Timothy John
Phew! If you weren’t already convinced that there are no free lunches in domestic road racing, you must certainly be now. And while we could devote the rest of this podcast to contemplating tough economic certainties. let’s lighten our spirits with some positive news: British Cycling will host a National Road Series next year. How can we be sure? Well, we have it on the best authority: Erick Rowsell, the federation’s Elite Road Racing Manager.
Erick Rowsell
“I’m confident we’ll have a national series next year. I think it will look quite good. I’ve been working very closely with the organisers. They’re all really engaged still. They’re all really enthusiastic to get going again. Everyone wants to get bike racing happening again. I’m quite confident we will have a good national series next year.”
“Our aims for the future won’t happen next year, but I think going through what the country and the world has just gone through, to have bike racing at that level will be a big achievement in itself. We could be in a situation where most organisers or authorities or sponsors just say: ‘We’ve taken such a big hit this year, we’re not even going to attempt it next year.’ So the fact that we’re having these conversations about races for next year is already a positive, given the climate we’re in, I think.”
Timothy John
We’ve started this section of the story at the end. How Erick Rowsell and his colleagues at British Cycling have fashioned a National Road Series for 2021 must be at least as interesting as the pledge that they have done so. For a start, he has forged new working relationships with disaffected race organisers - no small achievement given the acrimony that surrounded a disagreement over branding rights at National Road Series events that delayed the publication of the 2020 calendar until March. Peter Harrison, vastly experienced and no stranger to British Cycling’s often mysterious ways, approves of its new man.
Peter Harrison
Well, Erick has been doing a good job, in fairness. Erick’s got involved in our national organisers’ group. Funnily enough, I’ve been having regular telephone conversations with Erick. He is listening to the riders. He’s been along to a meeting with national event organisers and he’s prepared to listen and he’s putting forward points of view to those in the organisation who don’t know about cycling at that level. So, yes, Erick’s a very good ally and is doing a lot.”
Timothy John
So what exactly is Erick doing? The scope of his role involves nothing less than reimagining the structure of British road racing, up to and including the flagship National Road Series. So what changes has he planned? And what purpose do he believe the domestic road scene should serve?
Erick Rowsell
“The key thing to remember here is that the National Series should be seen as a development series. It should in my eyes be there to help progress British talent and help it move on to bigger and better things. What was needed in my opinion was someone who understood the sport; the way bike races happen, what riders need, what teams need. If we’re saying it should be there for developing riders then someone who understands what riders need to develop; what teams need to develop riders.”
“There are a hundred other things that play into this as well, but recognition that someone who knows the sport is needed. Effectively my idea for the future would be a three-tiered approach with a top series consisting of UCI events, a middle series where, effectively, you could use the old name of Premier Calendar and a new, under-23 development series to sit below that. The key things would be the calendar spread and geographical spread of those events.”
“If I could paint the perfect picture that’s what I’d like to try and achieve. It’s a huge task. If the appetite is still there, and people still want this racing in the UK and we’ve still got the riders and teams to do it, then we will do our best to make it happen as well.”
Timothy John
Erick’s vision for the development of domestic road racing and the riders within it is coherent, sincerely held, and based on eight years’ experience as a professional rider. He has clearly given careful consideration to fine detail like the race classifications that would underlie a tiered approach. Is there a broader consideration of the purpose a national series should serve, beyond merely developing rides? Should it be a national showcase to rival the Tour of Britain? A guaranteed passport to the UCI WorldTour? Is it even necessary, or has the reinvigoration of club time-trials under lockdown shown that grassroots can rival razzmatazz? Here’s VeloUK’s Larry Hickmott.
Larry Hickmott
“Because we’ve missed the National Road Series this year, basically the sport is missing that top level; missing that excitement. That said, having spent the last month since racing’s returned, going to club events, there is a great deal of happiness, joy, whatever, at racing returning. I look at the results, and I know where people live and I see where they’re racing, so they’re obviously travelling quite a distance just to pin on a number, so racing is obviously quite important to them.
So you have two levels. You have the grassroots racing, simply because people enjoy racing and getting that competitive spirit out. But when it comes to the National Series, that’s more of a business. There’s a lot of pressure on riders to perform in them. The problem there is that, whereas the Tour of Britain and even the National Championships can help a rider to win a contract in Europe, as Rory Townsend has found, after winning three Premier Calendar events last year, winning Premier Calendar or National Series events, whether its male or female, does not necessarily get you a contract with a big team in Europe.
“The difference between a Premier Calendar and the Tour of Britain is simply the riders competing in it. A domestic race, a Prem, is simply going to have British team riders, whether they come from Australia, New Zealand, wherever, it’s still dominated by British teams. The pro teams in Europe aren’t going to be looking at riders and what they’re doing here, whereas the Tour of Britain, if you do a good performance, such as the likes of Matt Holmes and James Shaw in the Tour de Yorkshire; they’ve done top five, top 10 overall. That shows their potential which has perhaps helped them get spots in WorldTour teams that they have managed to do.”
“I still think it’s an important part of that stepping stone to Europe for riders to be able to show their potential and give themselves their own morale boost to know that they can do this. If we lost the National Road Series, it would be a huge thing. It would obviously effect bigger teams; the UCI teams. Those teams would perhaps fall by the wayside. I think that would be a detriment to the sport. The ladder to the top would stop a few rungs earlier than if we lost the National Series.
Timothy John
Larry’s fears are certainly justified - this year’s National Road Series seemed imperilled even before the pandemic, due to the late publication of the calendar and British Cycling’s seemingly unilateral decision to abandon television coverage of its flagship road series. But Erick’s appointment has reassured many, not least the race organisers. His vision for a three-tiered National Series will not be delivered overnight, but its effect could be transformative.
Erick Rowsell
“My opinion of the direction the National Road Series should take in the future is that it potentially needs to be a tiered approach.”
“Imagine a pyramid, and at the top you’ve got the Tour of Britain, the Tour of Yorkshire, RideLondon, those sort of events. Below that, we’ve got one UCI 1.2 event, which is the CiCLE Classic, and then below that, you’ve got the National Road Series and National Bs. There are obviously some gaps there that we could fill.”
“If you’re a Conti team, you can ride the top races and you can ride the CiCLE Classic and the Premier Calendar, but if you’re an elite British team, you can’t ride those top races. All you have access to is the National Road Series or National B events, unless you’ve got the money and the budget to go and do UCI events abroad.”
“I think the future we need to look at is a more tiered approach where there are potentially three different series. There could be a top one, something in the middle, and potentially much more of a development series that sits below it. I think that could then provide more certainty to teams that we think: ‘Right, we know what we’re competing in, we’re aiming for that series. If we can win in that, we can potentially have some exposure in the next series.’”
“It sort of gives a bit of direction to where the teams sit and what would be there for them, rather than just one series. At the moment, it’s one suits everybody, which is not what we’ve got in the UK. That’s almost the beauty of racing in the UK. We’ve got completely different circumstances. You’ve got someone who might work as a postman racing one week, and a rider who might be paid 40 grand racing the same race the next week. We’ve got to try and develop a calendar that suites everybody, which is very, very tricky, but my idea is that we separate things out a bit, rather than relying on one solution for everybody.
“The ideas and ambitions are big. They’re long-term They’re not going to happen this year. Everything is not going to happen in one go next year. It’s going to be a phased approach where we map out where we want to get to, but it’s going to take some time to get there. We can’t just click our fingers and change everything overnight.”
Timothy John
Erick’s vision for a tiered structure will have the greatest impact on teams and so is one we’ll examine in part two of this episode. That Erick has a vision however and is determined his appointment will bring necessary change is to be welcomed. HIs insistence that change will take time to implement is to be respected too, but that time will pass quickly. The commercial landscape changes rapidly indeed and once sponsors are lost, they can be hard to regain, as Phil Jones explains.
Phil Jones
“The worst thing that anyone can do is lose a sponsor, in the same way that, with my business hat on, we all know that the cost of acquiring a new customer is far more expensive than keeping a current one. When a sponsors walks away from a sport, to bring them back is quite hard. What you’re doing is challenging a decision. If that decision is a fairly recent division, then generally speaking it’s unlikely that someone is going to review that position in the short term. I think the trick now has got to be how the sport finds ways to ensure that the sponsors who currently exist in the sport stay in the sport and stand at the side of the sport while it’s going through this really difficult period. That’s going to mean that they’ve got to be talking to their sponsors regularly and finding new ways to activate their sponsorship and add value.”
“Looking from outside in, you can see that BC are going to have a few challenges ahead themselves. They have recently lost, I believe, their major sponsor. They’ve got a job to go away and find a brand new, big ticket sponsors to help with funding, which will be part of their headache, that the commercial teams are going to have to land a big fish.”
Timothy John
‘Landing big fish’ might almost be Jonathan Durling’s job description, and two of the biggest he’s landed for SweetSpot Group are OVO Energy. It’s hard to imagine two more distinct businesses, yet cycle sponsorship generated return on investment for both. So how is it done?
Jonathan Durling
“OVO were a young company who needed to build brand awareness. We ticked that box very well, especially as there were some brand values that we shared, principally around sustainability. We work with Skoda, and as much as brand awareness is important, most people have heard of Skoda. What they do want to do is sell cars, funnily enough. But they want to also start to position the brand in a different way and to different audiences.”
“So if we’re going old school, and you’ve got the purchase funnel: awareness at the top, sales at the bottom and consideration in the middle, brands can sit at the top, sit at the bottom or sit in the middle, and it’s my job, and our job as a team, to convince them that we can address and answer their objectives, and sometimes it’s easier than others. With OVO, it wasn’t a difficult conversation. They wanted to increase awareness. Cycling and cyclists were an important audience for them, and that’s clearly something we can do very well.”
Timothy John
Jonathan’s marketing funnel is perhaps the only old-school piece left in cycle sport’s sponsorship jigsaw. Bike racing’s value to local authorities in particular has evolved in the 15 years since SweetSpot Group revived the Tour of Britain.
Jonathan Durling
“We’re now moving into cycling being regarded not only as a sport, but also as a means of transport. Active travel is high on the agenda, as is health and well-being.”
“What we can do as an event to help a local authority inspire and motivate their communities off the sofa and onto bikes or any form of exercise. I now have conversations with directors of public health. We wouldn’t have had those conversations two or three years ago. Now, it’s a fairly common conversation. An important objective for them is an active community and what can we do to help.”
“What’s been interesting is not just what we can do, but it’s about what cycling can do and the world of cycling, so we start to include conversations with people like Bikability; with British Cycling, who we work with very closely. There’s a great need and feel for collaboration among everyone involved in cycling and how we can all help local authorities engage with their communities. It’s a really interesting time to be involved.”
Timothy John
If we seem to have veered a long way from bike racing, it’s worth reminding ourselves that events on the scale of the Tour of Britain, and even the races in the National Road Series demand substantial investment. Bike racing’s ability then to serve a range of agendas, from economic regeneration to public health, is highly significant. The new frontier of cycle sponsorship lies in community engagement. Nothing brings people together like a bike race. Phil Jones recalls the Tour of Britain’s denouement last year in Manchester, Brother UK’s home town.
Phil Jones
“I think they showed what could be done. That was the reason why the race went through every borough of Greater Manchester. That was part of the payoff: that everybody got the race in their particular borough, which I thought was great. But of course, it was well-supported. There were hundreds of thousands on the street. People who would not normally be watching; on the street, out in their hundreds of thousands.”
“I watched the race depart in Altrincham. In fact, I rode on my bike just a few days ago under the mile zero bridge. It always reminds me when I ride under it of what a great day that was for Altrincham to see the town centre packed with thousands of people, the coffee shops full, the bunting…It just did a brilliant job to put Altrincham on the map. It actually came very close to Brother UK as well, which was lovely.”
“Then it finished off course on Deansgate in Greater Manchester. Having been at the race in the morning, I shot to see the finish as well. There literally were hundreds of thousands in the city on that particular day. It was a beautiful day; the buzz. It was a day to remember. I still remember it very, very vividly.”
Timothy John
Days like the Tour of Britain’s visit to Manchester last year are those where every piece of the bike racing jigsaw fall into place: commercial and sporting: Mathieu Vane Der Poel sprinkled WorldTour stardust on a central Manchester with a dazzling sprint victory, while the race’s major backers - corporates like Brother UK and councils in the shape of the combined Greater Manchester Authority could reflect with pride on having brought the race to Manchester. People came out in their hundreds of thousands and went home happy. This last element - community engagement - might be the most powerful of all, as Jonathan Durling explains.
Jonathan Durling
“The final stage of the Tour of Britain last year was an extraordinary success, because we took the race through all 10 boroughs of Greater Manchester, which got all 10 boroughs working tightener, which they’d never done before on that scale. We had a debrief afterwards and found that people had been writing into their councils and saying: ‘Thank-you for bringing the race.’ Local authorities never get emails like that. They never get a thank-you. It’s always a complaint. They did some digging into this and all 10 boroughs had the same message, which was: the community bonded. There’s no other event can do this. The only other was when the Olympic flame made its way around the country. You get people coming out of their front door, standing on the side of the road for maybe 20 minutes waiting for the race to come through or waiting the flame to come, and talking to their neighbours.
“If our event can improve community engagement and community relationships, it’s a positive. The local authority can see the benefit of that further down the line. There is a financial argument that if we can get 10 per cent of the population on bikes and more active further down the line there will be a saving to the NHS and other cost centres. It’s up to me to make the argument.”
“It is stark and there are times when you just know that now is not the time. One of the reasons we postponed the Tour of Britain when we did is in the bigger scheme of things, when people are fighting for their lives in hospitals, it is only a bike race.”
