The future of the Women’s Tour, the leading international British race and a fixture on the UCI Women’s World Tour, is looking bleak after its owner and promoter went into liquidation on Thursday.
SweetSpot, who also used to run the men’s Tour of Britain and the Tour Series of city centre races, has appointed KRE corporate recovery to deal with its creditors after entering voluntary liquidation and admitting its liabilities are likely to extend significantly past £1m.
It is the latest blow to the struggling British cycling scene with the company’s chief executive, Hugh Roberts, saying “the prognosis looks bleak” for the Women’s Tour, which was cancelled in 2023 due to lack of funding.
The liquidation announcement comes less than six months after SweetSpot assisted with the running of the UCI Super World Championships in Glasgow and two months after British Cycling rescinded the company’s naming rights to the Tour of Britain, following a dispute over unpaid rights fees. Cycling’s governing body claimed the debt amounted to £750,000. While SweetSpot said at the time that legal teams were handling the dispute with a view to resolving it amicably, the company was also reported by Cycling Weekly to be facing legal action from the Isle of Wight council, following the cancellation of the final stages of the 2022 Tour of Britain, due to the death of the Queen.
Roberts said that initial estimates of around £1m outstanding debt could be higher. It is understood that further creditors include local police forces and also in-race service suppliers. British Cycling insisted in November, as the rift with SweetSpot deepened, that it remained “fully committed to the delivery of the men’s Tour of Britain in 2024.” Further details are expected to be provided towards the end of this month, but the future of the Women’s Tour has been thrown further into doubt given that SweetSpot own the rights to the event.
Roberts said spiralling costs, the knock-on effects of race cancellations during Covid, the death of the Queen, and the stance of British Cycling in the dispute over rights fees, had led to this point.
“Liquidation started to become a possibility back in July,” Roberts said. “Because we were already under a lot of pressure financially with the Tour of Britain. There was a potential title sponsor keen to be involved, with the men’s Tour and the women’s Tour, so we went ahead with the race, because that encouraged other sponsors to get involved.”
When those negotiations fizzled out, Roberts said that he realised it was going to be “a real struggle.”
“ The reality of us having to decide to do what has actually happened came into focus. It’s the end of an era. It’s 20 years of hard work that have come to this,” he said.
“We have been fighting so many headwinds for the last three or four years, that it’s come to the point where we really can’t carry on in the current climate and the current business environment that we find ourselves in.”
Roberts said: “The conditions that were set for us to extract ourselves from the position with British Cycling were too onerous.
“British Cycling wanted to still receive the full licence fee that they felt they were due in 2022. Despite the Queen dying in the middle of the race and all our other partners showing a little bit of financial sympathy to us they were insisting that the fee they felt they were owed should be paid in full.”
While he acknowledged that SweetSpot could be seen as culpable in accumulating debt, Roberts added that he felt British Cycling had acted too hastily in ending the licence agreement.
“That, along with Covid, with not having a race from September 2019 to September 2021, the debt taken on board to keep the whole thing afloat,” he said. “Local council bankruptcies, belt-tightening all over the place – that does not augur well for events that rely on government support.
“British Cycling say they have a plan [for the men’s Tour of Britain] but I don’t know what it is,” he said. “There was no room to negotiate. We were not even given the grounds to appeal.”
In a statement, British Cycling said: “We are making every possible effort to ensure that the Tour of Britain and a UCI Women’s World Tour stage race take place in 2024 and beyond, and will be in a position to provide further details in the coming weeks.”
