As the 2025 cycling season comes to a close, The Outer Line’s latest AIRmail newsletter unpacks a week of conflicting events but undeniably compelling storylines. From Uno-X’s breakout victory at the Veneto Classic and the final UCI promotion/relegation shake-up, to corporate lessons drawn from Nike’s massive restructuring, the sport continues to mirror broader business and media trends. While late-season races faded with little fanfare, behind the scenes cycling faces financial uncertainty, team mergers, and governance challenges that could redefine the 2026 WorldTour lineup. Meanwhile, shifts at Zwift and the escalating battle for Warner Bros-Discovery underscore how broadcast and digital platforms will shape the next era of fan engagement.
In this week’s AIRmail newsletter, The Outer Line takes an in-depth look at conflicting events, but exciting racing, good week for the U.S., victory for ‘student athletes’, bad week for doping … Challenges at Zwift …
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Key Takeaways:
● As 2025 Season Wraps, UCI Overlooks a Potential Marketing Boon
● 3-Year Promotion/Relegation Protocol Ends: Winners and Losers
● Cycling Teams on the Edge?
● Nike’s Rebuilding Plan – and Lessons for the Bicycle Market
● The Battle for Warner Bros-Discovery – and the Impact on Cycling
The men’s road season formally wrapped up on Sunday with the Veneto Classic, where Uno-X capped off their breakout year with Sakarias Koller Løland landing an impressive win over UAE’s Florian Vermeesch (freshly-crowned World Gravel Champion). But as always, the calendar’s slow fade after Il Lombardia leaves cycling with one of the strangest endings in professional sport. A smattering of late races trickled in – from the WorldTour’s Tour of Guangxi to smaller events like the Tour of Holland (which even had a stage canceled after cars were allowed onto the course due to a lack of police presence). The Chinese event was marked by what felt like endless, identical sprint stages; little-known sprinter, Paul Magnier, won five out of its six total stages. The overall result was a confusing and distinctly anti-climactic finish – a quiet sputter rather than the grand finale the sport deserves – a missed opportunity we have discussed many times. The late-season races did hold significant implications for the UCI’s three-year WorldTour promotion/relegation cycle renewing at the end of this year, but unfortunately there was no way for casual viewers to track those standings from race to race, understand what was at stake, or cohesively follow the action.
Sakarias Koller Løland (Uno-X) carried his end of season form (above) to a win at the Veneto Classic, and UCI promotion points.
The relegation race has been settled and it appears that three teams, Lotto, Israel-PremierTech, and Uno-X will earn promotion, while Cofidis and Arkéa-B&B will fall out of the WT (with the latter folding entirely). In addition, Intermarché-Wanty appears to have surrendered its spot by failing to submit paperwork by the UCI’s October 15th deadline to keep its license for another three years. Uno-X edged Cofidis by just 397 points across three seasons and seems set to take the final 18th WorldTour slot; (for a good overview of the team’s accomplishments, see Daniel Benson’s summary on Substack). Meanwhile, Tudor, Q36.5, and Cofidis will gain automatic invitations to all WorldTour races in 2026 as the top three finishers in the ProTour ranking. In fact, Cofidis barely held off TotalEnergies for that final spot by less than 200 points, which could have been a thrilling spectacle to draw in fans right through the very final races of the season. However, the UCI provided zero context or marketing of this competition for the final spot. What could have been an exciting marketing asset was turned into a dull accounting exercise. It’s important to note that, with all the teams still needing to pass the UCI’s financial, organizational, and ethical checks, the rankings still aren’t final, and won’t be formally announced for several more weeks.
On that note, the long shadow of the supposed Lotto–Intermarché merger gets darker each week, marred by numerous red flags. Intermarché’s license seems destined to disappear, but its debts, running up to millions in loans, unpaid wages, taxes, and social contributions, most likely won’t. The 2023 accounts already showed the team plugging losses with anonymous cash infusions and a €2 million sponsor loan, and Belgian media reports that the liabilities remain. Even if we believe the recent reports that Lotto, which lost its former co-sponsor Dstny, needs a new co-sponsor to survive, it begs the question of why Lotto would even want this merger? Intermarché looked destined to fold, which would have left its top riders available for Lotto to cherry-pick. With a potential merger, Lotto now risks inheriting a political and financial mess just as it re-enters the WorldTour.
Another interesting, if less publicized, situation is brewing for the TotalEnergies team. After losing out on 2026 wildcard invitations by finishing fourth among the ProTeam rankings, it looks as though the team could fold after next season, with its title sponsor committing to join Ineos as a secondary jersey sponsor. Team officials, however, indicate that they are on the hunt for new sponsors and that the team will continue. The aforementioned sponsor combination would unite two of the peloton’s most problematic brands; Total is heavily tied to Russian gas interests, while Ineos has a range of well-documented environmental and chemical controversies. In addition, it would leave French cycling in a tailspin, with only two teams remaining in the top flight, while one of those, Decathlon-AG2R, shifts away from its French roots to embrace a more international profile. This means that in 2027, there could be just a single French-registered wildcard team available to invite to the Tour de France (the Unibet-Tietema Rockets squad). While this likely exposes the fragile state of French cycling, it also presents a near-unprecedented opportunity for a completely new project to emerge and secure a Tour wildcard in 2027.
For a more detailed analysis of the potential longer-term outcomes of the just-finished Rwanda World Championships, see The Outer Line’s recent article in VELO. “Now that the rainbow jerseys are in the record books and the dust is settling, there are still many questions about how the events will impact the direction of the country, and where African cycling could go from here. However, we can draw at least a few preliminary conclusions regarding the UCI’s bold and risky decision – more than four years ago now – to bestow its most prestigious event on the tiny central African country.” As we noted last week, the Rwandan-backed paramilitary group M23 took only ten days to escalate its military adventures in the nearby Congo, announcing that it would begin to march on the DRC capital city of Kinshasa to overthrow the government.
Nike’s CEO recently appeared in a televised interview to discuss the sports apparel heavyweight’s shareholder value collapse and long recovery path ahead – and there may be broad lessons here for the entire cycling industry. According to Elliott Hill, who came out of retirement to take over the company’s reins in 2024, the previous executive team over-focused on the digital sales channel when the pandemic constrained supply chains and online sales were the only avenue to meet consumer demand. However, rather than re-synch to the market as the post-pandemic retail markets reopened, Nike shed its retailer agreements and failed to innovate in its core running and basketball product lines, flooding its market with deadstock. The results were predictable. In hindsight, Nike lost massive retail floor presence and market share to smaller, more nimble and innovative brands. At one point, its stock share value dropped more than 20% in a single day – a remarkable loss of $28 billion dollars of its 2024 market capitalization. (Notably, at the time of that drop, Nike’s total market cap was $139 billion; the entire global bicycle market was just $101 billion.)
Nike has restructured its corporate verticals, but Hill’s significant strategy shift has been to refocus on sport, stating, “When we grow sport, we grow the overall marketplace.” By re-investing in sports science, manufacturing R&D, and key team, league and athlete sponsorships, Hill believes that Nike can organically regain its leading market presence. Nike’s positioning and investment move could inform – and potentially resolve – a market approach problem that has vexed the cycling industry. Year over year, bicycle sales forecasts and manufacturing planning have been egregiously wrong; not because brand directors didn’t understand the market, but because the market they’ve over-focused on is saturated. This conundrum was succinctly outlined by podcaster Anthony Walsh in a post last week regarding how quickly road cycling has contracted. Brands today are producing an ever-diversifying and dizzying array of bicycles – road, mountain, gravel, aerodynamic disciplines – but pushing the selections to the same market repetitively and often through online sales, to the detriment of local bike shops. Thus, as gravel has grown in popularity, it has siphoned fan interest and consumer bicycle spending away from road and the other disciplines; the size of the recreational cycling market didn’t change much, but gravel now accounts for a larger portion of spending patterns inside of that market.
Reducing product variability may be one way of reinvigorating the road market, as the podcaster suggests, but the Nike strategy may be a useful blueprint for the bicycle industry as well. By backing key sports through athlete sponsorships, advertising, and new media investment, Nike not only broadens the sports’ appeal but also promotes its revamped products to ever-wider audiences. This symbiosis of product/athlete/sport is a model Nike perfected with Michael Jordan to supercharge the NBA’s global growth, which created a larger and more competitive consumer market for its basketball shoes and apparel – a big slice of a very big pie. Cycling’s stakeholders and key brands have the capability to succeed with this model today. Race calendars, team tiers, and governance structure can be revamped to encourage viewership and fan interest through a more comprehensible and focused season narrative. But in parallel, cycling’s brands can look beyond the sport’s perceived current target market with new partnership investments and platform diversification – to expose the sport to audiences outside of cycling’s traditional market view, which could open the door for broader competitive appeal and consumer expansion.
The battle for Warner Bros.-Discovery is continuing to heat up. After Paramount Skydance made an unsolicited offer for the business, its stock value jumped; indeed, it has almost doubled in the past six months. But now it appears that a bidding war may have been initiated, with other top players like Comcast reportedly also interested in acquiring the business. Amazon and Netflix have also been mentioned as potential suitors. At the same time, WBD CEO David Zazlav says that he and his board are committed to remaining “independent” and have a plan in place already to split the company into two more valuable pieces. A bidding war could push the company’s value into the $60 billion range, making it a tough nut to crack for almost any buyer. Paramount owner Larry Ellison’s relationship with President Trump, and Trump’s apparent willingness to use the FCC as a political weapon, potentially complicates bidding for the company. Regardless of where this battle goes, it’s important to remember that any of these outcomes could have massive impacts for sports fans and TV viewers. According to the company’s website, and for various markets around the world, it offers “more than 1,000 live cycling broadcasts and 2,500 hours of racing including 100% of the men’s and women’s UCI World Tour streaming on Max and discovery+ across Europe.”
Written and Edited by Steve Maxwell / Joe Harris / Spencer Martin
THE OUTER LINE
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