Look around the Tour de France and you’ll see 38 sponsors – some huge international companies – lending their name to the 23 competing teams. The collective annual budget of the teams is, according to an official UCI document seen by Cycling Weekly, in excess of €600m. Top-tier cycling, on the face of it, looks richer, healthier and more financially sustainable than ever before.
But those headline figures don’t tell the full story. One team manager at the race told Cycling Weekly that 15 of those teams are currently searching for new title sponsors who will invest significant seven-figure sums, and no one else who CW spoke to disputed or was surprised by that number.
