In our recent State of the Sport essays and our longer time writing Analysis pieces on the Journal we have often been focused on the sustainability of ‘traditional’ categorized bike racing as we know it today. This line of analysis inevitably led us into questions on how the upswing in gravel racing is impacting road racing, a topic we started to tackle in our most recent piece: State of the Sport: What Happens When Gravel and Road Racing Collide? With some help from some friends outside the team we are in the process of analyzing ~200,000 rows of data to try to answer that question with more certainty. With that much data it will take us a while to complete the analysis so in the interim we wanted to refresh on an analysis that we first completed back in 2017 called The Demographics of Cycling.

If you read that prior piece you are well aware that new members are the lifeblood of CRCA precisely because membership retention in the Club is (spoiler alert) very weak. We are hopeful that the numbers for NYSBRA/USAC as a whole are better than those that we are about to discuss - as we touch on in the conclusion to this essay there are some reasons to think that is true (unfortunately the only data we have pertains to CRCA). But at the same time CRCA is also a unique and impressive entity: a volunteer led non-profit that doesn’t have to maximize financial return and as a result can offer a members-only 12 race series for just $100 (roughly $8 per race). Ultimately we can’t be sure how closely the CRCA numbers mirror the broader sport locally/regionally/nationally - we only have the CRCA data - but with 700 odd members in the club its a large sample size to work with.

Note: some of these charts look slightly different from the original analysis as for this essay unless otherwise specified we are focused on total CRCA membership (including associate members that cannot participate in the Club Race Series) in this version of the analysis. Also note that the data set is not thorough enough to identify riders that left the club for a period of time and then rejoined. This is likely a small number of riders that should not impact the overall analysis. Lastly, this data only pertains to CRCA so we don’t have any direct visibility on broader NYC/NYSBRA/USAC trends.

The Abbreviated Lifecycle of a Bike Racer

So with that said, we start with the count of new CRCA members by year in the chart below. We see the well recognized ‘Lance effect’ where cycling as a whole was on a growth trajectory in the 2010-2013 timeframe. During those boom years the Club saw ~250 new members joining the club each year. Then in January 2013 Lance sat down for his infamous Oprah interview and the following year new membership dropped off to its lowest levels in recent history. Since then the Club has been bouncing around +/- 200 new members per year. Unfortunately the most recent data point - 2018 - was also the worst since that big down year in 2014.