'We're still not in modern cycling' - Thomas Van Den Spiegel and the push to reform the WorldTour

With Omloop Het Nieuwsblad on the horizon, Tomas Van Den Spiegel is a busy man this week, even if he shrugs off the idea. “The thing is, I’m always busy,” laughs the former basketball player, who became CEO of Flanders Classics in 2018.

The organisation had already made significant tweaks to its races in order to boost their commercial viability, most notably when the finale of the Tour of Flanders was altered in 2012 to facilitate a finishing circuit and VIP tents on the Oude Kwaremont. That delicate balancing act between innovation and tradition has been maintained through Van Den Spiegel’s time at the helm.

“I always say that I’m trying to make our races and what we do future-proof, but without neglecting the heritage of it all,” Van Den Spiegel tells us. “I think it’s a unique selling point to have that heritage, but we need to make sure that we don’t get stuck in the heritage: that’s the challenge.”

Van Den Spiegel’s innovations have included having his women’s races finish after the men’s races to boost television coverage, making adjustments to Brabantse Pijl and, more recently, a renaming of Gent-Wevelgem.

The Belgian has also made little secret of his desire to bring about changes to the cycling calendar and reform to the sport’s economic model. This week, Van Den Spiegel spoke to Domestique about his vision for Flanders Classics and cycling at large.

There was a lot of discussion over the winter about paid ticketing at bike races. At your races, there are already a lot of VIP sections, and it seems like you’re trying to find a balance between commercial imperatives and the traditional idea that cycling should be free to view. Is that something that will change in the future?

I think cycling – especially in Flanders, but not just here – has historically has always been the people’s sport, so we need to make sure that we preserve that. There will always be free cycling, but that doesn’t prevent us from giving thought to certain things, like the way we did it with the VIP sections. The fact that it also should be for free shouldn’t prevent us from giving thought to certain business cases that we think that are feasible and that the sport would also benefit from.

But the thing is, it’s also public domain, so you need permits from authorities. I always tell people, if you’re not involved in organising cycling, then you have no clue how complicated it is… We have tried to find a model around our courses that has offered some commercial possibilities without touching the history of how cycling races have been always run, making sure that there is something for everyone.

Right now, with our VIP sections, we are in a B2B environment and everything apart from that is just regular fans, so I think there’s still some untapped audience there in between. But we’ve done a lot of studies on that, and we haven’t found the one business case yet that will change what we are doing today. 

It would be too easy to say we could make the Kwaremont all ticketed, but it’s not worth it. From a commercial perspective, I think it would probably generate some income, but at the same time, you risk touching the product too much in a harmful way, in a way that you shouldn’t do or a way that the sport is not ready for yet. And we need to be better than that.

This year, the name of Gent-Wevelgem changes. Can you explain how a change like that happens and why? Because I imagine you’ve also had interest sponsors wanting to buy the naming rights for the Ronde, for example…

We’ve never put the naming rights for the Ronde on the market, because we protect our heritage, but Gent-Wevelgem was quite particular because it hasn’t started from Gent for decades. In recent years, we ran it from Ieper, but with the subtitle ‘In Flanders Fields,’ because we have been using it as a platform to tell the story of World War I in a certain way.

We wanted to build on that, and then we had to change the start town this year, so we thought the moment was there to turn it around and to start naming it ‘In Flanders Fields.’ We didn’t want to start calling it Middelkerke-Wevelgem, because then we would look like we were just selling out on the Gent-Wevelgem name, and that’s something we didn’t want to do.

But it’s an evolution, because we have cities that are paying us money for marketing purposes, and we need to be able to look in the mirror as well when they tell us, ‘Look, we want to invest.’ If we want them to invest, it’s very hard to do that with the Gent-Wevelgem name. 

We thought, ‘How are we still going to tell a story that we’ve been telling for many years without throwing everything that Gent-Wevelgem has built overboard?’ We didn’t decide that in a blink of an eye. We really gave it some thought and we really stand behind it. 

Speaking of things that aren’t decided in the blink of an eye, we’ve been talking about reforms to the cycling calendar for decades… More recently, the UCI announced this consultation period, asking for stakeholders to bring their ideas. Now, there was already an idea brought to them via One Cycling last year that they rejected, but what would you like to see happen with this call for consultation and ideas from the UCI?

It’s been reduced to the One Cycling initiative over the past years, but there have been plans for reform since the early 2000s, since Hein Verbruggen. We want to make our assets – our races – future-proof, whether it’s cyclocross or road racing.

We’ve seen a lot of consolidation over the past years, and we have a couple of organisers that have become very big, controlling a lot of race days. We have seen also that the ones that don’t belong to that landscape are having a harder and a harder time, because organising in the modern times is very hard.

I think the whole environment realises that something needs to happen if we want to make sure that we preserve all types and all categories and all levels of racing. The UCI also realises that we cannot preserve the model that we have today for another 10, 15 years, with a lot of race days, a lot of different levels. 

It’s very hard to compete with a lot of other sports that have evolved and attracted a lot of investment. We all know that we are a sport with global potential, but we are a sport that is not using its full potential today. We are all willing to do something about that. The only thing is: what is the endgame? And that is very hard, to get aligned on the endgame.

From a calendar and format perspective, it’s very hard. To try to extrapolate what we did with Flanders Classics to the whole landscape and then give the product a lot of thought is the challenge. And then of course, the other challenge is that once these discussions start, everyone is thinking – rightfully so, of course – about their own races, and then the teams also start to think about their own rights. 

Without becoming too concrete, I think we know that we cannot have 200 race days and overlapping events in the WorldTour, that makes no sense. We know that we need a reduction of the number of days, and we know that teams are willing to think about the product as well if they can get a share of the cake. I think we need to go sit around the table again with the important stakeholders and create that sense of urgency again. You really need to make sure that in 2035, we can stand next to some other sports that might have already passed us or will pass us in the future. But, well, I could talk for three hours about that….

If you were inventing cycling from scratch today, there are lots of races that wouldn’t exist in their current format but they’re also a crucial part of the fabric of the sport, so there’s always this tension between innovation and tradition. Flanders Classics has managed that quite well, but it’s probably not so easy to expand that concept to the whole sport...

No, and it a lot of courage as well. We do have a lot of people with courage, I think, in the landscape, but we all need to be courageous, and the incentive should be to be part of the group of people that has shaped modern cycling. And today, we’re still not there. We’re still not in modern cycling. We’re still building and trying to maximise on history, but we’re not trying to reshape cycling. 

And I think I always said that the incentive for me to put a lot of time and effort into these projects is that I want to be in that picture one day. That should be our legacy, and I think that’s what we should aim for. 

I would give all credit to ASO for what they have done, and I think it’s very hard to say whether we would have done things differently if we were in their shoes. To be honest, I think we would have done things differently, but we shouldn’t play the blame game and try to point fingers, because I think everyone, logically so, is trying to protect what they have.

We’ve always said that our position is that we believe in an integrated model where there’s room for everyone, with a strong top tier, with a very strong second tier when it comes to races, and with a model where there’s a type of sharing with teams in a different way than what we have today.

There’s a lot of work ahead of us, and I hope that everyone goes into the future discussions and consultations with a constructive approach, and with a sense of urgency that we really need to go ahead with the reform.

What’s the most urgent challenge for cycling over the next 10 years?

The world has changed and our audience is changing. We’re growing older with our audience, and that’s the challenge we have as a sport. In other sports, you see a lot of evolution, and almost revolutions in certain places. In cycling, we are just building on the past. We improve probably with baby steps, and we try to do better, but we haven’t made the sport ready for the future yet.

On the future, the most important part of your business is the races in Belgium, but we also see Flanders Classics working more with foreign races, like at Amstel and the Tour de Suisse. Are there ambitions for the company to grow, to take full control of the organisation of big races further afield?

We’re always exploring the landscape. We’ve become quite international with cyclocross, with Amstel and Tour de Suisse, so we’re already involved in some races outside of Belgium. There are a lot of races probably interested in partnering with us or even being acquired by us, but that wouldn’t help the future. We would just become a bigger player in the room, but then maybe the puzzle would even become more difficult, not just for ourselves but also for a potential reform. 

It’s like we’re waiting a little bit right now. We always like to be part of any discussion because we think we have something to bring to the table with our vision and what we’ve done, but we also don’t want to make it more complicated, so let’s see where this goes.

Right now, we have big brands coming into the sport, so everyone sees the potential, and these brands are also becoming team owners, and I think this is a good sign. But we need to make sure that none of the parties overplay their hand, whether it’s the teams, the UCI, or the organisers. I think we all realise we want to do something, but we need to do it with each other. And I think that’s my key message.

There should be some way of coming out of this with something that we all consider a better value proposition for the sport, and something where we can all benefit from – not just the big organisers, but also what I call second-tier organisers. Not every one of our races is the Tour of Flanders, and we need to realise that. We cannot expect all these races to have Tadej Pogačar and Mathieu van der Poel at the start line, but this doesn’t mean that these races don’t have a future.

I think we’ve created a good set of races that all have their own attractivity and their own USP, and they have a reason to exist at a certain level, and there’s a lot of value in that as well. But today, I think the fragmentation of the races and the calendar makes it hard for a lot of races in that situation to be sustainable.

With regard to women’s cycling, shifting the races to finish after the men has been a welcome evolution, but is there ever a point where the women’s Ronde will be on the Saturday instead of the Sunday? Or is the sportive too big an obstacle?

Well, that’s one reason, but the other reason is I think there eventually will be a tipping point where we can say that a standalone women’s race needs its own place on the calendar. I really believe that, but I don’t think we’re at that tipping point yet. I think that the slipstream of the men’s races is still of big value for women’s races, and you see this year that Paris-Roubaix has come away from having the races on separate days.

Women’s cycling has grown quite explosively over the past years, and we need to cherish that, but I still think that we need to solve some of the other of the growing pains before we can consider it. I hope we will be the first ones to do that one day, but we have a really good feel of what’s working and what’s not working. And I think it’s still working very well to have the women’s races after the men’s races for now.

When Vincenzo Nibali came to ride the Tour of Flanders in 2018, your first year, it was a big novelty to have a Grand Tour rider at the Ronde, but that’s obviously changed in the Pogačar era. So what are the chances we will see Remco Evenepoel at the Ronde this year?

My feeling doesn’t matter, but of course I hope so. Above all, I think he could be a real fit for the race. Maybe not in the first attempt, but the course could be a real fit for him in time. 

But at the same time, I’ve never gotten involved in riders’ programmes, and I won’t. We just try to offer the best possible races, and I hope they value that. And of course, I really hope to see Remco this year, because that would really prove that having the best riders in the best races is not an illusion. 

I think we’ve been saying ‘the best riders in the best races’ for a long time now. I hope that is something for the near future, and if it’s already this year, then we would be very grateful. But I can’t answer it…

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.