When the Tour de France starts on Saturday, cycling fans in the US will be without a serious home contender for the yellow jersey in the world’s best-known bicycle race. The omission of Tejay van Garderen from the BMC team’s lineup leaves the Cannondale-Drapac team fielding the three US riders in the race.

While many will be glad to see Taylor Phinney belatedly debut in the Tour, where he and Nathan Brown will support the team’s co-leader Andrew Talansky, the best that can realistically be hoped for from this team is a frequent presence in breakaway groups and at the front end of the 198-rider peloton as they hunt for stage wins.

A new, clean, grand Tour winner would be a great thing for cycling in the US not only to help erase the painful memories of the Lance Armstrong scandal, but also to reestablish the credibility of the entire sport in the American mainstream.

Derek Bouchard-Hall, the president of the sport’s governing body in America, USA Cycling, is a former professional cyclist who competed in European classic races such as Paris-Roubaix and Gent-Wevelgem. “Having a Tour de France winner would be very significant. Greg LeMond was transformative, he brought me into cycling. The Tour de France is the only cycling event that brings significant general public attention [in the US]. It will put cycling on the pages of major newspapers, sporting magazines, television, we know this from the LeMond and Armstrong eras,” he says.

Devoted cycling fans long for the years when the big races were given prominent time slots on major US television networks. These days most of the racing that is shown comes on in the wee small hours of the morning.

Given that the Tour de France is the only reference point to bicycle racing for many Americans, awareness of cycling in the mainstream may be slowly fading. Or alternatively maybe that awareness is just growing more organically from the grassroots up. Many insiders see healthy growth in the sport with more participation in disciplines outside the traditions of men’s road racing.

Brook Watts, a USA Cycling board member and event organizer who brought the cyclocross world cup to the USA for the first time in 2015, says: “Even with a [Tour de France] champ, I don’t think the US would see a big boost in numbers. It would be a blip on the radar screen. We’re probably where we’re going to end up.”

Watts is among many who think American cycling has matured beyond its narrow focus on the men’s pro road circuit. Cyclocross has boomed in the US during the past decade, gran fondos are immensely popular, track cycling is on another upswing, and the gravel racing phenomenon has provided thousands of riders with fabulous new experiences.

“There are lots more ways for cyclists to get their competitive jollies now,” says Watts. “You can even do it online, using Strava.com to compare your times to big name riders. And as for riding, I’m almost exclusively using my ‘cross bike on dirt roads and trails these days. I’m less interested in fighting the traffic.”

All this isn’t so bad says Watts, who points to the major growth area for competitive cycling in the US. “Look at women’s racing. US women are energized, we turn out some of the best female cyclists across all disciplines, a women’s junior racing cyclist sees no limits.”

Andrew Talansky (left) and Nathan Brown are two of the three US riders in this year’s Tour. Photograph: Philippe Lopez/AFP/Getty Images

Two years ago the USA Cycling Track Team of the Year award went to the Minnesota-based women’s racing team Koochella. The Koochella team started in 2013 and now counts more than a hundred women in its community. The founder, Anna Schwinn, attributes this interest to factors such as a strong community with an interest in healthy, active lifestyles, as well as the increased frequency of equal prize purses for women and men.

Bouchard-Hall is abreast of the changes in US domestic cycling, particularly the growth in women’s participation. While USA Cycling continues to develop talent in the men’s road racing field, Bouchard-Hall says resource allocation is increasing in several other areas of the sport and in particular female talent. “It’s hard for us to engineer another winner of the Tour de France, but what we can change is the resources available to women. America’s female talent pool is vast compared to most other countries,” he says.

And then there is the National Interscholastic Cycling Association. This started out in in the year 2000 as a high school mountain bike club in Berkeley, California, and by now has grown to a national youth development organization with mountain bike racing leagues in 18 U.S. states embracing 12,000 students and 4,500 coaches. Another five states are lining up to launch NICA leagues in 2018.

Although the mission of NICA is not to develop elite racing talent this tends to be a byproduct of what their program, and many of those riders go on to success in road cycling. “I looked extensively to NICA athletes for upcoming talent,” said the former US Under-23 national coach Mike Sayers, who now runs a cycling performance clinic in Sacramento, California.

“Training has moved along a lot even since I was a pro,” says Sayers. “Power meters are a big part of this and riders are using every minute available now to achieve clearly defined goals. They can achieve in five hours what it might have taken us 10 when I was coming up. The level of the good young riders now is phenomenal.”

Along with this, he reckons, comes increased pressure to perform. “There’s some urgency now for a rising star. If you’re that good you’ll earn a lot, but the question for the team is how long can they continue to pay the big contract fees before they see major wins.”

“I was always urging our young riders to take more risks, challenge the established names. They need a sense of urgency, because they don’t have much time. And in the European peloton it’s tough. Nobody gives them anything, there are no pats on the back.”

Sayers adds that the stakes may be lower for young US riders to succeed. “Look at it this way, if a Colombian rider has a successful pro career it might affect several generations in the family,” he says. “In a US family, it might affect just a single generation. It’s not necessarily that huge a deal here.”

Among the rising stars in the US are Adrien Costa, 19, from Stanford, California, who has twice placed second in the junior time trial world championships in the past two years. Brandon McNulty, 18, from Phoenix, Arizona, the reigning junior time trial world champion, and Neilsen Powless, 20, from Sacramento, California who this year placed third in the Elite national championships time trial and last year won a stage of the prestigious Tour de l’Avenir in France.

“We can get a rider to the start line of a race like the Tour de France, but that’s just step one,” says Jim Ochowicz.

Ochowicz is the president of the BMC racing team. He rode for the US in the 1972 Olympics and later founded the successful 7-Eleven cycling team in 1981. He has coached three US Olympic teams and more recently founded the BMC Racing Team, which fields one of the race favorites for the 2017 Tour de France, Australia’s Richie Porte.

Ochowicz is under no illusions about the difficulty of bringing up the next grand tour winner. “It’s almost impossible to predict,” he says. “You don’t find that person, they find you. They excel at what they’re doing. Looking at US riders now you’re talking about a stretch of four to five years at a minimum before you even get them onto the start line of the Tour de France.”

Grand tour winners have a knack of just showing up, sometimes unexpectedly. Doug Dailey, the highly-regarded former national road cycling coach from Great Britain, told the Times that his early impressions of Chris Froome were far from concrete: “He was very raw but I felt he had potential, but I can’t swear I thought he’d be a Tour de France winner.”

Bouchard-Hall counsels patience for those awaiting the next US grand tour winner. “I don’t think that we should expect that every five or 10 years that we should have another Tour de France champion. But I think once a generation it will come along.”

Americans love a winner, but in the grand tours it looks like this might be a while coming. In the meantime, the likes of Watts and Schwinn will be among the legions of US cycling fans in the coming three weeks devouring whatever news they can obtain about the Le Tour. And all the while, US cyclists in the wider cycling world will continue to achieve success across a range of disciplines.