To many, Richard Plugge, the general manager of Visma-Lease a Bike, is one of cycling’s few true entrepreneurs at heart; a leader with a long-term vision who is fixated, perhaps obsessed, on leaving his team, and the wider sporting arena, in a better place. It’s no surprise, to those who have got to know him well in the past decade, that, alongside his remarkable and meritorious transformation of a tainted cycling team to the greatest on the planet, he has simultaneously become the public face of the OneCycling plans to make professional road cycling more sustainable and comprehensible.

To others, including to an increasingly dismayed and growing number within the sport, he is an individual who does not see rules and laws as impenetrable boundaries, but as obstacles that can and will be bypassed. As president of the men’s teams’ organisation, the AIGCP, he has, according to some of his detractors, wrestled maximum control to the benefit of his team, and has purposefully refused to engage with lesser colleagues in order to drive through measures he steadfastly believes in. 

He is an admirer, almost a disciple, of Formula One guru Bernie Ecclestone, who in the 1980s helped turn the niche motor racing sport into one of the world’s biggest sporting successes. Plugge wants to do the same in cycling, believing that if the sport doesn’t change within the next decade, and adapt to modern day trends and consumer behaviours, it will face an existential threat. But can he, alongside keeping his team at the summit of the sport, really be the man to lead a revolution?

This article was published in Rouleur in December 2023. You can read the full article here.