More Prize Money, European Races—It’s All on the Table for the Life Time Grand Prix

There was a feeling in the air on the night after Big Sugar Gravel that is probably best described as the feeling of the last day of school. Minus the yearbooks and textbook burning, the final Life Time Grand Prix podiums and “Gravel Rave” was filled with the cycling equivalent of a bunch of riders, support staff, and content folks wishing all their bike friends a happy break.

Yet, it’s one of those goodbyes that had the happy undertones that the vast majority of those same people will be back around when the circus gets on the road again in the spring.

That feeling was reaffirmed even more when Kimo Seymour, the head of the Life Time Grand Prix, got on the mic before the final podiums started. The tone was set with a high-octane montage of helicopter-shot clips from the racing and reaffirmed with what Seymour would go on to say next.

“We will have all the details in a few weeks,” Seymour said, “But what I can say is next year we will be back, and we will have exponentially more prize money than this year.”

Now, what exactly exponentially more prize money means is unclear. What was clear, however, is that Seymour is only projecting bullish confidence that the Life Time Grand Prix will continue its steady march of year-on-year growth.

Plus, with over half a million dollars in prize money already guaranteed, any raising of the stakes just fuels that attitude of grandeur more. Five years into this experiment to make cycling’s newest discipline professional, Life Time is the undisputed king of the castle.

All that being said, it’s still a pretty small castle in the grand scheme of the cycling world. The next five years will be telling on how the king can manage it.

To get a deeper sense of the health, future, and challenges of the series, we sat down with Seymour and Michelle Duffy, vice president of marketing, retail and events at Life Time.

Note: This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity. 

Q&A with Kimo Seymour and Michelle Duffy

Velo: You guys are in year five, and in corporate jargon, a five-year plan is a big deal, right? I’m sure you had some kind of five-year plan at the beginning. How much has the series lived up to that, how much has it deviated, and would you generally call it a success?

Kimo Seymour: I would certainly call it a success. What do they say about all good plans? You know, the quote about getting punched in the mouth.

Velo: Mike Tyson said everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.

Kimo: Yeah, that’s kind of what’s happened with it. We’ve had to figure out how to navigate on our own, even with what we thought was a good, solid plan in the beginning. It’s evolved so much.

I joke that I was going on walks with people in the industry who live in Boulder, where I live most of the year. I’d invite them to go on a walk, and I’d pitch the idea. Some people were like, “That’s a stupid idea, it’s crazy,” while others were like, “Oh, yeah, I think that could work.”

But at the beginning, those conversations were more about taking in the feedback and ideas from people. I’d be honest and tell them we had no idea what we were doing. We just had a series of races, and we said, “Let’s put them together and see if we can make something happen.” We built a plan, but it’s literally evolved every year.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that the five-year plan has evolved greatly, and I would say it’s been a success, but we still feel like we have a long way to go.

Michelle Duffy: While we put together a vision and a strategy and where we want to be, both Kimo and I, as leaders, don’t always think with the corporate playbook. So yes, we talk about where we want to be in five years, but we’re both very gut-driven leaders and decision-makers. So much of our decision-making is driven by intuition, flexibility, and open-mindedness, too.

We try to put ourselves on a path, but we’re not afraid to deviate if it gets us to where we’re going or adapt the plan over time.

From highlight clips to helicopters, the Grand Prix has changed its content massively

Velo: From the outside, it seems like the biggest change has been how the Life Time Grand Prix continues to function as a media house.

This is not just an event organization, there is also the series as a media asset. It’s almost its own thing in terms of connecting to a broader audience that might not be interested in racing these races, especially if you’re thinking of Europeans who might be viewing the series from afar or road racing fans dropping into the series in the United States.

How has that media asset evolved, and is that something that you feel like you have been able to improve on the fly?

Kimo Seymour: A couple of years ago, we started realizing that we knew we needed to create content that people could put in the palm of their hands. We wanted people to want to see it on their phone or on their TV in their house, right? To create cycling entertainment that would belong in people’s living rooms was one of the ideas of the series in the beginning, and then, two-three years ago, we started saying that this needs to become even more of a media property.

As I said earlier, the future of professional cycling needs to evolve away from this sponsorship model into more of a media rights distribution model. There needs to ultimately be a rep share from those distribution dollars. Everybody knows that’s what the sport of professional cycling needs. We’re not brilliant because we came up with that. You’ve read that 10 different places over the years, but we’re all still trying to figure out how to crack that code and how to make it happen.

One of the criticisms we get is that we’re no different than the big behemoth in Europe that has the same challenge. They’re a for-profit-driven entity and why would they give up any of that revenue?

I think what we’ve recognized is that we can still grow that revenue, and that pool can get bigger and bigger as we evolve into more of a media property. But the only way it does that is with the athletes. You can’t do it without the athletes. There needs to be an opportunity for the athletes to share and benefit from that as we grow it.

Michelle Duffy: And content is not a new priority for the Life Time Grand Prix. In year one, we did a deal with FloBikes and invested in Call of a Life Time. So from the get-go, it was bold to launch with such a strong, robust content plan in year one. It’s always been part of the plan. Defining why it is part of the plan and how it can be a part of the future is what’s evolving.

The other thing is that we could move that along much quicker if we went outside of ourselves and our team and invested with some big media group, but we’re not. We have built it internally, and I think that’s really unique: we’re not afraid to try new things, and our content plan is what has adjusted a lot.

We came out with live broadcasts, and we tabled that for a few years to make sure that the product we could put out was something that we were proud of, and we’re back to that now. We do work with an amazing group, BCC out of Boulder, but our team is ultimately still crafting the run of show and acting as the director of the products.

Velo: And commentating! [Gestures at Kimo Seymour who has commentated on the live streams this year.]

Kimo Seymour: Yeah, but I’m doing that begrudgingly.

Finding the balance of creating content and building a professional competition

Velo: If you look at it from the series moving forward, it seems like there’s this constant parallel structure to create a better product in terms of who’s racing and that content side. Would you say you feel like you’re stronger on the content side or the rider side?

Kimo Seymour: That’s an interesting question. The rider side kind of develops itself. We ask ourselves sometimes how much we can control, dictate, and manage what is happening in the peloton. It is one of the things we’ve talked about a lot on the live broadcast and in some of our content.

This year, the big debate was about teams coming to the sport. We didn’t know how much we could dictate what’s going on there versus how much is happening with or without us, right? Like, how do we stop 10 people from showing up from the same team at Unbound and racing for one person to win? And then how much do we care? You know, like we might personally care, but from a business perspective, should we care? And I think that comes into play too. Like, are we fixing something that doesn’t need fixing?

Velo: Is that part of why you pivoted to this different qualification method? Because it seems like for a while you were trying to find that right mix directly. You put out an open invitation, but you were the ones selecting. And it seemed like that mix was always hard for you to figure out, especially for riders from abroad.

Kimo Seymour:  The decision to move to more of a qualifications system had multiple components to it. One, try as we might, we just weren’t very good at selecting athletes. We left out some athletes that have now proved us wrong over the last few years. We had a wild card last year that won the whole series.

These are athletes we turned down. We looked at results and we’re trying to figure out who the best riders are. With international riders, it’s so hard to compare them because we can’t stack them up against the riders here that we’re at least more familiar with.

So the reality is as much as we tried, it was really hard to be objective. A lot of the criticism we got is, ” How are they doing this? It’s not very transparent.” Well, we’re gonna make it transparent now. They’re gonna decide for themselves.

Still, we’re getting some people who are casting a little bit of shade even on that new process. You know, the unfairness of having to qualify in two days at Sea Otter. But that was a suggestion from a number of the athletes, actually. That was an athlete-driven idea for the selection process next year. We asked them, “Gosh, how do we get out of the business of selecting athletes? What would be the best way to do it?” And collectively, there was a big debate.

Questions like do we take 10 athletes automatically, 15, five, make everybody race—eventually we settled on top 10 and 10 on each side, plus our U23 athletes. Everybody else has to race their way in. It really was more athlete-driven than anything. I wish we could take credit for it, but we’re excited to see how that works.

The constant search to find the right calendar will continue

Velo: On the note of events, for the first few years there was experimentation about where the calendar would land. In the last two years, the calendar crystallized. But now you’ve gone back and added the Rad Dirtfest back in. Was there any desire to try to do more turnover? You do have other touted events outside of the ones we’ve seen; why run something back that has been tried in past years?

Kimo Seymour:  Michelle, tell them what I wanted to do.

Michelle Duffy: Firstly, we believe the Rad is the most beautiful gravel course in the United States, and many of the athletes agree. It is a true, stunning gravel course that deserves the visibility that the Life Time Grand Prix would bring it.

We have done a lot of experimentation, but we’re also learning each year when we bring the same events back. We believe that cutting a bunch of events to bring new events every year doesn’t actually allow us to build on the prior years’ learnings.

We want icons in the Grand Prix, or monuments as they’re often referred to in cycling, and I think that this current series really solidified around true monuments in the off-road cycling industry. But, Kimo, I don’t know if you want to build on that answer.

Kimo Seymour: Yeah, I wanted to put 10 events in this year.

Velo: So why didn’t you?

Kimo Seymour: Well, the team shot it down, I guess.

Collectively, we talked about it, and I could see it evolving to eight, nine, 10 events over the next few years. I do think adding one event a year is an option.

One of the other criticisms we get is there’s a big gap in the summer. But if you ask some of the international athletes, they’re thankful for it. So as much as we would like to put something in July, that one month in the middle would make it really challenging for the international athletes to be able to stay and raise the entire series, both for travel and from a visa perspective.

The possibility of European expansion

Velo: I think when I look at the series, my main criticism is the balance of the calendar and balance of geography. The east coast has never hosted a Grand Prix event. Are there conversations or desire to acquire or set up events that could fill the gaps in the schedule or fill that big sort of geographic skew that Life Time has towards the rest?

Kimo Seymour:  There are lots of conversations about it. We’ve been out and sent people out looking and consulted with people up and down the east coast and looked at different venues and courses, and it’s weird how much of what we do is kind of west of here in Bentonville.

Somehow, there just isn’t that big of an event in the east. You can’t name any really big, monumental-type events that are further east of here, so we just haven’t quite found that one opportunity to acquire. We don’t have a big appetite to add new events right now, to green-field new events, just because we have so much on our plate.

I would tell you that I think the next move east might be across the pond. If we were going to add something in July, I’d love to add something in Europe. I think that would mix things up pretty dramatically. It doesn’t help the Australian athletes or the South Africans, but for the European athletes, it would be cool to make everybody come over to their turf.

So if we were to go, I think it’s more likely if we go east that we end up in Europe than we end up on the east coast, at least in the foreseeable future. Unless someone comes up with something we just had missed.

Velo: Next year, I think the big conflict that a lot of people were talking about this year was Little Sugar with the UCI Gravel World Championships. You won’t have that conflict next year with the UCI Super Worlds. Is there optimism around next year kind of being the biggest one yet? Do you have anything that makes you feel particularly optimistic about 2027?

Michelle Duffy: I’ll let Kimo handle the meat of that response, but one thing that I think is interesting is there was a lot of chatter around Little Sugar and UCI Gravel Worlds and the intersection and what it would mean for the Grand Prix, almost as if the Grand Prix became second to UCI Gravel Worlds, but we had two athletes in the Life Time Grand Prix choose Worlds over racing at Little Sugar.

For me, I think that really shows the number of athletes who could have raced for Team USA, that decided to stay and prioritize their standings in the series, or even Brendan Johnston going to race Worlds in his home country. I think that really starts to show the commitment that folks are feeling to this series and the potential impact it can have on their career. That’s indicative of the value.

Kimo Seymour: I think what I’m most hopeful about next year is the reach of the content that we’re thinking about creating and some potential partners that might help us really expand that reach and kind of get that exponential growth we’ve been looking for.

We’re always open to suggestions and we’re always evaluating what the content should look like. Should it focus on more of a Call of a Life Time, binge-able type postseason series that is 6 episodes or 7 episodes, or should we continue with the live coverage and the short post-race cutdowns that we’ve been doing this year? Should it be a combination of both?

As we look to evolve that and then look to potential partners that might help us get more reach, that’s the biggest opportunity. If we can get to where, you know, now we’ve got one, two million views a year on the content that we’re putting out of the Grand Prix—that’s what’s gonna bring in the non-endemic dollars and the partners that we’ve all been talking about to elevate the sport of cycling. That’s where there is the biggest opportunity with what we’re doing.