Lost

In mid December I realized something was happening that hadn’t happened in 27 years. Canada would not have a single UCI trade team in road cycling.

My gut reaction was “this isn’t good”. Then, I paused to think.

Does it matter? What do these teams represent? What do we lose as a Canadian cycling community without them? Where is the sport today, and have other things evolved to replace what these teams provided to Canadian cyclists?

My conclusion? Like all properly complex system-type things: it depends.

If the system, or the “ecosystem”:

• Is aware it has happened, and
• Has created alternate methods of doing what the lost thing did, or
• Identified, that doing those things is no longer relevant

Then: it doesn’t matter. Otherwise it likely does matter.

I ended up deciding it matters, it matters a lot and Canadian cycling needs to rally in a unified way to do something about it. The kicker?

It didn’t come down to having or not having Canadian UCI trade teams, it’s something that was happening in those teams that’s now missing.

But what is “it”?

The role these teams served was: athlete development, and preparation for progression to pro levels of the sport (World Tour, or Pro Teams). More specifically, it was developing “race craft”, and team based racing capabilities needed to transition more easily into pro levels.

They did other things as well, often captured in the french term “le metier”, learning to live and manage one’s life as a professional sports-person.

When we think about creating sustainable ways for Canadians to succeed in the world’s biggest bike races and inspire our cycling community, these teams were vital development platforms.

My conclusion is we’ve lost hold of a critical stage of development. And I think that’s a big deal.

This may sound alarming, and people reading may disagree. That’s okay, bear with me as I move through this, because I believe we can do something about it and it’s not a crisis, yet. In fact it could be one of our biggest opportunities.

First, it’s important to realize I said a “critical stage of development”. Not “all development”. We still have some really great people doing amazing development work across the country.

I view development as mult-faceted. Some facets can be “nice to have”, others form a “critical path” and are necessary.

The role UCI Trade teams played was part of a “critical path” and we’ve not replaced that facet. Which doesn’t mean “go get more Canadian UCI teams”, rather it means “ensure the development work these teams were doing is done elsewhere in the Canadian cycling ecosystem”.

Next, I focused on thinking through implications in men’s road cycling.

Not because women’s cycling isn’t equally important, but because women’s cycling is structurally behind men’s. (I actually believe women’s cycling holds more potential value than men’s, and I’ve been quoted saying as much)

Women’s road cycling has just gone through 5-6 years of fast growth, to adopt the same structure as men – 3 levels of UCI Trade Teams: Continental Teams, Pro Teams and World Teams (or World Tour Teams).

Men’s cycling has had this 3-tier team structure in place for 27 years. And, Canada has had a men’s UCI Trade Team for every one of those 27 years, until now.

Within this structure, World Teams and Pro Teams are regulated as professional, and Continental teams are not. Let’s say Continental teams are quasi-pro or professional development.

Given all this, I thought “we can look at men’s cycling as a leading indicator”.

Leading and lagging indicators come from management science and economics. Lagging indicators measure outcomes; leading indicators measure the inputs that predict those outcomes.

Translate that into academic or coaching sport language – leading indicators are where process-focused work happens.

In the last 27 years, 35 Canadian men have raced at a professional level. 33 of them spent formative parts of their career racing in a Continental team. Hmmm… that’s a strong correlation, and makes for a good “leading indicator”.

Next, I thought about the quality of those continental teams. Is it just any Continental team, or certain kinds of teams?

This is where I flipped over from my “business hat” to my “sport strategist/coach hat”. Yes, the quality of the team matters, because if you seek to develop athletes you fundamentally need 3 things:

1. You need great athletes, or, athletes with great potential – obvious. However, doing this consistently over time requires robust recruiting and/or “talent identification”.
2. You need the resources to be competitive. For example: good equipment, enough equipment, athlete support/care, access to appropriate racing (which often simply comes down to money to get there). So, money is an important resource, but how you use the money is equally important. Which leads to…
3. You need great leadership & coaching. This is about “choices” and “decisions”, mostly related to the first two areas. Getting the right people (athletes, and their primary support team), prepared well, with the right resources, at the right time. Ideally doing this consistently better than the competition.

I could write a book about those 3 things. Someone could turn those 3 things into 12 or more things, and even give them fancy framework names like: SPLISS.

This article isn’t about digging into that, it’s about why losing Canadian UCI Trade Teams is a big deal. Let’s simply assume those 3 things are reasonable.

Now that the following are established:

• These Canadian Continental teams served good purpose
• The quality of these teams was important, and
• We no longer have these teams

I went back to thinking about those “ecosystem” questions. In particular:

Have alternate methods of doing the work these teams did been created, or are those things no longer relevant?

To answer this, I thought about recent changes in men’s cycling. While women’s cycling has been a massively changing thing, men’s cycling has been changing in less visible ways.

In 2019, 5 of 18 World Tour Teams had an integrated U23 devo team. Today, 17 of 18 World Tour Teams have one. Alongside the World Tour, many Pro Teams are spinning up integrated U23 development squads.

87% of neo pros are recruited from these teams now. This number is increasing. In 2026, at the World Tour level, 91% of neo pros came from these Continental devo teams.

So, if there is an aspiration to have Canadians racing in the World Tour, inspiring us at the Tour de France, the Classics, World Championships or the Olympics. UCI Continental devo teams are still a vital piece of the athlete development ecosystem.

However, having Canadian UCI Trade Teams – is not – because the Continental teams doing this work are operating within pro team structures.

Next, I started to consider how many Canadian pros do we have, are there more, fewer, is their performance level better, lower, the same?

Then I went back to that leading/lagging indicators.

I also considered my insights from spending a considerable amount of time working in those Continental Trade Teams over the years.

What I learned from those experiences: the environment matters more than the talent of any single individual within it.

The environment can be a “team”, an interstitial project, a critical mass or a few other things.

The Canadian sport system often talks about an “environment of excellence”. Create this and you stand a good chance of unlocking potential in people who may not even realize they have it.

I could write another book about this. Moving on…

Now, with the following:

• UCI Continental teams still matter, and those integrated into pro teams matter most for progression to a pro level
• We don’t need Canadian UCI teams doing development work
• But we do need the work that was being done in those Canadian teams

I began considering: is the work the teams used to do being done, and being done at appropriate quality?

If so, there is no problem. If not, we have work to do.

If the answer is yes, the work is being done, we would expect to see stability in two lagging indicators:

1. A stable or growing number of Canadian men racing at the professional level, sufficient to sustain performance at WorldTour, World Championship, and Olympic level.
2. A sufficient number of Canadians in the Continental development teams that now serve as the primary gateway into professional cycling.

Neither condition currently holds true.

Over the past six years, the number of Canadian men racing at the professional level has declined steadily. In 2020, there were 13 Canadians racing on WorldTeams or ProTeams. Today, there are 7.

At the same time, the number of Canadians racing on UCI Continental teams has fallen sharply – from roughly 30–40 athletes per season five years ago to just 17 today.

More importantly, only 4 of those 17 riders are currently embedded in the type of Continental development teams that now produce the majority of neo-pro recruitment.

Roughly half of the riders in these pro-linked Continental devo teams progress to the professional level within 2-3 years. Entry into these teams during the early U23 years has become increasingly decisive.

Over the same period that Canada lost 6 professional men, replacing that capacity would require 12 Canadian riders to be embedded in the appropriate Continental development environments. We have 4.

In other words, the system currently has one-third of the development volume required to restore recent losses, before considering growth or performance improvement.

The decline in professional riders is a lagging indicator – it tells us what has already happened.

The number of athletes in pro-linked Continental development teams is the upstream leading indicator. It tells us what confidently needs to be in place now if we want improvement over the next few years.

If the leading indicator is too low to sustain the lagging indicator, we can confidently infer there is a problem in the system. This is the case in Canadian road cycling.

Importantly, this is not a story of global (pro rider) market contraction.

Other nations outside traditional western Europe have faced the same structural shifts in professional cycling, and responded differently. The United States and Australia experienced early contraction and appear to have arrested their declines – stabilizing professional representation. Norway, starting from a smaller base, has grown its number of professional cyclists during this same period of increasing competition.

What these nations share is not scale or tradition, but consistent numbers of athletes in the right development environments. Enough to sustain, and in some cases grow, their professional presence. Along with an ecosystem that appropriately supports developing athletes.

Canada’s challenge, by contrast, is not that the market changed. It’s that development environments didn’t adapt to the realities of the new professional cycling market.

This does not mean that having Canadian-registered UCI trade teams is essential. Nationality of registration has become largely irrelevant.

What is essential, and currently missing, is a critical stage of development within the Canadian ecosystem:
Reliable methods to consistently develop Canadian athletes with the visible capabilities needed for recruitment into the environments where the final-stage development now occurs.

This issue is not gender-specific.

Men’s road cycling simply provides a leading indicator. Women’s cycling now operates within the same structural reality.

Without deliberate attention, it is reasonable to expect similar erosion to appear in Canadian women’s road cycling over time.

Interestingly, Canadian women’s cycling is arguably at an all-time high. This means the opportunity is not only to prevent decline, rather to build something stronger than what currently exists – potentially moving Canada into the top tiers of global cycling nations.

Our Canadian challenges are now visible, quantifiable, and structurally clear.

The decline we’ve seen in men’s cycling is reversible. The opportunity in women’s cycling is huge. A single solution leads to both outcomes!

All this leads me to a set of questions without a single owner or a single answer. Questions the Canadian cycling ecosystem must grapple with collectively:

• What, exactly, is the development function that is missing today?
• Who currently assumes responsibility for it, explicitly or implicitly?
• Where does that responsibility fall when athlete progression depends on private, and/or international environments?
• How do we know, in advance, whether the ecosystem is healthy, rather than discovering decline after it has already occurred?

These questions are not about recreating the past. They are about deciding, together, how Canada intends to compete and develop within the sport as it actually exists today.

Who wants to help answer these questions? These questions matter if you’re a: coach, athlete, team, funder, or federation.

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