Friends,
As 2025 makes a desperate throw for the finish line, we have news to share about how the TCI team will lineup in the New Year. For the last few seasons, Robot, or Emlyn, or John, or however you’ve come to know him, has been more or less running the team, such as it is. From January 1, Padraig will slip into the role of directeur sportif once more.
We don’t anticipate major changes, but you will be seeing less of Emlyn’s by-line and more of Padraig’s.
The business of cycling journalism (if that’s even what we’re doing here) has only gotten harder since the pandemic rocked the boat of the bike industry as a whole. You can certainly see in the remaining media landscape that there is less coverage generally, and along with that fewer advertisers/sponsors, to fuel the work. We are not the only subscription-based (but not paywalled) rider in the winnowed and harried peloton either. Writers are looking for new ways to make their work pay, with mixed results.
Our initial plan was to be fully reader-funded, and though there is a core of interested readers willing to pay for words about bikes, we needed to bring in sponsors to close the gap on our overhead and salutary income. That looks like continuing in 2026 as we work to reach that critical mass of readership that offers the TCI team some sense of financial stability.
If you’ve read this far, it’s because you like what we do, and we couldn’t be more grateful for that. If you’ve subscribed to TCI already, please consider sharing our work with your cycling friends. The media and sponsorship opportunities for 2026 don’t look any better than they did last year or the year before, and anyway, our ambition has always been to survive on the quality of our work and the investment of our readers.
As ever, thanks for your attention in 2025, and wherever you are, whatever you’ve got going on, we hope you get out for a ride today.
Padraig and Robot
