Another U.S. Criterium Team Jumps to UCI Level
UCI teams have long been part of the criterium peloton and we should recognize that now in 2023
Project Echelon recently announced that it will race as a UCI Continental team in 2023. For those unfamiliar with how UCI licenses work, on the men’s side, teams are divided into three categories, in ascending order— Continental, Pro Team, and World Team. The Continental level is the ground floor of internationally recognized professional cycling. As you read this, Eric Hill, the owner of Project Echelon is already composing an email about the article’s headline. In his email he reminds us that Project Echelon is not just a criterium team; but also races the biggest stage races in the U.S., and has spent the last two years fielding a squad at UCI races in France and Belgium. The email will go on to point out that 2022 standout Tyler Stites, who won the GC at Redlands, finished 3rd in the GC at Joe Martin (a UCI race), and 2nd at the U.S. Pro Road Race Championships, before racing as a stagiaire at races like the Tour of Slovakia for Human Powered Health, will be returning for 2023. The email will further suggest that winning the GC at Green Mountain with the freight-train like power of Dr. Stephen Vogel and finishing 3rd in the U.S. Pro Time Trial Championship thanks to aero-obsessed Zach Gregg is a further testament to the team’s non-crit palmares.
These facts cannot be denied. However, slavish recognition of them would mean that we would need to re-write the headline, and miss out on the opportunity to point out that yet another team we regularly see in crits is finding success in European-style racing too. Also, as will be shown 7 paragraphs from now, we will be able to make a call back to the opening paragraph and lay out an important lesson regarding exposure and U.S. racing.
However, before we get there here are some foundational facts. Project Echelon finished first in the men’s individual competition in the inaugural season of the American Criterium Cup with Brandon Feehery, and also won the U23 competition with Ethan Craine. Craine will be going with his team in the upgrade to the UCI next year. When Craine lines up at Tulsa or Intelli next year with Project Echelon he will join a host of other UCI riders and teams. For example, the women’s overall ACC champion in 2022, Maggie Coles-Lyster raced on DNA Pro Cycling, a UCI team. Coles-Lyster missed several races in the ACC while competing in UCI track races. She did that right alongside Jennifer Valente, Twenty24, the reigning Olympic omnium gold medalist, the 2020 World Champion in the team pursuit, and now the 2022 World Champion in the omnium. Both Valente and Coles-Lyster are a part of the UCI Track Champions League, now in its second edition.
While they do not appear in the ACC tabulations, the men of L39ion (who upgraded to the UCI in 2022) are regular race winners (the women’s team was not UCI in 2022). We also have Luke Lamperti, U.S. Pro National Crit champ, of Trinity Racing, a British UCI team, animating races and making decisive moves like he did at Boise and Tulsa. We cannot, and should not, overlook the impact that UCI squads like Team Skyline and Wildlife Generation had last year either. One need look no further than what Scott McGill and Noah Granigan did in the crit at Joe Martin to ensure Johnny Clark’s overall win. The aforementioned Team Skyline featured a rider like Wolfgang Brandl, who previously raced for the Movistar Team Ecuador Continental squad, and who represented his home country of Germany in the first UCI gravel world championships held in Italy this year.
On the women’s side, in addition to DNA, Canadian UCI squads like InstaFund and Emotional.Fr line up right alongside their US counterparts. With the latter, they are from Quebec, so their pronunciation of “allez” is a bit different than what you hear on the side of the road in the Tour de France Femmes. You even saw a women’s WorldTour team on the podium for four days in a row at Gateway Cup with Kaia Schmid of Human Powered Health.
There has also been a trend of UCI riders returning from Europe to race in the U.S. This trend includes 2019 U.S. Pro Criterium champion Travis McCabe, who, after a pandemic-shortened tenure with Isreal Start Up Nation in 2020, returned to race with BestBuddies in 2021. More recently Sergio Henao, who had previously raced with Team Sky and Qhubeka, was racing in the U.S. at Athens and Somerville in 2022 with Emanuel Iberry. On the women’s side riders like Sam Schneider, formerly of TIBCO and Team Illuminate, returned to the crit peloton this year after having a child.
Next year looks like a continuation of the same trend with signings by 2022 U.S. National Road champ Kyle Murphy (i.e. the guy who beat Stites), and Robin Carpenter both with L39ion. Both riders previously had ridden for Human Powered Health which was a UCI Pro Team this year. There are obviously many, many other examples; but this article is not designed to go overboard.
This is a long way of saying, we are tremendously fortunate to have this level of talent routinely hitting the apexes of corners in the United States. For a long time referencing a rider or a team using the adjective “crit” in front of it has been viewed almost pejoratively. It even gets bandied about in CX with the classic phrase “grass crit” to denote an untechnical course. Riders and teams have hidden from the describer “crit” at the risk of being cast aside by or looked down upon by the more established European-style racers. That needs to end.
Now we return to the second paragraph for our call back. For fans in the U.S., the most likely place for you to be exposed to riders and teams, at the UCI non-World Team level, will be in a criterium. That includes both in person and streaming, unless you go really deep in the recesses of the internet. Teams should leverage the unique and intimate opportunity that comes with it. In 2022 the number of elite stage or road race opportunities in the U.S. were sparingly few. At the top level we were offered Redlands (CA) and Gila (NM) both in April, followed by Joe Martin (AR) in May and then a month later in June was the U.S. Pro Road Race Championship (TN). We also did have the first Maryland Cycling Classic over Labor Day weekend. Even if you expand that to include races like Green Mountain, Killington, and Valley of the Sun, that is not an overly broad number of events.
On the criterium side we had substantially more events, even if you just limit it to the races that were live-streamed. That list included nine events within the ACC, then also Athens Twilight, all of Tulsa Tough, and the U.S. Pro Criterium Championship. With the ACC, fans were provided free streaming by Outside Magazine which was a substantial improvement in quality over prior years. The feed included two broadcasters, with color commentary by legit experts like Kristin Armstrong, Rahsaan Bahati and Daniel Holloway. Yes, there is room for improvement and we will devote many column inches to that discussion in coming articles; however, these improvements and opportunities should be front and center for marketing firms within reach of these markets.
The reach of live streaming of the UCI competitors, and their domestic elite team counterparts, that are present in the criterium field is undervalued. Wide-scale development of live streaming and sharing of revenue from it with the teams must be a part of the future. If you are a race organization, you cannot expect more live fans than you currently get at your events. If you want to expose eyeballs to your communities and sponsors it will be through live streaming. This is a fact understood by all other professional sports in the United States.
For context, in 2022, per Baseball-Reference.com the Chicago Cubs had approximately 32,000 fans at each home game. Wrigley Field is an iconic place to watch a game and fans flock to that venue regardless of the quality of the play on the field. At 32,000 fans per game the Cubs were in the top 5 for average attendance. That was 1/4 of the size of their TV audience, which, according to the Chicago Tribune was 116,000 people. This did not include those that listened to it on the radio. And the Cubs were one of the poorer watched teams. Their rivals, the Cardinals, saw closer to 200,000 TV screens tuned to each game in a 162-game regular season.
There clearly are not 162 criteriums in a season, so maybe that comparison breaks down. There are 17 football games in an NFL season which is much closer to the number of crits we see elite riders doing in a year. Using the Chicago Bears, since consistency is obviously key, in 2021 the average attendance per game was just over 60,000 according to Statista.com. In 2021 the average weekly viewership for NFL games, regardless of team, was 17.4 million. There is a lot of room within these numbers for explanation and further deep dives; however, the takeaway for this article is simply this- there are more eyeballs available in streaming criteriums, and the quality of the riders here is already high.
Why should this matter to teams, sponsors, and events, in a word- exposure. The brands that invest in American racing are typically local with local customer bases and marketing reaches. Cities that host events want to see racers, fans, and spectators visit them again, outside of just race weekend. In developing a robust scene we serve those dual goals while keeping quality riders in the sport, closer to home and hopefully further from European burnout. We can use the criterium scene as a bedrock for road racing upon which the remainder can be built. So welcome to the UCI and congratulations Project Echelon. We cannot wait to see you in your first crit of 2023.