I knew that when we decided to dedicate the cover of Bicycling’s 2021 Issue 5 to Justin Williams and on it call him the world’s most important bike racer, I would be ridiculed by some as a racing ignoramus—I mean, just to start, how in the hell could I ignore the way van Aert and van der Poel and van Vleuten and van der Breggen and Vos and Pogačar and so many others are forging a new golden era in which to be considered one of the best you must excel at all kinds of races? But I went ahead anyway and said what I said about Williams. Because it’s true.
As Carvell Wallace says in his story on Williams, the racer “has taken it upon himself to represent for every Black cyclist,” but also for “every marginalized rider, every person who has been told, ‘You don’t belong here.’” Inextricable from this ambition is his determination to resurrect the criterium as the quintessential American race—and in the process make it bigger and more lucrative than it ever was.
I was around when mountain-bike racing was born in the United States, then watched it shed its homegrown character to become an international sport. If gravel racing continues to spike in popularity, it will follow a similar trajectory. (I know, I know, it’s too pure to ever be ruined, but there was also NO WAY it would ever happen to mountain biking. Trust me on this one.) And try as we might—from the Tour de Trump/Tour Dupont as far back as 1989 to the Tour of California’s demise after 2019—we’ve fought and fought yet failed to establish stage racing as a pillar of American cycling. We are capable of sporadically exporting successful stage racers—Coryn Rivera! Sepp Kuss!—over to Europe, the homeland of Grand Tours, but we just can’t seem to make our own multi-day races work. And maybe we shouldn’t even try anymore.
In the view of some longtime racing nerds, including me, it was in fact our obsession with Grand Tour–style competitions that decimated the sole type of racing at which our country can truly excel. This is a vastly simplified explanation, but to participate in our sparse but high-profile stage races, our best domestic teams and most important race and team sponsors diverted their funds and focus away from crit racing. Eventually, for young American racers there was no longer a career path that didn’t funnel them toward Europe, and for various reasons (from the size of our country to the inclinations of our sports fans) stage racing never developed into a stable, popular, profitable form of entertainment.
Crits are simpler to understand and watch, to broadcast, to promote, and, for reasons Williams explains well, easier for any aspiring racer to take part in. We’ve been here before. Years ago, our top cyclists specialized in or participated in crits, even those who’d found success overseas, such as Davis Phinney, a sprinter who was the first American to win a road stage in the Tour de France. Domestic crit racers could scratch together a livable wage from crits, and riders from other countries would relocate here to do so.
Because of his vision, his swagger, his shit-talking, and the results of his team, Williams is empowered with a unique capability in this moment to push for equitable access and rewards for all competitive cyclists, and to revive American racing at the same time. Across all types of bike racing all over the world, no one else has a better chance at effecting such a major transformation.
You Might Also Like