Adam Morka opens his Jan. 3 essay with a familiar scene: an athlete with a sponsor deck walking into local businesses and hearing no, over and over.
“At the time, I assumed the problem was me,” he writes. “It never occurred to me that the issue might be structural rather than personal.”
His argument builds from there. After years racing professionally, helping secure major partnerships and running a team, he says he now sees the same problem less as an athlete’s hustle issue and more as a business-model issue.
“The problem was not passion,” Morka writes. “It was not performance. It was economics.”
The core question beneath the noise
Morka frames his piece around one question he thinks cycling avoids.
“Are race teams actually an effective marketing engine for modern cycling brands, economically and not emotionally?”
He is not asking whether racing matters culturally. He is asking whether it works as a repeatable marketing investment when brands are expected to justify spending with clearer outcomes.
The budget squeeze
To make his point concrete, Morka lays out a hypothetical brand and a hypothetical marketing budget.
“A healthy marketing allocation might sit around 10 percent, giving the brand roughly $2M per year to cover everything,” he writes, describing a $20-million cycling company.
Then he drops a race-team reality into the middle of that budget.
“A legitimate UCI MTB World Cup program typically operates in the $1 to $3M range annually,” he writes, adding that many teams end up as “a roughly $2M program supported by 6 to 10 sponsors.”
His point is not that those numbers are impossible.
“On paper, it works,” he writes. “In practice, it is fragile.”
Factory teams and private teams
A big chunk of Morka’s essay is about what he calls a critical distinction.
“Factory-backed teams operate with a safety net most people underestimate,” he writes, pointing to “products, margins, and distribution beneath the racing spend.”
Private teams do not have that underlying engine.
“A private team’s only product is marketing impact for its sponsors,” he writes. “Just exposure and the expectation that exposure equals value.”
That difference matters because one model can absorb uncertainty and the other cannot. Factory programs can lean on the broader business. Private teams live and die on a sponsor’s confidence.
The Canadian example
Morka describes a period when his team and Emily Batty helped a…
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