Rapha CEO Fran Millar has delivered a blunt warning to the UCI in an updated Rapha Roadmap for competitive cycling, telling the sport’s governing body that it risks withering unless it modernises — urgently. The message carries weight, but also comes loaded with irony.

Responding to a UCI consultation on the future of professional cycling, Millar — a former CEO of Ineos Grenadiers — described the sport as one that is beautiful and historically rich, but one that has failed structurally and commercially. Millar said what struck her returning to cycling after four years was not how much had changed, but how much hadn’t — and called the backward movement in reform debates deeply depressing.

The Roadmap’s authors — analysts Steve Maxwell and Joe Harris of The Outer Line, updated by former pro Joe Laverick — open with a damning verdict: professional cycling has never suffered from a lack of ideas, only a lack of courage to act on them. They note the original document had little success moving the sport’s governance and that cycling today is characterised by a sense of despair — that nothing will ever change.

Millar’s message would be more powerful were it not coming from a brand mired in its own stagnation. Rapha recorded a loss of £17.2m in fiscal 2024 — its eighth consecutive unprofitable year — while the company’s investment value dropped by £102m to approximately £67m, against the £200m paid by the Walton brothers when they acquired it in 2017. Owner RZC Investments has since paused new investments entirely and is reevaluating the fund’s future.

Since the acquisition, Rapha has cycled through a string of CEOs — Simon Mottram, William Kim, Daniel Blumire, François Convercey, and now Millar — struggling to maintain strategic continuity.  Efforts to right the ship include closing nearly a quarter of Rapha Clubhouse retail locations and refocusing on premium product quality. 

Millar’s prescription for the UCI is sound. The diagnosis of a sport clinging to outdated structures at the expense of broader growth is hard to argue with. But the credibility of that prescription is weakened when the company delivering it has spent seven years failing to adapt its own business model to a changing market. Evolve or wither, Millar tells the UCI. It is advice Rapha might equally apply to itself.

Photo Credit: Rapha

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