£25,550: the incredible annual cost of amateur bike racing

Yeah quite a bizarre article really, especially how vehemently he defended it on twitter. Even Katusha don't use that much bike, in fact I could go out and buy both TT and Road team bikes for just over £10k.

Weirdly I raced against him at the weekend, on his £8k wyndymilla massive attack and deep section reynolds wheels. Didn't do a lot for him vs a mate on an older felt.

grudas said:
You don't need to spend 16k on two bikes to do some amateur racing!
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You definelty don't need a wattbike either, or to spend that much travelling to races, or nutrition.
 
Hummmmm. Quite inflated prices.

You don't need to spend that much going to Majorca. You don't need to go to Majorca at all. You don't need a Watt bike. As mentioned already, you don't need to spend that much on two race bikes. You don't need to spend £2k on a winter bike.

Also, even if the bikes cost £16k, and you needed a watt bike and winter bike totalling £4.25k, you certainly don't need to buy these every year! Therefore it is misleading to include these costs in the yearly expenditure.
 
Thomas. PLease. said:
Goodness, there's more:
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What utter trash that article is.

"Of 3,000 people polled, one in five were found to have a person loan. A quarter of the loans had been taken out to purchase either a bicycle or a car."

So.. that's 150 people took out a loan to buy a car OR a bike. So, if it's 50%, that's 75 people out of 3000 have a loan for a bike. Just 2.5% of the people surveyed.
 
uv said:
What utter trash that article is.

"Of 3,000 people polled, one in five were found to have a person loan. A quarter of the loans had been taken out to purchase either a bicycle or a car."

So.. that's 150 people took out a loan to buy a car OR a bike. So, if it's 50%, that's 75 people out of 3000 have a loan for a bike. Just 2.5% of the people surveyed.
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And chances are it wasn't even 50%, probably about 5-10%, and in reality about 0.01%.
 
Article looks pretty much spot on to me?
If you ignore the cost of the bikes because:
-he didnt actually pay for them
-they wouldnt be annual costs

You get left with around £5-6k annual cost for:
-race entry (not silly prices like sportives, but they still all add up)
-race licence
-travel to races (I probably average £60-90 in fuel for a race. bikes on a roof rack kill am already poor mpg)
-other race costs (hotels for multi-day races, eating out because you dont get home from the race until late at night)
-clothes (race jersey, bibshorts, skinsuit, helmet)
-servicing + consumables (chains, cassettes, tyres, brake pads)
-mallorca training camp
-nutrition (bars,gels, iso powder, protein, etc)

I'd say that's a fairly average base cost. Then add onto that whatever you want for bikes+turbo trainer, personal choice on how much you want to spend.
 
It's the title that really takes the p - he's hardly an rank amateur. A better title would be "the annual cost of semi-professional bike racing when you are trying to wring the absolute maximum performance, in order to gain a few % more than what could be achieved with a £500 alu bike"
 
touch said:
Article looks pretty much spot on to me?
If you ignore the cost of the bikes because:
-he didnt actually pay for them
-they wouldnt be annual costs

You get left with around £5-6k annual cost for:
-race entry (not silly prices like sportives, but they still all add up)
-race licence
-travel to races (I probably average £60-90 in fuel for a race. bikes on a roof rack kill am already poor mpg)
-other race costs (hotels for multi-day races, eating out because you dont get home from the race until late at night)
-clothes (race jersey, bibshorts, skinsuit, helmet)
-servicing + consumables (chains, cassettes, tyres, brake pads)
-mallorca training camp
-nutrition (bars,gels, iso powder, protein, etc)

I'd say that's a fairly average base cost. Then add onto that whatever you want for bikes+turbo trainer, personal choice on how much you want to spend.
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I think the main gripe with the article is that fact that you don't actually explicitly need most of that stuff in order to be competitive at Cat 3 and 4 racing.

And it's not stuff that is required to be renewed every year, rather its a one off cost.

If you were geniunely talented enough to make it up to where you should be a pro, you could easily get there on half that amount imho.
 
FrenchTart said:
Pretty hilarious.

That said, I'm fairly sure my yearly spend on cycling stuff adds up to quite an eye-watering amount (for me) and I don't even race :p
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Same, I've averaging around £2k a year on Wiggle without even buying bikes from them! But that was a starting cost really for me as I had no gear before... Then again I've easily spent 4 times as much on gear/equipment than I have on bikes...

GSVBagpuss said:
It's the title that really takes the p - he's hardly an rank amateur. A better title would be "the annual cost of semi-professional bike racing when you are trying to wring the absolute maximum performance, in order to gain a few % more than what could be achieved with a £500 alu bike"
Click to expand...

Vonhelmet said:
If you're going to take out a personal loan to fund £12k of Pinarello then you're probably a moron, and you'd be financially inept regardless of what hobby you had.
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FrenchTart said:
I completely agree. The article is really ridiculous. It's written purely to appeal to the types that like to have an expensive hobby to throw money at.
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Agreed, it's utter clickbait. To be honest some of his costs are a little low (clothing/equipment) as I doubt he'd be wearing DHB! ;)

To be honest, I earn nowhere near 26k a year (before tax!) so it's all relative, yes if you were buying the best bikes you could from the best shop you could find in London they may cost that.

In reality if people are spending loans of that amount on bikes and cycling (I doubt even 5% of them are) then they're the same people who have Cars/Phones/Laptops/TV's all on loans/credit cards and are mortgaged up to the hilt already. £10k on 'cycling' isn't going to make a huge difference to their already huge loans and 'poor' financial situation.
 
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