyone equally and impartially.

‘Fair play’ is usually understood to mean using only tactics that are in accord with the spirit of the sport. That’s on a human level. But on a formal level, that’s where UCI and WADA rules come in.

Again on a human level, it does beg the question: why do athletes dope? Michael Joyner wrote a piece in 2013 suggesting that one of the reasons is down to game theory. Athletes are in a game with one another, the piece argued, each vying for the best result and highest salary. If the athlete feels testing and enforcement are lax, the risk of being beaten by a doper is perceived to be larger than the risk of getting caught. In short, doping becomes the optimal strategy for victory.

An Enhanced free-for-all?

Now, let us return to the Enhanced Games, namely the safety aspect that they pay great credence to on their website. "Athletes competing in the Enhanced Games will receive free medical screening prior to competition, which will ensure that they are healthy and able to compete,” it reads. “The screening will involve an echocardiogram, blood tests and genomic sequencing, in order to build up a full picture of the athlete’s health, and allow athletes to make an informed decision about whether they are safe to compete."

Then, "The Enhanced Medical Pre-Screening Protocol, which is still in development, will allow athletes to track their biomarkers prior to competition, creating a blueprint of athletic excellence that could be used to inform performance therapies, diet, sleep, and training."

Safety, if you believe the marketing, is paramount at the Enhanced Games. But which doctor would prescribe therapeutic drugs for performance reasons without risking being struck off?

"That’s what we’re arguing," says Brett Fraser, chief athletics officer of the Enhanced Games and two-time Olympic swimmer. "We’re looking to create an environment where we’re using the best doctors and scientists in the world to understand and optimise sporting performance in a safe manner. This is all going to be done with the focus on the safety of athletes. That’s the most important thing."

One of Fraser’s hopes is that they’ll learn what doping products today’s current athletes might be using and feedback to WADA so that they can improve their testing protocols. Whether that’s philanthropy or simply a safety smokescreen, well, we’ll leave that hanging. What’s clearer is that Fraser feels the Prohibited List has become bloated based on little empirical data.

"You’ll find some pretty interesting substances on there," says Fraser. "And there’s an inconsistency. Why would they be allowed in training but not in competition, for example? What is the rationale behind some of these substances being on the prohibited list? They’re not studied enough and could be perceived as being arbitrary in nature."

This has clear parallels with Heuberger, so what does Heuberger think about the Enhanced Games? "I don’t think it’s something I support as it seems too extreme," he says. "However, it would be interesting to see what’s possible with pharmacological enhancement, but this isn’t the best way to investigate it because it’ll be difficult to do in a balanced and well-controlled way that protects the health of the athlete."

Will the Enhanced Games happen? If PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel has his way it will. Thiel was revealed as an investor in a multi-million-dollar seed round in January for the Games. 

Where does that leave us? Substances like EPO and steroids have sufficient empirical and anecdotal evidence behind them to suggest that they’re potentially harmful to health, certainly at reasonably high levels. Whether that’s enough of a deterrent to an athlete depends on their motivation, desperation and moral compass.

But there’s a clear feeling that many of the substances require further research to quantify the potential risks and how much of a performance enhancement they’ll deliver. If you can prove that they don’t enhance performance, of course, then that will arguably be a greater deterrent to an athlete taking it than the health-risk aspect.

Heuberger suggests restructuring the setup so that you focus on the drugs that you think will have a big performance gain, undertake proper tests or trials for that, and then put those on the list and develop very sensitive tests to detect them. He also feels that WADA should drop the third criteria for placing substances on the List, the ‘spirit of sport’, because of its problematic fuzziness. 

As stakes become higher, technology becomes better, and medical knowledge becomes deeper, the challenge of anti-doping will become greater. In a future where athletes aren't concerned with health risks, we can only hope that ethics is front and centre to the principles of our sporting stars.

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"I was working at the AIS, and the physiology department was led by Professor Chris Gore. USADA commissioned him to review Lance Armstrong’s ABP data. He was my PhD supervisor and got me interested in the passport."

The words of Professor Laura Lewis, director of science at the United States Anti-Doping Agency, formerly at the Australian Institute of Sport, and one of the world’s leading experts on the Athlete Biological Passport (ABP).

Reid Aiken, deputy director of the ABP at WADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency, had flagged up Lewis’ haematological expertise (see part one), specifically her encyclopaedic knowledge of the potential blind spot that is dosing micro quantities of the blood-booster erythropoietin (EPO) and altitude. So, one email dropped, a swift reply, and we were away, starting with a reminder of what the ABP measures…

The anti-doping alarm bells are ringing

"The passport has a blue line in the middle," says Lewis. "This is the athlete's data points [new red blood cells, aka reticulocytes, and haemoglobin levels] that go up and down. Then there's this adaptive model that WADA owns that calculates an upper and lower limit, which are represented by red lines. These lines start off quite far apart but the more samples you take, the narrower they become and predict within 99% confidence where the athletes' value should lie."

If it's flagged by the model, that's not like an EPO test, says Lewis, which would be a positive; instead, it's an alert. Another expert examines the data and, if the alarm bells continue to ring, two further experts do similar.

"If all of you are saying doping's likely, then you write what's called a 'joint opinion'," says Lewis.

"That's using all the information that you've got at that point, explaining the abnormality, which is sent to the athlete. The athlete then has the opportunity to provide further information that might have impacted the results, like a visit to a hospital. The experts evaluate that new information. If they accept it, nothing happens. If they don't, then you move onto arbitration and the athlete having to defend themselves and potentially a sanction."

Which is the Badlands currently inhabited by French rider Franck Bonnamour, who in March was released by his team, Decathlon-AG2R La Mondiale, after being temporarily suspended by the UCI in February for anomalies in his biological passport.

The alleged transgressions actually happened when racing for B&B Hotels – KTM in 2022. The case continues, meaning we’re not aware of the exact details of the alleged biological passport violations – specifically, we’re unaware if the impact of altitude on haematological values provided part of his defence.

We are aware, however, that this is a common defence. Take Kenya’s former 1500m Olympic champion Asbel Kiprop, who served a four-year ban from 2018 to 2022 after testing positive for EPO. At his defence, the Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU) called Kiprop's explanation an "a la carte menu of reasons why the charges should be dismissed".

Among these, the AIU said, were that the "EPO was naturally produced due to intense exercise at altitude", that it was produced by medication, that the test, or the analysis, was badly conducted or that the sample was spiked.

The three-person panel concluded that high altitude could not explain the presence of EPO in the test and that Kiprop had produced no evidence to support other possible explanations.

In Kiprop's case, his biological passport was used to target when the anti-doping authorities should undertake EPO testing. This synergistic approach is a useful strategy, especially because of the difficulty in separating blood values at altitude and blood values when doping moderate amounts of EPO. As we highlighted in part one, a 2022 paper by Jonas Saugy, entitled 'Altitude and Erythropoietin: Comparative Evaluation of Their Impact on Key Parameters of the Athlete Biological Passport: A Review', revealed that an athlete's blood profile when micro-dosing was "hardly distinguishable from those identified after hypoxic exposure".

It's a scenario Lewis is more than aware of.

"There have certainly been reports of athletes using EPO at altitude to mask its effects. When you're at altitude, your body's natural response to the low levels of oxygen is to produce its own EPO, which accelerates the production of red blood cells. Depending on the individual's response to altitude, it can have similar effects on the markers as blood doping – EPO and blood transfusions – but not to the same magnitude.

"So, it can cause the passport to flag above those upper or lower limits. It's led to some athletes using recombinant EPO at altitude as they feel they can explain the anomaly on their passport."

Inconsistency of altitude

Lewis concedes that micro-dosing EPO at altitude does make it more of an anti-doping challenge, not only due to unpicking one from the other but because of how a cyclist naturally reacts to altitude.

"Some say how you react is down to being a responder or non-responder to altitude," Lewis says. "I've never subscribed to that camp as it's too simplistic. I've been on training camps with elite athletes where they respond one time and don't the next.

"I think it's really related to a number of factors, like the dose of altitude that they're given. So, duration, height of the exposure, but also were they ill when they headed to altitude? Did they have extra stress going on? You really need your body to be in an adaptive state to respond to altitude. It's why athletes who smash themselves at camp to reduce their weight tend not to respond haematologically, whereas if they periodise their training and they're a seasoned pro, and eating the right things and they have enough iron available, they tend to have good responses."

Lewis says that there were attempts to add a more formalised altitude factor to the ABP. "But it was decided that there were just too many variables, so it was decided to enhance the literature around individual responsiveness to altitude and its effect on the markers of the biological passport instead. You then leave it in the hands of the experts who review the passport to really dig deep."

That's why athletes are encouraged to provide as much detail as possible about, say, an altitude camp when they're filling in their ADAMS account. This is WADA's Anti-Doping Administration and Management System, where, among many things, athletes are required to provide a 60-minute time slot every day between 5am and 11pm that anchors an athlete to a specific location for testing.

This detail tangentially led us to discuss a metric entitled 'the kilometre hour', which is how many hours it takes to respond haematologically. (Bear with us, we do circle around to explain this) You can read more about it here. The paper, entitled 'Time for a new metric for hypoxic dose?' and co-written by Lewis, introduced a new way of looking at altitude exposure that combined different altitudes and durations in one unit: kilometre/hours. If you lived and trained at around 2,200m for 22 days (528 hours), that would amount to around 1,161km/hrs.

"Broadly, it takes around 900km/hrs for a sea-level resident to really benefit from altitude," says Lewis, with the model showing an increase of haemoglobin mass of around 2% at 500/km/hr, 4% at 1,000km/hr and 6% at 2,000km/hr. The latter would realise a saving of 10bpm for any given power output or a boost in power of around 20 watts for the same heart rate, which begs the question, why not reach out to [Edmund] Hillary-esque heights in search of even more rarefied air and potentially greater performance?

"There's an altitude sweet spot because the higher you are, the harder it is to perform high-intensity work like VO2 max work," says Lewis. "It's why cyclists might train at around 2,000m in Andorra but will sleep in an altitude tent set to 3,000m.

"The problem is, when an anti-doping control officer comes knocking, even though there is a question about using simulated hypoxia devices, they might be more focused on the fact that they're living at altitude and answer the question incorrectly. That would make a difference because the experts are looking at skews in data that they're being told was at 2,000m but, for 10 hours a night, that response is down to exposure at 3,000m."

So, detail matters to ensure the innocent remain innocent, especially when it comes to altitude. Unless, of course, you are cheating. And when it comes to cheating up high, imagination counts.

"The Aderlass case exposed athletes who headed to altitude and extracted blood while they were there to accelerate the regeneration of new red blood cells [reticulocytes]; you'd return to a 'normal' state faster than if you were taking out blood at sea level," says Lewis.

"Or they'd go to altitude, generate a whole lot more red blood cells and then extract blood at the end of the camp that they might reinfuse back at sea level. They were creative!"

DNA testing and AI are the future (and current)

Lewis is one of many anti-doping experts focusing their efforts on altitude. Another name that keeps cropping up is Nikolai Baastrup Nordsborg, the head of nutrition, exercise and sports at the University of Copenhagen. Nordsborg has led myriad studies into doping and altitude, including the genetic impact.

In the first paper, the Norwegian had 39 subjects randomly assigned to an EPO group, where they'd receive micro-dosing injections of 20 IU per kilogramme of body weight, or to the placebo group, where they received a saline injection. (The EPO levels seen in the 'naughty 90s' and into the 2000s, and before cycling adopted the ABP in 2008, were over seven times that amount.) They trained at both sea level and altitude, and each individual received 11 injections, given intravenously every second day for three weeks.

As an aside, samples were taken via dried blood spot (DBS) testing that WADA approved in 2021. DBS is a form of blood sampling where samples are blotted and dried on filter paper, and hold many advantages over traditional blood sampling, including they're less invasive as you only require a drop or two and they're cheaper.

What were Nordsborg and his team looking for?

Genetic markers identified from previous research he'd undertaken that were "sensitive to blood manipulation". For the lab coats amongst you, they were 5'-aminolevulinate synthase (ALAS2), an enzyme involved in haemoglobin biosynthesis and specific to erythropoiesis, and carbonic anhydrase 1 (CA1), an enzyme involved in different cell processes, including cell respiration, and indirectly involved in erythropoiesis. And as Nordsborg suspected, his results showed that both genetic markers were significantly higher when microdosing EPO to altitude alone.

Nordsborg also examined the impact of altitude and injecting EPO on iron metabolism. The two main regulators of iron availability, hepcidin and erythroferrone (ERFE), are "sensitive to altered erythropoietic activity". Vis-à-vis, Nordsborg hypothesised, and then showed, that they are both "sensitive markers in an anti-doping context".

Looking in a different place 

So, despite the difficulty in separating legal and micro-dosing methods of changing your blood profile, it's not impossible. But is it the panacea of modern-day anti-doping? Maybe not. "One of the most enlightening studies I undertook at the AIS was at the 2013 Tour of Qinghai Lake in China, where we were working with the Australian national team and Drapac," says Lewis. "It's the highest race in the world and features one climb that peaks at over 4,100m.

"The main reason we chose that race was down to two extreme and conflicting stimuli," Lewis adds. "The first is obviously the altitude that should see a significant increase in haemoglobin. The second is down to the number of stages [which back then numbered 13 but now numbers eight]. Multi-stage racing has been shown to dilute haemoglobin. You're not destroying it, but the fluid component of blood, known as plasma, expands. It's your kidneys' natural response to the stress you're applying day after day.

"The question that was relevant to the passport was, at altitude, which one will 'win' – the increase in haemoglobin or the increase in plasma volume? I thought that the altitude would win because oxygen is pretty important! But I was wrong – every rider's haemoglobin level dropped because of the amount plasma volume had expanded. We also tested a Chinese team who were natives at that altitude and the results were the same – haemoglobin levels drop, plasma volume rises.

"That was really important information because it showed us that plasma volume, particularly in cycling over many long days, could actually be more of a confounder to the passport than altitude itself. I think we have a good handle on altitude, albeit because micro-dosing does raise the chances of false positives, it's important for anti-doping organisations to continue with EPO tests hand in hand with the ABP. But then the way that plasma volume can change with tapering or increased training loads, that's a little bit harder to quantify."

To that end, WADA has directed money into further research into plasma volume. "I'm part of a working group that's looking at quantifying plasma volume in the real world, in repeatable fashion, and not just in the lab," says Lewis. "That's a challenge. But not impossible. A study came out of Qatar from Louisa Lobigs that could predict plasma volume based on simple chemistry markers from a blood test.

"We tested it out at the Tour Down Under in 2020, just before COVID-19, and it predicted the changes in plasma volume really well. It'd involve another blood test and tube to be taken from an athlete at the same time as the ABP, but it could give you more confidence in, is there a plasma volume shift related to this?" In other words, it'd take into account the impact of altitude on haemoglobin levels and the plasma-volume impact of racing hard many days over.

Raphael Faiss, research manager at the Centre of Research and Expertise in Anti-Doping Sciences (REDs) at the University of Lausanne, who we met in part one, is currently utilising machine learning to estimate what a rider's plasma volume should be at any given time; artificial intelligence is used to define normal patterns and patterns that correspond with doping.

In fact, WADA has several ongoing AI projects that focus on different facets of the ABP, including the ability to flag up 'urine exchange'; in other words, to crack down on athletes looking to pass off somebody else as them during a drug test. From 2012 to 2019, WADA looked into more than 60,000 cases and discovered a doppelganger pattern in 130 of them.

The most recent high-profile case concerned Kenyan middle-distance runner Michael Saruni, who in February received a four-year ban from all competition by sending a look-alike to give blood and urine samples. He was alleged to have walked into a bathroom after the national trials for the 2022 World Championships accompanied by another man before switching clothes and sending him to be tested. His elaborate ruse didn't fool an anti-doping official, however, who "noticed that the person did not look like an athlete who had just finished a race". Saruni was later discovered in a toilet cubicle by investigators, but rather than handing himself in, he tried to escape by leaping over a barred wall.

Reid Aiken, deputy director of the ABP at WADA and another expert we met in part one, told us that WADA is working with the German Institute for Artificial Intelligence to identify sample swapping via an AI-led pattern-recognition tool. If suspicion is aroused via AI, the urine samples that were taken for the steroidal module of the ABP can then be DNA tested.

All of these are innovations that will hopefully bolster the effectiveness of the ABP in its efforts to remain relevant, especially when headlines are directed to projects like the Enhanced Games, which would do away with drug testing altogether. It's this evolution that's so important, says Lewis, for the identification of cheats and the protection of the innocent.

"The ABP's been in use for over 15 years. In that time, doping's changed and now the [suspicious] passports look very different. They're not textbook ECG profiles. Athletes are much smarter and more sophisticated. I don't think we should ever get rid of the ABP because it's such a good deterrent, but things need to evolve so that it doesn't become redundant. The concern is that anti-doping organisations spend a lot of money on ABP tests – it's expensive to collect, transport and analyse the blood – and if you're not getting any cases or not seeing any benefit from an organisation perspective, you start to question, why are we pouring all that money into this?

"I hope in another 15 years the ABP is still around. But we need to better educate the athletes on what information we need to ensure they're on a level playing field with the experts on the ABP side. If the athlete had low iron, for instance, but didn't feel it relevant to flag up. Better education will help them. If it's in the same format as now, we'd have failed the athletes. We must move with the times to ensure the ABP's as useful as possible."

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“Look at the climb of Alpe d’Huez in 2022. [Geraint] Thomas, [Tadej] Pogačar, [Jonas] Vingegaard, they were all there and over three minutes slower than [Marco] Pantani in 1995. And he was on a 9kg steel bike. Over the last 10 years, the sensitivity of doping and analysis has increased by a factor of 1,000, which means that you’re able to detect substances with a concentration that’s 1,000 times less than before. We are still improving the system, but I would say that if there is a doping substance in the body of an athlete, it will be found.”

These are the words of Raphael Faiss, research manager at the Centre of Research and Expertise in Anti-Doping sciences (REDs) at the University of Lausanne. The cause of Faiss’ optimism? The Athlete Biological Passport, or ABP, this year celebrates 15 years since WADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency, rolled out its “new testing paradigm”.

Over two parts, we speak to experts in the know to chart the strengths and weaknesses of the ABP, discovering why old-school EPO is favoured over the new, why blood bags remain problematic and why estate agents often look upwards when selling to cyclists. We’ll look at the present and the future, but start by looking back to see what stimulated the development of the passport…

Beating anaemia… and the competition

While an aerodynamic Greg LeMond flew past Laurent Fignon’s old-school TT set-up to win the 1989 Tour de France by eight seconds, a development in the medical world looked set to transform the lives of severe anaemics as FDA (the USA’s Food and Drug Administration) approved the use of exogenous EPO (erythropoietin). EPO is a hormone naturally produced by the kidneys that stimulates the production of red blood cells. Vis-à-vis, the recombinant version would benefit those who couldn’t generate sufficient levels on their own. And, it soon transpired, cyclists and their teams seeking a competitive edge.

While amphetamines were historically the cyclist’s drug of choice, EPO was next level as suddenly world-class climbers morphed into world-class time triallists. Athletes whose haematocrit levels – the percentage of red cells in your blood – came in at 44% could now raise it to more than 55%, even 60%. Great for endurance performance but mightily dangerous. Tales circulated of cyclists awakening in the middle of the night to perform press-ups to prevent their hearts from stopping due to high blood viscosity.

The UCI (cycling’s international governing body) took note, primarily for health (and arguably PR) reasons, and blood tests were eventually rolled out alongside a haematocrit cut-off of 50% for men and 47% for women with the first ‘no-start rule’ applied at the 1997 edition of Paris-Nice. The price of their misdemeanour? A two-week suspension. That still proved long enough to upset riders and teams who tagged phlebotomists the ‘vampires of the peloton’.

But already the teams were ahead of the game as in 1998, it became clear that the plasma expander hydroxyethyl starch (HEL) was being used to decrease haematocrit concentrations; in fact, many teams had purchased Coulter ACT haematology analysers at the beginning of the season to ensure haematocrit values measured on the morning of each race dipped under the threshold.

A year later, in 1999, Pantani was thrown off the Giro d’Italia when leading due to haematocrit levels of 51.9%. Indeed, this year's race marks another anniversary in the history of cycling doping, as it has been 25 years since that exclusion.

This, coupled with the 1998 Festina affair, left cycling’s reputation in tatters. Something more needed to be done, and it arrived thanks to a direct test for EPO developed by a French lab with the first two adverse findings in 2001.

Look indirect rather than direct

The defence had been bolstered. But there remained clear cracks. The problem with the EPO test, which is used to this day, is that for each new drug, a new test must be developed. This creates a significant lag, ensuring the cheats kept well ahead. The solution? What if instead of looking directly for drugs, you looked indirectly? To measure the physiological impact of drugs by observing trends? By examining longitudinally an athlete’s blood? This led to the development of the ABP, first used in battered-and-bruised cycling in 2008 and then rolled out by WADA a year later. Reid Aikin, deputy director of the Athlete Biological Passport at WADA, explains how it works.

“When you take EPO, you generate more reticulocytes or new red blood cells. This can skew your results above line,” says Aikin. “But there’s also an ‘off-phase’ component. When an athlete stops taking EPO, the body responds to this supra-physiological dose by shutting down the normal production of red blood cells in search of homeostasis. You then have lower reticulocyte values than normal. So, you have this booster and off-phase that the ABP picks up. When the ABP started, you were having so many athletes turn up with low levels of reticulocytes because everyone stopped taking it during competition.”

By this time, out-of-competition had cranked up, too. Both these anti-doping advancements had an immediate impact upon a rider’s blood profile, illustrated by a 2010 paper by Mario Zorzoli and Francesca Rossi entitled ‘Implementation of the biological passport: The experience of the International Cycling Union’. They observed that from 2001 to 2007, around 10% of the samples taken exhibited reticulocytes in the extreme range of either below 0.4% (off-phase) or over 2% (on-phase). On introduction of the ABP, this dropped to 2-3%. The category defined as ‘very extreme’ – below 0.2% for off-phase and over 2.4% for on-phase – disappeared entirely.

No such paper has been published since though there’s compelling evidence that the ABP has had an impact. In 2007 there were 643 positive tests. That had dropped to 146 in 2021. In 2004, around 4.6% of anti-doping samples tested were positive; in 2022, that had dropped to less than 1% (you can see the full breakdown of test volume and AAFs in WADA's published testing figures).

Evolution of the ABP

Of course, history challenges the notion that an absence of a positive test means a clean athlete. “I’ve been tested 500 times and never failed a drug test,” Lance Armstrong repeated. Often. But the ABP has evolved to target a wider gamut of performance-enhancing drugs. Originally, the ABP featured solely a haematological module. “But in 2014, a steroid module was added to the ABP that’s detected in urine samples,” says Aikin. “Then last year, we launched the endocrine module, which profiles markers of growth hormone or IGF (Insulin-like Growth Factor 1) use. This is via blood, albeit it’s a serum sample, so each module requires its own separate sample collection, though follows the same basis of observing trends over time.”

The ABP also now accounts for the performance evolution of an athlete. “It’s a project we’ve worked on with Professor James Hopker of the University of Kent, England, where we can observe ‘normal’ career progression compared to outlier efforts,” says Faiss. “This includes looking at power data. There’s much conjecture about technology fraud and motor doping. But we can look at the figures, look beyond the leading riders of a race to those who might feel they can hide in the peloton and notice that they might have needed 100 fewer watts to reach the end of the stage, meaning that they might have used a motor. Essentially, this system shines a light on any given athlete at a given time point. We don’t have infinite resources, so it’s all about pointing the light in the right place at the right time.”

The athlete system behind the passports evolved, too. WADA introduced the Whereabouts system in 2004, and it requires athletes to update their ADAMS (Anti-Doping Administration and Management System) app to state where they are one hour per day, seven days a week.

“This has been refined,” says Aiken. “We used to give details of the blood data from the lab tests but it turned out certain ‘projects’, including Aderlass [which we delve into shortly], were using this data to fine-tune their doping programmes. It’s a restriction of athlete data but they understand why.”

A costly exercise

This evolution comes at a cost. As of the end of 2021, each men’s WorldTeam and ProTeam contributed around €185,000 and €96,000, respectively, to the International Testing Agency (ITA) International Testing Agency’s, an independent body that’s led anti-doping operations on behalf of the UCI since the start of 2021. According to Iwan Spekenbrink, CEO of Team DSM-Firminech PostNL and vice president of the MPCC, aka Movement Pour Credible Cycling, this isn’t enough. The MPCC created an educational video entitled ‘Keeping the light on’, in which they raise awareness about the fight against doping.

“We as teams contribute less than 1% of our budget to anti-doping,” Spekenbrink says in the video. “Thanks to the MPCC, we’ve increased the budget so made a step but need more. Teams spend more on digital content and hospitality than doping. The biggest thing for our sport is to be credible to the world – sponsors, fans. We must increase funding.”

The UCI has increased its financial backing for its anti-doping programme by 35% in 2023 and 2024 to €10 million. Further money comes from the Tour de France ($214,000), while the Giro and Vuelta contribute $181,900 each. WADA’s annual budget is just under $50 million.

That increased budget is needed as testing isn’t cheap. At the beginning of the programme in 2008, the UCI planned to collect a total of 10 blood and four urine samples for each athlete both in- and out-of-competition. In 2009, this would remain for new riders entering the programme, while the older ones would undergo a reduced number of tests (six blood and three urine tests), unless other reasons (i.e. abnormal profiles, sport performance) dictated otherwise.

Now, the aim of the ABP is an average of three tests per year, with some riders tested once, some more than 10. This tends to vary depending on success, with the leading riders tested at least three times during a Grand Tour. Complete two Grand Tours in a season, and that’s already six without taking into account other in-competition and out-of-competition tests. If you’ve raced for many years at the top level, your passport will have ballooned to over 130 samples that are then kept in storage, albeit a bugbear of many in anti-doping is that GDPR stipulates the data can only be stored for 10 years.

Testing frequency also depends on which country you’re based, says Aiken. “When we talk about 15 years of the passport, there's still a real gradient of experience with some countries only implementing improved anti-doping measures in the last few years,” he says. There are 30 WADA-accredited laboratories worldwide but only one apiece in South America and Africa, meaning unless a rider is training in Rio de Janeiro or Bloemfontein, their sample will have to travel a significant distance at great expense.

Then again, if a rider is training in a remote location, this arouses suspicion at the UCI, whose ‘Regulation for Testing and Investigations’ lists a number of factors where riders should be tested more frequently, including “moving to or training in a remote location”. Other factors include “nearing the end of a contract” and “withdrawal or absence from expected competitions”.

Understandably, what it doesn’t list are the weaknesses of the ABP. Roger Legeay is president of the MPCC, creating the organisation in 2007 off the back of ‘another’ doping scandal, Operacion Puerto. “The passport is a great tool for the fight against anti-doping but has one clear problem,” he says. “With the passport, it takes a long time to see if there’s something wrong, to spot trends. It can take several seasons to see if a rider’s profile potentially says that he or she is cheating.”

It’s a criticism Aiken counters: “You can flag outliers even on the first test as you can compare with that athletic population and say, this is highly abnormal. In fact, we often flag up an athlete’s data after their first test because they don’t think they’ll be under scrutiny. In general – and this is published WADA stats – almost 45% of EPO positives are with the first EPO test of an athlete. Of course, when it comes to the ABP the athlete’s limits narrow more over time and it becomes more personalised to them, becomes more sensitive.”

Importance of Aderlass

Of course, like any tool, the ABP is only as effective as the experts who use it. And that means learning. Which is why Aderlass provided much insider material for the anti-dopers to pore over. Operation Aderlass was one of the highest-profile doping scandals of recent years and was an investigation in Austria and Germany into doping practices carried out by German physician Mark Schmidt. Numerous cyclists and cross-country skiers were implicated.

On March 3, 2019, Stefan Denifl, who last rode for Aqua Blue Sport the season before, confessed to blood doping under the assistance of Schmidt, while a day later, Georg Preidler, who was riding for Groupama-FDJ at the time, also confessed to having had two blood extractions with Schmidt in late 2018 but denied ever actually doping. Both were handed four-year bans.

The abiding image of the Aderlass scandal, however, is one of Schmidt’s clients, cross-country skier Max Hauke, caught red-handed by the Austrian police in the middle of a blood transfusion. One of the police filmed the episode.

“Hauke recently presented at an anti-doping conference where he explained some of the tactics employed by doping athletes to beat the testing,” says Faiss.

“One of the simplest involved living on the top floor of a high-rise apartment block. When a doping officer rings the bell, you have more time to rapidly drink saltwater that impacts your plasma volume [of which we’ll elaborate on shortly]. You then play dumb to buy more time and try to charm the officer before telling them that you’ve just trained hard, which means you need to wait for two more hours as hard exercise can impact the results.”

“Hauke also told us that he was using blood transfusions and growth hormone rather than EPO because Dr Schmidt told him he’d be caught if he took EPO,” Faiss adds, stating that this was before the endocrine module of the ABP was brought in last year.

Faiss also revealed that there’s evidence that athletes using EPO are reverting to the original product as the latest generation’s designed so that severe anaemics would require fewer injections so it lasts longer in the body. Great for them, not for dopers.

How they take EPO can vary, too. “Athletes take the same substances but in different forms,” the head of science and medical at the ITA, Neil Robinson, explains in the ‘Keeping the light on’ video. “When I began my doctorate, athletes were taking EPO subcutaneously. It’s the best and cheapest way to make sure it works. But it’s detectable. So, dopers went from subcutaneous to intravenous. It’s less effective, offering fewer benefits but also less detectable.”

Blood transfusions seem medieval compared to EPO, but, says Faiss, there’s a good reason they’re still used. “Taking your blood out, putting it in the fridge and reinfusing it, compared to the quantity that you have in your own body, that’s not much, so that’s a challenge. Historically, we’d look for plasticisers, which are small plastic particles from the pouch that were detectable in the blood. But then athletes started using pouches that didn’t release any plastic particles.”

The major challenge: micro-dosing

That 2010 paper by Zorzoli and Rossi revealed the behaviour change stimulated by the ABP. Which brings us to micro-dosing, more specifically, micro-dosing of EPO. As the name suggests, this simply involves injecting smaller quantities of EPO that are harder to detect by the ABP but still high enough for a performance boost. A 2022 paper, ‘Altitude and Erythropoietin: Comparative Evaluation of Their Impact on Key Parameters of the Athlete Biological Passport: A Review’ by a team led by Jonas Saugy, showed that traditional EPO resulted in haemoglobin and reticulocyte levels that were 1.7 times higher than micro-dosing while haemoglobin mass was four times higher. Despite that, one Danish study showed a 5% increase in time-trial effort after micro-infusion.

“In a sense, I’d say the ABP’s working because it’s forcing athletes to change their attitude towards doping, which is certainly less dangerous,” says Faiss. “Imagine you’re in a car travelling from A to B. You know there are never police on that road so you can drive really fast. But what happens when you know there’s a road with a speed camera on? You know you must reduce your speed. Okay, you may drive slightly over the limit, but not fast enough to be flashed. It’s safer and ultimately health of a rider is the number one concern.”

Both Aiken and Faiss concede that micro-dosing EPO is problematic for anti-doping organisations, especially as its blood profiles are very similar to an environment increasingly inhabited by the world’s finest cyclists. That 2022 paper by Saugy showed that an athlete’s blood profile when micro-dosing was “hardly distinguishable from those identified after hypoxic exposure”. In other words, when an athlete hits altitude (legal), the endurance-friendly adaptations are at a similar level to micro-dosing (illegal).

“It’s true that differentiating the two is absolutely a challenge in anti-doping,” says Aiken, “so when athletes combine the two, it can cause confusion. We've invested heavily into research in this area. It’s high priority for WADA.” A series of papers spearheaded by Nikolai Nordsborg of the University of Copenhagen is investigating different markers to separate the two, including genetic markers. “But it’s worth speaking to Laura Lewis,” says Aiken. “She’s an expert on the haematological module.”

And so we did. What Lewis told us left us feeling reassured and concerned in equal measure. Find out next time about the nefarious performance benefits of extracting blood at altitude, why the future of anti-doping is artificial intelligence and how DNA testing lay behind the case of the Kenyan doppelganger.

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