Key Points
- ProVelo Super League brings everything into a tighter package
- National Road Series to be replaced by PSL
- Australian businessman and GreenEDGE cycling owner Gerry Ryan will back the PSL
- Potential outweighs risks of new venture
Watch all the best , with the Tour de France, Tour de France Femmes and much more.
A new Australian road cycling domestic series, the ProVelo Super League, has been announced as a replacement for the troubled National Road Series from 2025 onwards.
The well-backed league has some simple objectives. To bring the new series closer to the Australian summer of cycling time-wise to capitalise on the increased interest in cycling, location-wise to bring racing to population centres, and to expand the ways and opportunities the audience engages with the sport through television broadcast and digital platforms.
“So what we going to do is create a more compact racing series,” Pro Velo Super League co-founder Matt Wilson told SBS Sport. “Compact the format into a 10-12 week racing block, and also compact the tours. So, have a standardised format where we roll out on the Friday, have a criterium, a double stage day on the Saturday and then the queen stage on the Sunday.”
“As well as that, we’ll keep our big heritage classics with Melbourne to Warrnambool and Grafton to Inverell.”
Stream free On Demand
Men's Race Mini Recap
Highlights from the 2024 Melbourne to Warrnambool men's race
Highlights from the 2024 Melbourne to Warrnambool men's race
Crucially, the privately-owned league will have the backing of Australian cycling colossus Gerry Ryan, with the owner of the Greenedge team (currently racing as Jayco-AlUla and Liv AlUla Jayco) backing the private project that will be endorsed by, but sit separate from, the Australian national cycling organisation, AusCycling.
“He’s the sports greatest benefactor in this country over the last 25-30 years,” said Wilson. “There wouldn’t be many road cyclists in Australia that haven’t benefitted in one way or another from Gerry’s support.
“He was the first person we went to with this, and he was unwavering from the start that he wanted to support this. Having his experience, knowledge and passion behind this is huge.”
The ailing National Road Series becomes the shiny new ProVelo Super League
In short, the Auscycling National Road Series (NRS) will cease to exist, and the ProVelo Super League (PSL) will become the sole Australian domestic competition.
The competition will operate in a similar manner to the NRS in some ways, the PSL will act as the overall body for the league, running things like the broadcast production, promotion and framework for competition, while individual event organisers will retain responsibility for running events, local sponsors and organisation.
The series has canvassed a technical director for overall support for event delivery, a great need filled in standardising the quality and safety of races. The PSL will also make a financial contribution to event organisers.
Proposed calendar for the 2025 ProVelo Super Series
Rather than the current method of staging multi-stage tours in smaller towns to avoid problems of closing down major roads to make it easier to get permits to race from police, the new organisation will instead boldly target major cities, with Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane all on the agenda. The Tour of Tasmania is also slated for inclusion, a race with a lot of history and typically raced around Launceston and northern Tasmania.
The early races will be run around the mainstay events of the ‘Summer of Cycling’; the Tour Down Under, and the Cadel Evans’ Great Ocean Road Race. Later races will build off the initial limelight gleaned from the major cycling events, to build upon the identity of the new series.
This mostly involves the creation of new races in those areas, the most critical question is around the Melbourne race, with the Herald Sun Tour potentially a possibility to be included within the series or be an event that the PSL springboards off. It is the major domino to fall in the proposed calendar, with the Victorian stage race yet to be confirmed as returning in 2025.
READ MORE
Herald Sun Tour cancelled for 2021
Races will become more compact and centred around the weekend, with a Friday night criterium, Saturday time trial and kermesse, and Sunday featuring a road race. Friday and Sunday racing is slated for live broadcast, with livestreaming likely to be part of the mix, while the Saturday racing will have highlights.
What that means for events that were included in the NRS, but won’t join the PSL is as yet unclear. Auscycling Executive General Manager Sport Kipp Kaufmann, said that the races could exist outside the PSL.
“Our understanding is that there are only a couple of these events that will not move to the PSL,” said Kaufmann. “They can continue in the AusCycling calendar in other formats should they choose to do so.”
When asked whether the NRS would continue alongside the PSL, or if the new league didn’t end up materialising, the support for the new set-up is clear, with the NRS a back-up plan for 2025.
“We will fully support the PSL and are not seeking to have another national series,” said Kaufmann. “We are committed to ensuring that there is a National Road competition. If for any reason the PSL does not proceed we will have a series.”
The key points of the PSL launch
Who’s driving the change?
Managing Director of the ProVelo Super League, Gerry Ryan, is a familiar presence within Australian cycling circles. He is a businessman with diverse ventures from Jayco caravans to the Moulin’ Rouge musical, and a semi-philanthropic/business presence in the sporting world.
In cycling, a sport that domestically is strapped for cash otherwise, Ryan’s support of athletes and most recently his support of Greenedge Cycling, the only Australian team competing at the top level in road cycling, stands out.
The co-founders also bring their own gravitas to the proposal, with Matt Wilson a professional rider for 11 years before switching to being a sports director, then setting up the ARA Skip Capital team that has become one of the leaders in the domestic peloton in developing riders for professional pathways.
“We felt that the spread-out calendar was becoming difficult and the biggest issue was that nobody was watching the NRS any more,” said Wilson. “It was becoming more expensive to run events, events were having to charge teams more for entry fees, which meant teams were becoming more financially unviable as well.
“We need to turn all that on its head. To do that we needed to unlock some private equity to bolster it.”
Co-founder Aaron Flanagan is more the business and executive side of the operation, with experience working at board level, operations and consulting across a number of tourism and business properties. He’s also been involved with the running of sporting events like the Brisbane Cycling Festival and Noosa Enduro and speaks about delivering a different proposition for audiences of the new ProVelo Super League.
“It’s an exciting product cycling, right,” said Flanagan. “It’s about us building the product and educating new fans of the sport around the intricacies of it. We want to produce the broadcast differently, we want to take fans into the race.
“We want to mic-up directors, we want to mic-up riders where possible. We really want to use our broadcast platform to engage, and build a digital network for the league that will be really informative and allow fans to connect with the league on every level.”
Reception, caveats and potential
A meeting with teams and event organisers was held in the lead-up to the launch, and there was some questioning and scepticism around the new league. However, most agree with the league being the pathway forward, with Melbourne to Warrnambool, Tour of Gippsland and former Herald Sun Tour event organiser Karin Jones putting it succinctly when talking to SBS Sport.
“Something needed to change,” said Jones, “it wasn’t happening with AusCycling and I really think it’s going to be a great idea. The way we were going with a decline with AusCycling and the NRS, there wasn’t going to be one next year, this is the only option.”
Andrew Christie-Johnson is the most experienced person within domestic cycling in Australia, managing the current Team Bridgelane from the present dat back to its original form as Praties in the mid-2000s, nurturing a young Richie Porte in the sport. He was consulted early on the new league and was full of praise for the pragmatic direction and vision of the venture.
"You look at everything that is becoming more expensive, in general life as well as in cycling, and I think the three-day tours are affordable and an excellent idea," said Christie-Johnson. "Racing in summer, we love to race all year round, but if you’re showcasing a period, let’s do the summer.
"It’s better for a crowd to come out and have a beer watching a bike race than expecting them to show up in winter."
From a media perspective, I’ll lean on my own experience covering the NRS for the last nine years in saying that moving to major cities is a critical factor in the new league, both for general interest and for broadcast. In the past, a traditional broadcast has been impossible without helicopters or phone coverage, which is notoriously disrupted across regional Australia, where the majority of races were held.
Bringing the season together to a stable offering in a three-month window, and building it off the summer of cycling brings an easily digestible narrative for broadcasters and media organisations to bring to an audience, rather than wondering if the next race will be cancelled or what the broadcast offering will be from the organisers.
Equality being evident right from the first moment of the league is brilliant to see as well, with not only equal prize money, race days and exposure for women and men in the new league, but also no question that it would be anything other than that throughout the early briefs.
ProVelo Super League launch event in Melbourne (Pic: Christophe Mallet)
The season is short on race days, but it's not a massive reduction from past years, and a stable foundation with a shorter calendar doesn't preclude potential expansion in following years.
A major risk is the potential of diluting what makes road cycling great for riders and audiences alike, true tests of endurance, tactics and skill across varied terrain that makes the countryside the stadium. The proposed format of a Friday criterium, Saturday double race time trial plus kermesse, with a queen stage road race on the Sunday might compromise the core appeal of road cycling a little too much to entrance new and existing audiences.
Christie-Johnson weighed in on the point, making the case for a more popular series that doesn't just cater to the purists and the notion of an ideal race.
"It won’t be the most desirable format for cyclists, but I think we owe it to the sport to showcase it in a better light," said Christie-Johnson. "Road stages can be boring - you sitting in a team car, watching all the action, it can be great - but watching from the road, you’d be lucky to see anything some days. Criteriums you can watch it all."
The other is that very little is finalised at this stage, SBS Sport understands very little has been signed in terms of contracts between event organisers and the PSL or with contracting key staff. A lot of the current drive and launch is around getting all the stakeholders on board for this new venture, so there is little concrete in place at present.
All those detractions and queries will be forgotten if the league, as it promises, brings a new direction to road cycling. A driving force creating more interest in domestic cycling, building an audience and bringing events to public relevance is what the sport has been crying out for domestically for a long time.
While there are risks, the potential of the ProVelo Super League to grow the sport to new levels in Australia is real and the pathway is clear.
