REINARDT JANSE VAN RENSBURG RELISHING NCL CHALLENGE

Author: Damian Murphy | ProTouch Africa | 8 March 2023

After a successful start to the 2023 season back home in South Africa, where Reinardt Janse van Rensburg was crowned the National Criterium Champion, the South African sprinter has arrived in the United States of America to prepare for the inaugural National Cycling League (NCL) with his new team, the Denver Disruptors.

PROTOUCH AFRICA caught up with the fast-finishing South African, to find out a little more about what the NCL is all about.

“The NCL is a new criterium cycling league that is starting in America this year. The organisers are trying to use the more traditional American sports model, whereby teams are named after cities and the league owns all the teams. The league then employs a revenue share to help fund the teams and league. Teams can also be bought and sold, so investors that acquire a team will now have an asset that can be sold on, unlike a traditional cycling team that stops when the sponsor pulls out.”

“The idea is also to make the sport fairer and to focus on equality throughout. So, what will make the NCL very different is that women and men compete in the same event. The women compete first, then there is a half time before the men compete in the 2nd half.”

“The racing format is very different too, essentially it is a points race on the road. Circuits will be 1km to 2km long, with races lasting between 1 hour and 1 hour and half. Every lap, points will be scored by the first 3 riders across the line. At the end, scores from both the women’s and men’s race are tallied together to determine the winner. So, what the women do on the road is equally as important as what the men do, and vice versa. There will also be substitutions allowed mid-race, so there are a lot of new fresh ideas that aim to make the racing more spectator friendly and exciting.”

The NCL league will hit the road with the first NCL Cup Series race taking place in Miami Beach on the 8th of April. There will be three more NCL Cup Series events in the year, taking place in Atlanta, Denver and Washington D.C. Janse van Rensburg will be riding for the Denver Disruptors, a squad of both male and female riders, in the NCL.

“The Disruptors are one of the NCL owned teams, the other being the Miami Nights. As time passes, I feel the teams in the league will become more professional as the league also gains stature. Having said that, we already have Factor bikes that have come onboard together with SRAM and Vision wheels, so from an equipment point of view we are sorted.”

“We also have Svein Tuft as the main director of our team, I raced against Svein many years on the World Tour, he brings a lot of experience to our team. There are soigneurs that I worked with at Team Dimension Data and our mechanics are excellent, so it is a very good set-up here at the Denver Disruptors.”

The NCL generally goes against everything that the traditional professional cycling model has been built around, which is possibly something that the American cycling scene desperately needs given its downward spiral over last few years. Janse van Rensburg spoke to this point:

“The NCL is ambitious, it is mostly business people with business backgrounds running the series. They have seen an opportunity within cycling to bring different business concepts from other industries and American sports that worked, to cycling. The NCL aims to address the problem which is a broken cycling business model, and are trying to create a new model for the sport.”

“The goal is to also professionalise American racing, which is much needed, as racing in the USA has taken a huge step backwards over the last few years. A lot of races have been stopped, there are fewer continental teams, and the calendar is not what it used to be. It’s left such a void in American cycling and the NCL are trying to fill that gap now. This whole project is going to take time though, there will be a necessary process to go through to learn and grow.”

The NCL has made clear its intentions to do things differently though, and to also appeal to a ‘new’ cycling audience.