Pregnancy is protected. But who protects the teams?

I still remember sitting around the table when we were laying the foundations of the team that is today AG Insurance–Soudal. Budget meetings were never the highlight of the job, but they were where reality hit hardest.

We tried to prepare for every situation we believed a professional cycling team could face. Serious crashes, long term injuries, riders leaving unexpectedly, sponsors changing direction. Every scenario had consequences for the sporting programme and for the budget.

Over the past few months, pregnancy announcements from Women’s WorldTour riders Emma Norsgaard Bjerg (Lidl-Trek), Élise Chabbey (FDJ United - SUEZ) and Pauliena Rooijakkers (UAE Team ADQ) brought those meetings back to mind. Women’s cycling has changed enormously since those days, and thankfully so.

A professional rider should never have to choose between becoming a mother and continuing her career. The UCI deserves credit for the progress that has been made, and organisations such as The Cyclists' Alliance deserve enormous recognition for the work they have done to get maternity protection onto the agenda.

Contracts can no longer be terminated because of pregnancy, and Women's WorldTeams can register temporary replacement riders. Those are significant milestones in the professionalisation of women's cycling. In many ways, that success creates the next challenge.

The purpose of maternity protection is to remove uncertainty for riders. If today's regulations give more women the confidence to start a family during their career rather than waiting until retirement, that should be celebrated.

It would mean the regulations are achieving exactly what they were designed to achieve. It also means the sport should be ready for what comes next.

When we were building a team back then, pregnancy simply wasn't something we discussed. Women's cycling wasn't there yet.

Running a professional cycling team means accepting uncertainty. You budget for crashes because they happen. You budget for injuries because they are inevitable.

You build your squad knowing riders may leave at the end of the season. Those are realities every team manager understands.

But you don't sit around a budget meeting expecting to lose one of your leaders for twelve to eighteen months because she decides to start a family. I don't mean this as criticism, but it is simply the reality of elite sport.

The moment a rider announces she is pregnant, she disappears from the race programme. If she is one of your leaders, the sporting project changes immediately.

Race programmes are rewritten, performance goals are adjusted, and sponsors inevitably see less of one of the riders they invested in. What follows is pregnancy, childbirth, recovery, rehabilitation and, eventually, a return to elite competition.

Every rider's journey is different, and every return takes its own course. As a team manager, however, you cannot build a sporting project around the most optimistic scenario.

You build it around the most realistic one. In practice, teams often have to prepare for the possibility that one of their key riders will not be available at the highest level for twelve to eighteen months.

Today, I see this discussion from a different perspective. Through RightMatch Agency, I work with riders every day, so I understand exactly why maternity protection matters.

I also know what it means to build and manage a professional team. Those experiences don't contradict each other, but they reinforce one belief.

Rights are only as strong as the organisations that can afford to uphold them.

Unless I've overlooked something in the UCI regulations, there is currently no collective mechanism within professional cycling that redistributes the financial impact of maternity leave across the sport itself. Employment law, social security and insurance systems differ from country to country, meaning some teams recover part of those costs while others carry a much larger share of the financial responsibility.

That leaves teams in very different positions. For the biggest organisations, absorbing one long term absence may be manageable.

For smaller teams operating with significantly tighter budgets, the impact can be much greater. If two or three riders become unavailable during the same period, the challenge changes completely.

A temporary replacement rider helps solve part of the sporting problem, but it doesn't automatically solve the financial one. In many cases, a team continues carrying a substantial contractual commitment while also investing in another rider to remain competitive.

Women's cycling has collectively decided that motherhood deserves protection. I completely agree with that decision.

What the sport has not yet done is collectively organise the financial consequences of that decision.

Every major change in a professional sport has sporting, legal and financial consequences. Women's cycling has rightly focused on the first two.

The sporting and social case for maternity protection is clear. The financial consequences deserve the same level of attention.

If professional cycling wants to continue evolving, it should also be prepared to ask whether the financial model supporting these regulations is as sustainable as the regulations themselves. I don't mean that as criticism of the decision, but it is part of making sure the decision remains sustainable for the next decade.

For years, we've discussed minimum salaries, better contracts, health insurance and maternity protection. Every one of those conversations has strengthened women's cycling.

Rights have been professionalised. The financial model hasn't necessarily kept pace.

I don't pretend to have the answer. My aim isn't to criticise the regulations or question the protection riders now rightly have. My question is much simpler.

Women's cycling has already answered one important question: should riders be protected during pregnancy? Thankfully, the answer is yes.

The next question is whether the financial model is ready to support that answer over the next ten years. Because rights are only as strong as the organisations that can afford to uphold them.