I noticed this Reddit post: Is road cycling dying in America? and ended up leaving a comment a couple of days later that was a good postmortem on the bicycling-related venture I explored last year:
I researched this for about three months last year trying to get something going after seeing this gap and wondering what happened to the thriving junior racing scene I enjoyed in the 90s in PA. Here is what I found, and what led me to give up.
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There aren’t as many races because costs and logistical hassles have made organizing one untenable. See “What the hell happened to road racing” on here and this article.
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Mt biking is king. NICA is doing well. It can conform to the school sports model. A parent can drop their kid off at a trail and pick them up two hours later. They don’t have to worry about cars. Crashes might be more frequent but they’re less serious when they do happen. The events don’t require road management, permits, or police.
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USAC has dropped the ball across the board. Maybe for the same reasons I gave up, the cultural and logistical headwinds in this country are just too daunting, and the resources to overcome them lacking.
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Kids don’t have unstructured time anymore. I used to just get on my bike and ride (granted, I lived in the country). Kids these days are driven from one distant structured event to the next for every non-school hour they have. Other sports and activities are all-consuming, the parents are highly invested (anyone who thinks the cost is the issue here doesn’t have a kid in any competitive sport or activity), so trying to introduce another activity that can’t compare to that level of organization is difficult.
My 10 year-old is still really into road riding. He gets to race once a year at the state road race, which is 3 hours away and at risk of discontinuing, despite occurring on an army base which I assume makes some of the hassles a little bit easier to manage. I struggle to create new routes for us to ride, the bike infra here is improving but safely connecting from one bike path to another is a challenge. He is a total anomaly out there, and all the adult riders notice and encourage him, which is fun and great for his confidence. There is one juniors team in town, at an extremely high-end private school. Every once in a while when I’ll hear about a local juniors racer, they’ll just be on a regular racing team. (This is in a metro area of over 7 million.) There are a few proper junior dev teams in the US like Hot Tubes, and as far as I can tell they have to race all over, with attempts to focus on regions where there are still more races (the NE and CA). Their racers are so good they’re probably doing the cat 1-2 races except for the occasional juniors race + nationals. Their youngest riders are ~16 years old.
Europe isn’t that much better for juniors, by the way. I did some research and there wasn’t as much there as I assumed. More velodromes, which helps.
Triathlon is doing well, there are lessons to be learned from there. Same for hill climb TTs in the UK.
If you go look at the web site I created you can see we pivoted to just, “Riding bicycles is fun and we’ll help your kid to do it safely,” but in the end even that’s hard, mostly due to #4 above.