Why Cycling Sponsorship is so Hard

Tour de France, photo by Pauline Ballet

Over the last 20 years, I’ve done a lot of work in both cycling and running. That has included serving as the CMO of the Los Angeles Marathon and, on the cycling side, working with athletes, events, sponsors, athletes and teams on marketing and sponsorship. So I’ve seen sponsorship issues from 360 degrees in different sports. And finding cycling sponsors has been very hard, for many reasons. There is not a single American pro cycling team (that I’m aware of) with a major sponsor from outside the bike industry. EF Education is owned by it’s non-American sponsor. Lidl-Trek, while owned by Trek, is comprised of mostly international riders. So I don’t count those as “American” teams.

I am writing this just after American trade tariffs have kicked in. And where they end up is anyone’s guess. I realize that, because of the tariff situation dramatically impacting the bike industry, cycling sponsorship is about to get even more difficult than it has been in the recent past. But I’m still putting these ideas out there, because the sport goes on.

Kasia Niewiadoma on the way to victory at the 2024 Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift

Here’s what I’ve learned:

1. Cycling is an expensive sport. Teams are having to travel up to 30 riders around the world all year with equipment, vehicles and support staff. Bike races (particularly on the road) need to close hundreds of miles of roads and (often) set up an expensive live video broadcast to cover all of that ground. All of this takes resources and money.
2. For sponsors, there’s very little measurable ROI in cycling. Unless a race is the Tour de France (approximately 3.5 billion TV viewers for the men’s race in 2024 and 18 million for the women’s race) there aren’t many people watching cycling events. And nobody buys tickets to sit in a stadium and watch a bike race. So what exactly do sponsors get in return when they write a check to a team or race or athlete? If the sponsor wants to do their own content creation, they actually can get quite a bit for their money. Red Bull, for example, has many events, teams and athletes in niche sports (including bikes) that they create lots of compelling media around. But that sponsor is highly unusual: the Red Bull Media House is a big operation with over 1,000 employees. At the same time, if a potential cycling sponsor just wants a checklist of assets that are already in place, sponsorship of, say, a soccer team might be a better investment. English Premier League soccer team Arsenal FC, for example, played before 2 million live spectators in 2024, and their TV broadcasts were available in over half a billion homes. That’s the kind of scale many large sponsors sign up for. And that’s why Emirates Airlines pays approximately £50 million per season to put their name on the front of the Arsenal jersey.
3. As I’ve written about before, any sport not called the NFL or NBA or EPL is essentially a niche sport, with a niche fanbase. Cycling is on the small side of this framing, with only one truly global event (Tour de France) and many relatively tiny ones. So while fans do exist around the world, it’s a very thin group.
4. Pro cycling sponsorship is particularly challenging for American brands, because the sport mostly happens in Europe. Imagine going to European brands and asking them to sponsor Major League Baseball teams in the US. That’s what it’s like for cycling. An American cycling team has to say to potential sponsors: “Write us a check and we’ll put the money to work for a team that competes 6,000 miles away, and our athletes may never even set foot in the United States.”
5. Gravel racing has not fully taken off yet. While it is getting popular in the US, and Europe is catching up, it’s not yet televised (outside of rare exceptions like Garmin Gravel Worlds) and gravel race mass participation fields are not yet at the scale of, for example, marathons. So while there is potential with this new discipline, it will need live streaming to even get into second gear. Otherwise it will languish as a niche within a niche.
6. A path forward. Bike racing is for me still an incredibly compelling and beautiful sport. Road, gravel, MTB — I like all of it. So I’d love to see it thrive. Here are some ideas:

• National teams: what if these were more of a thing, going all season long? There’s currently no organized cycling development system in particular for women. Talk to any female aspiring pro cyclist, and you will understand that there is no clear route through the system. While USA Cycling does put together national teams for some races in North America and Europe, these are inconsistent and subject to funds being available. Imagine if there were national teams for both junior and U23 levels, for both men and women, that were in place all year long, with different athletes rotating on an off the teams based on availability. Imagine that these were completely funded from donations or sponsors. So developing riders could count on the opportunity to learn their craft at important races.
• An organized U.S. road calendar & series: the current American road racing scene (separate from criteriums, which are like a different sport) feels like it’s hanging on by a thread. But there are signs of life. Tour of the Gila, a UCI race, is still going. The Maryland Cycling Classic is back this year. The Redlands Classic just celebrated it’s 40th year, and the newer Tour de Bloom in Washington just added UCI classification for its women’s stage race. And the Joe Martin Stage Race may come back in 2026 as the Tour of Arkansas, which would be exciting. It feels to me that road racing is poised for a comeback. But some organization and collaboration will go a long way. All of the events I mention here run on their own, without working together as a system, which is how it should be. This system, or overall series, would be a great sponsorship opportunity. And it would not be that hard to put together.
• An onramp for European bike racing: while USA Cycling does have a residence for athletes in Sittard, The Netherlands, there needs to be more of this. Friction needs to be removed from the process of learning to race in Europe. The skills a rider picks up there — huge, fast pelotons, foreign food and language, narrow roads — cannot be learned in the United States. Those things don’t exist here. So let’s make it easy, and relatively cheap, for junior teams and young cyclists to go there and learn. The house could be more like a commercial dorm for young cylists from around the world. Again, this is a great sponsorship opportunity.
• Levi’s Granfondo: This event, which took place in Sonoma County, California last weekend, is using a gravel race format for road racing, which is promising. The 1,500 fondo participants help fund the professional race at the front end. Here’s what I wrote for The Outer Line newsletter (where I’m a contributor) in this week’s edition:

Saturday was the second edition of the Levi’s Granfondo Growler professional race, held in Northern California’s beautiful Sonoma County. The Growler is a recent addition to Levi Leipheimer’s long running fondo event and featured a 137-mile paved course with almost 14,000 feet of climbing, and surprisingly the $156,000 USD prize purse made it the world’s richest one day bike race, and by some margin. (Yes, you’re reading that correctly: more than famous monuments like the Tour of Flanders — $65,000 total prize money this year and Paris-Roubaix — about $120,000 this year.) The Growler organizers took some of the defining characteristics of a big gravel race — equal prize purse for men and women, the same tough course for everyone — and applied those things to a road race. They also created a competent and engaging live broadcast, with Matt Stephens and Hannah Walker calling the race. The women’s race on Saturday was won by Lauren Stephens, and the men’s race by Keegan Swenson — who might arguably be America’s most successful bike racer at the moment, pound for pound, and cross-discipline. While there was some racing on open roads — which looked dangerous and may need future remediation — expect this race to grow if organizers find a way to attract top WT riders from the European peloton. Regardless, the race is a promising sign of life to an otherwise stagnant American road racing scene.

Feel free to share your own experiences or ideas with me in the comments. I welcome any ideas to help grow the sport of cycling in all formats.