David Lappartient bangs his fist on the table. The president of the UCI, the sport’s governing body, wants to hammer home his message. “We have a green tool: the bicycle,” he says. “We have to be green ourselves.”

As the world grapples with the climate crisis, cycle racing – like every other component in life – is caught in its crosshairs. Racing in summer is becoming so hot that this August a stage of the Tour de l’Avenir was forced to start in the morning for riders’ safety. Other races have been affected by flooding, landslides and high winds that are too frequent to not be a direct consequence of a changing climate.

Yet to the backdrop of this, cycling continues to regularly fly its riders around the world, let teams double their vehicle fleet, and do very little to address a carbon footprint that is seemingly rising year-on-year. 

Lappartient knows he has to address the situation. The head of the sport since 2017, last year he released the UCI Agenda 2030 mission statement in which he sets out how all of the sport’s stakeholders – teams, races and the UCI themselves – must reduce their carbon emissions by 50% in 2030, and be carbon neutral in the same year [see below]. “There is no other choice to change,” Lappartient says.

This article was published in Cycling Weekly in September 2023. You can read the full article here.