Few milestones in childhood are as universal as learning to ride a bike. My five-year-old son started out pedaling on a smaller bicycle, but as his skills grew, my wife and I decided it was time for an upgrade and we surprised him with his first ‘real’ bike, a blue Specialized with hand brakes and a free wheel that we hope marks the start of a lifelong love for cycling. While our family can accurately be described as ‘avid cyclists’, our son’s experience typifies the American cycling experience: survey data shows an estimated 94% of Americans know how to ride a bike. In spite of this, only about 6% of Americans (8% of American sports fans) follow professional cycling. Compare this to the 72% of the US population who follow American football, the vast majority of whom have never played in their life. What explains America’s ambivalence towards a sport with such cultural ubiquity?

We believe it’s a matter of perspective. Competitive cycling in America operates on a participant-focused model that prioritizes racer participation over fan engagement, ultimately stalling its growth as a spectator sport. While the world’s most successful sports leagues build around the spectator – cultivating fan loyalty and generating scalable revenue streams like ticket sales, merchandise, advertising, and media rights – American cycling struggles with fragmented seasons, inaccessible race formats, and an exclusionary image that alienates potential fans. By failing to optimize for modern viewing habits and cultural relevance, the sport has yet to establish the durable and lucrative fan connections that drive success in other sports.

Participant-First Events

The growth of American professional cycling is stalled in part by the prevailing participant-focused model of events. Unlike other professional sports leagues, which showcase one marquee fixture per event, professional cycling races are often scheduled at the end of a long day of amateur races, leaving them overshadowed and less accessible to fans. 

To achieve economies of scale, professional races are often held as part of larger events that overwhelmingly cater to amateur racers of various ages and abilities, offering separate race categories for each. This approach is driven in part by the significant, recurring costs associated with building race infrastructure from scratch for each event. Spectator attendance is typically free, so race organizers rely heavily on racer entry fees for funding, further incentivizing them to maximize participation by offering an abundance of varying race categories. While this approach helps organizers offset costs, it comes at the expense of the professional race’s prestige and spectator appeal, diluting the excitement and focus that should surround elite competition, and making it harder to attract and retain a dedicated audience.

Disjointed Season Structure

In most professional sports, a unified season where consistent competitors vie for a championship title serves to build emotional stakes and keep fans engaged. Professional cycling seasons, on the other hand, feature a fragmented calendar of siloed events (like Paris-Roubaix in Europe or The Amazon Armed Forces Cycling Classic in the U.S.), which offers no guarantee of consistent athlete participation from event to event. This lack of continuity deprives fans of the storylines that are essential to sustaining fan interest and engagement. Initiatives like the American Criterium Cup (est. 2022) aim to address this, but limited resources still hinder consistent participation.

The exceptions to this are the UCI WorldTour’s Grand Tours – the Giro d’Italia, the Tour de France, and the Vuelta a Espana – each of which features a 21-stage format that unfolds over the course of 23 to 24 days. While the intense, dramatic nature of these races captures attention in the short term, this hyper-compressed approach limits the ability to build sustained fan engagement and community interaction. 

Long, Unengaging Race Formats

Professional cycling’s long, drawn-out race formats make it difficult to offer a compelling viewer experience, particularly for endurance races where stages typically last 5–7 hours. Compared even to professional baseball games, which routinely stretched to over 3 hours until the 2023 rules change, the duration of professional road races is extreme. American broadcasters often limit coverage of Grand Tour stages due to the excessive length, and even devout cycling fans rarely watch more than the final 20 kilometers of a flat stage. 

While this condensed viewing window could appeal to casual fans, it creates barriers to deeper engagement. Tuning in only for the end means missing key moments including the attacks and tactics that shape the narrative of a race, making it harder for new viewers to understand and connect with the sport. Overarchingly, the endurance-focused structure of longer races doesn’t align with the attention spans of modern American sports fans. 

Unsuitable Venues

Cycling’s expansive outdoor venues pose significant challenges to its growth as a spectator sport. The spectator experience is arguably best at road criteriums (circuit races held on city streets), however, these races still only offer audiences, on average, 8.5% visibility of the action. The peloton comes by every 45 seconds or so, only to disappear behind buildings, leaving spectators to miss key moments like attacks or lead changes that happen elsewhere on the course. Point-to-point endurance races are even worse to spectate, with fans getting to see the peloton fly by just once before disappearing into the distance. 

Even if current venues did provide an optimal viewing experience, their public settings and lack of a defined entry point make it challenging for race organizers to generate revenue from spectator ticket sales, limiting revenue potential and hindering overall growth.

Broadcast coverage of outdoor races can be equally problematic. While TV offers better visibility, properly capturing elite events involves a fleet of motorbikes, production trucks, helicopters, and airplanes, the cost of which is prohibitive for many organizers. Lower-tier events often rely on a limited number of stationary cameras, resulting in inferior broadcast quality that makes it difficult to deliver the kind of experience needed to generate revenue from distribution rights, sponsors, and advertisers. Many races have no broadcast coverage at all thus limiting their reach, and in turn driving down the cost that organizers can charge for sponsorship, further minimizing revenue potential and stifling growth.

Cultural Irrelevance

Americans find it difficult to connect with a sport that often feels exclusionary and elitist, and professional cycling in America has long struggled to reach audiences beyond its traditionally white, affluent core. The sport’s image is shaped by significant barriers to entry, with top-end race bikes costing upwards of $15,000, far exceeding the accessibility of other popular sports like basketball or soccer, where equipment costs are minimal. This exclusivity reinforces cycling’s perception as a niche, expensive hobby rather than an inclusive sport with mass appeal.

Representation also plays a significant role in limiting cycling’s reach. Unlike other American sports, cycling in America has by and large failed to reflect the shifting demographics of the country as a whole. The lack of diversity among athletes, teams, and leadership reinforces cycling’s exclusionary image and further compounds its disconnect with many Americans.

Representation also plays a significant role in limiting cycling’s reach. Unlike other American sports, cycling in America has by and large failed to reflect the shifting demographics of the country as a whole. The lack of diversity among athletes, teams, and leadership reinforces cycling’s exclusionary image and further compounds its disconnect with many Americans.

While cities across the U.S. feature vibrant urban cycling subcultures including bike messengers and fixed gear racers – who blend cycling with elements of fashion, music, art, and extreme sports – the elite racing scene remains detached from this energy.

Without a clear cultural or economic bridge to broader audiences, professional cycling remains a sport that many Americans feel is out of reach and out of step.

Reaching the finish line of widespread American cultural relevance will necessitate professional cycling overcoming its lingering dependence on racer-funded events and fragmented season structure, and addressing the barriers that prevent it from connecting with larger, more diverse audiences. This means offering engaging race formats that appeal to modern American sports fans, ensuring accessibility through improved spectator experience and broadcast quality, building continuity to sustain fan loyalty, and broadening representation by embracing the communities that already love, and could champion, cycling.

At Formula Fixed, we’re taking these lessons to heart by designing a fan-first cycling league with culture and community at its core. By rethinking the sport from the ground up, we aim to redefine what professional American cycling could and should be.