"I was sad to see him go" - Geraint Thomas explains why INEOS allowed Filippo Ganna to join Lidl-Trek in surprise transfer move

I think it’s becoming clear that cycling got way ahead of itself for a few reasons and is now coming to the realisation that some rider salaries just exploded without justification and it snowballed until sponsors started pulling money out because THEY did not see any return on increased costs. Cycling is still a dying sport (that never moved out of the niche family) and will remain so if it doesn’t embrace and promote new ventures or manage to attract new markets. Even within cycling, fans are basically compartimentalised, (almost nobody here follows track for example), and the multiplication of possibilities hasn’t grown the sport, it has just split it into a larger number of smaller branches. If it weren’t for nation state sponsors (far too numerous already) other teams would never have (had to resort to) raised bigger budgets that are now leading to sponsor abandonment. That’s the difference between long-term steady growth and financial doping, the latter can also just blow up in your face. I will venture to wager that apart from one or two exceptional cases, rider salaries will no longer go up and are quite likely to actually drop over the next decade.