The aim of any professional athlete is to reach the top. It's just that in some sports, the road to the top is a lot harder than others. Cyclists have always had two main ways to reach the top: the track and the road. Track continues to be an avenue for some, although four Aussies who competed on the track in Paris are currently racing on the road in the UCI World Tour, including Sam Welsford (Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe), Kelland O'Brien (Jayco AlUla), Alexandra Manly (AG Insurance-Soudal) and Georgia Baker (Liv AlUla Jayco). Others have developed solely on the road, with a handful, such as grand tour podium finishers Richie Porte and Jack Haig, and world and Olympic time trial champion Grace Brown, honing their skills via the Australian National Road Series (NRS). However, after Porte, Brown and others went from ripping up the NRS to winning some of the biggest races in the world, the series all but lost its direction and, increasingly, its relevance, before wrapping up last year. For riders, it felt like one of those pathways to the top was closing. "Road cycling in this country has started to really struggle because it's just getting so much harder at club level to even host events, to run events," promoter Aaron Flanagan told ABC Sport. "[The decline of the NRS] was certainly a concern for our future riders as to what that pathway was gonna look like. "How are they gonna cut their cloth before they got that opportunity to go to Europe?" Vanishingly small entry lists, spiralling costs and increasing apathy towards a convoluted season — as confusing for fans as it was the riders — all combined to send the Australian domestic scene into a death spiral. Something needed to change. 'We're fools' Financial struggles are not an issue isolated to cycling in Australia. Earlier this month, British Cycling was accused by Active Fakenham of trying to kill off smaller races by demanding prohibitively expensive safety measures for it to run its Easter criterium races this year. The demise of that event is part of a systematic pattern within the sport in the UK that has seen the number of elite road race events in the nation plummet from 17 to 11. Britain will host the grand depart of the 2027 Tour de France, but the feel-good factor that saw cycling in Britain peak around the time of the London Olympics is evaporating. Events in Australia are also feeling the pinch — the Tour of Margaret River in Western Australia is not alone in being at risk after traffic management costs rose by 300 per cent last year. Flanagan and Matt Wilson, a former Australian road race champion and Herald Sun Tour winner, both have first-hand experience of running an event in the NRS — Cycle Sunshine Coast — and understand the challenges facing the sport as well as anyone. Before it wrapped up, riders typically abandoned the NRS for Europe throughout the middle portion of the year, events were haemorrhaging money and, as a result, were always looking for savings. "Your focus [when running events] is, how do I do it cheaper without losing so much money?" Flanagan said. "So you run events at sparrows in the morning, in the middle of nowhere, to try and do it as cheaply as you can without pissing anyone off. "There's only one way that ends. "And Cycling Australia, they're trying to do it off the smell of an oily rag and everyone was wearing the risk but them, and it's just it's just very hard to turn that around. "I’d say impossible, frankly." With all that in mind, this year domestic cycling took a huge gamble. Flanagan and Wilson pitched a radical new idea to reinvigorate the local road racing scene. Supported by long-time Australian cycling benefactor Gerry Ryan, the NRS was torn up and the calendar condensed into a three-month summer swing of races under a new banner: The ProVelo Super League. It was not without risk. "We're fools, really," Flanagan said. He was only half-joking. A new look league with old favourites Speaking to ABC Sport midway through the inaugural season of the ProVelo Super League, Flanagan stressed it "was never about being a breakaway from the sport". "It never was and never will be that," he said. "It was about working for the sport, trying to find a suite of partners that could provide the equity that we needed." Flanagan and Wilson proposed a six-event race calendar — which they hope will increase to seven for 2026. This year's season features a mix of different types of events, four of which are muti-format, mini-stage races across a single weekend, with the other two events legacy one-day races. Those new events — the SA Kick It, Spirit of Tasmania Cycling Tour, the Harbour City GP and this weekend's season finale, the Q Tour — largely feature a common format comprised of a Friday night criterium, a time trial and kermesse-style circuit race on the Saturday, and longer final Queen stage on the Sunday. "The straight criteriums are important because it's the best way to engage new fans," Flanagan said. Part of the strategy ProVelo Super League has employed in these race is to bring back city centre racing, including the Q Tour, which will feature a criterium under lights on South Bank. "We knew that we needed to bring these events back to population bases," Flanagan said, admitting that creating and running four new events "just about killed" the fledgling ProVelo team. "We need to put them on at a time of day when people can actually spectate. "And we knew that was important because we need to broadcast it free to air [and] live wherever we possibly could. "To do that well, you need to have spectators there." Another key pillar of the league was to integrate two of Australian cycling's most historic one-day events, the Grafton to Inverell Classic and the Melbourne to Warrnambool. The Melbourne to Warrnambool is renowned as the second-oldest, one-day cycle race in the world behind Liège-Bastogne-Liège, having first been raced in 1895. "You can't ignore heritage," Flanagan said. "History is a wonderful thing but I think the response from those events has been equally exciting, because they didn't have a lot left in their team car either. "I just love seeing how re-energised they are and their communities are. "[But] what's really exciting for me is teams entered it [the ProVelo] as wild cards, thinking they might do one or two rounds, now they'll do more — they've done the entire season now. "That's super important because it's one thing to have viable events, but it's super critical we have viable teams." Ticket to the WorldTour As important and essential as the new league has been, the organisers have arranged something of a coup for competitors. The overall winners of the ProVelo Super League in the under 23 category will receive stagiaire, or trainee, contracts with GreenEdge's cycling teams, Team Jayco AlUla and Liv Jayco AlUla. "I was having dinner with [cycling commentator] Matt Keenan in April, so it [the ProVelo] was only two months old," Flanagan said. "He said, 'Wouldn't it be cool if we could get GreenEdge [UCI WorldTour team Jayco AlUla] to give us a stagiaire contract for this?' "I thought, that's a good idea, so I messaged Matt [Wilson] and he said, 'Yeah, that's a good idea, I'll ask Gerry [Ryan]'. "And, of course, Gerry goes, 'Done, let's do it.'" It's the golden ticket to a chance of competing in the UCI WorldTour and make no mistake, it's a huge opportunity. "I think we kind of knew it was big," Flanagan said. "It's the first time we're aware that it's ever happened in the world, but we didn't realise how big it was actually gonna be. "It has become the narrative. It is the narrative." It's also been a key driver for what has been entertaining racing throughout. Talia Appleton, who races for domestic team Praties, pulled out of competing for the Australian national team at the Tour Down Under in order to give herself the best possible chance of winning the contract. And the 19-year-old remains in with a shot, winning the opening round at the SA Kick It to give her an early lead in the standings. As the season has gone on though, her teammate Sophie Marr, a 20-year-old former track rider, has overtaken her and leads the standings heading into the crucial final event of the year. The men's campaign has been just as tightly fought, with 19-year-old Jack Ward of Team Brennan p/b TP32 leading 21-year-old Zac Marriage of Butterfields Ziptrak Racing by a fraction in the overall standings. Marriage rode the Tour Down Under for the ARA Australia team in January, finishing second in the Young Rider's classification and being part of the breakaway on stage one — although he still competed in the first two stages of the SA Kick It event to accrue some points. Ward, meanwhile, missed last weekend's Grafton to Inverell race — where Marriage finished second — to complete in the Australian Mountain Bike titles at Mount Buller, where he too finished second. "Universally, people are commenting on the quality and the fierceness of the racing. These women and men are having a crack," Flanagan said. "And that makes for great, great content." Q Tour the ticket The success of the racing has been evident throughout the relatively short season — and the broadcast too, with live feeds from cameras on bikes in Davenport just one way in which the league is pushing boundaries, with more innovation to come. The overall financial success of the league will take longer to ascertain. Flanagan and Wilson are in this for the long haul, backed by Ryan for now, are keen and hopeful that soon the league will be able to stand on its own two feet as a sustainable and profitable entity — and not without some justification, as it is already ahead of where they expected it to be at this stage. "It's incredibly brave," Flanagan said. "Matt and I put ourselves out there and effectively said, 'Well, cycling, you need to let this go, you need to give us the opportunity to do this'. "We will get some things wrong, we will make mistakes. "But as long as we do it transparently, own them and work through it with our stakeholders … everyone understands we're trying to get to somewhere that's sustainable. "Gerry [Ryan], he's in the Hall of Fame for his support of sport and his philanthropy in sport." But Flanagan said they did not want the ProVelo to be a philanthropic venture. "Gerry has given us a goal of being at this point by this period and we'll do whatever we can to do that because that's the best thing for the sport. "It can't be reliant on the Ryan family's generosity. "It has to be a good business and we've made that really clear to all our stakeholders." From a sporting perspective, a bigger marker of success will be seeing riders make their way from the ProVelo league and into the UCI WorldTour. If a graduate of the Ticket to the WorldTour ends up mixing it with the likes of Michael Matthews, Tadej Pogačar, Mads Pedersen, Jasper Phillipsen, Lotte Kopecki, and Demi Vollering — all of whom will be competing in the year's first monument of the year at Milan-Sanremo while the ProVelo Super League reaches its conclusion — it will be a hugely vindicating for Flanagan and the ProVelo team. "There's been so many moments where we could have bailed," Flanagan said.