An Introduction to Wheelysports
Why I'm writing a cycling newsletter, and what you should expect from it.
If you don’t know me already, my name is Michael Baumann. In my day job, I cover baseball for FanGraphs; before that, I worked at The Ringer for five years, and before that Grantland and D1Baseball. I’ve written about football for The Atlantic and hockey for Sports Illustrated.
So why am I starting a cycling newsletter?
This is an odd sport. Like Formula 1, you’ll see bright colors and far-flung scenery on morning broadcasts, and plenty of petty squabbling and infighting besides. Like football, it’s a sport founded on indescribable physical toil; the decorated American rider Tyler Hamilton once said his greatest asset as a cyclist was his ability to endure suffering. Like baseball, it has vast history and mythology, and at its core is mostly a matter of keeping your wits about you while waiting for something to go horrifically wrong.
But there’s nothing quite like cycling on the sporting calendar, and it rewards those who come to learn about it.
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always been searching for a new sport to follow. I got into soccer in college, then auto racing, swimming, rugby. Each new sport had new rules to learn and folklore to explore, strategy to understand. And each new insight offered a new way to look at the sports I’d internalized before I could remember—baseball, football, hockey.
And, eventually, cycling. When I was in college, I read a series by Bonnie Ford on ESPN about a new American cycling team called Team Slipstream. This squad was founded by refugees from the U.S. Postal teams of the 1990s and 2000s who were trying to make a new start in the sport after a decade marred by drugs scandals. I’d grown up at the peak of Lance Armstrong hysteria, so I knew him, and I knew the Tour de France. I’d heard of Greg LeMond, and recognized the names of certain of Armstrong’s teammates and rivals, but I didn’t understand the sport.
Cycling is the simplest sport you could imagine. Just pedal your bike from here to there before the other guy. But it took me longer than any other to really get what it was all about. From the moment I started following it seriously in 2008, it was close to a decade before I felt like I had a complete grip on the tactics, the complex and ever-changing race calendar, and the matryoshka doll of competing interests and conflicts that make up even a single day’s racing.
So why am I starting a cycling newsletter?
Because I want to shorten that timeline as much as possible for you. This is a very interesting, but very odd sport, and I want to lower the barriers to entry.
Who am I writing for? General sports fans who want to try something a little different. People who landed on the Tour de France while channelsurfing and want to see what else is out there. Those blessed few among you who have enjoyed my writing about baseball, or F1, or anything else, and are willing to trust me that there’s something to be gained from learning about the men and women who go screaming over the Alps on two wheels.
I’m also writing for the people who, on the rare occasions I’d be allowed to write about cycling at previous jobs, would write in to ask for more. The nice thing about a newsletter is that it works at a much lower scale than a general-interest sports website. I’m doing this all on my own, with no need or even desire to draw in hundreds of thousands of views. As much as I’ll be evangelizing to new fans, I also hope this newsletter will be worthwhile if you’re already a cycling diehard and want coverage that’s not just functional but fun to read.
Here’s how things are going to work. On launch day, I’ll be posting a quick start guide, a crash course in tactics and terminology that will hopefully get new readers from zero to conversant in as little time as possible. Not that short, since it’s close to 6,000 words, but it will be available on the site for free forever, if only so I won’t have to get bogged down explaining the difference between the Tour de France and the Tour of Flanders over and over again.
Going forward, I’ll be writing twice a week. Every Tuesday at noon ET, I’ll have one longer, focused essay. It could be focused on a race, a rider, or a more abstract concept. Then, on Fridays at 9 a.m., I’ll have a second post, usually a handful of shorter capsules previewing races, discussing news items, or looking back into history. (For instance: The most interesting time trial at the 1989 Tour de Frace isn’t the one everyone talks about.)
The first few posts will be setup and onboarding, and in a couple weeks I’ll pivot to previewing the 2024 cycling season. (For the time being, I’ll be focusing solely on road cycling, and only touching on track or cyclocross as they relate to road racing.)
These posts will be free until the new year, then as of Jan. 2, the first scheduled post of 2024, Wheelysports will go to $5 a month or $50 a year.
That’s as far as I’ve planned things out. Over more than a decade as a professional sportswriter, I’ve always operated under the aegis of a larger website or media organization. Even when I was just starting out as a blogger, I always had a partner at the very least. So this is the first thing I’ve ever produced for public consumption all on my own. That means I get to do everything exactly how I want it, but that level of freedom is more than a little anxiety-inducing.
I hope you’ll be kind enough to subscribe, and once subscribed, to let me know how I can best serve you, the readers. Let me know what you want to read, what you want to know, what questions you have. This is a great sport, and I hope we’ll have fun following it together.