Lessons from the West Midlands: William Fotheringham on how road racing survives
With entries arriving later, organisers carrying more risk and calendars under pressure, domestic road racing is often framed as a sport in retreat. In an exclusive interview with The British Continental, William Fotheringham explains why the answer may lie not in reform from above, but in practical decisions made close to the ground.
For much of his career, William Fotheringham explained cycling to the outside world. As The Guardian’s long-time correspondent, he chronicled the sport’s politics, scandals and slow evolutions with a historian’s eye and a reporter’s restraint.
These days, his vantage point is different. Fotheringham is no longer filing dispatches from the Tour de France; he is helping to keep domestic road racing running in the West Midlands – chairing the regional road racing group (West Midlands Road Racing), supporting organisers, and running a development squad, the Halesowen Academy. It is work that involves fewer headlines and more spreadsheets, fewer grand narratives and more small decisions taken under pressure.
You can spend your time moaning about British Cycling, or you can ignore that and do something
In an exclusive interview with The British Continental, Fotheringham reflects on what that shift has taught him. At a moment when British road racing is often discussed in terms of decline or dysfunction, his experience offers something rarer: a grounded account of what actually helps, what quietly works, and what responsibility looks like when it is taken seriously. What follows is not a polemic, but a case study – a manifesto by example.
William Fotheringham. Image: Gary Main
A sport under strain
Domestic road racing in Britain is not short of diagnoses. Falling entry numbers, rising costs, volunteer fatigue, a calendar that looks thinner each year: all are familiar to anyone who has spent time around the sport. For Fotheringham, speaking to The British Continental, the picture is less one of sudden collapse than of slow, cumulative pressure – structural changes that have altered how races are entered, funded and sustained.
“The way the finances of races are done has changed,” is one example Fotheringham highlights. “The entry money is taken up front, which means riders all enter later. Two weeks out, an organiser could be looking at 20 entries, which basically means a failed event. The fact is that in the next 10 days they may well get another 40 or 50 entries – but you don’t know that when you’re staring at the spreadsheet.”
It’s really scary as an organiser. You’re quite close to the event, you haven’t got the entries, and you know you haven’t got the entries you need to cover your costs
That uncertainty has consequences. Organisers are asked to commit several thousand pounds up front, often with no realistic visibility of whether costs will be covered. “It’s really scary as an organiser,” Fotheringham says. “You’re quite close to the event, you haven’t got the entries, and you know you haven’t got the entries you need to cover your costs. It’s absolutely understandable that people won’t hold their nerve.”
In recent seasons, that loss of nerve has translated into late cancellations, with events disappearing from the calendar days before they are due to run.
The temptation, in moments like this, is to look upwards to British Cycling for answers – or culprits. Fotheringham admits he has been there himself. His view, however, has shifted towards something more pragmatic: an acceptance that the governing body’s priorities, systems and remit are unlikely to change quickly — if at all.
Image: Gary Main
What follows from that, he argues, is a different question altogether. Not who is responsible, but what can actually be done.
“I think British Cycling is problematic,” he says. “But it’s very easy to blame British Cycling for everything. And actually there are quite a lot of things that people can do themselves. You can spend your time moaning about British Cycling, or you can ignore that and do something.”
Supporting race organisers
That shift in emphasis – away from critique and towards construction – sits at the heart of what has happened in the West Midlands. Rather than waiting for reform, Fotheringham and others have worked on the assumption that the conditions under which races operate are unlikely to improve, and that any progress will have to be made within those constraints.
“We know it’s not going to change,” he says of the entry system and the financial pressures it creates. “So we’ve had to adapt.”
Image: Gary Main
At the centre of that adaptation is a blunt recognition of where the sport is most vulnerable. “If you lose an organiser, that’s really a huge difficulty,” Fotheringham says. “Organisers are quite hard to replace. So your organisers have to be really valued and really looked after and supported.”
In the West Midlands, that support has been formalised rather than implied. The regional board has taken the decision to underwrite race losses – a conscious choice about where risk should sit within the system.
The effect is most keenly felt at the moment organisers are now forced to make judgement calls: two or three weeks out, when entry numbers can look terminal but often are not. Without a backstop, those decisions tend to err towards cancellation. With one, organisers are more likely to hold their nerve.
Knowing that the board was willing to support it financially if need be gave us the confidence to keep it going
It is something, Fotheringham says, that helped get the region’s Handicap series off the ground. “Knowing that the board was willing to support it financially if need be,” Fotheringham says, “gave us the confidence to keep it going.”
“It changes behaviour,” Fotheringham says. “If you know you’re not going to be left carrying the can on your own, you’re much more likely to let things play out.”
That approach has also allowed the region to attempt formats that would otherwise feel prohibitively risky. He points to the Thursday evening handicap league as an example – a series that required upfront commitment with no guarantee of return. “It was quite a gamble,” he says. “But the only reason we could do it was because we knew the board would step in if it didn’t work.”
In practice, losses have been limited. In the previous season, a small number of races ran at a deficit and were supported through regional funds or other means. The point, he argues, is not whether money is ultimately lost, but what that willingness to absorb it prevents. Losing a small amount on an event is preferable to losing an organiser entirely.
Image: Gary Main
Around that financial guarantee sits a more hands-on model of support: close contact with organisers as races approach, coordinated social media pushes when entries lag, and visible backing when decisions become uncomfortable. But he is clear about what makes the difference.
Fotheringham is also careful not to overstate the role of structures alone. “First and foremost I inherited a very strong volunteer group,” he says. “And West Mids wouldn’t be unique in that. There are some people without whom racing simply wouldn’t happen here. They know who they are, and they have made an immense difference.”
Moral support helps; practical help helps more. Removing personal financial exposure changes everything. Covering losses, in that sense, is not about rescuing failing races. It is about protecting the people without whom there would be no calendar to speak of.
Treating riders as participants, not just entry numbers
If organisers are the most fragile part of the ecosystem, riders are the most visible. In the West Midlands, one of the quiet but consequential shifts has been a change in how riders are regarded – not simply as names on an entry list, but as people whose experience of the sport matters beyond the finish line.
We’ve moved from seeing riders as just competitors – just people who turn entry fees. They are the consumers, if you like.
“We’ve moved from seeing riders as just competitors – just people who turn entry fees,” says Fotheringham. “They are the consumers, if you like. We’re looking to provide them with a product.”
That language is deliberate, and slightly unfashionable in amateur sport. But the thinking behind it is straightforward. If riders are more selective about where and when they race, then races have to offer more than the bare minimum. In practical terms, that has meant investing in things that make the sport visible and shareable. “We have a photographer at pretty much every race as far as possible,” Fotheringham says. “Providing pictures for the riders to put up on social media.”
The region’s social media presence, he is keen to stress, is the brainchild of Tom Wilson, British Cycling’s regional representative. That work has been supported by targeted investment in equipment – including a drone and on-bike cameras – allowing races to be documented in more distinctive ways. Taken together, Fotheringham suggests, those decisions have helped give events a clearer identity and a life beyond the finish line, without distracting from the racing itself.
Alongside that, Fotheringham points to the region’s long-term backing from Fusion Media as an enabling factor of a different kind. Their support, he explains, has been primarily financial, and sustained over four years. That backing has allowed the region to invest in its own infrastructure: building and maintaining a dedicated website, and ensuring elements such as a women’s regional championship that carries proper status, including a dedicated trophy.
Image: Gary Main
It has also meant thinking more carefully about the shape of the racing itself. The West Midlands’ three-day stage race – the Marches 3 Day – now entering its fifth running, is cited repeatedly by Fotheringham as an example of doing something distinctive within familiar constraints. “We’re very proud of the three-day,” he says. “It does some really interesting things. It’s got a really good summit finish, which I don’t think many other races in the UK do.”
Elsewhere, the emphasis has been on inclusivity rather than hierarchy. The region’s Thursday evening handicap series has become a testing ground for that approach. “The handicap league’s a brilliant thing,” Fotheringham says. “You get some of the very best riders riding it, and at the same time you’ve got guys who are just there to have a good time on the night.”
That mix is not incidental. “For Masters, it’s been really successful,” he says. “And next season we’re going to try and expand the demographic again and make a push to get women into the handicaps. For relatively unseasoned women racers, they’re an extremely good way into road racing.”
You can’t just put on races in the same village halls, on the same courses you were using 10 or 15 years ago. People find other things to do
None of this, Fotheringham is keen to stress, is about spectacle for its own sake. It is about recognising that participation now has to be earned. “You can’t just put on races in the same village halls, on the same courses you were using 10 or 15 years ago,” he says. “People find other things to do.”
Building from the bottom, not the top
One of the clearest themes to emerge from Fotheringham’s account is a resistance to top-heavy thinking. In recent years, British cycling has developed more visible and more viable pathways to racing abroad – particularly for juniors and under-23s. That progress, he acknowledges, is real. But it comes with consequences.
“A lot more of the juniors are racing UCI races abroad,” he says. “Quite a lot of the under-23s are now racing abroad as well, which is great. It’s good that there are these established pathways up to WorldTour level which weren’t there before.”
If you count up the number of weekends they’re spending abroad, that’s a lot of weekends they’re not racing in Britain. That’s fees and potential volunteers that are going west
The problem, as he sees it, is what gets left behind. “If you count up the number of weekends they’re spending abroad, that’s a lot of weekends they’re not racing in Britain,” he says. “That’s fees and potential volunteers that are going west.”
The result is a narrowing of the domestic middle. National-level racing survives, to some extent, but the layers beneath it – the Regional Bs, the entry points, the developmental spaces – become harder to sustain. “You can’t have a calendar that’s made up of Nat Bs and National Series races,” Fotheringham says. “Otherwise the bottom of the pyramid just goes.”
That is why the West Midlands’ next step has been to launch a Regional B series – the Wales and West Mids Cup – in collaboration with Beicio Cymru. “If people don’t look after the grassroots, the whole sport goes,” he says. The seven-race series will feature three races in Wales and four in the West Midlands and is squarely targeting at new entrants to road racing.
This focus on the base is as much about participation as it is about racing opportunity. “Riders are more selective about what they race,” he says. “The races are more expensive to ride and more expensive to get to. You might not want to ride four races a month anymore.” In that context, making entry-level and mid-level racing feel worthwhile becomes a structural necessity, not a philosophical preference.
“You’ve got to rebuild the market at the bottom of the market,” Fotheringham says. “The only way you can do it is to really look at the product you’re putting out, and try to draw riders into it.”
Collaboration over silos
If rebuilding the base is one part of the answer, Fotheringham is clear that it cannot be done in isolation. Regional self-sufficiency, he suggests, is largely a myth. What has helped the West Midlands endure is not just internal organisation, but a willingness to work across borders – geographical and institutional.
You can’t just exist in a silo. You have to collaborate with people
“You can’t just exist in a silo,” he says. “You have to collaborate with people.”
That principle has shaped a growing relationship with Wales, rooted initially in geography but sustained by shared interests. “The three-day that we run is cross-border,” Fotheringham explains. “It uses Welsh and English accredited marshals. We built that collaboration on the back of the three-day.” From there, joint leagues and shared calendar space have followed, including Welsh rounds within West Midlands series and vice versa.
The appeal of working with Wales, he suggests, lies partly in structure. “Wales has a really good system of accredited marshals,” he says. “The governing body there has more power than in England, and that means the races are really well supported.” The trade-off is cost. “I think the costs are quite large in Wales compared to England,” he adds, “but there are things they do extremely well.”
Collaboration also extends beyond cross-border racing. Fotheringham points to the Regional Road Race Forum, a body which he chairs. It is designed to bring together regional leads to share practice – as an idea whose time has come, even if its momentum has stalled. “That forum exists, it’s a good thing. But it needs more impetus behind it,” he admits.
Image: Gary Main
The risk of not sharing, he argues, is uneven development. “I think we make a disproportionately large contribution to the national calendar now,” he says of the West Midlands. “That reflects well on everybody in the region – but it’s also slightly worrying nationally.”
A sport concentrated in a handful of strongholds is not, in his view, a healthy one. “You don’t want a sport that’s strong in one, two or three regions,” he says. “You want it to be strong nationally.”
What emerges is a vision of domestic road racing as a network rather than a hierarchy – sustained not by central instruction, but by lateral cooperation between regions prepared to learn from one another.
The responsibility question
As the conversation draws wider, Fotheringham repeatedly returns to a theme that sits uncomfortably with easy narratives of decline or blame. If domestic road racing is under strain, he argues, responsibility does not rest solely with institutions or organisers. It is dispersed – and that, he suggests, is both the problem and the opportunity.
People who are involved in the sport need to be hard on themselves. What am I giving back to this sport?
“It’s more important to be honest that people who are involved in the sport need to be hard on themselves,” he says. “What am I giving back to this sport?”
For riders, the answer can be deceptively small. “Just try and enter your races earlier,” Fotheringham says. “Having an entry a week or two earlier makes a big difference to an organiser.” It is a modest act, but one with disproportionate impact on confidence and decision-making.
For teams, the obligation is broader. “No one expects every team or club to run races,” he says. “There aren’t actually enough riders for that number of races.” What would help, he argues, is a shift in mindset. “If you’re running a team, look at the number of parents you’ve got. Are any of them helping out as accredited marshals, as race drivers, even as red flag marshals?”
William Fotheringham. Image: supplied
These gestures, he suggests, do more than fill gaps on a rota. “If someone phones up and says, ‘Can I help?’ it doesn’t just help you run the event,” he says. “It improves your outlook on life and makes you far more likely to keep running races.”
The governing body, in this framing, becomes neither villain nor saviour. “British Cycling has its issues,” Fotheringham says. “It’s changed. It’s trying to do many more things.” That expanded remit, he notes, inevitably limits the space available for regional road racing. “So we need to fight harder to be heard.”
Everyone needs to look at themselves and say: I’m involved in this sport, I love this sport – what can I personally do to make it stronger?
But waiting for rescue, he suggests, is a mistake. “Rather than worrying about what the governing body is or isn’t doing,” he says, “everyone needs to look at themselves and say: I’m involved in this sport, I love this sport – what can I personally do to make it stronger?”
It is a question without a single answer, but one that reframes the future of domestic road racing as a shared project rather than a delegated one.
Image: Gary Main
Why he still stays
For all the talk of systems and structures, the interview ultimately circles back to something more personal. Fotheringham is clear that his continued involvement is not driven by nostalgia or a desire to fix the sport in his own image. It comes instead from a long view of what cycling can give – and what it once gave him.
“Having raced myself for quite a long time, at various levels – never particularly great, but always loving doing it – and then having seen my own son do it,” he says, “it’s clear to me what the sport can bring to people.”
That understanding was sharpened by contrast. “I spent a lot of time covering the Tour de France in the Lance Armstrong years,” he says. “That was a pretty negative experience. And it was a real relief to come back to something as I knew it and experienced it, and realise what it can give to people.”
You can have riders who don’t ever win a bike race, but get a huge amount out of the sport – the comradeship, the fun, the sense of being part of something
What it gives, in his telling, is not primarily success or status. “It’s not just about winning races and becoming a WorldTour pro,” he says. “You can have riders who don’t ever win a bike race, but get a huge amount out of the sport – the comradeship, the fun, the sense of being part of something.”
That, more than anything else, explains his refusal to disengage. “I’m very frustrated with British Cycling as well,” he says. “But just saying I’m going to walk away because I don’t like the governing body – I don’t really have much time for that.”
There is, too, an awareness of time passing. “It really frustrates me that I’m 60 and can’t do it anymore,” he admits. “But being able to give back some of the positive things I took from it – that’s a really good thing to be able to do.”
In a sport often preoccupied with pathways and outcomes, Fotheringham’s motivation sounds almost unfashionably simple. Cycling mattered to him. It still does. And as long as it does, he seems intent on helping to make sure there is something left for others to fall in love with too.
Image: Gary Main
A manifesto without slogans
If there is a manifesto here, it is an understated one. No grand reform programme, no single lever to pull. Instead, a series of small, cumulative choices – made by organisers, riders, teams and regions – that determine whether domestic road racing continues to function at all.
Fotheringham is wary of overclaiming. “I don’t want it to read as if we’re the only people in Britain doing good things,” he says. “Because we’re not.” What he does want, however, is for the conversation to shift away from fatalism.
The alternative he offers is neither heroic nor glamorous. It is grounded, collective, and occasionally inconvenient. “You don’t have to organise a race,” he says. “You can literally just offer to lend a hand.”
When you run a race successfully and you’ve pulled all these people together and created something – that’s very rewarding
What sustains his optimism is not a belief that the sport will magically recover, but that it still works – when enough people decide to make it work. “When you run a race successfully,” he says, “and you’ve pulled all these people together and created something – that’s very rewarding.”
In that sense, the West Midlands’ model is less a blueprint than a reminder. Domestic road racing is not sustained by strategy papers or rescue narratives, but by a series of modest decisions: to back organisers when it matters, to share risk rather than deflect it, and to keep showing up when doing so would be easier to abandon.
It is not an answer that lends itself to slogans. But it is one grounded in experience – and, in the West Midlands at least, it is holding.
For much of his career, William Fotheringham explained cycling to the outside world. As The Guardian’s long-time correspondent, he chronicled the sport’s politics, scandals and slow evolutions with a historian’s eye and a reporter’s restraint.
These days, his vantage point is different. Fotheringham is no longer filing dispatches from the Tour de France; he is helping to keep domestic road racing running in the West Midlands – chairing the regional road racing group (West Midlands Road Racing), supporting organisers, and running a development squad, the Halesowen Academy. It is work that involves fewer headlines and more spreadsheets, fewer grand narratives and more small decisions taken under pressure.
In an exclusive interview with The British Continental, Fotheringham reflects on what that shift has taught him. At a moment when British road racing is often discussed in terms of decline or dysfunction, his experience offers something rarer: a grounded account of what actually helps, what quietly works, and what responsibility looks like when it is taken seriously. What follows is not a polemic, but a case study – a manifesto by example.
A sport under strain
Domestic road racing in Britain is not short of diagnoses. Falling entry numbers, rising costs, volunteer fatigue, a calendar that looks thinner each year: all are familiar to anyone who has spent time around the sport. For Fotheringham, speaking to The British Continental, the picture is less one of sudden collapse than of slow, cumulative pressure – structural changes that have altered how races are entered, funded and sustained.
“The way the finances of races are done has changed,” is one example Fotheringham highlights. “The entry money is taken up front, which means riders all enter later. Two weeks out, an organiser could be looking at 20 entries, which basically means a failed event. The fact is that in the next 10 days they may well get another 40 or 50 entries – but you don’t know that when you’re staring at the spreadsheet.”
That uncertainty has consequences. Organisers are asked to commit several thousand pounds up front, often with no realistic visibility of whether costs will be covered. “It’s really scary as an organiser,” Fotheringham says. “You’re quite close to the event, you haven’t got the entries, and you know you haven’t got the entries you need to cover your costs. It’s absolutely understandable that people won’t hold their nerve.”
In recent seasons, that loss of nerve has translated into late cancellations, with events disappearing from the calendar days before they are due to run.
The temptation, in moments like this, is to look upwards to British Cycling for answers – or culprits. Fotheringham admits he has been there himself. His view, however, has shifted towards something more pragmatic: an acceptance that the governing body’s priorities, systems and remit are unlikely to change quickly — if at all.
What follows from that, he argues, is a different question altogether. Not who is responsible, but what can actually be done.
“I think British Cycling is problematic,” he says. “But it’s very easy to blame British Cycling for everything. And actually there are quite a lot of things that people can do themselves. You can spend your time moaning about British Cycling, or you can ignore that and do something.”
Supporting race organisers
That shift in emphasis – away from critique and towards construction – sits at the heart of what has happened in the West Midlands. Rather than waiting for reform, Fotheringham and others have worked on the assumption that the conditions under which races operate are unlikely to improve, and that any progress will have to be made within those constraints.
“We know it’s not going to change,” he says of the entry system and the financial pressures it creates. “So we’ve had to adapt.”
At the centre of that adaptation is a blunt recognition of where the sport is most vulnerable. “If you lose an organiser, that’s really a huge difficulty,” Fotheringham says. “Organisers are quite hard to replace. So your organisers have to be really valued and really looked after and supported.”
In the West Midlands, that support has been formalised rather than implied. The regional board has taken the decision to underwrite race losses – a conscious choice about where risk should sit within the system.
The effect is most keenly felt at the moment organisers are now forced to make judgement calls: two or three weeks out, when entry numbers can look terminal but often are not. Without a backstop, those decisions tend to err towards cancellation. With one, organisers are more likely to hold their nerve.
It is something, Fotheringham says, that helped get the region’s Handicap series off the ground. “Knowing that the board was willing to support it financially if need be,” Fotheringham says, “gave us the confidence to keep it going.”
“It changes behaviour,” Fotheringham says. “If you know you’re not going to be left carrying the can on your own, you’re much more likely to let things play out.”
That approach has also allowed the region to attempt formats that would otherwise feel prohibitively risky. He points to the Thursday evening handicap league as an example – a series that required upfront commitment with no guarantee of return. “It was quite a gamble,” he says. “But the only reason we could do it was because we knew the board would step in if it didn’t work.”
In practice, losses have been limited. In the previous season, a small number of races ran at a deficit and were supported through regional funds or other means. The point, he argues, is not whether money is ultimately lost, but what that willingness to absorb it prevents. Losing a small amount on an event is preferable to losing an organiser entirely.
Around that financial guarantee sits a more hands-on model of support: close contact with organisers as races approach, coordinated social media pushes when entries lag, and visible backing when decisions become uncomfortable. But he is clear about what makes the difference.
Fotheringham is also careful not to overstate the role of structures alone. “First and foremost I inherited a very strong volunteer group,” he says. “And West Mids wouldn’t be unique in that. There are some people without whom racing simply wouldn’t happen here. They know who they are, and they have made an immense difference.”
Moral support helps; practical help helps more. Removing personal financial exposure changes everything. Covering losses, in that sense, is not about rescuing failing races. It is about protecting the people without whom there would be no calendar to speak of.
Treating riders as participants, not just entry numbers
If organisers are the most fragile part of the ecosystem, riders are the most visible. In the West Midlands, one of the quiet but consequential shifts has been a change in how riders are regarded – not simply as names on an entry list, but as people whose experience of the sport matters beyond the finish line.
“We’ve moved from seeing riders as just competitors – just people who turn entry fees,” says Fotheringham. “They are the consumers, if you like. We’re looking to provide them with a product.”
That language is deliberate, and slightly unfashionable in amateur sport. But the thinking behind it is straightforward. If riders are more selective about where and when they race, then races have to offer more than the bare minimum. In practical terms, that has meant investing in things that make the sport visible and shareable. “We have a photographer at pretty much every race as far as possible,” Fotheringham says. “Providing pictures for the riders to put up on social media.”
The region’s social media presence, he is keen to stress, is the brainchild of Tom Wilson, British Cycling’s regional representative. That work has been supported by targeted investment in equipment – including a drone and on-bike cameras – allowing races to be documented in more distinctive ways. Taken together, Fotheringham suggests, those decisions have helped give events a clearer identity and a life beyond the finish line, without distracting from the racing itself.
Alongside that, Fotheringham points to the region’s long-term backing from Fusion Media as an enabling factor of a different kind. Their support, he explains, has been primarily financial, and sustained over four years. That backing has allowed the region to invest in its own infrastructure: building and maintaining a dedicated website, and ensuring elements such as a women’s regional championship that carries proper status, including a dedicated trophy.
It has also meant thinking more carefully about the shape of the racing itself. The West Midlands’ three-day stage race – the Marches 3 Day – now entering its fifth running, is cited repeatedly by Fotheringham as an example of doing something distinctive within familiar constraints. “We’re very proud of the three-day,” he says. “It does some really interesting things. It’s got a really good summit finish, which I don’t think many other races in the UK do.”
Elsewhere, the emphasis has been on inclusivity rather than hierarchy. The region’s Thursday evening handicap series has become a testing ground for that approach. “The handicap league’s a brilliant thing,” Fotheringham says. “You get some of the very best riders riding it, and at the same time you’ve got guys who are just there to have a good time on the night.”
That mix is not incidental. “For Masters, it’s been really successful,” he says. “And next season we’re going to try and expand the demographic again and make a push to get women into the handicaps. For relatively unseasoned women racers, they’re an extremely good way into road racing.”
None of this, Fotheringham is keen to stress, is about spectacle for its own sake. It is about recognising that participation now has to be earned. “You can’t just put on races in the same village halls, on the same courses you were using 10 or 15 years ago,” he says. “People find other things to do.”
Building from the bottom, not the top
One of the clearest themes to emerge from Fotheringham’s account is a resistance to top-heavy thinking. In recent years, British cycling has developed more visible and more viable pathways to racing abroad – particularly for juniors and under-23s. That progress, he acknowledges, is real. But it comes with consequences.
“A lot more of the juniors are racing UCI races abroad,” he says. “Quite a lot of the under-23s are now racing abroad as well, which is great. It’s good that there are these established pathways up to WorldTour level which weren’t there before.”
The problem, as he sees it, is what gets left behind. “If you count up the number of weekends they’re spending abroad, that’s a lot of weekends they’re not racing in Britain,” he says. “That’s fees and potential volunteers that are going west.”
The result is a narrowing of the domestic middle. National-level racing survives, to some extent, but the layers beneath it – the Regional Bs, the entry points, the developmental spaces – become harder to sustain. “You can’t have a calendar that’s made up of Nat Bs and National Series races,” Fotheringham says. “Otherwise the bottom of the pyramid just goes.”
That is why the West Midlands’ next step has been to launch a Regional B series – the Wales and West Mids Cup – in collaboration with Beicio Cymru. “If people don’t look after the grassroots, the whole sport goes,” he says. The seven-race series will feature three races in Wales and four in the West Midlands and is squarely targeting at new entrants to road racing.
This focus on the base is as much about participation as it is about racing opportunity. “Riders are more selective about what they race,” he says. “The races are more expensive to ride and more expensive to get to. You might not want to ride four races a month anymore.” In that context, making entry-level and mid-level racing feel worthwhile becomes a structural necessity, not a philosophical preference.
“You’ve got to rebuild the market at the bottom of the market,” Fotheringham says. “The only way you can do it is to really look at the product you’re putting out, and try to draw riders into it.”
Collaboration over silos
If rebuilding the base is one part of the answer, Fotheringham is clear that it cannot be done in isolation. Regional self-sufficiency, he suggests, is largely a myth. What has helped the West Midlands endure is not just internal organisation, but a willingness to work across borders – geographical and institutional.
“You can’t just exist in a silo,” he says. “You have to collaborate with people.”
That principle has shaped a growing relationship with Wales, rooted initially in geography but sustained by shared interests. “The three-day that we run is cross-border,” Fotheringham explains. “It uses Welsh and English accredited marshals. We built that collaboration on the back of the three-day.” From there, joint leagues and shared calendar space have followed, including Welsh rounds within West Midlands series and vice versa.
The appeal of working with Wales, he suggests, lies partly in structure. “Wales has a really good system of accredited marshals,” he says. “The governing body there has more power than in England, and that means the races are really well supported.” The trade-off is cost. “I think the costs are quite large in Wales compared to England,” he adds, “but there are things they do extremely well.”
Collaboration also extends beyond cross-border racing. Fotheringham points to the Regional Road Race Forum, a body which he chairs. It is designed to bring together regional leads to share practice – as an idea whose time has come, even if its momentum has stalled. “That forum exists, it’s a good thing. But it needs more impetus behind it,” he admits.
The risk of not sharing, he argues, is uneven development. “I think we make a disproportionately large contribution to the national calendar now,” he says of the West Midlands. “That reflects well on everybody in the region – but it’s also slightly worrying nationally.”
A sport concentrated in a handful of strongholds is not, in his view, a healthy one. “You don’t want a sport that’s strong in one, two or three regions,” he says. “You want it to be strong nationally.”
What emerges is a vision of domestic road racing as a network rather than a hierarchy – sustained not by central instruction, but by lateral cooperation between regions prepared to learn from one another.
The responsibility question
As the conversation draws wider, Fotheringham repeatedly returns to a theme that sits uncomfortably with easy narratives of decline or blame. If domestic road racing is under strain, he argues, responsibility does not rest solely with institutions or organisers. It is dispersed – and that, he suggests, is both the problem and the opportunity.
“It’s more important to be honest that people who are involved in the sport need to be hard on themselves,” he says. “What am I giving back to this sport?”
For riders, the answer can be deceptively small. “Just try and enter your races earlier,” Fotheringham says. “Having an entry a week or two earlier makes a big difference to an organiser.” It is a modest act, but one with disproportionate impact on confidence and decision-making.
For teams, the obligation is broader. “No one expects every team or club to run races,” he says. “There aren’t actually enough riders for that number of races.” What would help, he argues, is a shift in mindset. “If you’re running a team, look at the number of parents you’ve got. Are any of them helping out as accredited marshals, as race drivers, even as red flag marshals?”
These gestures, he suggests, do more than fill gaps on a rota. “If someone phones up and says, ‘Can I help?’ it doesn’t just help you run the event,” he says. “It improves your outlook on life and makes you far more likely to keep running races.”
The governing body, in this framing, becomes neither villain nor saviour. “British Cycling has its issues,” Fotheringham says. “It’s changed. It’s trying to do many more things.” That expanded remit, he notes, inevitably limits the space available for regional road racing. “So we need to fight harder to be heard.”
But waiting for rescue, he suggests, is a mistake. “Rather than worrying about what the governing body is or isn’t doing,” he says, “everyone needs to look at themselves and say: I’m involved in this sport, I love this sport – what can I personally do to make it stronger?”
It is a question without a single answer, but one that reframes the future of domestic road racing as a shared project rather than a delegated one.
Why he still stays
For all the talk of systems and structures, the interview ultimately circles back to something more personal. Fotheringham is clear that his continued involvement is not driven by nostalgia or a desire to fix the sport in his own image. It comes instead from a long view of what cycling can give – and what it once gave him.
“Having raced myself for quite a long time, at various levels – never particularly great, but always loving doing it – and then having seen my own son do it,” he says, “it’s clear to me what the sport can bring to people.”
That understanding was sharpened by contrast. “I spent a lot of time covering the Tour de France in the Lance Armstrong years,” he says. “That was a pretty negative experience. And it was a real relief to come back to something as I knew it and experienced it, and realise what it can give to people.”
What it gives, in his telling, is not primarily success or status. “It’s not just about winning races and becoming a WorldTour pro,” he says. “You can have riders who don’t ever win a bike race, but get a huge amount out of the sport – the comradeship, the fun, the sense of being part of something.”
That, more than anything else, explains his refusal to disengage. “I’m very frustrated with British Cycling as well,” he says. “But just saying I’m going to walk away because I don’t like the governing body – I don’t really have much time for that.”
There is, too, an awareness of time passing. “It really frustrates me that I’m 60 and can’t do it anymore,” he admits. “But being able to give back some of the positive things I took from it – that’s a really good thing to be able to do.”
In a sport often preoccupied with pathways and outcomes, Fotheringham’s motivation sounds almost unfashionably simple. Cycling mattered to him. It still does. And as long as it does, he seems intent on helping to make sure there is something left for others to fall in love with too.
A manifesto without slogans
If there is a manifesto here, it is an understated one. No grand reform programme, no single lever to pull. Instead, a series of small, cumulative choices – made by organisers, riders, teams and regions – that determine whether domestic road racing continues to function at all.
Fotheringham is wary of overclaiming. “I don’t want it to read as if we’re the only people in Britain doing good things,” he says. “Because we’re not.” What he does want, however, is for the conversation to shift away from fatalism.
The alternative he offers is neither heroic nor glamorous. It is grounded, collective, and occasionally inconvenient. “You don’t have to organise a race,” he says. “You can literally just offer to lend a hand.”
What sustains his optimism is not a belief that the sport will magically recover, but that it still works – when enough people decide to make it work. “When you run a race successfully,” he says, “and you’ve pulled all these people together and created something – that’s very rewarding.”
In that sense, the West Midlands’ model is less a blueprint than a reminder. Domestic road racing is not sustained by strategy papers or rescue narratives, but by a series of modest decisions: to back organisers when it matters, to share risk rather than deflect it, and to keep showing up when doing so would be easier to abandon.
It is not an answer that lends itself to slogans. But it is one grounded in experience – and, in the West Midlands at least, it is holding.
Featured image: Gary Main
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