The long and winding road - the difficult process of change in road cycling

摘要

The paper focuses on change in professional road cycling. The main research question goes as follows: has professional road cycling successfully made the transition into the 21st century or is it still stuck in the 20th century? At a first glance, professional road cycling indeed appears to have made some moves forward. But how significant are these evolutions really? The study is evidence based and combines qualitative and quantitative data. The qualitative data stem from different official and non-official documents describing the many projects that have been proposed for restructuring professional road cycling in the past decade. Various sources of second hand data, covering team budgets, competition formats and the cycling calendar, TV ratings and data on internationalisation are also consulted to evaluate the process of change in professional road cycling.