I Know Why We Don't Have More Road Racing In the U.S., but Maybe Things Will Be Different Next Time

The Laurentian Classics bring the World Tour...close...to home

Photo Credit: Billy Ceusters, ASO

I talk a lot on here about how cycling only became a properly global sport in the past 40 years or so. While some of the major races stretch back more than 100 years, until 1983, only one winner of a grand tour, monument, or men’s world road race championship came from outside of a specific strand of western Europe: France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Germany, Italy and Spain. The only exception was Tom Simpson, an Englishman, who won three monuments and a world championship in the 1960s.¹ That’s what counted as exotic back then.

In 1983, Greg LeMond became the first non-European world champion. The same year, Irishman Sean Kelly won Il Lombardia. LeMond became the first American grand tour winner in 1986; a year later, Colombian rider Luis Herrera became the first South American grand tour winner. In 1994, three different riders from the former Soviet Union won monuments. Now, those 10 most important races on the calendar have been won by riders from 26 different countries on five continents.

With all that said, Western Europe retains its monopoly on hosting the world’s biggest races. That’s unavoidable to some extent, as the grand tours and monuments are tied to a location, as are the other prestigious World Tour races like the Tour de Suisse or Amstel Gold. The UCI is actually doing a decent job moving the world championships around—the next five road world championships will be contested in Switzerland, Rwanda, Canada, France, and the United Arab Emirates—and the grand tours have spread race starts around the region.

But of the 38 races on the men’s World Tour, only seven are contested outside the traditional cycling heartland. And let’s not act like the UAE Tour is some organic expression of cycling fervor, compelling a race as it may be.

This weekend is the World Tour’s only visit to North America—its only visit, in fact, to the entire Western Hemisphere. These are the Laurentian Classics: Friday’s Grand Prix Cycliste de Québec, followed by the Grand Prix Cycliste de Montréal.

These races are pretty typical hilly classics, but the winners have run the gamut from hybrid sprinters to GC riders. Greg Van Avermaet, Michael Matthews, and Peter Sagan have won here, but so have Tadej Pogačar, Thomas Voeckler, Adam Yates, and Rigoberto Urán.

The startlist for GP Quebec is actually pretty loaded: Arnaud de Lie, Biniam Girmay, Alex Aranbaru, Alberto Bettiol,² Julian Alaphilippe, Ben Healy, Matej Mohorič and Tobias Halland Johannessen among the sprinters and classics specialists. Among the GC guys: Pogačar, Jai Hindley, Pello Bilbao, Simon Yates, Juan Ayuso…this wouldn’t be a half bad lineup for a stage race, even with a bunch of stars going to the European road race championship.

Especially because—to no one’s great surprise—every team that’s got a notable North American rider is taking him. Out of 23 teams, including one U.S.-based ProTour team and an ad hoc Canadian national squad that’s being assembled for the occasion, 11 have at least one American or Canadian in the lineup. The big names include Matteo Jorgenson for Visma-Lease a Bike,³ Magnus Sheffield headlining an Ineos squad that’s more than half North American, Quinn Simmons, Luke Lamperti, Larry Warbasse, Neilson Powless and Sean Quinn for EF, Lawson Craddock, Kevin Vermaerke, and not one but three Canadians—including Derek Gee—for Israel-Premier Tech.

The only team that has big-name North American riders and isn’t bringing them is UAE, whose duo of Brandon McNulty and Isaac del Toro just rode the Vuelta.⁴ McNulty in particular is full of holes now, so it makes sense he’d want some time off.

So why is the entire hemisphere restricted to two World Tour races in the same Canadian province on one weekend?

It’s not because we don’t have star power in terms of riders. I do think there’s a cultural schism between North America and Europe in terms of urban design that definitely makes our country⁵ hostile to cyclists.

(This last point is particularly salient in my part of the world at the moment after lunatic drivers caused two newsworthy fatal accidents this summer. Barbara Friedes, a young doctor, was killed in Center City Philadelphia in July, sparking widespread outrage and calls for reform and new cycling infrastructure. Leadership in the Philadelphia municipal government met the moment with its typical mixture of aloofness and cynical inaction. And two weeks ago, NHL star Johnny Gaudreau and his brother, Matthew, were hit from behind and killed by a speeding and drunken driver while riding their bikes in Salem County, New Jersey.)

Normative public safety concerns aside, North American cities are new—in some cases, they’ve been built more or less from nothing since World War II—and designed to have big roads for cars, rather than small roads for pedestrians. And wider roads can make for sedate racing; this is why taking a major bike race to a Formula 1 circuit is novel and cool, but having so much space takes some of the air out of the event tactically.

Nevertheless, we have crowded city centers. We have cobbled streets suited for Flanders (I’ll once again link to the 2015 Worlds in Richmond to prove that point).

Right here in Philadelphia, we’ve got the legendary Manayunk Wall, a hill with as much cycling history as any in North America. We’ve got mountains such as the European mind could only imagine. Pros from around the world come to California and Colorado and Arizona to train.

And while professional road racing might be rare, grassroots racing is undergoing a bit of a golden age, with downtown criterium racing and hugely popular gravel and mountain bike events. Despite our best efforts, we’ve got a cycling culture. So why don’t we have a commensurate share of the professional calendar?

There’s probably a little bit of European chauvinism at work, particularly when it comes to potential race sites in Latin America. Though with that said, the pro cycling calendar operates on European time pretty consistently from the end of February on. A rider could go from Spain to Belgium to Italy in a couple days and barely notice. Going from central Europe to California is a nine-hour time difference. Pro cycling teams count every second of sleep and every strand of pasta that goes into their riders—adjusting to that time difference is a big ask. To say nothing of the cost of shipping the team’s equipment halfway across the world.

But they managed it for years, decades even, for the Mid-Atlantic Tour DuPont and the Coors Classic and the Tour of California. So why doesn’t it continue? Why do we have only the Laurentian Classics and a handful of second-tier races?

Well, those three big stage races don’t exist anymore because of sponsorship collapse.

It’s expensive to hold a bike race, to pay infrastructure costs and licensing fees and prize money. To shell out appearance fees to get star riders to cross the Atlantic. It takes an image-conscious sponsor with deep pockets and an appetite for funding this kind of loss leader. (It’s an amusing historical footnote that Donald Trump was once just such a sponsor, putting his name on a stage race in the 1980s.)

That’s why the Tour of California, the last American World Tour race, a race that in its dying moments introduced many of the stars of today, including Pogačar, McNulty and Egan Bernal, got canceled even before the pandemic.

Eventually, I have to imagine someone else will have a crack at it. We’ll see how much crossover appeal McNulty, Jorgenson and Sepp Kuss have as their careers progress, or how much Kristen Faulkner’s double gold medal-winning run in Paris bolsters the sport here.

Elite road cycling doesn’t have to be this Eurocentric, but unless the money is there, that’s how it will remain.