Before gravel, there was a time, fleetingly, when road racing in North America was on the ascendency. Buoyed by the success of a certain Texan at a certain race around France, resources previously allocated to more traditional sports began to find their way into cycling. The result was multiple stage races of the highest calibre, on U.S. soil. Reigning world champions and Tour de France heroes—like Thor Hushovd and Cadel Evans—arrived fit and ready to race at the Tours of Utah, Colorado and California.
And a fresh crop of up-and-coming young American racers was ready to rise to the occasion. The next generation: Taylor Phinney, Tejay van Garderen, Alex Howes. In these riders and their contemporaries, U.S. cycling had its protagonists and captured the attention of legions of new fans.
“I don’t think it’s any accident that some of the best years, in terms of quality of races that we had in the States, were years when Garmin and BMC were big rivals, and you had multiple proper professional teams battling it out every week,” says Alex Howes, looking back at that part of his career. “They weren’t just North American or American teams by name—they had the best U.S. racers as well. When you have a bit of depth there and a bit of a rivalry, it gives something for the fans to get behind.”
Now retired from racing, Howes serves as a sports director for the brand-new U.S.-registered UCI ProTeam, Modern Adventure Pro Cycling. The team exists for the express purpose of highlighting and developing American riders, with the hope of eventually becoming a top-division team and competing in the biggest races in the world.
Howes and those of his generation raced through the peak years, as well as the lull that followed after the revelations about systematic doping in the previous generation came to light. Subsequently, a slow decline in sponsorship funds and other resources led to the demise of the big three U.S. stage races, as well as other U.S. cycling events.
Without races, there is no venue for racers to show themselves. U.S.-based talent hasn’t disappeared, but high achievers have largely been finding opportunity in mountain bike racing and gravel, disciplines with more opportunity and less baggage. Modern Adventure Pro Cycling hopes to change that.
“The pipeline’s not really there right now. That’s really the main goal of the team, to bring guys from the States and get them over to Europe and really get them a shot,” says Howes.
Howes was instrumental in the recruitment efforts of the team, which was created by George Hincapie and his brother Rich, as well as businessmen Luis Vargas and Dustin Harder.
In tandem with fellow sports directors, Ty Magner and Joey Rosskopf, two other former pros, Howes says they constructed a team that was focused on “really trying to find a group of guys that would be able to mesh well with each other and ride well together and buy into the whole idea of riding as a team and trying to get results as a group.”
To achieve success, they wanted cooperation from everyone on the team. He says, “The reality is that cycling, for the last five to ten years, if you can’t ride as a team, if you can’t ride as a unit, it just doesn’t work. The higher-level teams are too organised and too strong.”
So far, the whole experience has been a bit of a trial by fire, and Howes and his fellow directors are learning new things every day. “Definitely, as a director crew, there’s so much we didn’t know coming into it. And there’s still a five-thousand-page book’s worth of things we still don’t know. Hopefully, we find out, but maybe we don’t. [I’m] wearing a different set of pants, literally and figuratively. So it’s been a big learning process.”
The Modern Adventure team is off to a strong start this debut season, but they’ve also received some pushback. Team co-founder George Hincapie and performance director Bobby Julich were part of the era that was fueled by performance-enhancing drugs. According to Howes, “those guys, George and Bobby, they’re probably the first to say that there are skeletons in the closet.”
Howes has had a lot of time to grapple with the fallout from the doping era.
“It’s funny,” he says, “Because some of the stuff that happened in that generation—the blowback was tough, it was really hard on the sport of cycling, especially in the States. But through all that chaos and bullsh*t, it really created a huge window of opportunity for me, and my generation.
“Slipstream Sports, billed as the “clean team”, needed a young American rider named Alex Howes that they could send to get blood tested 48 times a season and call me up every week to make sure I understood the mission: go fast and [do it] clean.”
And because of that, Howes got to race on the world’s biggest stage.
“Had that pathway not been there for me, I’m not some superstar rider who would have found a way. I needed that window and through all of the chaos and Lance blowback, that window opened wide open for me. So I feel pretty fortunate in kind of a funny way.”
As an instrumental part of this new project, Howes feels the criticism levelled at the team, but he also understands it.
“The pushback hurts sometimes,” Howes admits. “People shouting about stuff. Yelling in the comments about George and how we’re all a bunch of dopers and idiots. I sit there thinking, ‘man, I got tested so many times and did everything right.’ All I want to do is give an opportunity to some of these young guys. Guess you gotta ignore the haters and keep pressing forward. Some of that is justified, too, though. It’s okay.”
It’s been noted by some that the former dopers on European pro teams haven’t necessarily received the same level of scrutiny; but then there are different cultural norms. Furthermore, removing anyone tied to the scandal is unrealistic. For Howes, he’s happy to look forward.
“It’s not really a secret that we would love, if he’s up for it, to sign George’s son, Enzo, when he’s no longer a junior,” Howes shares. “If you can’t turn the page when it’s literally a new generation, when do you turn the page? Because at some point we need to turn that page.”
Modern Adventure Pro Cycling, with Howes and his fellow directors behind the wheel, clinched its first major GC victory in Europe last week with sprinter Ben Oliver claiming the overall title at the Tour de Wallonie. While a lot of the focus in on European exposure, the team will do a block of racing in North America later this summer, including at the much-anticipated return of the Philadelphia Cycling Classic.
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