What does it all mean?

We’re going to save a deep qualitative dive for another Journal entry, but needless to say the 2019 data doesn’t look good for traditional USAC racing. Participation and event days are both going to be negative this year, but with the former shrinking faster than the latter we worry that the race calendar will only continue to condense further next year — especially as USAC is already talking about a 20% increase in insurance premiums. If event costs continue to increase at the same time that participation continues to decline, a smaller race calendar unfortunately feels almost inevitable. Against this backdrop, USAC has established the following goals for 2020:

• Slight increase in events as whole as compared to 2019

• Increase in MTB, Track, Gravel and Gran Fondo’s

• Flat in CX

• Slight decrease in competitive Road for 2020

Hopefully that first bullet point - a slight increase in events - comes to fruition as USAC needs some way to stop the negative feedback loop of declining participation leading to fewer events which leads to fewer USAC members and thus still lower participation. But even so, in the final bullet point USAC seems to be acknowledging that road racing is likely to continue to shrink in 2020, a fact that doesn’t bode well for riders (and race directors) focused on traditional USAC racing.

Is there a floor at which point the sport can stabilize at healthier levels for racers and race directors alike? The accelerating decline in 2019 numbers suggests that we’re not yet at that inflection point, but with a host of new leadership walking in the door at USA Cycling it will be interesting to see what initiatives they put on the table, not just to stabilize USA Cycling membership with their newfound focus on recreational riders, but hopefully to help traditional categorized racing reach a stable equilibrium. In the interim, for those of us that know and love traditional USAC category racing, the time is now to put our heads together to try to work through some solutions to stabilize the sport.

More to come soon….