“The cycling boom is here to stay,” Ian Drake, chief executive of British Cycling, proudly declared in 2014. A more innocent time. Perhaps this is all a little early for 2010s nostalgia, which is why this decade still feels like a scroll of random motifs and images rather than a convincing cultural narrative. I watch Cat Bin Lady hum Despacito as she heads to bottomless brunch. I’m taking a Buzzfeed quiz titled Choose Your Favorite Food Bank and Let’s Guess Your Age.
And it was the decade of cycling, at least in this country. Laura Trott and Jason Kenny’s wedding to OK! It was the decade that he made the cover of the magazine. magazine (“Princess Charlotte’s First Royal Tour” into an additional image). This was a decade of long summer afternoons spent in the Rapha cafe while “G” and “Cav”, Wiggo favorites and Hugh Porter, some boring Lotto-Soudal teams buzzed by in approximate echelons. Dave Brailsford was a god-level genius and the sun never set on the British Empire.
Relating to: British Cycling launches rescue mission for 2024 Tours of Britain
Narrator: The cycling boom wasn’t here to stay. Ten years later literally all of Yorkshire was watching this show. big take off At the launch of the Tour de France, news broke that British Cycling had been forced to step in to save the Tour de France, which had been under threat since the liquidation of the previous organizer last month. Last year the Women’s Tour was canceled due to lack of funding and this year it will almost be a slimmed down race. The Tour de Yorkshire quietly disappeared during Covid and never returned.
Meanwhile, British Cycling is going through redundancies due to a drop in sponsorship income and a drop in membership numbers; The latter is largely driven by anger over the deal it signed with oil giant Shell last year. Smaller teams like AT85 Pro Cycling, Madison Genesis and JLT-Condor went out of business. Bicycle shops, which experienced a small increase during the pandemic, are largely closing. Former Giro d’Italia champion Tao Geoghegan Hart wrote last year: “Cycling in the UK is at a lower level than I have ever seen in my time.”
At this point we are faced with a paradox. Because in many ways cycling in this country is still in a relatively healthy place. Jim Ratcliffe’s Ineos may not dominate the sport as its predecessor Team Sky once did, and Brailsford himself defected to Manchester United, but this country still has plenty of top talent: Geoghegan Hart, Lizzie Deignan, Tom Pidcock, Hugh Carthy and Pfeiffer. Georgi is on the road, Emma Finucane and the Barker brothers are on the track.
Last year’s world championships were billed as the biggest cycling event in history, with one million spectators flocking to Glasgow. The Tour of Britain often attracts spectacular crowds. Anecdotally, the grassroots scene seems to be doing pretty well. Meanwhile, wander around many British cities these days and you’ll see lattices of cycle lanes that would never have existed twenty years ago. Clearly this thing still has an audience. So why does it still feel like the air is getting thinner?
To find the answer, it’s worth examining other things Ian Drake said a decade ago, because amidst the righteous backslapping there was also an implicit warning. “Medals and role models alone cannot turn Britain into a nation of cycling people,” he said. “Fundamental to our approach is a mixed economy of funding and support from across the spectrum of private, public and voluntary sectors.”
The medals keep coming: Great Britain took first place at the last Olympics and world championships. The enthusiasm is still present. Volunteers still come every weekend. What has evaporated in recent years is the last and most important part of the equation: the institutional will to make the sport work, a public sector that is truly invested in cycling as a concept and not as a tool for prestige or profit.
Instead, organizers, already facing rising costs, face austerity-starved local officials who are no longer willing to foot the bill for cycling races. The self-destructive nature of Brexit has made it difficult to attract interest from overseas riders and teams who now have to wade through a bureaucratic sewer pipe just to transport their equipment across the Channel. We now have a Conservative government that is happy to involve cyclists in its dirty “pro-biker” culture war; This government is led by a prime minister who, if he saw a real bicycle, would probably be astonished to find a moving Peloton.
And in fact this is as much a change of style as policy or politics. Perhaps this is just talk of nostalgia, but for all the weird cult energy of Team GB and the annoying new-age carefreeness of Team Sky, the cycling boom somehow also expressed the optimism of the age. The chance to live healthier and greener lives. A bold experiment to recreate the sports culture of an entire country. Perhaps it’s an attempt to imagine ourselves a little more European.
Cycling will always exist here because there will always be those who want to keep it. But this is now a poorer country, a more ruthless, more narrow-minded and more moneyed place, obsessed with quick fixes and results. And perhaps, for all its achievements, Britain has never really looked like that. to obtain Cycling is a sport of cooperation and dedication, a sport where people come and watch for free, where you can’t sell a stadium or bonds, where the benefits are intangible and manifest across generations. In this respect, cycling seems like a pretty good metaphor for the last decade.
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