'Cycling is not dead, grassroots is thriving' - Yorkshire organisers bullish as Women's Tour is latest casualty of cycling's financial crisis

While both Giles Pidcock and Marc Etches are as concerned as anyone in cycling about the number of senior professional continental teams representing this country plummeting from six to zero in recent times, and the news on Friday that the Women’s Tour has been abandoned this year due to a lack of sponsors, they do see greenshoots of recovery.

For Pidcock and Etches, cycling at grassroots and youth level is still thriving, and they are bullish that sport is cyclical and this is merely a bump in the road.

The alarm bells began to ring last month when the Tour Series for elite male riders was abandoned due to financial constraints coming amid the realisation that there are no longer any British UCI pro-continental men’s teams.

Then on Friday, race organisers Sweetspot admitted defeat in their quest to raise the funding required to stage the five-day Women’s Tour in June.

Prior to that announcement, Teo Geoghegan Hart, a former winner of the Giro d’Italia, suggested on social media the sport was “at a low that I’ve not seen during my time” and “it’s dying…I don’t see anyone coming to resuscitate it”.

Despite the doom and gloom, Pidcock, who runs an Under-19s team and organisers the Otley Cycle Races, and Etches, who has a multitude of roles in youth cycling as well as organising the Sheffield Grand Prix, both respectfully disagree.

For Pidcock - father of Tour de France stage winner and Olympic mountain bike champion Tom - the problem is not the top or the bottom, but the middle, and it has been brought on by the decline of the economy and Brexit.

“At the world level we’re in quite good fettle, we’ve got 20 or 30 riders riding World Tour races, across men and women, and they’re all inspirational,” says Pidcock.

“Then at the bottom the youth scene is still vibrant, albeit after a kicking from Covid.

“Where we’re struggling is at elite rider below World Tour level.

“Five years ago there were five or six professional teams, all well funded, riders on salaries, races were on television, there was a Tour series, a Tour of Britain.

“All that’s been ripped out of the sport, there are no teams paying salaries any more.

“It’s like there has been a forest fire and all the big trees have burnt down, but there are some greenshoots of recovery.

“I’m very much of a view that it’s had a beating but it’s not dead.

“But there are significant headwinds - the economy, high inflation, so people and businesses are struggling.”

For Etches, the sport at the level of the British male senior rider is paying the price for the excess of the post Bradley Wiggins era.

“We came off the back of the Olympics with Mark Cavendish and Bradley Wiggins, and cycling was on the crest of a wave,” says Etches.

“People were throwing money at teams and riders and the Tour de Yorkshire raised the profile. You had a real block of fantastic teams, but they were spending all their money. They all wanted to emulate Team Sky who hit the ground with such force, that for me it had a detrimental effect and we’re now suffering the fallout from that.

“Teams coming in with massive budgets and only lasting a year is not a sustainable model.

"And now blue chip companies are pulling out because they’re protecting their assets. They’re not going to be chucking £50,000 at a bike race when they’ve got to protect staff. It’s just business.”

Both men are passionate that there are enough good people, and enough goodwill, to help cycling climb out of the hole that has been dug.

“My focus is trying to help rebuild it from the ground upwards,” says Pidcock. “Not only do I run an Under-19s team but I also promote a race as part of the national junior series.

“If we can make that an aspirational age group to be in, that will motivate the kids beneath and will create the next wave of riders that are suffering because of the demise of the teams and the Tour Series.

“We’ve been here before. The sport’s been on its knees three or four times in the 30-odd years I’ve been involved in it, but because intrinsically it’s a good sport that people are interested in, it always rekindles.”

Pidcock’s junior team has a budget of £30,000 a year but Brexit means unseen costs have to be spent on cataloguing every piece of equipment that goes out of the country and comes back in.

“Brexit is a nightmare, it makes it much harder and more expensive,” he says. “For those teams that are running on a shoestring it’s the difference between life and death.”

Etches, who is secretary of Sheff Rec Cycling Club and chairman of the White Rose Youth League, adds: “I see all the hard work I do and a lot of other people in the Yorkshire region do and I’m very encouraged.

“Yorkshire is a leading region in youth cycling because we get a lot of traction. James Hawkins who rides for Cycling Sheffield, sees there’s no races so with a group of lads sets up a few races.

"He’s 19-years-old and last month he set up the Peaks Two-Day race; 122 entries for only 70 spots.

“People were whinging so they put an event on. If more people did that we’d have a really buoyant scene.

“The White Rose Youth League is getting 1,100 youth riders per year; the national round of the youth series is over-subscribed every year.

“The scene is not dead, it’s far from dead. Hundreds of people watch races, the appetite is still there from the fans.”

The races these two men organise are set to go ahead this July. Etches says he is close to securing funding to stage a Sheffield Grand Prix for the first time since Covid, while Pidcock reports that the Otley Races are secure because it has a pool of around six sponsors and therefore not reliant on one big backer.

“I think the future of the sport is sound,” concludes Pidcock. “We just need to get over this hump and keep working hard to promote it, to keep getting kids into cycling.

"It’s not just about being the next Bradley Wiggins or Mark Cavendish, this is something you can do for the whole of your life. It’s social, it’s a lifestyle.”