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His six-month review: Part one of a two-part conversation with Steve Johnson
It’s only been six months since Steve Johnson took over the reins at USA Cycling, but already the new CEO is dreaming big. Among the items on his wish list: a nation where obesity and an over-dependence on gas guzzling cars are wiped out by the new dawn of the bicycle.
Johnson believes “the time of the automobile is rapidly drawing to a close, and I see the bike as a wonderful vehicle for transportation, health and fitness, and everything else that is wrong with America.”
That might be just a tad overly optimistic, but some of Johnson’s other visions seem very attainable. He’s looking to triple USA Cycling’s membership over the next five years, bring a ProTour event to American soil, and continue refining the pipeline that has supplied a steady stream of homegrown talent to the professional peloton.
Recently VeloNews sat down with the 56-year-old for an exclusive, wide-ranging interview. Following is part one of this hour-long exchange starting with how Johnson got into the cycling world, and going all the way to where he sees his organization in five years. Part two will be posted on Thursday.
VeloNews: Give us some background about yourself. Are you married? Do you have children? What is everybody up to?Steve Johnson: I’m married with four kids. My oldest son is an air traffic controller in Kansas City. My oldest daughter is married with two kids and lives in Denver. My youngest daughter just got married two weeks ago. My youngest son is a department manager at a sporting goods store in Denver. They range in age from 23 to 35.
VN: And your wife?SJ: She’s a sales rep for Wilson Sporting Goods. Actually she’s a territory manager in the tennis racket business.
VN: How about you? How did you get into the cycling world?SJ: Well I actually started competing at a fairly advanced age. I think I was 29 when I did my first race back in 1979. I was a skier in my undergraduate life. I skied for the University of Utah. All skiers ride bikes for training and for fun. In graduate school I ended up in the same lab as an individual who had been a bike racer and he talked me into doing my first bike race and the rest became history. I ended up riding for amateur teams, all of Thom Weisel’s early amateur teams actually. So I was on Montgomery Securities, then Subaru Montgomery and then Montgomery Bell.
Then I put that aside. I had to do my real job, which was a college professor at the University of Utah for 15 years.
VN: What kind of skier were you?SJ: I was an alpine skier. I coached in Park City for seven years before I went back to graduate school.
I was actually recruited here [at USA Cycling] as a consultant in 1998 to review a high performance plan. Based on that review EDS funded what they called Project Triad in 1998. I was retained as a full time consultant in the calendar year 1999 to implement part of that plan. Some of those components are still active today. The U23 team grew out of that. The results and ranking system grew out of that. Our coaching association grew out of that.
Then in 2000, EDS announced that they were going to pull their sponsorship. As a result of that I sat down with Thom Weisel in the summer of 1999 and we talked about forming a foundation, creating an another fund raising component for the organization to help fund development programs, things that are hard to find sponsors for.
That became a reality in 2000 and in that process I was convinced to leave the University of Utah and take on the full time responsibility of managing the foundation. That grew into the chief operating officer position and then director of athletics, and now as chief executive officer.
VN: What did you teach at the University of Utah?SJ: Exercise science. Exercise physiology specifically. I had a lab at the university: the human performance research laboratory. I also started an exercise science program at a local hospital in Salt Lake City.
VN: How did you first get to know Thom Weisel? Was it just by chance? It’s been a fairly significant relationship in your life.SJ: One of my best friends as a ski coach was a guy named Boone Lennon who is the guy who invented aerodynamic handlebars. He was the brains behind the Scott aero bars, and Boone was a ski coach in Sun Valley. I was a coach in Park City at that time. So we were friends and knew each other through skiing. He had started bike racing sooner than I did. When I got involved, he knew Tom Weisel from Sun Valley connections, because Thom had a home there. That led to a number of things.
VN: Tell me one or two highlights from your racing career?SJ: I don’t have any. I enjoyed racing my bike profoundly. I did what at the time it was called a master’s World Cup. It’s now called the masters world championships. It was 1987 and I was lucky enough to win that. I have eight masters national titles scattered around in road, criterium and time trial. The world’s race was road. It was a sprint. There was seven or eight of us in the final pack and I managed to win. All of that and a buck and a half will buy you a cup of coffee.
VN: USA Cycling oversees everything from elite athlete development to event management to member services, so with all that in mind, what is the mission of this organization?SJ: Well we are the national governing body for the sport and our internal mission, basically it’s a two-fold mission. One is to grow the sport in America. When we think of that, historically we thought of growing the competitive sport and I’d like to broaden that a little bit and we can talk about that later. But the other is international success and in particular sustained international success.
I think the two are connected. I think it’s pretty clear that the international success of American riders, particularly over the last few years, has fed back into the growth of the sport in America. So in some respects it has helped us fulfill our primary mission, which is to grow the sport in this country. I think that connection is something we need to understand better and do a better job of actually managing.
VN: What are the biggest challenges you face right now?SJ: Well, obviously from an elite athlete perspective or a development perspective, finances are our biggest challenge. Unlike most of our competition, we have no solid source of funding. We depend on sponsorship. We depend on money from the USOC, money from the foundation. We are basically under-funded in respect to our major competitors, other international cycling countries. That’s always been an issue for us. We work within the constraints of a system that requires us to basically package and sell programs and try to raise money through sponsorship and other avenues.
In terms of say track programs, our biggest competitors are Australia and Great Britain. Our funding is less than theirs by almost an order of magnitude.
VN: So exactly what do you have to work with compared to what they have to work with?SJ: In terms of total finances? Well part of the problem is that we are kind of a one-stop shop. We maintain a coaching association. We maintain a sports science program. We maintain athlete programs, where as a lot of the other countries have separate sports ministries that manage these things as components, so it’s difficult to add up all the parts and compare.
But one example would be our U23 program, which is based in Europe. Australia runs theirs to the tune of over $1 million. Ours is about $400,000 in total. So it’s those kinds of things that always create an issue for us. But that’s not the kind of thing we can’t overcome. I’m convinced that Americans are very good at funding pipelines. If you look at sports that are more relevant in a social context like basketball, baseball, football; billions of dollars go into development pipelines by private individuals. Parents put the kids in camps.
I think cycling has the opportunity to really grow the pipeline from the perspective that we have dollars that flow in from the participant side.
VN: Do you think this organization should be responsible for so many different aspects of the sport?SJ: It’s not an issue with this organization. It’s a country issue. They have sport ministries. These are socialized governments, whereas our society is much less socialized. Our government has much less effect on our daily lives.
VN: What’s the annual budget for USA Cycling?SJ: It’s about $9 million a year and of that $3.3 or $3.2 million goes into athletics.
VN: Where does all the money come from?SJ: It comes largely from membership. It comes from sponsorship sales. We have general USA Cycling sponsors and on the athletics side we have program sponsors. We have the USA Cycling Development Foundation and we have the U.S. Olympic Committee. So our primary funding source is the USOC. Second highest would be the Foundation and then several sponsors participate and support specific programs.
VN: Without going through the entire financial statement can you break down how that money is spent?SJ: Well, again, $3 to $3.5 million goes to athletics. The rest goes back into member services. We support a large member services department. The fulfillment on the licenses. Insurance is a big expense line for us. Those are the costs of supporting members and doing business.
VN: How would you characterize the overall financial picture of the organization right now?SJ: It’s very healthy. We are seeing large growth on the roadside in particular. The mountain bike side stabilized a couple years ago and has been growing slowly, but the road growth is what I think you can legitimately call explosive. We are just passing 58,000 members. We finished last year with 54,000 members. We finished the year before that with I think 52,000 members, so we are really seeing increased interest in competitive road cycling.
I think that is very clearly related to the success of the international elite cyclists. I think Lance’s story has been a big part of that. I think it has put the sport on the radar screen for a lot of people. I think it has a lot of ancillary benefits. Just by training to race you end up being healthier, you lose weight, you tell that story to your friends. Now you have a whole community kind of jumping on the bike race bandwagon. We really have seen a lot of interest in the sport, particularly on the competitive side, which is very exciting to me.
VN: Okay, let’s talk about some of the programs that are going on right now. Walk us through what’s going on with your organization right now.SJ: In reality we are finally settling on our place in the cycling world. As you know cycling is professional sport at the top end, but the level of professionalism varies considerably from sport to sport. I think on the men’s road side you could make the argument that it’s finally reached the level of American professional sports.
The women’s professional road side is a little behind the men. If you think back 22 years ago to our first professional road championships, and at that point the amateurs were the most competitive athletes we had and the professionals were not up to that level. Now that’s definitely been reversed. I think with the women you are just seeing a sport that is about five or six years behind the men in professional development and opportunities for the competitors. Women’s road racing is getting there.
Mountain bike racing is a little less than men’s road racing, probably comparable to the women’s road side. I say that based on the number of opportunities for professional riders to make a living, and the size of the salaries that are available and those sorts of things. So road, mountain bike: definitely professional sports at the top. That means our programs fall more on the development side. We are kind of in the middle of that spectrum from beginner to professional.
As a result we have tailored our programs appropriately. On the men’s side we have focused on U23. We are going to change that to U25 this year because we had a lot of U23s that were not able to make that transition. It’s focused on Europe. That’s where the highest level of cycling is right now. The European peloton is a few years ahead of the American peloton. In some respects I think the best way to get European cycling into America is to get American professionals into European teams. We saw ProTour teams at Tour of California and Tour of Georgia, and they were here because they had American riders and American sponsors.
It may seem counter intuitive to put Americans in Europe in order to grow the sport in America, but I think that the result is increased interest in America by European sponsors and teams. That will ultimately bring a higher level of racing back to the states.
On the women’s side it’s the same thing. We are looking at a development level person. We are going to mimic the men’s program. We are going to build a development program in Europe. It’s going to be in Tuscany. Obviously we have a long list of volunteers of people who would like to help staff that. Our goal there is once again to try to put American women in the highest level of international competition, and the best way to do that is to go live in Europe.
VN: What’s the time line of the women’s program?SJ: We are going to fire that up next year. SRM, which is one of our sponsors, has just built a training center in Tuscany and we are going to lease or rent part of that from them. That will provide housing for up to 12 athletes and five or six staff.
On the mountain bike side we are moving in a similar direction. We are focusing our efforts on a U23 program. We have a U23 resident program here. Again it is designed to create the pre-professional, to teach them the skills they need to develop into professionals at a higher level. Our goal is international success, so we really want to focus on athletes who are seeking international success.
Then there is track cycling and that is probably the biggest challenge for us because there are virtually no opportunities for professionals. The opportunities are so limited that our role in track cycling will be much bigger in terms of cradle to grave programs than it is in the other sports.
With that said we are looking at track as more of an opportunity to develop the complete athlete and take them to a higher level with our programs. We’ve made a lot of efforts on the crossover side, which is realizing that the endurance track events in particular have the same physical requirements as road racing, same kind of motor. So the same kind of athlete is going to be successful in both environments.
So we have really encouraged the women in particular to make the transition from road racing to track cycling. We started that program a year and a half ago and have been remarkably successful. We’ve had several women riding at a level that is as high or higher than we’ve had on the endurance track side in the last decade. We secured our first individual world championship at UCI track world’s this year. So that program has been very successful.
We have a camp coming up this week. It’s what we call a newbie camp where we are trying to introduce road cyclists to track racing. We are actually introducing that same program to the U23s. It’s going to become a mandatory requirement for the U23s to ride on the track, to take some track skills camps. I think what we will find is that some of these athletes actually enjoy the experience. To be successful you can’t just have the ability to ride on the track, you have to like it. It requires so much specialization and time, if it’s something you are not comfortable with you are not going to stick with it.
We are also moving our European program down a notch into the juniors. We started that program this year. We had I think 15 17-18-year-olds in Europe for six weeks with an amazing amount of success. After junior nationals we sent eight 15-16 year olds over to Belgium to live in host housing. So we are really trying to move the age group down in who we are sending to Europe. What we found is that even by 19 the difference between an American rider and a European rider is quite great, so our 19 year olds struggle because the level of racing is so much higher. On the 17-18 year old side and even the 15-16s, they are very similar in terms of ability compared to the European riders.
VN: Okay, shifting gears a little. Dave Zabriskie was staying at your house right before he left for world championships. Tell us about that experience.SJ: He was here for a week. I’ve talked to him for years about getting on the track, because I know based on his prologue times and his time trial skills that he has the motor to ride the individual pursuit. Whether he has the interest or not is going to be ultimately up to him. Even though I have talked to him for a number of years, it wasn’t until the Dauphine prologue this year. It was a 4.2km prologue and his time was remarkable. Stuart O’Grady came up to him afterwards and said, “Mate you should try the track.” So we talked again and decided that it made sense to get him some track experience.
It was very simple stuff. No time trials, just learning how to ride the track, ride a track bike, fixed gear. I think he had a good time. It was an experiment to see how he adapted to the track and I think he enjoyed it. He found that it suits his style of riding. As you know he is a world-class time trialist. I think he has the mindset that would work well on the track, that internal focus, the ability to move the pain to a different department in his brain and not think too much about it. He did some very simple testing and his times were quite remarkable. Now it’s up to him to decide what he wants to do. He’s contemplating going to track nationals when he gets back from road worlds.
VN: What can you tell us about managing the different BMX communities. I know this has been a hot button topics, the varying relationships between the NBL, ABA, UCI and USOC. Where do things stand as far as getting everybody on the same page?SJ: Well, we created the BMX association. That’s basically a vehicle that any organization can join. We invited both the NBL and the ABA to join. We had elections for the BMX Association, so we have a board of trustees for the first time.
So what we are trying to do is create a little bit different structure than we have with our other sports. It’s based on the fact that these associations existed before the sport became organized on the Olympic level. Both of these organizations sell memberships. Their business model depend on membership sales. Their revenue keeps them afloat. So rather than create a whole new revenue structure that we manage, what we are trying to do is really work with these organizations to really engage their membership and let them join us as organizations, and respect their business model. I think we have made a lot of progress over the last few months and I think in the next couple of months we should be able to finalize everything.
VN: You said in April when you first got this job that you thought enough of the programs here were staff driven that you thought the organization would be able to carry forward without missing a beat even though it was a very tumultuous time. Has that proven to be true?SJ: I think so. Absolutely. If anything, we have not only not missed a beat, we have made a lot of progress in terms of discussions about where we want to go in the future and the kind of programs that make sense. I don’t think there has been any indication that we skipped a beat.
VN: You also mentioned a few moments ago about the amount of growth you have seen. It’s been about four years now of positive growth. Is the expectation that will continue, and if so how do you keep it growing?SJ: Obviously we hope it continues. I think that at some point there is probably a critical mass where the size of the racing population helps to continue to generate new members. I think that we are absolutely convinced here that the success of international riders feeds back on the road side, that the local associations are the perfect vehicle to help take advantage of that growth and provide the local structure and the opportunities. So we really as an organization have two things going on the road side.
One is the international success. The clear opportunities for professionals, which drives the decision-making matrix at the bottom end. People decide to do a sport in this country in particular based on what they perceive to be opportunities at the end of the pipeline. They are willing to make the tremendous investment that it takes in any sport to reach the top based on those opportunities.
So we are seeing a lot of growth on the junior side. Our junior numbers will pass 3500 this year. That’s up almost 1500 over two to three years ago. To me that’s an indication that parents and kids feel that there really are opportunities in the sport as professionals.
That said we have an obligation in this organization to do a better job of integrating with the cycling community and the cycling industry at large. To me America faces two really critical challenges. One is the epidemic of obesity: 30 percent of our population is obese. The costs in terms of morbidity and mortality are going to be phenomenal in the next decade.
The other thing is that gas is $3 a gallon. I think the bicycle is a tool that could be used as part of the cure for both of those ailments. I would like to help make that happen. I would like to engage cyclists in general. I would like our organization to have relevance to the average cyclist. I would like to help the other groups that are involved in this industry in advocacy, because I really believe that we are all connected. It’s a great opportunity from our perspective to grow the base.
Tomorrow: Bringing a ProTour event to the U.S., reviving mountain biking and the fight against doping.
