One Cycling is attracting interest from some of the top WorldTour cycling teams, but receiving damning rebuttals from key stakeholders, including the organiser of the Tour de France.
However, should the idea of calendar and financial reforms designed to create a season-long narrative and financial stability for pro teams take off, it could transform the world of professional cycling.
But while teams including Visma–Lease A Bike and race organisers such as Flanders Classics are interested, ASO and RCS (organisers of the Grand Tours) are yet to be convinced.
So what does this mean for fans, races such as the Tour de France and the future of professional cycling?
What is One Cycling, what are its aims and who’s behind it?
The issue, as One Cycling sees it, is that professional cycling’s calendar is incomprehensible, making it difficult to grow the audience.
While most people will be familiar with the Tour de France, how the other Grand Tours, Roubaix, Flanders, Milan-San Remo and everything else fits into the cycling season is difficult to explain to those unfamiliar with pro cycling’s history.
Once Cycling's proposed solution is to remodel the cycling calendar and overhaul broadcast rights to aid the financial stability of teams.
Reforms are seen by many in the sport as an essential stepping stone to a more stable financial future – and One Cycling isn’t the first attempt.
The Velon initiative was one of the more recent attempts to shake up pro cycling.
Formed and primarily funded by a collective of professional cycling teams, Velon aimed to increase the sport’s commercial appeal and sustainability by enhancing engagement through live data, introducing new race formats and other measures.
Although live data transmission continues, Velon struggled to establish a sustainable revenue model for teams, the Hammer Series ended in 2022 and the body found itself in frequent conflict with the UCI.
In contrast, One Cycling is rumoured to have secured significant financial backing outside of cycling – although exactly who’s behind it is unclear.
Escape Collective reports One Cycling is “close to securing the support of up to €300m from SURJ Sports Investment, a subsidiary company of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund”.
One Cycling also has buy-in from key WorldTour teams.
The concept itself is the brainchild of Richard Plugge, the general manager of the Visma–Lease a Bike team.
It is also supported by teams including Ineos Grenadiers, Soudal QuickStep, EF Education–EasyPost, RedBull Bora hansgrohe, Bahrain-Victorious and Lidl-Trek.
One Cycling hopes to launch in 2026 in time for a new WorldTour season.
However, details on how such a calendar would be structured are scarce.
One Cycling has said the Grand Tours and classics would be unaffected.
Instead, a key focus of One Cycling is to ensure big-name racers line up against each other more frequently throughout the season.
With overlapping races, GC riders such as Jonas Vingegaard and Tadej Pogačar may only face each other once or twice before the Tour de France.
The success of cyclocross, which sees big-ticket names clash more frequently than in the road calendar, suggests the theory has legs.
Regular races attract good TV attention and decent crowds, but fan attendance is visibly far greater when big riders such as Mathieu van der Poel, Wout van Aert, Tom Pidcock and Marianne Vos turn up. Fans evidently want to see the big stars racing.
ASO vs UCI vs One Cycling
Where exactly does One Cycling sit along with cycling’s other key bodies? Well, it’s complicated.
The Amaury Sports Organisation (ASO) is the race organiser for the Tour de France and other key races, such as La Vuelta.
Alongside the ASO are other large race organisers, such as RCS (Giro d’Italia) and Flanders Classics (Tour of Flanders, Omloop Het Nieuwsblad and others).
Sitting separate from these is the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) – cycling’s governing body, which sets out the rules and regulations for all regulated competition.
It also organises certain races, such as the World and European Championships.
One Cycling aims to be an umbrella organisation, sitting below the UCI, but above a collection of race organisers.
The problems here for One Cycling are twofold.
Firstly, One Cycling appears to want those with all the cards – namely the ASO – to share the wealth of one of the world’s biggest sporting events, an unlikely outcome.
However, speaking to CyclingNews, a source close to One Cycling suggested it didn’t want to upset the apple cart: “ASO has a monopoly on the sport and wants to defend their interests but One Cycling doesn’t want to take away anything from them, we want to work with them.”
Despite these reassurances, Tour de France director Christian Prudhomme told Cyclismactu that “everywhere and every time cycling has tried to transform itself solely with money, it has failed.”
Secondly, reforming the cycling calendar to suit an imagined season-long narrative will be hard.
Riders, sponsors and fans place most of their interest and value in particular stages and race wins.
For example, a Flanders win is everything in Belgium. On the other hand, wins at the Tour de France attract international attention and are the focus of the biggest teams. How an organisation can build a narrative out of these competing goals is unclear.
The UCI World Tour has existing competitions for the top-ranked riders and teams, but little credence is given to these beyond an end-of-year social media post and maybe a LinkedIn article from a team’s CEO.
It’s not impossible, but to make a narrative out of this will be a tough ask.
Lessons from outside cycling
Cycling isn’t the only sport to have gone through similar calendar overhauls or attempts to create new leagues, and it hasn’t been plain sailing elsewhere.
LIV Golf formed a breakaway league in 2021 and attempted to attract the sport's biggest names.
However, tensions rose quickly between LIV and golf’s traditional PGA Tour, which banned LIV golfers from its competitions, such as the Ryder Cup and The Masters.
A number of the world’s biggest football teams made plans to form an elite European Super League (ESL) in 2021.
This went down like a lead balloon with fans and nine of the 12 founding teams pulled out, with the league collapsing within 48 hours.
The issue centred around perceptions of exclusivity and greed. While the league would have been a competition for 20 clubs, 15 of these would be permanent members with no fear of relegation.
Five qualification spots were initially available, but there would be little hope for other clubs to gain access to the competition through hard work.
Many fans and pundits struggled to see the benefit of such a competition, with the BBC’s Danny Mills stating that he was frustrated and angry because “it’s about money” rather than being a benefit to football or fans.
While the ESL has now been modified and rebranded as the Unify League, the sport of cycling will need to retain the ability for teams to grow from humble beginnings to the top level.
Thankfully, early rumours of a breakaway league for cycling were quashed, so the lesson seems to have been learned before any damage was done.
But the challenge of getting buy-in from the existing organisations that control the sport remain.
How will One Cycling change things for cycling fans?
While the prospect of the top racers competing against each other more frequently in a season that makes more sense might be a tempting one, there may be a price to pay.
One Cycling is keen to make cycling easier to sell to broadcasters, but the reality of this for fans is likely to be felt in their pockets.
Recent news that Discovery PLC has gained exclusive rights to broadcast the Tour de France in the UK from 2026 spells the end of ITV4’s free-to-air live coverage.
That means if you want to watch the world’s biggest bike race, you’ll need a Discovery + account, the cost of which recently increased by 343% from £6.99 to £30.99 per month. The situation is similar in other countries, with free-to-air sport in general under threat.
In regards to the Tour de France, fans will see little change this year – and possibly for years to come, especially if the ASO won’t work with One Cycling.
Whether or not One Cycling gains the buy-in of the ASO, the race may end up helping to shape the narrative of a season-long competition in the future.
