“I’ve by no means received such a giant race,” mentioned bike owner Cédrine Kerbaol in 2024, beaming in a post-race interview. She had simply received a stage of the Tour de France Femmes after a 15km solo assault, making historical past as the occasion’s first-ever French stage winner, and securing her crew Ceratizit-WNT Professional Biking’s most prestigious victory. “It is loopy.”
Loads can change in a 12 months. Kerbaol left for EF Schooling-Oatly on the finish of the season, activating a get-out clause after the crew had some hiccups registering for his or her WorldTour license. Then, in September 2025, Ceratizit Professional Biking’s basic supervisor Claude Solar was compelled to shut the crew he’d spent greater than a decade constructing. “It is your child,” he tells Cyclingnews. “You have bought an excellent relationship with all of the riders – it is like your loved ones. And from the sports activities standpoint, it is not an excellent factor.”
The irony is that girls’s biking has by no means been larger: the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift is broadcast in 190 completely different international locations, with 7.7 million viewers watching the ultimate stage final 12 months, based on France TV. There may be more cash, extra professionalism. The Girls’s WorldTour stage was launched in 2020, the common WorldTour crew funds has risen to €4.67 million, and the UCI’s minimal wage necessities are virtually in step with the lads’s. However with prices hovering, groups like Ceratizit are struggling to remain afloat. Is ladies’s biking turning into a sufferer of its personal success?
Solar, who was beforehand gross sales supervisor for the B2B reducing and machining instruments firm, launched the crew, then often known as WNT, in 2014. The goal was to advertise the enterprise – diluting the model’s masculine picture by sponsoring a ladies’s crew – and, he says, to “develop new expertise, crucial for us, and have a global crew.” In 2019, the crew moved from Sheffield to Germany, signing riders like Kirsten Wild, Clara Koppenburg and Lisa Brennauer. It joined the WorldTour in 2024, and, over its 11 seasons, achieved 65 highway victories – 13 within the WorldTour – and 4 Olympic medals, hardly poor outcomes.
Solar approached 5 completely different groups in 2024 and 2025 – together with Lotto, Ineos Grenadiers, Cofidis and Decathlon – to debate a possible merger. He initially focused males’s groups with no ladies’s counterpart, in addition to Lotto, with whom Ceratizit shared Orbea as a motorbike sponsor.
“I used to be very optimistic, as a result of we had a WorldTour crew which was quantity 10 worldwide on the time,” says Solar. “However sadly, the financial state of affairs for the lads’s groups was the identical… They’d no funds, or no real interest in ladies’s [cycling], as a result of the prices have exploded.”
For a 12 months and a half, Solar contacted potential title sponsors, solely to obtain the identical reply. “We all the time thought we might discover a answer… We had so many discussions,” he says. “It was all the time the identical: no funds.”
Solar is just not alone in having to shut his crew within the final 12 months. US-based Continental crew Cynisca introduced a “strategic hiatus” final 12 months after falling in need of its $1 million sponsorship objective, whereas Arkéa-B&B Motels folded each its males’s and ladies’s groups on the finish of 2025.
“For my part, the event of ladies’s biking over the past 4 years was too quick,” says Solar. “I can think about that the UCI wished to realize the identical stage [as men] for ladies: groups, tradition, funds. However they forgot one factor: the sponsor. The sponsors give the cash. The sponsors pay the UCI… When the funds will increase, the sponsors need to pay. I do know, as a result of I used to be the sponsor.”
Rising prices, however not rising funding?
It’s a good storm: a mix of quickly multiplying prices and income from sponsorship unable to maintain up. In 2014, Solar had a funds of €400,000 for the crew. By the point Ceratizit closed in 2025, this had risen to €3.2 million, a rise of 700 per cent. And it nonetheless wasn’t sufficient. In response to Solar, it prices round €5 million a 12 months to run a ladies’s WorldTour crew now; the common had been €2.4 million in 2022. “It is like in an organization: you have bought the identical turnover, however your personnel prices double. If you don’t discover a new sponsor or enhance your funds someplace, you have bought a giant difficulty.”
Biking’s drawback, after all, is its dependence on sponsorship. Roughly 85 per cent of a median crew’s income comes from its sponsors. With prices ballooning, groups have two choices: persuade their sponsors to pay extra, or discover extra sponsors. That is simpler mentioned than carried out. On the crew’s inception, Solar says the return on funding was 1:10, that means the sponsor earned €10 for each Euro invested. Now, although, he believes this has fallen to 1:7. “The sponsor’s worth has not elevated by 100 per cent [since 2022],” says Solar. “When it comes to the cash to pay for a crew, you have bought solely the sponsorship. That is harmful.”
For crew managers, it’s outgoings like journey, lodging, workers, meals and, more and more, altitude camps, which have risen most. Holding a WorldTour licence carries its personal price ticket, and new guidelines are making it much more costly: as of this season, there may be an obligation to compete in additional races – together with all three Grand Excursions – with groups solely capable of skip one of many remaining 24 WorldTour races. This implies extra riders, extra transport, extra workers, extra bikes – and more cash.
For some groups, the prices connected to a WorldTour licence are just too excessive to compete in what was as soon as each crew’s goal league. Final 12 months, Basque outfit Laboral Kutxa-Fundacion Euskadi had been the Fifteenth-ranked crew on the earth – sufficient to earn a WorldTour license – however determined to stay a ProTeam, regardless of its long-held objective of becoming a member of the WorldTour.
“Three years in the past, we arrange a funds to be a WorldTour crew. Immediately, we’ve that funds, however the actuality is that it is not sufficient to be a high WorldTour crew,” basic supervisor Aitor Galdos instructed Cyclingnews in November. “We’re maintaining our present class.”
Likewise, rising salaries within the sport are rightly hailed as a step towards gender parity. Nearly all of ladies’s WorldTour riders now earn between €80,000 and €100,000 a 12 months, with Demi Vollering rumoured to earn as much as €1 million. The introduction of huge brokers to ladies’s sport is inflating salaries additional, managers say.
“It is good for the rider,” says Solar. “However the improvement of the riders’ agent is a giant difficulty, as a result of they scent cash. It is like when you’ve got a lake with some fish in it, and everyone needs to have the identical fish. Should you take the identical fish for 2 or thrice more cash, the agent can take the cash, 10 per cent, however the fish won’t go quicker.”
With out the funds to pay bigger salaries, it’s tougher to retain expertise, with some riders buying and selling management at a smaller crew in favour of a higher-paid domestique position elsewhere. Kerbaol, for instance, terminated her Ceratizit contract a 12 months early to hitch EF Schooling-Oatly, regardless of it being – at that time – a step down from the WorldTour to ProTeam stage, although possible for a better wage.
Not like sports activities like soccer, there aren’t any switch or improvement charges for groups which have invested in and developed younger riders. Consequently, the ever-increasing hole between the richest “superteams” on the high of the WorldTour, like Lidl-Trek, SD Worx-Protime and UAE Crew ADQ, and people on the backside, like Ceratizit, is widening. “The larger groups have gotten larger, and the smaller groups are in difficulties,” says Solar. “For my part, the small ladies’s groups don’t have any future anymore. Financially, you can not survive within the WorldTour.”
Pragmatic choices to outlive
FDJ United-Suez completed final season because the top-ranked ladies’s crew, and, with riders like Demi Vollering, Juliette Berthet (née Labous), Évita Muzic and Elise Chabbey, is now one of many sport’s ‘superteams’. However they too are beneath strain. The crew is known to have a funds of round €5 million, in comparison with the €7 to €8 million budgets of the richest groups. For over a decade, manager-owner Stephen Delcourt has factored in an annual funds enhance of between 5 and 10 per cent – however within the final 12 months alone, his prices have elevated by 29 per cent.
“We’re like a start-up with out funds,” he says. “We play with cash that we do not have in our pockets. That is harmful. The consequence is that we’ve 15 WorldTour spots, and solely 14 [teams] apply. We have to analyse that. We go too quick as a result of we’ve no guidelines. There may be area for the large groups, however for the others, there isn’t a place.”
Like Solar, Delcourt has been struck by the rise in personnel prices, with participation within the WorldTour calendar turning into more and more costly. Race organisers usually subsidise journey for groups to compete in races. However one of many issues, says Delcourt, is that regardless of having related expenditure, this contribution is way smaller for ladies’s groups. For the Santos Tour Down Underneath, males’s groups obtained €60,000, whereas ladies’s outfits had been paid solely €25,000, regardless of participation costing FDJ €31,000.
“How can we proceed in 2026 to have a distinction like this?” he asks. “In biking, we pay to work. After we go to Paris-Roubaix or Flèche, the price of the journey is dearer than the charges I get again.”
Consequently, Delcourt has needed to make pragmatic, budget-conscious choices in regards to the coming season. He has slimmed his crew down from 18 to 16 riders, and is planning a diminished racing calendar with extra targeted objectives. “There’s a funds resolution and a sport resolution,” he says. “I actually really feel that if [costs] proceed to extend at 29 per cent, I must be calm and never go too quick. And with the new UCI guidelines, I need to watch out.”
However, the game’s rising profile and FDJ United-Suez’s roster of star riders have helped to entice new sponsors. When the crew signed Vollering in 2024, it led to high-profile collaborations with each Nike and Specialised, which changed long-term associate Lapierre because the crew’s bike sponsor and is known to contribute to Vollering’s wage. And mid-season final 12 months, FDJ United-Suez signed new offers with aparthotel model Adagio and insurance coverage firm Gan Assurances. As a crew, they appear to usually add new sponsors. Curiosity in sponsoring ladies’s groups is booming, says Delcourt, but it surely stays tougher than ever to shut partnership offers.
“After we began the crew in 2006, it was exhausting, as a result of no person knew [about women’s cycling]. Now, it is simpler to realize the eye of larger manufacturers as a result of we’ve visibility, we’ve numbers – and we’re primary on the earth. It’s exhausting to conclude the deal now, due to the worldwide financial system. Everyone is afraid that tomorrow Trump will put a tax on Europe. I really feel that everyone needs a ladies’s crew – everyone needs to be concerned in my crew, particularly – however they are saying they should wait.”
Zwift is considered one of ladies’s biking’s most distinguished sponsors, funding each Canyon-SRAM and Fenix-Premier Tech in addition to races like Paris-Roubaix and the Tour de France Femmes, which represents the corporate’s single greatest advertising and marketing funding. It’s eager to encourage different potential sponsors to observe go well with. “We need to be part of the answer, says Kate Veronneau, director of ladies’s technique. “We recognise that the game is rising actually quick, and we need to be sure that extra traders are coming to the desk, so we attempt to share as a lot as attainable that this has been a optimistic transfer for us on so many ranges – not simply pure return on funding, however on sentiment, on model worth, on who we’re and our group feeling good about being Zwifters.”
The sponsorship panorama has modified since Zwift began supporting Canyon-SRAM in 2016, and Veronneau says return on funding has elevated. Athletes are not as accessible, however audiences are larger than ever. “The way in which that the game is rising, and the rise of followers simply means extra publicity for us, and that we’re reaching larger world audiences,” says Veronneau. “To see how a lot additional these sponsorship {dollars} go now, as a result of extra folks have entry and visibility into ladies’s biking – that is seen all of us get much more return on funding.”
On the floor, the game seems to be thriving – thanks partially to firms like Zwift. However whereas some groups are buoyed up by the wave, others are borne down beneath it, unable to remain afloat. Solar has terminated his contracts along with his sponsors, shut down his services, and is within the strategy of promoting off Ceratizit’s outdated inventory.
“This isn’t unfavourable,” he says, itemizing the crew’s achievements. “We had 70 completely different riders, we have got good contact with all of them, we love them, and we pushed ladies’s biking. Maybe our time is over. It is not a foul factor. It was an excellent time. The longer term will inform us what’s going to occur subsequent.”