The year 2020 was one of upheaval worldwide and, for women’s cycling, it was the year the sport was irrevocably altered. Changes were put in place that set the sport down a road of rapid growth. It was the year the UCI implemented a minimum wage for those riding with WorldTeams, among other rules like mandatory live coverage for WorldTour races.
The professionalization of women’s cycling has created an ecosystem of support roles around the athletes themselves, with sports agents emerging as key players in this transformation. As salaries and opportunities have increased, the need for professional representation has grown from a luxury for a select few to a consideration for many in the peloton, marking a significant shift in how the business of women’s cycling operates.
Until recently, female cyclists working with an agent were few and far between. Most women represent themselves, they go alone to teams to ask for a job. Annemiek van Vleuten, for example, never worked with an agent. The implementation of mandatory salaries meant more money for the women who make cycling their lives, but it has also formed a livelihood for those adjacent to the sport. With the rise in salaries, there has also been a rise in agents specializing in the women’s side of the cycling world. That means more jobs for those working around the sport itself, more interest in bigger contracts and more accountability for those contracts to be legitimate.
In the beginning
One pioneer is Emma Abel (née Wade), who has been working in sports marketing for over 20 years. She originally worked with Olympians from various sports before taking an interest in cycling. She’s been representing Lizzie Deignan for years and helped navigate Deignan’s first pregnancy and move from Boels-Dolmans to Trek-Segafredo in 2019.
“I started with Lizzie and Elinor Barker, and when you start with two amazing female cyclists like that inevitably you attract other female cyclists, which is great, but also I realized there was a massive change going on in women’s cycling, and it was developing quite quickly, it was becoming more commercially aware,” Abel told Escape Collective.
“It was literally the cream of the crop that had agents at that point, probably because they were making money outside of the sport so it was managing that as much as anything else, whereas now there are a lot more agents. I guess that can only be good for the sport, it means it’s more professional at the end of the day.”
Abel entered the sport before 2012 when Deignan gave up the track to race full time on the road just before she won a silver medal at the London Olympic road race behind Marianne Vos.
“When Lizzie first started on the road, the difference in the way the team was set up, the sponsors that are involved, the media coverage, we’re in a world of difference now, we still have a long way to go, but we’re in a completely different environment than we were at the start.”
“It’s gradually shifting and I thought it was something I could probably help with, not only the riders but also to kind of help see how we can make the sport more sustainable.”
Alison Jackson does an interview before winning Paris-Roubaix in 2023
Abel was one of the first agents to support female cyclists almost exclusively. Other agencies represented some women, but for the most part, there was never enough money to justify it. Only the top riders were making enough money to warrant representation before 2020.
Hannah Barnes retired in 2023 from a long and illustrious career and almost immediately found her next home with SEG Cycling, an International Talent Agency representing Pauline Ferrand-Prévot, Dylan van Baarle, Wout Poels, Kristen Faulkner, and more.
“Hannah’s role at SEG will be to ensure that the interests of women riders are well represented at all times. She will also have an important role in the development of women’s cycling at SEG,” read the press release announcing Barnes’s new job.
“It’s always been a thing for me, not really to be the agent, but to look after and help guide other riders through their career,” Barnes told Escape Collective. “I was lucky enough to have quite a few good mentors at the start of my career that helped me so I’ve always wanted to do that.”
“I’ve been given the opportunity to recruit riders that I would like to work with, that I feel have a future in the sport, and could really gain from having an agency, and hopefully gain from having me on their side.”
Both Barnes and Abel stressed that being an agent is not just about negotiating contracts with teams or finding their riders teams to ride for. For some riders, agents can help with external sponsorship deals, like Deignan’s partnership with Cycle Plan UK, for example. Barnes sees her years in the sport as an advantage when helping her riders navigate the landscape of women’s cycling.
“Being able to just ask us any question, especially me, I’ve had a 12-year career, so I’ve probably been through a lot of what they’re going to go through throughout their career,” Barnes said. “So it’s about how they can trust me and they feel comfortable approaching us if they need anything.”
Throughout those 12 years, Barnes didn’t have her own agent handling media requests and “taking away the awkwardness” of negotiating a contract. It wasn’t until the end of her career that she had representation.
“I had two agents throughout my career, but that was towards the end of my career, the first three or four contracts I did myself, so I do have a bit of experience in negotiating contracts and how stressful and awkward it can be.”
Going from racing in 2023 immediately into SEG was another advantage, according to Barnes.
“It’s been a little bit, not awkward, but just strange, messaging people that I raced with (last year) to then be their agent,” Barnes said. “It’s nice to be really new to it and still have an idea of good riders and good young talent that’s coming through.”
“It’s definitely an advantage having an agent that can take that awkwardness away when you’re in a racing environment, to be kind of kept in the loop, but not doing those awkward conversations.”
Why have an agent?
The “awkward” conversations, Barnes explained, could be when a rider is at an important race and their team manager or director approaches them about their next year’s contract prior to the race, moments when a rider doesn’t want to be thinking about the following year but rather focusing on the present.
“It’s just being able to have someone there who can just take all the stress and the pressure away from the stuff that you don’t really want to think about and just focus on the race.”
When looking at the big picture, it’s clear that there are definite perks to having an agent on your side. People know the basics of having an agent, someone to help you negotiate a team contract or find you a team, but that’s really the bare minimum of what an agent does. Working with an agency doesn’t just mean access to an agent, it also means access to the other people in that agency.
“Say we’ve got a British rider, and there’s a company say, Skoda Cars, that would like to work with them,” Barnes explained. “They can hand that over to us, and we can negotiate that, and the lawyers in the company can go over the contract, and then marketing can look over it, and their finance people as well. So it’s just about having all those different departments in the company that can just look over anything and go over the communication deals.”
Abel’s passion is matchmaking between teams and her riders.
“Helping them find the right team gives me a lot of personal satisfaction, making sure that I can work with the teams and find out what they’re looking for what they need and how they want to best put together a team to achieve whatever results they’re trying to achieve versus working with my clients and what they want, what their goals are and matchmaking those together.”
For Abel, working with a rider goes far beyond their time in the peloton. She also helps her riders transition out of riding professionally when they have to navigate the real world and find their worth away from riding a bike.
“Taking them from, you know, being a professional athlete every day into retirement,” Abel said. “Working out what they’re going to do next, perhaps staying in the sport as a coach or going to work for a brand. We worked with a lot of athletes who went on to work in media, for example.”
“It is about a personal relationship. It’s about finding out what a rider needs and every rider is different. Each person needs different things and different support at different times and in different ways.”
With the growing professionalism of the sport and the rise in salaries and opportunities, young riders are now seeing an agent as an essential part of their toolkit. Even before they’ve won a race, riders are searching for someone else to find them a contract and handle those negotiations for them.
“Having an agent isn’t crucial, you don’t have to have one, but it definitely helps,” Barnes said. “For me, when I was cycling, I think the biggest advantage wasn’t just negotiating a salary. It was having professionals look over your contract, and having someone that’s there who has the experience and can help you and advise you in any way. I’ll never decide on a contract for someone or a team for someone, but it’s just me being able to give them advice so they’re comfortable with the decision they make.”
It’s not all about getting a contract
While Abel and Barnes both agree an agent is necessary for success, they both point out that athletes can reach a point in their career where an agent can work with the rider to make their lives more manageable.
“In terms of rules and regulations, obviously, we’ve got a minimum wage now, maternity rights, insurance, a basic set-up that just wasn’t there when Lizzie first started on the road,” Abel pointed out. “That is a necessary part of every World Tour contract now. It’s a completely different set-up in that way.”
“When riders become more high profile, they’re getting more and more (media) requests, it’s a balance for the riders to make sure they’re able to concentrate on their day job and ride their bike and not be overwhelmed by requests.”
That’s where an agent can step in and filter out the noise so the athlete can do what they need to do: ride their bike.
“I get quite protective because that’s my job,” Abel said. “I want to allow them to be the best version of themselves by letting me filter out a lot of those requests and set those up for them.”
In the early days of Abel’s time in the sport, before there was live coverage of a lot of the racing and more interest in the riders themselves, there weren’t many riders who garnered enough attention to need an agent fielding requests.
“Now, there is much more depth of talent there’s much more focus on media attention and on the rider, so there will be a need for more of them to have representation,” Abel said.
There are also riders who prefer to have someone else looking over contracts and weeding out requests and some that would rather have all the aspects of their career in their own hands.
“I think a lot of nations, particularly like Britain, the Italians, I’ve noticed that they like having an agent,” Barnes said. “They like having someone there who’s looking over their contracts and helping them. Whereas a lot of riders like doing that themselves.”
“When your profile rises to the point that your inbox is imploding with media requests that you don’t know how to deal with, and other sponsorship requests, all those kinds of things, having that personal connection with an agent who can help advise around both media and other brand possibilities outside of the team,” Abel explained. “I think that’s the kind of time when you start wanting to work with somebody else to manage that.”
Kopecky swarmed by journalists during Paris-Roubaix Femmes, 2023
Agents also have brands approach them requesting athletes to work with. Barnes used an example of a British brand like Skoda looking for a British rider to sponsor, without reaching out to riders they could deal directly with an agency instead who would then manage the partnership for both sides.
“When you get to a point where you’re overloaded with so many things going on, that’s when you would need an agent to come and help you with more than just your rider contract,” said Abel. “Probably when you are renegotiating a contract when you’ve had some success because that’s when it’s difficult to know what your value is.”
The problem with knowing your value is that women’s cycling is growing so rapidly that value is hard to suss out without the proper connections.
“If you’re a young rider, and you are offered an opportunity within a WorldTeam, there’s a minimum wage, so you know, you’re gonna get paid a certain salary and decent salary,” Abel said. “And as a young first-year rider, chances are that minimum salary will be what you’re looking at anyway. And that contract is covered by certain UCI regulations because WorldTeams are heavily regulated now.”
Young athletes are reaching out to agents like Abel to find them spots on teams, when in reality there is a lot more that an agent does apart from simply finding their rider a home for the season.
“For young female cyclists there’s now a thought that if you are a cyclist, you need an agent immediately to do well and get a team and for protection because they don’t know the system, but there are resources out there. The Cyclists Alliance are amazing, they have an awful lot of information on their website where you can find out how to work with teams, what should be in your contract, etc. It’s not necessary for every young rider to have an agent straightaway.”
Not all good
Rapid growth brings growing pains, and the organization that has had to take on a lot of the cleanup is The Cyclists Alliance. The women’s cycling union provides options for members to help them do a lot of the things agents do: negotiate contracts, make sure those contracts are legal and make sense, deal with any issues that may arise while on a team, etc. In recent years, they’ve also had to help riders get out of deals with agents that weren’t working, or team contracts that had been negotiated by agents with teams TCA would deem unfit to hold a license.
“From the beginning, we have been encouraging riders to get legal support, especially because we see that this is something that makes a really big difference for a rider in terms of negotiating a good contract, and not really about the salary, but just about signing a good contract and knowing what they’re signing and knowing it’s a contract that that’s actually legally valid,” explained Iris Slappendel, co-founder and President of TCA. “It’s also something we have been doing a lot from the beginning, checking riders’ contracts and advising them. But we are not agents, of course, so we will not negotiate on behalf of riders”
“Agents are not lawyers, or at least most agents are not lawyers, so I think it’s really important that riders understand what they need an agent for.”
With the increase of rider agents out there, TCA is now helping riders negotiate contracts with agents instead of teams.
“Now riders come to us with the question, if we know an agent for them, and they also come to us with questions about contracts that agents have sent them,” Slappendel said. “If you go work with an agent, they normally send you a contract. So now they come and ask us to help us with the contract.”
“For us, really the biggest problem is that anyone can call himself an agent at this time, there is a UCI exam for agents, and you need to have this to be certified as a UCI-approved agent.”
There are three ways to become a UCI-accredited agent. Take and pass the UCI exam and be approved by a national federation, be a practising lawyer, or be the family member of the rider being represented. Kind of an odd one, that last option.
“Currently, in the UCI exam, there is nothing specific about women’s cycling,” Slappendel pointed out. “So I think the exam is a good first benchmark, but it doesn’t say so much about how good an agent is. Also, this exam is valid for basically the rest of your lifetime. So if you did it 30 years ago, you’re still a UCI-certified agent.”
Like with directors, coaches, and many other professions, there is a vast difference in quality between one agent and the next. While some agents are employed by agencies with legal departments, like Barnes, and some are practising lawyers themselves, some may just be the brother of the rider they are representing.
In recent years, riders have fallen into the trap of thinking they need an agent to be successful only to find themselves worse off.
“We help (riders) by cleaning up the mess that their agents make,” Slappendel said. “Because this is, to be honest, something we see a lot in the last, especially two years, that there are so many agents out there that are just really poor in what they do, they mess it up.”
“They make a rider sign for teams that, for example, we have advised other riders not to sign with. Then it’s up to us, because the riders, or even agents come to us with the question to help them out.”
“We have seen riders negotiating really good contracts for themselves in the past few years with just having some simple tools and some advice on salary, we have so much data on it, and some help in understanding their contract,” she explained. “In my opinion, every rider can negotiate their own contract if they have the right information. Of course, some riders would feel more comfortable with it than others, and, therefore, I think it’s good that agents are out there.”
Demi Vollering and Annemiek van Vleuten, two riders of two different eras, on the podium of Omloop het Niewusblad 2022
TCA has tasked themselves with setting riders up to comfortably and effectively negotiate and understand their own contracts, and for riders to be able to recognize red flags in contracts when necessary. For example, if the contract is written in another language from the rider’s primary language.
“As a rider, you should not just think like, oh, this is the easiest thing to do because hopefully, it will bring you more salary. But it’s not all about the salary. And secondly, it’s also about a lot of other things that you might not be able to measure in euros, but are still important for the development of your career.”
Riders can write their own CV, gather their own power data and find all the team contacts necessary to get their names out there on the UCI website.
“You can always contact the TCA to help out with contracts,” Slappendel adds.
“There is a big difference between a union and an agent. For an agent, there’s also the pressure, they need to get the rider at a team at some point, and we are completely objective.” Agents, of course, make a commission on those deals, so they are incentivised to make them happen.
“Riders, they think this is the solution to their question on how to find a good team with a decent salary. But I don’t think the only answer to that is to work with an agent. We see also riders changing agents on a regular basis, which also means to us that they are just very unhappy with their agents.”
Further proof that the sport is growing
Overall, the increase in agents working with the women’s peloton is seen as a good thing. Abel and Barnes both can only take on so many riders and as more riders become hot commodities, the need to shelter those riders from a slew of requests to join the Wheel Talk Podcast is real.
But the interest from agents is proof that there is enough money there, in large enough quantities for agents to want to take on female athletes.
“There are not many sports where you are getting paid that much,” Barnes said. “I mean, of course, you have to be at the top of the sport, but when I first started, you had to have a side job. You couldn’t just do cycling as your only job. Riders would stop cycling because they were just like, ‘I can’t live like this, I have to get a proper job.’
“Now it’s seen as one of, probably one of the best-paying jobs you can have as a woman (in sports). So just seeing that, it’s definitely going in the right direction.”
“For the men, you could be on a team for over 10 years, just as a domestique, earning a pretty good salary,” Barnes explained. “But for the women, it was hard to move around to teams because no one saw what you did, because it wasn’t on TV. It wasn’t advertised. No one really saw that, they just saw the results page. But now it’s changing. Now you’re being poached by the teams as one of those teammates that’s reliable.
“It’s not just people who win races getting a lot of money, it’s those teammates who are also helping them do that too.”
A dream job
A rising tide lifts all ships, but that includes the ships of pirates. While the increased need for agents in women’s cycling is a sign of its growth, it has also opened the door for inexperienced individuals to prey on the riders who don’t think they can manage alone.
For some, the job is a passion project as much as a career. For Barnes, staying in the sport was always the hope, but she couldn’t envision herself as a team director. “Stepping back and looking after the riders and helping them through their careers is pretty much my dream job,” Barnes said.
For Abel, who has seen the sport change and evolve over the years, there is a level of investment in the continued progress that keeps her hooked. “I want the sport to do well, I want women’s cycling to do well,” Abel said. “It’s not got as much history as the men’s side has, so it’s playing catch-up.”
The explosion of agents in the sport reflects its remarkable growth and increasing professionalization – a sure sign that there’s finally enough money and opportunity to sustain an ecosystem beyond just riders and teams. But this gold rush has brought both pioneers and opportunists. For every agent working to advance both their clients and the sport itself, others see only easy commissions. The challenge ahead lies not just in growing the number of agents, but in ensuring they truly serve the riders’ interests. As Barnes and Abel demonstrate, the best agents aren’t just deal-makers – they’re mentors, advisors, and ultimately, stewards of women’s cycling’s future. In a sport still writing its own history, that kind of commitment matters more than ever.
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