The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. – Eleanor Roosevelt
The Future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed. – William Gibson
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. – Martin Luther King, Jr.
Struggle is a never ending process. Freedom is never really won, you earn it and win it in every generation. – Coretta Scott King
Do what you feel in your heart to be right – for you’ll be criticized anyway. – Eleanor Roosevelt
The best way to predict your future is to create it. – Abraham Lincoln
The best way to predict the future is to invent it. – Alan Kay
Get in good trouble, necessary trouble. – John Lewis
Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced. – James Baldwin
True leaders don’t create followers, they create more leaders. – Tom Peters
The Center for the Future of Cycling (CFC) is a Paris-based think and action tank that brings together agents of change, activists, creative people and innovators both from within professional cycling and from outside the sport. CFC is multidisciplinary…and necessarily so. We are disruptors. We push for change not by demanding it but by achieving it. We are sponsors, race organizers, team owners, activists, publishers, journalists, business owners, consultants, scientists, teachers, sports federation officials and fans. We are producers, filmmakers, photographers, artists, composers, musicians, videographers, animators, editors, writers, software developers, drone pilots, technologists and athletes.
The future is what we make it. In a sense, you could say we have already spent considerable time there.
We work to modernize professional and amateur cycling. We work to build a sport we can be proud of.
Pro cycling has long suffered from, among other things, what is known as the “streetlight effect”. Wikipedia describes this idea as an “observational bias that occurs when people only search for something where it is easiest to look.” But instead of the wikipedia story that involves a drunk man looking for his car keys under a street lamp “because that is where the light is” but not where he actually lost the keys, the problem in pro cycling, most notably with regard to race organizer ASO and the sport’s governing body, the UCI, has largely been about simply following the money (“where the light is”) instead of focusing on what we believe to be the true keys to the future of the sport. That is starting to change and hopefully will continue to do so.
The long-planned launch of the Paris-based World Center for the Future of Cycling (@futureofcycling) is finally announced this week for a reason: the launch, also in Paris, of the game-changing Tour de France Femmes. More on all that to come but for now the following comprise our initial areas for thought and action:
- Diversity and activism: These are essential keys to the future of the sport. Advances in women’s cycling are leading the way.
- Disruption: DO the disrupting.
- Business and sponsors
- Technology and data: Example: As streaming grows, use geo-detection to INFORM, not block.
- Jobs: If we do not create jobs, we greatly limit ourselves.
- The environment
- Ethics
- Leadership
There will of course be plenty of overlap among these areas of thought and action.
CFC will comprise a number of advisors both from within and from outside the sport. These advisors will be announced in the weeks before the 2022 Tour de France and the inaugural 2022 Tour de France Femmes.
Peter Geyer, founder, the Paris-based World Center for the Future of Cycling