“In the past it was doping. Now it is financial doping” – Tour de France stage winner warns cycling has reached major crossroads for competitiveness

Professional cycling’s next existential challenge may not be physiological, technological or tactical. According to Jan Bakelants, it is financial, and the consequences could quietly reshape the sport’s competitive balance for a generation.

Speaking in conversation with Het Laatste Nieuws, the former Tour de France stage winner drew a stark comparison between cycling’s past and present, arguing that the peloton is drifting back towards a familiar divide. “We are once again heading towards a two-speed peloton,” Bakelants said. “In the past it was caused by doping. Now it is caused by financial doping.”

Bakelants’ concern is not centred on individual riders changing teams, but on how easily wealthier squads can now dismantle smaller projects. The modern transfer system, he argues, increasingly mirrors football rather than cycling’s traditional ecosystem, with buy-outs and financial muscle overriding long-term development.

Teams operating with tighter budgets are particularly vulnerable. Once a rider performs beyond expectations, retaining them becomes less a sporting challenge and more a financial impossibility. In Bakelants’ view, that dynamic threatens the very purpose of WorldTour parity, allowing the strongest organisations to accumulate talent with minimal resistance.

The danger, Bakelants suggests, is structural rather than short-term. Sponsorship-driven teams depend on visibility to survive, yet visibility becomes harder to secure when talent is routinely siphoned upwards. Sponsors, he notes, expect a return, and diminishing exposure weakens the entire model.

That imbalance feeds itself. Riders increasingly prefer shared leadership roles at dominant teams over full responsibility elsewhere, even when both outfits sit at the same WorldTour level. “If you can ride for Team Visma | Lease a Bike, UAE Team Emirates - XRG, Lidl-Trek, Red Bull - BORA - hansgrohe, INEOS Grenadiers and now also Decathlon CMA CGM Team, your life looks very different compared to riding for Lotto-Intermarche,” Bakelants explained. “And that is also a WorldTour team.”

The numbers underline the issue. A multi-million-euro transfer may represent a manageable percentage of a super-team’s budget, while consuming a quarter of a smaller squad’s annual resources. “That is exactly my point,” Bakelants said. “A huge imbalance in budgets is emerging within the peloton.”

Bakelants points to Alpecin-Premier Tech as proof that alternative models can succeed, but only under circumstances that no longer exist. Their early commitment to Mathieu van der Poel allowed the team to grow organically before today’s hyper-aggressive transfer market fully took hold.

That timing, he argues, was decisive. “When he fully broke through on the road, the practice that is now becoming common was not yet really established,” Bakelants said. In today’s climate, such patience would likely be punished. “If Mathieu van der Poel had won his first big Classic now, an opportunistic team like INEOS or Lidl-Trek would certainly have jumped in with an astronomical offer.”

The difference, Bakelants believes, is that cycling has lost its natural protection mechanisms. Where once development, loyalty and gradual progression mattered, raw purchasing power increasingly dictates outcomes.

Bakelants is not arguing that dominance by strong teams is new, but that the mechanisms behind it have changed in worrying ways. Without safeguards, he fears cycling risks entrenching inequality so deeply that upward mobility becomes the exception rather than the norm.

The crossroads he describes is therefore not merely financial, but philosophical. Whether the sport chooses to address that imbalance, or accept it, may determine how competitive professional cycling remains in the decade ahead.