What Happened to Road Racing in America?

The last time I raced my bike in California, Donald Trump was a reality TV star, COVID was a name two stoners would consider calling their film-sharing cooperative, and a decent rider could make a living racing their road bike in America.

In 2015, I raced the Tour of California for a team called Optum p/b Kelly Benefits. Since this was my second year racing on the US domestic scene, I was a relative unknown and one of the lowest-paid riders on the team, earning $27,000 USD. Several riders on the team made over $50,000 USD. This may not seem like a lot of money to some, especially given inflation now; however, when you have no kids and are used to living off less than $30,000 CAD managing a shoe store, this is not a bad salary for riding in the sport’s third division. The next year, in 2016, I signed my first WorldTour contract with Cannondale for $100,000 USD. Although the sum was almost four times more than what I had earned the year before, I believe, dollar for hour of work, I still earned far more on Optum.

Racing the US domestic scene was a treat. I was able to go home to Canada far more often and be based there for many months. I raced less than 50 days that season, in predominantly great weather, at races that required far less work. Races were shorter, had less elevation, and featured weaker fields. I remember comparing the file from when I finished my first Liège-Bastogne-Liège to the four-day stage race of the Redlands Classic, and I believe the number of calories required to finish Liège wasn’t far off from the entire four-day race.

Life was pretty sweet on the US domestic scene. Teams were much smaller, so you got to know all of your teammates well. You became brothers in arms as you traveled from one race to the next, eating burritos in every corner of America. Altitude camps weren’t spent crammed in a tiny hotel hanging on the edge of a mountain in an abandoned ski village; they were held in Nederland or Big Bear, in a big house with a BBQ, and within walking distance of a proper coffee shop, an artisanal grocery store, and a wood-fired pizza joint. I loved it. The race calendar made sense and followed the seasonal weather. The season started much later and began in the American Southwest. Then, as spring turned to summer, races would move northward or into the high mountains of Oregon, Colorado, and Utah.

Field sizes at races were often smaller, roads were wider, and the sport was, in general, safer. On Optum particularly—but I know this was the case on most teams—you were valued as much for how good of a person you were as for your FTP. You had to be, as you couldn’t just recline in a luxurious chair and put your headphones on at the back of a pimped-out coach bus. You had to be able to carry on a good conversation at a Waffle House and be willing to take long shifts driving from Arkansas to New Mexico. I think, because of this, the now-gone concept of the “spirit of gravel” that I have heard so much about was alive on the domestic scene.

My experience racing in this world wasn’t unique. There were many riders who chose not to move up to the WorldTour because they knew that the scene was that good. There were also riders who raced at the sport’s highest level only to return to the US domestic level for that very reason. I think, in many ways, this scene was one of the reasons why US cycling was so weak in the wake of the Lance Armstrong era. The path to reach the WorldTour from America was too soft, and those who moved into it simply pined to go back to race the Tour of Gila and the Cascade Cycling Classic. I remember receiving the offer from Jonathan Vaughters, the owner of Cannondale, and having a long debate with Jonas Carney, the manager of Optum, about whether I should make the jump. Like Odysseus, I had gone through a lot of shit get to Circe’s island, and the living was so good there that it was hard to entertain the idea of getting back in a boat to go anywhere else.

From the San Dimas Classic to the Redding Road Race, a Continental-level rider in America could make a livable wage and stay within the confines of North America. There were at least six teams that paid riders wages at this level, along with a large number of other national-level teams that fully supported this robust system. Major races like the Tour of Colorado, Utah, and California are all gone now, along with countless smaller UCI races like the Joe Martin Stage Race, Winston-Salem, and the Tour of Battenkill. The week-long crit series races that could cushion your budget for weeks, if not months, while trying to move up to a team like Optum have all but disappeared.

If Tadej Pogačar were slightly more handsome, named Chase Steelhead, from Texas, had a single mother, survived a terminal illness, and was more brash and charismatic, I would probably be racing the Cascade Cycling Classic this season on an American domestic team for six figures. Regardless of the doping (don’t get me wrong, what he did was terrible), Lance Armstrong was a unicorn and is still the only rider to have transcended the sport of cycling and reached an audience outside its confines.

Although he reached his heights due to using performance-enhancing drugs, he is still the greatest thing to happen to professional cycling in America. Every cyclist today is richer because of him, and for a solid decade, due to the tsunami of interest that Lance created, there was a robust road racing scene in the United States. Were it not for him, I am positive that I would never have found my way into the sport, and it is safe to say that countless other riders from non-traditional cycling nations can say the same. However, now, it is hard to imagine an America that could even support a rider like Armstrong. There aren’t the same races, and the sport has become too inaccessible for a kid from a single-parent home in Texas to just drop in and find his way to the top.

Sports are like a lava lamp. They are constantly and unpredictably moving and changing. They reform, split, come together again, and go off in unimaginable directions. It’s easy in the moment to think that a sport will remain in its current iteration for time immemorial, but baseball was once just a version of cricket, horse racing used to be a top-three sport in America, and sports like jiu-jitsu, professional wrestling, and boxing have coalesced to form what is arguably the most popular fighting sport at the moment—MMA.

In my mind, road cycling, at least in its current form, will be gone far sooner than most people realize, and the American racing scene is the best example of this. Pro road races are too hard to organize. Global warming is making racing far less feasible, and with the increase of road furniture, as well as the wildly expensive costs of road closures, organizers require vast sums of money to put these races on, with dwindling forms of revenue production. America loves winners, and in the absence of an American dominating the sport in the TikTok age, there is not enough interest to drive most people from the USA to sit down for six hours and watch a bunch of non-Americans roll around the streets of France, Belgium, or Italy, let alone in their own backyard.

So, as I flew from Barcelona to San Francisco, I sat on the plane wondering if I was en route to see the boneyard of a once-burgeoning sport or if I was going to see the shoots of a new sport sprouting from the scorched earth of another.

“Is road cycling dead in America?” I asked Bob Roll after being several glasses of wine deep at Mattina’s, a high-end restaurant in San Francisco run by Matthew Accarrino, a celebrity chef and cycling enthusiast. The day before, Matthew and I had ridden north from Monterey, stopping to pick strawberries in a farmer’s field, whose produce we would eat the following night at his restaurant. Diaa Nour, Ventum’s co-founder, had also joined us for the ride, and as we spoke about our dinner plans at Matthew’s later, Diaa mentioned that he might extend the invite to Roll.

For those who don’t know Bob Roll, he is a long-time cycling commentator and a former professional rider from the pre-Armstrong era. Roll made his name, along with Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen, commentating on Lance as he dominated the Tour from 1999 into the early aughts. However, unlike Liggett and Sherwen, Roll came from racing in America and, as a commentator, always seemed to have a greater connection to and understanding of the sport. As a young cycling fan, I loved hearing his insights, but I had never met him once I actually became pro. So, I have to admit, I was taken aback as he rolled into the restaurant, donning a trucker hat and sporting a Santa Claus-spec white beard. It wasn’t until he flashed his signature gapped-toothed grin that I stopped trying to discern whether he was actually the guy I had watched talk about US Postal Service back in 2001.

“Yes!” Bob quickly responded to my question. For an American who has lived, ridden, commented, and worked so intrinsically in the sport—through Greg LeMond, Festina, Armstrong, the Oprah interview, the cleaning up of the sport, and into the Pogačar era—it was an emphatic admission. I imagine that the sport, through his eyes, must have transformed dramatically, but to say that it is now dead in America, especially as someone who raced in a time before all of the influx of money that came from Armstrong, is as strong a certification as any that road racing in the United States, the biggest sports market in the world, no longer has a pulse.

But just because pro road racing is dead in America doesn’t mean that cycling is.

Enter Sea Otter.

In the film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, there is a scene where Hunter S. Thompson, played by Johnny Depp, is stumbling through clouds of dust as he impossibly tries to cover the Mint 400, a dirt bike race in the Nevada desert. While walking the several-thousand-foot trek through a makeshift parking lot in the arid hills above Monterey this past week with the former US crit national champion and my guide for the weekend, Travis McCabe, I couldn’t help but feel the same way. Clouds of dust swirled around us, kicked up by a seemingly endless line of vehicles, all aiming to park in the dry grass and

gopher-holed fields surrounding the Laguna Seca Raceway. Their goal was to enter— for $35 for one day, or $125 for the entire four days— the Sea Otter Classic (SOC). Self-titled as the “World’s Premier Cycling Festival,” the event is a four-day confluence of brands and cycling races that could really only exist in America. I came to the SOC with two goals: to race the elite gravel race and to see what over 1,000 cycling vendors would look like congregated in the middle of a racetrack in Northern California. In my mind, if road cycling was dead in America, the answer to what would come next was most certainly there.

Lining up for the SOC was like every other road race I had done in the US a decade earlier. The announcer spoke only in superlatives, the national anthem was sung (no other country in the world does this pre-race), helicopter parents stood on the sidelines giving unsolicited advice to their adult children, and I looked over to see Ted King lining up beside me, thinking, “Maybe nothing has changed.”

However, from the flag drop, everything was different. This race was damn hard and super cool. There was a moment in the opening kilometers where I watched a rider sit on his top tube and super-tuck, disappearing into a thick cloud of dust in front of me as we barreled down a loose, pothole-filled gravel road at 70 km/h. I hadn’t seen anyone perform that in a race since it had been banned in the WorldTour in 2021, and the moment I saw it, I told myself, “I am not in the WorldTour anymore.” The course was dynamic, exciting, technical, and produced an event that was well worth watching. It being looped meant that spectators could see many parts of the race, and the terrain and conditions made for a truly worthy winner. The American national gravel champion, Bradyn Lange, executed a well-timed sprint against the most dominant gravel racer in the world for the past few years, Keegan Swenson, to claim victory.

I had a strong feeling Lange would win at the halfway point of the race. With only three riders up the road and 11 in the chasing group, Lange came up to me and asked, “How do you like gravel racing?” There was a freshness to him and an air of confidence that I definitely did not  have. “It’s fucking hard,” I responded. I was grumpy. He asked me this when I was in a bad patch, and I was hating how much I was hurting. I was jealous too, knowing how I had been in races before where I was the one with that same aura. And I was worried about how I would have to get through one more lap of the punchy 90-mile course. Shortly after Lange asked me this question, I was dropped on a steep kicker, and were it not for Ventum having a camera crew following, Travis schlepping my bottles through thick brush to a feed zone miles away, and Diaa and much of his staff watching, I probably would have dropped out. I died a thousand deaths out on that course as group after group of dropped riders passed me. But I have come to realize there is a reason why I have done this for so long and continue to race; I love to flog myself, and the satisfaction that I get from testing myself against others, facing whatever demons I have on a given day, and overcoming some perceived challenge that I have created gives me great satisfaction. So, after limping across the line well behind Lange, caked in dust, I sat on the top tube of my bike, sucked back complimentary grapefruit LaCroix, and happily swapped war stories with other riders who had just finished.

From that moment on, I began to see where American road racing went.

I have only seen the sport of cycling through two lenses: as a fan and as a racer. Never as a participant—over a decade ago, it was hard not to see the sport this way, as the market really only catered to racers and people who watched the sport. Nothing made me realize this more than when my agent, Simon Williams, managed to negotiate a deal for me with a company called RideWrap. Based in Whistler, RideWrap makes custom and stock protective coverings for your bike to prevent your frame from getting scratched or dented. When I first heard of the product, I said to Simon, “Why would anyone use that? It reminds me of when I went to my friend’s grandma’s house and saw the couches covered in plastic.” Simon responded, “Dude, that’s only because you have never had to pay full price for your bike.”

The statement was true. I started following the sport two decades ago, when the bikes were far uglier and far less fun to ride. The burgundy paint job on my NS1 alone is worth shelling out a few extra bucks to protect, and from the moment I left the start-finish line of the men’s elite race, it dawned on me why brands like RideWrap are now viable businesses.

I am accustomed to finishing a race and having a ridiculous amount of support. If you have ever watched the finish of a WorldTour road race, you will see riders crossing the line and immediately being wrapped in towels and jackets, given bottles of cherry juice and bags of Haribo, and ushered off to their immaculate team buses. However, at SOC, the elite field is just one of many races taking place over the course of the festival. The countless other races and distances help prop up and justify the main show. It is a model that works; it is far more sustainable from an organizer’s perspective, and in my mind, it makes cycling much more engaging. It is cool to be able to race on the same terrain as the pros and makes the sport far more accessible; however, this model also humbles a man who has become used to the luxuries of the WorldTour.

I had left my car keys with Sam Gross, the brand manager of Ventum, and he was in a meeting, so I cruised around the countless vendor tents in a fruitless attempt to get out of my chamois. With each stand that I passed, it seemed like somebody I had met at some moment in my cycling career would pop out, and a conversation would ensue. I got lost in the labyrinth of tents and products all oriented around supercharging my fueling or maximizing my cycling experience. Hours later, with pockets full of business cards and goodies, on an island surrounded by dyed blue water outside the VIP tent, I finally found Sam. I rode back to my car, washed some of the dirt off my body with a bottle of warm water that had been sitting inside my black rental van, and drove back to my motel.

Armstrong made road cycling far greater in America than it ever would have been, but he is also responsible for its premature death. I believe that had Armstrong never raced, American road racing would have likely continued in its very niche corner of the world. Cycling fanatics would have continued to put on small races, passionate fans and sponsors would have occasionally dipped their toes into putting on a bigger race to draw out big names from Europe, and the sport would still be in search of the next Greg LeMond. However, Armstrong did happen, and the sheer volume of people that flocked to the sport ultimately devoured it. By transcending the sport, Lance attracted people who would never have otherwise been interested in road racing. Those same people, who weren’t simply content with watching cycling in its current form or riding on the same roads with 23mm tires, drove the sport in entirely new directions, onto newer roads, or roads less traveled, and demanded equipment and products that were far better suited for the job. The market, in turn, met this demand, and now American cycling finds itself at the forefront of the burgeoning sport of gravel racing.

Up next, I head further north to Windsor, California, to take part in an event that, through this American gravel model, is trying to breathe new life into road racing—ironically, put on by a racer from the infamous Armstrong era—Levi Leipheimer’s Gran Fondo.