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

[Thomas. PLease.]

Anyone read this clickbait?

The sums of money inclduded are just farcical, I also saw it got mentions on the GCN show, after which there was a bit of twitter debate between Critchlow and the presenters. All of whom naturally thought his article was tosh.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/acti...dible-annual-cost-of-amateur-bike-racing.html

 

[Thomas. PLease.]

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.

You don't need to spend 16k on two bikes to do some amateur racing!

You definelty don't need a wattbike either, or to spend that much travelling to races, or nutrition.

 

[Thomas. PLease.]

As does mine, but to say you require £16k worth of bikes is madness. In order to compete in reality, at lower categories you barely even *need* anything over £1k of bike.

 

[Thomas. PLease.]

Yeah I don't blame him, have seen people on much older equipment in Cat 4 races.

Goodness, there's more:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/acti...ng-putting-the-economic-recovery-at-risk.html

 

[Thomas. PLease.]

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.

And chances are it wasn't even 50%, probably about 5-10%, and in reality about 0.01%.

 

[Thomas. PLease.]

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.

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.