Elite cycling has seen a shift towards teams developing their own talent in recent years, the majority of WorldTour teams creating in-house set ups to nurture young riders, running their own Continental and even junior teams, or building partnerships with existing outfits to offer a direct path for the best talent in the sport to its top tier. The phenomenon hasn’t escaped the UK domestic scene either, with junior team Tofuati Everyone Active partnering with DSM-firmenich NLPost, and Saint Piran running development teams in various guises such as 05/03 and until recently USKIS, merging it with their Continental team earlier this month.
In two years we will be the destination. In two years we will have a team in the Tour of Britain. We will be Continental
However, a new Elite Development Team in the shape of HUUB BCC Race Team has flipped the idea on its head; the new senior team a destination for riders graduating through the successful Beeston Cycling Club Academy pathway structure, the junior team of the same name already an established force in the U19 ranks, having recently won the Junior CiCLE Classic for the second consecutive year courtesy of Ahron Dick.
The British Continental spoke to Team President John McCay to discuss the team’s structure, a vision for reigniting the domestic scene, and what 2024 and beyond has in store for the East Midlands based outfit, both on and off the bike.
“I think we’re quite unique in the UK,” muses McCay, a long-time committee member of Beeston Cycling Club and one of the key players in building HUUB BCC into the Elite Development Team it is today.
“We currently have 35 riders in the academy, that is always club related, from under-14 to under-16 to under-19 and now under-23. Each age group has their own management,” he says, explaining how the academy is linked to the separately registered elite HUUB BCC teams, the junior version made up of a majority of academy graduates in their second junior year.
“You can only get into that if you’re a cracking first year junior, but really it’s for second year juniors because we believe that you’re still finding your feet transitioning from youth racing into junior racing – it’s like black and white, as a first year junior,” he continues, with great attention to detail about the team’s pathway and what it and stands for. “[The] Academy effectively has its origins in Beeston, Nottinghamshire. HUUB BCC is an East Midlands team. Very distinct. But they are linked. All riders attend the same workshops. If you were an external rider applying to come in, you must be better than anyone in the academy, because if they’re good enough, they come straight through.”
For 2024, the HUUB BCC senior team will have 12 riders – eight under-23s, five of which are academy graduates, and four senior riders. The senior riders, including the likes of Adam Kenway, Josh Housley and Seb Garry, all have strong connections to the East Midlands, the majority with links to partners HUUB and WeBuyCycle, having ridden for teams they’ve been involved in previously.
“They’ve come in because they believe in what we do,” he affirms. “We said, look, you guys are slightly frustrated because you were racing last year [with Derby CC-WeBuyCycle-HUUB], and you didn’t have any team support. We said, ‘We can give you an infrastructure, but you have to now ride for HUUB BCC, and Derby CC disappears’, and they absolutely jumped on that.”
It’s about sustainability. It’s about infrastructure and it’s about building it slowly and with strong foundations.
McCay emphasises that the senior riders are, crucially, behind the team structure and ethos. “It’s about sustainability. It’s about infrastructure and it’s about building it slowly and with strong foundations. If you go from the top down it just attracts other elite riders, no one really knows how to get in to it and they’re just after the win. But it’s not just about the win, it’s about the journey to the win, that’s most important.
10th ANEXO/CAMS Junior CiCle Classic . Ahron Dick of HUUB BCC Race Team wins. Image: Olly Hassell/SWpix.com
“The aim was to grow in stages and almost take the journey of the rider with you and develop stories,” he explains, pointing out some of the successful academy graduates, some of whom have joined the senior team this year. “So we’ve got Ryan Williams. Ryan joined us at 15. We’ve got Zaķ [Machin] who won the [CTT] Circuit Championship last year. Ben Marsh came at 15 and left us at 18 with three national track titles, the overall junior series and the CiCLE Classic. He’s gone to race abroad [with Project1]. Where we want to be is just two years too late for him, it’s just a timing issue. In two years we will be the destination. In two years we will have a team in the Tour of Britain. We will be [UCI] Continental.”
McCay’s passion and enthusiasm for the project shines through, although he clarifies his last sentence. “I say we will. It’s about building strong foundations,” he declares, noting that the most solid of these have come in the form of the partnership between BCC Race Team and businesses HUUB and WeBuyCycle, allowing the team to grow into 2024.
HUUB and WeBuyCycle are actually part of the management of the HUUB BCC team, they are shaping the team. BCC, HUUB and WeBuyCycle have effectively merged into a trade team
Although still reliant, like almost every other cycling team, on commercial sponsors for funding and equipment, McCay believes the partnership between the trio is more sustainable than a traditional sponsorship agreement. “It’s trying to build a partnership in the right way that isn’t just fickle to if they like racing or not. For example, HUUB and WeBuyCycle are actually part of the management of the HUUB BCC team, they are shaping the team. BCC, HUUB and WeBuyCycle have effectively merged into a trade team, but a trade team where the trade is intrinsically linked to the success of the team and their business.”
McCay points to the example of WeBuyCycle facilitating and providing the team with twelve Colnago bikes, which they will then sell on. “That relationship with our key partners means we’ll get high quality kit that can be fed through each year without strangling and stifling the team. Over the last seven years, we have been fortunate to have partners that have supported our core aim to invest in and develop talent, and many of them are still with us.
“We use the phrase partnerships of opportunities,” he explains. “Our main aim is to help our riders flourish, and we carry that message across to our partners. Despite the pressures of the economic climate, our partners are not going away, because they believe in what we’re doing, and I think that’s the key thing – doing things better, doing things to develop talent. I’m not just talking on the bike, I’m talking about the talent of the rider off the bike. Also, helping partners to develop their own talent.”
Off the bike, the team is as ambitious as on it, the ethos of ‘thrive to race’ translating across both areas. The team has entered into a headline grabbing partnership with the University of Derby, allowing their riders to study whilst racing at a high level, something which has seen great results in cricket with the MCCU scheme. With other projects in the pipeline, such as aiming to work with local charities, the team aims to support local communities in Nottinghamshire, as well as their riders, throughout the year.
But where did it all start? “It was a classic case of one AGM, someone said, ‘Why don’t we have a race team?’” McCay recalls. In his role as Beeston Cycling Club chairman, McCay would play a fundamental role in realising that ambition, setting up a team for the 2015 season which would win the East Midlands Road Race League with a young Ross Lamb, who would go on to ride for a number of UCI Continental teams. However, it wasn’t sustainable. “You’re only as good as the availability and the capability of the riders, because it’s amateur. We had a good two or three years doing that, but naturally there are peaks and troughs. We set up a successful women’s team, known colloquially as the ‘Queen Bees’, and that fell victim to the same thing.
if you want to try and make a difference in racing, you have to understand that club racing is very different from elite racing – they’re almost two completely separate things
“It gave me an appetite to say ‘you need to do something different, to try and do something different.’ There’s nothing wrong with [doing] that [club racing] because that’s a really healthy racing scene. But if you want to try and make a difference in racing, you have to understand that club racing is very different from elite racing – they’re almost two completely separate things. So you have to then start to make a jump into what are the foundations of a good healthy elite racing team that can both support the club and can support grassroots.”
Having seen teams come and go in a faltering domestic system in his role as a regional commissaire, McCay had ambitions of creating a team with a different model, something he shared with Bryan Steel, now head coach of HUUB BCC, an Olympic medallist based in Beeston who was running the Godfrey Bikewear Team at the time, along with his own under-23 academy. “Something myself and Brian always kind of said was, there has got to be a better way, but we never actually sat down and talked about it, and it kind of fluttered away,” he reflects.
2024 East Cleveland Classic. Josh Housley of HUUB BCC Race Team. Image: Olly Hassell/SWpix.com
McCay was then approached by parents in Beeston Cycling Club, whose children had finished the Go-Ride programme at other clubs, and were then left with a void, their parents acting as their coaches with no clear path. “I think four parents came to me and said, ‘Look John, we know you’ve got a vision, you’ve been talking about something different. You just need something to ignite it.’ So, I had five parents on-board, and I approached Bryan and said ‘Your senior academy is going nowhere’ – joking of course – ‘let’s start a youth / junior academy’. So we started that way and within six months he had closed his senior academy and focused on the youth / junior academy. We said, ‘Let’s grow the riders up and do it that way’.
“It’s only now year seven that we’ve got an elite team. But the vision was to always have an elite team. Grow it organically, so the riders grow with you. That’s the model.”
The final hurdle to get to where HUUB BCC are now, was being granted Elite Development Status by British Cycling, something which involves an interview process to ensure the teams are able to support their riders on their journey. However, the interview revealed that the team have far bigger ambitions, wanting to reignite the domestic racing scene, having proven their credentials with their junior race team in previous years.
“They went through, you know, all the basic questions. How are you going to support this team? A lot of it was tactical. I asked them, ‘What does good look like to you?’ We agreed it is about the collective promotion of the sport and all the various stakeholders.
“I said: ‘Surely to goodness, each of us teams want to win races, but some of us are going to come last. Shouldn’t we really be generating and engendering a culture of collaboration with the teams to communicate the benefits to the cities we operate in as a collective, so organisers, race teams and British Cycling start to work together. Whether we get the lanterne rouge or we get the yellow jersey, it doesn’t really matter to us. What matters to us is creating a vibrant environment. And I suggest that we all sit down – the organisers, the race teams and British Cycling and say: What’s in our gift, what can we do? How can we jointly promote things? How can we speak in concert together? What are the key messages that we wish to get out? How can we generate more sponsorship? How can we generate more interest? How can we generate more participation?’ And so that’s one of the mechanisms that we’ve proposed, and British Cycling thought that’s really interesting, and we hope to be a part of.
We’re actually here for UK Racing PLC – we’re all stakeholders. What we want to do is stop this situation where organisers are always the ones shouldering responsibility to put the race on
“For us, it’s about open dialogue and collaboration. If it means that we share intelligence, if it means we share marketing messages, marketing resource with the [other] teams. Actually get together, so it’s not 12 teams or 20 teams or 10 teams sitting round a table, we’re actually here for UK Racing PLC – we’re all stakeholders. What we want to do is stop this situation where organisers are always the ones shouldering responsibility to put the race on.”
McCay isn’t shy to say that he wants HUUB BCC to become the destination for riders in the East Midlands, and he is demonstrably as passionate about the UK scene becoming the destination for British riders to flourish as they move on in their careers. “We want to be seen as the centre of excellence for the East Midlands. Every junior rider wants to race in Europe now – and we’ve been frustrated by that.”
We want to be seen as the centre of excellence for the East Midlands. Every junior rider wants to race in Europe now – and we’ve been frustrated by that
Aside from reigniting the domestic scene, what are the aims for HUUB BCC for 2024 and beyond, both on and off the bike? “To better the results than we got last year,” answers McCay with regard to the on-bike equation, explaining that a realistic blend of successes would be the ideal outcome.
“We don’t just race for the win. We race for positive change,” he notes. “We’re building a reputation of being seen as a professional outfit, and some of the organisers have said we’re more professional than some Continental teams,” he notes. “Every race we’ve been in abroad, the organisers have said we will welcome you back. So, it’s building on that reputation.
“Off the bike, it’s about building on what we’ve done. We have done a lot of stuff supporting riders with wider opportinites, such as blending racing with an educational career. Doing what we can to support riders. We’re not a massive organisation. What we are is, it’s just basically looking after the well-being and the development of the talent on and off the bike – building champions.
“And then, the last point is, what does next year look like?” McCay asks himself, having previously stated the teams bold ambition to become a UCI team for 2026. “We need to get two reasonably sized partners that can take away the pressure of our day-to-day making the books balance. And it’s about doing that in the right way. A partnership of opportunities. Long gone are the days of just sticking a logo on the jersey. their business should benefit from their partnership with us.”
In many ways, the HUUB BCC team mirrors the riders it has so far produced, growing and developing in an assured way. “When we come across barriers, we sidestep them,” says McCay, explaining how the team has grown over the past seven years. With a crucial period, both on and off the bike ahead, it is an attitude that the team will hope continues to serve them well.
Elite cycling has seen a shift towards teams developing their own talent in recent years, the majority of WorldTour teams creating in-house set ups to nurture young riders, running their own Continental and even junior teams, or building partnerships with existing outfits to offer a direct path for the best talent in the sport to its top tier. The phenomenon hasn’t escaped the UK domestic scene either, with junior team Tofuati Everyone Active partnering with DSM-firmenich NLPost, and Saint Piran running development teams in various guises such as 05/03 and until recently USKIS, merging it with their Continental team earlier this month.
However, a new Elite Development Team in the shape of HUUB BCC Race Team has flipped the idea on its head; the new senior team a destination for riders graduating through the successful Beeston Cycling Club Academy pathway structure, the junior team of the same name already an established force in the U19 ranks, having recently won the Junior CiCLE Classic for the second consecutive year courtesy of Ahron Dick.
The British Continental spoke to Team President John McCay to discuss the team’s structure, a vision for reigniting the domestic scene, and what 2024 and beyond has in store for the East Midlands based outfit, both on and off the bike.
“I think we’re quite unique in the UK,” muses McCay, a long-time committee member of Beeston Cycling Club and one of the key players in building HUUB BCC into the Elite Development Team it is today.
“We currently have 35 riders in the academy, that is always club related, from under-14 to under-16 to under-19 and now under-23. Each age group has their own management,” he says, explaining how the academy is linked to the separately registered elite HUUB BCC teams, the junior version made up of a majority of academy graduates in their second junior year.
“You can only get into that if you’re a cracking first year junior, but really it’s for second year juniors because we believe that you’re still finding your feet transitioning from youth racing into junior racing – it’s like black and white, as a first year junior,” he continues, with great attention to detail about the team’s pathway and what it and stands for. “[The] Academy effectively has its origins in Beeston, Nottinghamshire. HUUB BCC is an East Midlands team. Very distinct. But they are linked. All riders attend the same workshops. If you were an external rider applying to come in, you must be better than anyone in the academy, because if they’re good enough, they come straight through.”
For 2024, the HUUB BCC senior team will have 12 riders – eight under-23s, five of which are academy graduates, and four senior riders. The senior riders, including the likes of Adam Kenway, Josh Housley and Seb Garry, all have strong connections to the East Midlands, the majority with links to partners HUUB and WeBuyCycle, having ridden for teams they’ve been involved in previously.
“They’ve come in because they believe in what we do,” he affirms. “We said, look, you guys are slightly frustrated because you were racing last year [with Derby CC-WeBuyCycle-HUUB], and you didn’t have any team support. We said, ‘We can give you an infrastructure, but you have to now ride for HUUB BCC, and Derby CC disappears’, and they absolutely jumped on that.”
McCay emphasises that the senior riders are, crucially, behind the team structure and ethos. “It’s about sustainability. It’s about infrastructure and it’s about building it slowly and with strong foundations. If you go from the top down it just attracts other elite riders, no one really knows how to get in to it and they’re just after the win. But it’s not just about the win, it’s about the journey to the win, that’s most important.
“The aim was to grow in stages and almost take the journey of the rider with you and develop stories,” he explains, pointing out some of the successful academy graduates, some of whom have joined the senior team this year. “So we’ve got Ryan Williams. Ryan joined us at 15. We’ve got Zaķ [Machin] who won the [CTT] Circuit Championship last year. Ben Marsh came at 15 and left us at 18 with three national track titles, the overall junior series and the CiCLE Classic. He’s gone to race abroad [with Project1]. Where we want to be is just two years too late for him, it’s just a timing issue. In two years we will be the destination. In two years we will have a team in the Tour of Britain. We will be [UCI] Continental.”
McCay’s passion and enthusiasm for the project shines through, although he clarifies his last sentence. “I say we will. It’s about building strong foundations,” he declares, noting that the most solid of these have come in the form of the partnership between BCC Race Team and businesses HUUB and WeBuyCycle, allowing the team to grow into 2024.
Although still reliant, like almost every other cycling team, on commercial sponsors for funding and equipment, McCay believes the partnership between the trio is more sustainable than a traditional sponsorship agreement. “It’s trying to build a partnership in the right way that isn’t just fickle to if they like racing or not. For example, HUUB and WeBuyCycle are actually part of the management of the HUUB BCC team, they are shaping the team. BCC, HUUB and WeBuyCycle have effectively merged into a trade team, but a trade team where the trade is intrinsically linked to the success of the team and their business.”
McCay points to the example of WeBuyCycle facilitating and providing the team with twelve Colnago bikes, which they will then sell on. “That relationship with our key partners means we’ll get high quality kit that can be fed through each year without strangling and stifling the team. Over the last seven years, we have been fortunate to have partners that have supported our core aim to invest in and develop talent, and many of them are still with us.
“We use the phrase partnerships of opportunities,” he explains. “Our main aim is to help our riders flourish, and we carry that message across to our partners. Despite the pressures of the economic climate, our partners are not going away, because they believe in what we’re doing, and I think that’s the key thing – doing things better, doing things to develop talent. I’m not just talking on the bike, I’m talking about the talent of the rider off the bike. Also, helping partners to develop their own talent.”
Off the bike, the team is as ambitious as on it, the ethos of ‘thrive to race’ translating across both areas. The team has entered into a headline grabbing partnership with the University of Derby, allowing their riders to study whilst racing at a high level, something which has seen great results in cricket with the MCCU scheme. With other projects in the pipeline, such as aiming to work with local charities, the team aims to support local communities in Nottinghamshire, as well as their riders, throughout the year.
But where did it all start? “It was a classic case of one AGM, someone said, ‘Why don’t we have a race team?’” McCay recalls. In his role as Beeston Cycling Club chairman, McCay would play a fundamental role in realising that ambition, setting up a team for the 2015 season which would win the East Midlands Road Race League with a young Ross Lamb, who would go on to ride for a number of UCI Continental teams. However, it wasn’t sustainable. “You’re only as good as the availability and the capability of the riders, because it’s amateur. We had a good two or three years doing that, but naturally there are peaks and troughs. We set up a successful women’s team, known colloquially as the ‘Queen Bees’, and that fell victim to the same thing.
“It gave me an appetite to say ‘you need to do something different, to try and do something different.’ There’s nothing wrong with [doing] that [club racing] because that’s a really healthy racing scene. But if you want to try and make a difference in racing, you have to understand that club racing is very different from elite racing – they’re almost two completely separate things. So you have to then start to make a jump into what are the foundations of a good healthy elite racing team that can both support the club and can support grassroots.”
Having seen teams come and go in a faltering domestic system in his role as a regional commissaire, McCay had ambitions of creating a team with a different model, something he shared with Bryan Steel, now head coach of HUUB BCC, an Olympic medallist based in Beeston who was running the Godfrey Bikewear Team at the time, along with his own under-23 academy. “Something myself and Brian always kind of said was, there has got to be a better way, but we never actually sat down and talked about it, and it kind of fluttered away,” he reflects.
McCay was then approached by parents in Beeston Cycling Club, whose children had finished the Go-Ride programme at other clubs, and were then left with a void, their parents acting as their coaches with no clear path. “I think four parents came to me and said, ‘Look John, we know you’ve got a vision, you’ve been talking about something different. You just need something to ignite it.’ So, I had five parents on-board, and I approached Bryan and said ‘Your senior academy is going nowhere’ – joking of course – ‘let’s start a youth / junior academy’. So we started that way and within six months he had closed his senior academy and focused on the youth / junior academy. We said, ‘Let’s grow the riders up and do it that way’.
“It’s only now year seven that we’ve got an elite team. But the vision was to always have an elite team. Grow it organically, so the riders grow with you. That’s the model.”
The final hurdle to get to where HUUB BCC are now, was being granted Elite Development Status by British Cycling, something which involves an interview process to ensure the teams are able to support their riders on their journey. However, the interview revealed that the team have far bigger ambitions, wanting to reignite the domestic racing scene, having proven their credentials with their junior race team in previous years.
“They went through, you know, all the basic questions. How are you going to support this team? A lot of it was tactical. I asked them, ‘What does good look like to you?’ We agreed it is about the collective promotion of the sport and all the various stakeholders.
“I said: ‘Surely to goodness, each of us teams want to win races, but some of us are going to come last. Shouldn’t we really be generating and engendering a culture of collaboration with the teams to communicate the benefits to the cities we operate in as a collective, so organisers, race teams and British Cycling start to work together. Whether we get the lanterne rouge or we get the yellow jersey, it doesn’t really matter to us. What matters to us is creating a vibrant environment. And I suggest that we all sit down – the organisers, the race teams and British Cycling and say: What’s in our gift, what can we do? How can we jointly promote things? How can we speak in concert together? What are the key messages that we wish to get out? How can we generate more sponsorship? How can we generate more interest? How can we generate more participation?’ And so that’s one of the mechanisms that we’ve proposed, and British Cycling thought that’s really interesting, and we hope to be a part of.
“For us, it’s about open dialogue and collaboration. If it means that we share intelligence, if it means we share marketing messages, marketing resource with the [other] teams. Actually get together, so it’s not 12 teams or 20 teams or 10 teams sitting round a table, we’re actually here for UK Racing PLC – we’re all stakeholders. What we want to do is stop this situation where organisers are always the ones shouldering responsibility to put the race on.”
McCay isn’t shy to say that he wants HUUB BCC to become the destination for riders in the East Midlands, and he is demonstrably as passionate about the UK scene becoming the destination for British riders to flourish as they move on in their careers. “We want to be seen as the centre of excellence for the East Midlands. Every junior rider wants to race in Europe now – and we’ve been frustrated by that.”
Aside from reigniting the domestic scene, what are the aims for HUUB BCC for 2024 and beyond, both on and off the bike? “To better the results than we got last year,” answers McCay with regard to the on-bike equation, explaining that a realistic blend of successes would be the ideal outcome.
“We don’t just race for the win. We race for positive change,” he notes. “We’re building a reputation of being seen as a professional outfit, and some of the organisers have said we’re more professional than some Continental teams,” he notes. “Every race we’ve been in abroad, the organisers have said we will welcome you back. So, it’s building on that reputation.
“Off the bike, it’s about building on what we’ve done. We have done a lot of stuff supporting riders with wider opportinites, such as blending racing with an educational career. Doing what we can to support riders. We’re not a massive organisation. What we are is, it’s just basically looking after the well-being and the development of the talent on and off the bike – building champions.
“And then, the last point is, what does next year look like?” McCay asks himself, having previously stated the teams bold ambition to become a UCI team for 2026. “We need to get two reasonably sized partners that can take away the pressure of our day-to-day making the books balance. And it’s about doing that in the right way. A partnership of opportunities. Long gone are the days of just sticking a logo on the jersey. their business should benefit from their partnership with us.”
In many ways, the HUUB BCC team mirrors the riders it has so far produced, growing and developing in an assured way. “When we come across barriers, we sidestep them,” says McCay, explaining how the team has grown over the past seven years. With a crucial period, both on and off the bike ahead, it is an attitude that the team will hope continues to serve them well.
Featured image: Emma Wilcock
Share this:
Discover more from The British Continental
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.