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OPINION
The rising cost of cycling and its demographic shift — should the financial playing field be levelled?
Thu, Dec 26, 2024 09:00
25
Bike on start line - Steve ThomasWhether we got one or not was another matter, but as youngsters many of us over a certain age wanted a bike for Christmas at some point during the pre-digital and internet era. After all, isn’t a bike the very meaning of Christmas? Be it a Chopper, a Chipper, a Grifter, a Burner, or even a 10-speed racer, for decades it was bikes that topped that seasonal wishlist; the one that we’d send glazed in stick-on glitter and sealed with starry-eyed hope to Santa (who I have since found out isn’t actually real. What a swiz, eh).
These days, it’s all about iPads, PlayStations and other fancy electronic gadgets – for both children and adults alike, which is a real shame for the overall health and wellbeing of humankind. They call it progress, though as we’ve learnt all too often over the years, progress cannot be paused; although I personally think it should and could be manipulated in some cases.
Needless to say, this evolution, or progress, runs right though modern society, which is inevitable; and yet, although many will argue the toss on this one, there seems to be an ever-deepening gulf between the have and have-nots in life. This financial disparity has also had a huge impact on cycling and the cost of it for those on the darker side of that divide, and accessibility of the sport to those on a finer financial line is much tighter than it once was.
Although cycling was not a mainstream sport or pastime by any means in the UK until recent times, in Europe and many other regions, cycling was effectively a working-class sport, including the majority of those who participated in it, especially at the completive sharp racing end. Sure, many will point to examples that contradict this narrative, and those who’ve come to the sport since the 90s (especially since Bradley Wiggins’ 2012 heroics) are probably far less attuned to the not-so-distant past. Even so, many of us who’ve been around in the sport for decades will likely be all too aware that the demographic of cyclists and the cost of bikes and kit has changed dramatically in the past 20 years, and way out of proportion to reasonable inflation levels.
How did cycling become so expensive?
It's hard to pinpoint exactly how and where cycling took the high road, although there are a few clear markers along the way. The first was perhaps the mainstream arrival of mountainbiking in the early 1990s, which brought a whole new technological arms race to the equipment side of the sport. This was great for most cyclists, although it didn’t really impact the cost of the dropped bar side of the sport too heavily. It was a welcome and much-needed kick in the rear of the bike industry.
Mountain biking also introduced a whole new demographic to the sport, many of whom transitioned to the road later, and therefore bypassing the traditional old-school club system. This did also bring a change in attitude along with it; all good stuff, which has benefitted us all in one way another over the years.
On the flip side of this, this evolution also partly introduced the never-ending trend of manufacturers producing new models of just about everything each year. I think these are often over-hyped and largely minor changes, and they can bring in compatibility issues down the line. Many products tend to focus on weight and supposed speed gains over practicality and durability, meaning a higher profit margin and faster turnover of product and a higher long-term cost to us. I guess you can’t blame them. It’s business, and many cyclists have tagged onto their wild goose chase for an extra watt or second here or there, whether they like it or not. That’s an expensive game.
> The rising price of entry-level road bikes
Around about the turn of new century many were terming cycling as “the new golf,” due largely to a demographic change/influx of what we now call MAMILs. The MAMILS had far more disposable income than cyclists of old could imagine, especially younger riders. This did also fuel the birth of high-end - and dare I say, overpriced – kit, and brands such as Rapha came along, with rising costs following suit. Needless to say, this was music to the ears of many brands, who seemed to find ever more complex and costly answers and unnecessary products in order to fuel this change.
Cycling’s popularity, its status, and the cost of it all rose considerably through the early 2000s. In the UK the sport’s growing popularity was fuelled in part of Team GB’s success on the Olympic velodrome. This started in awe with the 2000 Sydney Games and increased rapidly after that, before the doors were fully blown off in London 2012. The upshot was that cycling became big in the UK (as it became elsewhere) and cycling stars became mainstream celebrities, which was simply not the case before that.
Major corporations, non-cycling nations, state entities and more all jumped on the pro cycling publicity bandwagon. The stakes, pro rider salaries, pro team budgets, and the rewards became tenfold in comparison to the previous century. Cycling became big business in most spheres, and along with that it also became extremely popular with a whole new group of people, including those who could afford the new £10,000 bikes and £250 shorts to go with it.
Introducing new people and more external funds to the sport and leisure side of cycling is largely for the good, although I think it has pushed the entry point and general participation cost of cycling way beyond the means of many. Being a working-class kid, I very much doubt that I would have been able to entertain taking up cycling with the costs of today. Sure, there are many others who will chant that you don’t need a £10,000 bike, and I whole heartedly agree – I certainly don’t have one kicking around all these years later, despite having been in the industry and sport or most of my life.
It's not just in the UK
I’ve been fortunate enough to spend much of my ‘adult’ cycling life travelling and living in different places around the world, and have seen some shocking extremes in terms of the cost of cycling and it’s demographic. Everything from ‘hard as nails’ young guys riding 20-year old bodged and welded bikes to victory in the Philippines, to passion-driven standard bike racers in Sri Lanka (old pre-1960s colonial roadsters) racing for a tyre as a prize, right through to wealthy MAMILs and young kids on bikes and with set-ups better that WorldTour pros in other regions. Some of what I’ve sen melts my heart with passion for cycling, while some of it churns my soul and raises many inner questions about the state of cycling, and wealth rifts in general.
The good, the bad & the ugly
There’s no doubt that on the whole, cycling as a sport needed a lick of fresh paint a while back. Naturally that will come at a cost – but that cost hits way beyond the wallet, which is what concerns me the most.
It’s all of those youngsters from less privileged backgrounds who will not be able to afford to take up cycling seriously, or who will simply find themselves out of their depth and intimidated when they turn out for a group ride or race. They don’t need to be of course, but it can be a huge deterrent.
Cycling was never a cheap sport, but it is now very much an expensive sport in comparison to days gone by, with the well-heeled image to match. The great clocks of progress are impossible to turn back, and while there are indeed budget kit options out there, they may not be as cool as those with the brazen few letters on their backs. I just wish that at grass roots level there were less barriers for those who cannot afford the latest dogsbollox, WTF-branded shorts and jersey, and weird (but apparently very fast) aero helmets. Imagine a 13-year-old aspiring bike racer lining up in their Aldi trainers and on a second hand oversized bike against another kid on a fancy Dogma with all the spangly overpriced kit; should (or could) there be some form of financial standardisation for youth bike racing? Or has it all gone way beyond that?
With all the said, in 2025 and beyond I’d somehow like to see the playing field levelled so everyone can get a fair crack at the cycling whip. Give the underdogs a go at this cycling lark!
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25 comments
It's a myth, expensive as you want it to be.
Just bought a 2nd hand mint GT Edge Ti road bike, Carbon Deda wheels, Ultegra R8000 for £1600. One of the best bikes I've ever bought was £200 on a 1993 Kona Cinder Cone. Mint barely used 2014 Giant TCR Advanced full Ultegra 6800, £400 this year. All create the same smile, even my bought from new Carbon bikes. Change your mentality.
I wonder why the ultegra 6800 was a bargain... the reason escapes me.
I do not think that cycling has become very expensive. It's just the top of the range where stupid prices have appeared, 20.000 (choose your currency) no longer an impossibility. That doesn't mean that "normal" stuff has disappeared. For 5.000, a keen amateur will still be served extremely well. For 1.000, a good quality aluminium bike is available (Tiagra or 105), far superirior to more expensive bikes from only 10 years ago.
I think we were just spoiled in the past by the "top of the line" stuff (i.e. Super Record) still being affordable to normal people that prioritize their sport. Ulrich's or Hinault's bikes were just affordable, only now, the prices of some world tour bikes seem crazy (but, to be frank, realistic for the level of the world-tour). So, cycling will only be really expensive if we stick to our old expectation of riding bikes on world-tour level (or one tier below), while being riders of a far inferiour quality.
In short - I think it's not so much cycling that has become excessively expensive, but it's perhaps more our common sense that seems to struggle with finding the appropriate price point...
i dunno. EPO is pretty cheap these days
Here is a formula to work out the lìkely cost of cycling on an individual level.
C = S*G*I / E*FL*BD²
S - snobism, G- gullibility, I - Insecurities
E - experience, FL - fitness level, BD - bullshit detecting abilities (incl. marketing, pseudoscience and social/fashion trends)
Partly it's the fetishization of pro cycling. Let's face it, RedBull don;t sell F1 cars, Ducati don't sell MotoGP bikes, Toyota don't sell WEC championship winning cars. But cycling? Yeah, you can ride Tadej's £20k Colnago down the road to the shops. Until we get over this "I want to ride what Tadej rides" bs, cycling is going to stay focussed on hugely overpriced racing equipment, and not on bikes to ride for leisure and pleasure. AFter almost 60years of riding, and 50+ of racing, I gave up some years (decades?) ago on the "must have faster bike" lies and realised, I was never going to go as fast as I used to, and I was never going to turn pro. SO I redefined what I rode into what pleases me. Couple of Colnagos (Steel & Ti), couple of nice 531 Carltons, A Genesis for long rides / commutes, a steel MTB, and because I cracked on one silly occasion, a CF TT Bike I absolutely hate. I'm not even sure I LIKE the modern Carbon bikes, they all look plastic and cheap, even the really expensive ones. There's probably a multitude of "gains" I coud get from upgrading to a spanky new Speshadale Whizzomax or what ever, but the limiting factor is always going to be me, and frankly, it's easier to stand out fro the crowd on a good clasic bike (ALl mine a retromodded to take advantage of equipment gains...). And when somoen on an S-Works says to you "That bike is a beautiful piece of art" about your 35yo Columbus SL Colnago....
Agreed. I recently lent a friend of mine one of my Mercian road bikes (a 1980s King of Mercia, built up with Campag 9 speed kit). He told me that the only time another cyclist has said "cool bike, mate" to him is when he was on the Mercian. And the best thing was the whole bike cost me perhaps £350 and was a top notch machine in its day.
If you read the history of many - probably the majority - of the great champions from the past they started out on some of the worst, cheapest bikes imaginable and beat the flash Harrys with the latest equipment. The more interesting question to me is not why high-end bicycles are so expensive but when did we start talking as if it's impossible to make your way in the sport unless you can afford the highest of high-end equipment? Articles like this, well-intentioned as they doubtless are, perpetuate the idea that newcomers will be excluded if they can't afford the latest Pinarello or Colnago and I would argue do just as much to put youngsters off as the actual price of bikes. I wouldn't blame a youngster considering taking up cycling as a sport reading this if they said oh well, I'll try something else because there's no point if I can't afford the best gear. Yet the briefest glance at eBay this morning shows that secondhand bikes easily good enough for entry-level racing and beyond can be had for around £200 or less, less than the price of a high-end pair of football boots (does anyone in football say that deprived youngsters are being priced out of the game because the latest Adidas Predators cost £240?). Ridiculously expensive bikes have been around for many, many decades, certainly since I became seriously interested in cycling more than 40 years ago, but it's only recently that people have started to talk as if their presence means that anyone who can't afford them is automatically excluded. I'd respectfully suggest that talking as if this is the case is actually far more likely to do damage to cycling than the fact that a few middle-aged men like to buy £10,000 bikes.
Absolutely agree. It's largely a perception issue - perhaps exacerbated by the increasingly advertising-led coverage (since many of us are happy to let advertisers pay for our media - and they aren't likely to support something that tells readers not to buy more/more expensive stuff).
Precisely this. Its less the increasing cost - more the harping on about it.
As somebody with two daughters in youth football teams, the cost of the boots hardly scratches the surface of the expense. There's the £30 a month each team fees, the fact that you can't get to training or matches without a car (some are 30+ miles away), all the incidental costs, and the time it all takes. Plus you need a pair of boots for grass, a pair for astro, and a pair of trainers for fitness training.
It's affordable for us, but there's definitely a barrier there for many people.
Isn't a lot of this this really about the demise of plain old utility cycling over the past 30-40 years? The £10,000 bikes are still the exception, not the rule. I'm not into any sort of cycling competition, but I have learnt that it's dedication (and reliable kit) that powers your riding, not ever more fancy kit.
Perhaps it's the passage of time, but I pass my LBS a couple of days a week, I peer in the windows and I don't find all that attractive much of what I can see therein: it doesn't have the thrall of the glossy 1983 Raleigh catalogue or my local 5* Raleigh dealer's shop window.
As has been said, you can get a lot of rideaway value for your money from Boardman and Decathlon / B'Twin, but I still find myself drawn to the dignified, unflashy offerings of the likes of Temple Cycles.
The majority of the industry & media have dropped utility cycling in favour of performance - and we're all worse of for that.
Temple produce some of the few 'off the peg' steel bikes in the UK. I was thinking the other day, where are the decent quality steel tourers at a reasonable price? There aren't that many.
Temple, Spa, Stanforth - there are others like Mason or Fairlight which are more expensive.
The reliability comes with a cost though, and is achieved through buying good quality components initially and maintaining them properly - which isn't always cheap to do.
What a good essay; and kudos to RoadCC for publishing a piece so very much against their normal daily efforts to promote those aspects of cycling criticised and questioned by this essay.
The syndrome/issue of cycling becoming unaffordable to so many could be summed up as: the bog-standard effects of the neoliberal economic hegemony and its associated cultural claptrap of "I am what I own". As the author of the piece suggests, this is no easy condition to shift or change now. If anything, it's going to get worse as the politics of extreme socio-economic hierarchy waxes and bloats.
*******
From the cycling-as-a-sport perspective, what's needed is: the ejection of big cycling business and its marketing from the sport; a much greater emphasis on the amateur rather than the fatuous glamour of the professional; a levelling of opportunity by standardising racing bikes to a basic same-for-all standard that promotes the abilities of the rider rather than those of their equipment.
That'll not happen. The vested interests in keeping the cycling markets as they are is immense. This market is not determined by some Adam Smith invisible hand but by the machinations of very greedy money-grubbers with no care at all for their customers other than the fatness of their wallets and the gullability of their fashion addiction.
WIll RoadCC do anything more (than publishing this essay) to reduce the effects of spurious expensive and fashion-driven cycling equipment? To do so would require them to make an enormous change to their business model of advertiser-posing-as-news source.
It's not the cost of equipment, it is the cost of living in general. The minimum wage is well over £10 now but rent, council tax, utilities have gone up by even more.
When you are spending half your take home salary on rent, trying to save a deposit, chasing the overtime etc there is not much time or money left for hobbies.
Fair point, but people will always find time or money for their hobbies. And cycling can double as a cheap means if transport which actually saves you money: being a cyclist is one of the things which allowed me to sell the car a few years ago.
And - while too many people *are* struggling - there are still plenty who have the money for expensive bikes, kit, cycling holidays, etc.
It would be interesting to know (and I have no idea of what the answer is) to what extent bicycle companies rely on the top end of the market to make their profits and to what extent average/low-end machines might actually be more expensive without the income from high-end bikes, e.g. if a company sells 10 £10k bikes with £5k profit on each and 100 £1000 bikes with £500 profit on each, if they didn't have the profit from the £10K bikes the £1000 bikes would have to go up to £1500 to make the same income.
It's a good point and while I have no idea about whether the industry relies on the high end segment in terms of revenue, they definitely do in other areas. The first one is the "halo effect", for example, for every top of the range model, unaffordable for many, there's multiple models down with a little more weight, cheaper (and more robust) components, that look and ride very similar for half the price or less. Secondly, the "trickle-down effect" where successive generations of stuff inherit features & performance from the previous ones.
In essence, today's lower & mid range bikes definitely benefit from the high end stuff developed in previous years, so that segment has to exist.
Just my opinion & $0.02 worth of course.
That's possibly an overlooked benefit of the 'gentrification' of cycling and the increase in top-end products. Lots of things that were ridiculously expensive when first introduced are now much more affordable, either used or - quite often - new.
When I started cycling back in the 1980's cycling clothing was hard to come by, the Ron Kitching catalogue or the limited (quite expensive) selection at the local bike shop. Now with Aldi, Lidl and Decathlon producing quality gear and very reasonable prices its a lot easier to kit yourself out. Whilst top-end bikes have become very expensive, the likes of Boardman and Decathlon offer great value for money. My son competes in mountain bike races, on a second hand bike and often in Aldi/Decathlon kit - he still manages to get on the podium.
I totally agree, I started cycling around the same time as you and I well remember poring over the unattainable gear in the Ron Kitching and Freewheel catalogues! Bikes that were suitable for decent-level racing were far more unattainable for the average income person than they are today and the secondhand market was very much more limited. I really don't understand the desire of "old sweats" to try to claim that cycling is more difficult to get into these days when, if you ignore the mad prices for top of the range machines that only GT riders (and probably not even them) actually need It's actually easier and cheaper to obtain decent, raceable bikes and kit than it has been at any point in my lifetime. Just as an example, in 1987, thanks to a generous legacy from a grandparent and finding a model in the LBS that someone had bought and returned as being the wrong size, I purchased a Raleigh Road Ace for £440, gorgeous bike, Reynolds 531c tubing and Shimano 600 groupset (the precursor of Ultegra). I rode it for thousands of (ecstatically happy) miles in tracksuit trousers, T-shirts and trainers because “proper” gear - especially shoes – was so expensive. According to the Bank of England, £440 in 1987 is £1245 today; just by visiting Decathlon I could equip myself with a new bike that's perfectly adequate for amateur racing and kit myself out head to toe for that money, if I went on the secondhand market I could get a machine equivalent to those used by professionals less than a decade ago for half that, e.g., last year I sold my 2014 Btwin Facet full carbon Ultegra Di2 road bike, as used by the 2015 AG2R development and France National u-19 squads, for £550. Provided people aren't put off by articles like this saying that cycling has become unattainable there's actually never been a better time to get into it without ridiculous expenditure.
Aren't AG2R literally racing in Decathlon kit on Decathlon bikes ?
Funnily enough, not yet but will be shortly: Decathlon bikes but AG2RLM had a contract to the end of this year for clothing with Italian kit maker Rosti, so although they proudly had Decathlon on their jerseys they also had Rosti's name, albeit in smaller letters. For 2025 they'll have Van Rysel jerseys.