Tom Armstrong and Tom Martin, who finished the 2026 season by taking first and second place respectively in the National Road Series, share more than just a first name. They both ride for Wheelbase CabTech Castelli and, aside from a small amount of prize money, neither of them earns a penny from their endeavours on the road, despite having spent years riding at an elite level.
I’ve spoken to 32-year-old Armstrong, who also won this year’s Rapha Super-League, several times this season, interviewing him for Cycling Weekly after he graced the podium at Britain’s biggest domestic races. Each time, we have had to arrange the call around his work breaks. After a typical Sunday night travelling back from a race – often hundreds of miles from his Yorkshire home – on Monday morning he’s back at work in JE James, in Barnsley, the bike shop where he earns a crust.
Twenty-seven-year-old Martin, meanwhile, juggles 18 hours of training per week (on average, plus gym sessions), and multiple long journeys up and down the country from his Cumbria base to compete in races, with shiftwork as a mechanical fitter in a shipyard. To be clear, neither Tom is complaining.
They both very obviously love their team, and like others in their position, they are extremely passionate about cycling. But I wonder how many people – including cycling fans – are aware of just how tough it is for top riders who compete outside the sparkle of the Tour de France and WorldTour sphere.
“Life for top amateurs seems especially hard in Britain”
Expenses are high and pickings are extremely lean for even the very best domestic riders. Life for top amateurs seems especially hard in Britain, where there are no longer any men’s Continental teams through which they can aspire to step up to the next level and start getting paid.
Worse still, any prospect of joining a European squad has been complicated – or altogether banjaxed – by Brexit, which has restricted freedom of movement. British riders are now bound by the strict 90-in-180-day Schengen limit – a bureaucratic hurdle that few small foreign teams can afford to negotiate.
As a result, Armstrong and Martin are in a strange position in a sport that has defined the trajectory of their lives since they were teenagers. Having just proven that they are the top two British road riders racing on the domestic circuit, their next best move is to throw themselves into the gravel season over the winter, and hope to pick up a few sponsors who might help cover their costs for 2027.
Tom Armstrong leads Ollie Wood over the top of Michelgate at the Lincoln GP
(Image credit: Alex Whitehead/SWpix)
“Winning the National Road Series is just, as they say, for the love of the game,” says Armstrong. “I wouldn’t say I’m better off for having won it.
“This year I had help from Vetta with wheels, and Styrkr came onboard with nutrition,” he continues. “But we’re not talking about thousands of pounds in my bank account – it’s some gels and wheels. It alleviates that pressure, but then you’ve got the fuel and hotel costs. And then you’re still trying to run a house at the same time. It’s difficult.”
Both riders showed promise as juniors and attempted to go pro. “My first professional race was the Ronde van Limburg [in 2014], when I was 18,” Armstrong tells me. “It was also Mathieu van der Poel‘s first race [as a senior]. I just wanted to get around, but VDP went and won it.”
“It was a bit of a kick in the teeth. I was supposed to go into the Vacansoleil under-23 team, but that folded before the season even started. I joined a club team in Belgium for a season, and then I went and rode for T. Palm and Electro Hiper Europa, a Spanish Continental team.”
DOING IT FOR THEMSELVES: THE (BRIGHTER) WOMEN’S SCENE
(Image credit: Alex Whitehead/SWpix.com)
Faring much better than the men domestically, British female elites still have four UCI Continental teams in the UK. This provides a pathway that has dried up for the men. The four – O’Shea Red Chilli Bikes, Smurfit Westrock, DAS-Hutchinson and Handsling Alba Development – all rode the recent Tour of Britain Women, a Women’s WorldTour race, giving their riders the chance to show off their talents.
That’s not to suggest it’s non-stop glamour. Even at this level, there is no minimum wage for women, so many teams are semi-professional. Women’s teams being cheaper to run largely explains why they weathered the Covid pandemic better than the men’s Conti teams.
In recent years, ascendant British stars have used these home teams as a stepping stone to turn pro. Last year, for instance, Robyn Clay and Lauren Dickson both moved up from Conti teams to the World Tour, proving that the pipeline does work. There remains some confusion over which races these Continental teams can and can’t compete in, with the UCI’s rules suggesting that they aren’t admissible for World Tour events, but these rules seem bendable, at least for the moment.
This year’s National Road Series was won by Morven Yeoman, of DAS-Hutchinson, who is 22. She went on to compete in the Tour of Britain. The national series runner-up was 20-year-old Lily Martin, who rode for club team Loughborough Lightning, and has now signed for Handsling Alba.
When Electro Hiper folded, Armstrong returned to the UK and rejoined the team where he began cycling as a 15-year-old, Wheelbase CabTech Castelli – one of the strongest teams in the country, but not one with current ambitions to achieve Continental status. And there he remains – competing against, and often beating, Olympians and professionals to win races and take national titles “for the love of the game”.
One such Olympian is Ollie Wood, who previously raced for the country’s last-standing Continental team, Cornwall-based St Piran, which collapsed in 2024. “It’s very challenging, unless you get picked up by a development team when you’re younger,” Wood says. “I’m obviously very fortunate that I receive National Lottery funding, because if it wasn’t for that, I’d have stopped riding my bike when my brother did, back when the Canyon SunGod team folded [in 2023].”
Being on a strong, ambitious team is essential for any rider wanting to progress to the pro ranks, Wood explains: “If you don’t get in the right teams doing the right races, then it’s pretty tricky. Ten years ago you could race for a British Continental team, going to France and Belgium and getting exposure to races there. But now you’ve got guys who are having to uproot and move abroad to try and chase the dream.”
This description echoes Martin’s experience. In 2020, he took a sabbatical from work and went to Europe with Zappi Racing, a period he describes as “awful” – not least because it was during Covid. After that, he had a more positive period with a Spanish team. “I was hoping to progress to a Continental team in France,” he says, “but it never happened. You get inside, and get promised stuff, and it doesn’t happen, and teams fail… Basically, I ran out of money, so I had to come back to Britain to work.”
(Image credit: Andy Jones 2014)
Armstrong and Martin were unfortunate in that, just as their professional cycling careers could have taken off, Covid hit. Arguably, the pandemic not only hastened the demise of Britain’s men’s Continental teams, it also altered the dynamic of the sport. “All cycling changed when we came out of lockdown,” says Armstrong. “Every level got faster and more intense. The WorldTour teams started inviting in younger riders. There has been a huge cash injection at the top and a mentality change. It got more ruthless.”
For a talented British rider in today’s climate, unless they get spotted early and brought into a youth development squad that actually survives in the opaque financial landscape of professional cycling, they can easily find themselves approaching their mid-20s with a narrowing range of options in the sport.
“It’s not about not being good enough, it’s about not being young enough.”
Tom Armstrong
“Those years, when you’re 25 or 26, and you’re still in your prime as an athlete – or perhaps still maturing – you get stuck in this limbo space,” explains Armstrong. “There’s maybe a couple of teams out there in Europe that are willing to chuck you a couple of hundred euros and put you up in a barn for eight months of the year to go and race… Increasingly, teams are looking for younger riders. So you’re in this sort of no-man’s land [where] it’s not about being not good enough, it’s about not being young enough.”
Armstrong fears that this is not only a problem for riders in their mid-20s missing the proverbial boat, but could mean too much pressure being placed on younger riders too. “You could end up with a generation losing the love of the sport because they’re thrown straight into a high-pressure environment,” he says. “When I was a kid, the first thing you learned was how to enjoy going for a ride with your mates or the club – it was very much a club environment.”
Tim Shoreman is another Wheelbase CabTech Castelli rider who competes on the track for Great Britain. He gets some support through the National Lottery programme for his track riding, but has to self-fund logistics around his road-racing efforts. Living in Aberdeen, that’s an expensive process.
(Image credit: Andy Jones)
He has to pick his races carefully, inevitably missing some National Series events. “I accepted quite a long time ago that I probably wasn’t going to make it professionally on the road, so I’m kind of doing it just because I enjoy it,” he says. “Is the funding sufficient to see me through the whole year? Not really. It’s enough to survive, but I’m living with my parents… It’s not ideal.”
“Before Covid, we were too young, and now suddenly we’re too old.”
Tim Shoreham
Like Armstrong, Shoreman describes being overtaken by changes in the recruitment system. “When Tom [Martin] and I were juniors, it was expected that you’d go through the under-23s and then look to become professional or get opportunities as you got older. But the system sort of leapfrogged us. Suddenly development teams were signing 18-year-olds, and we were in that middle bit. It pivoted very quickly. Before Covid, we were too young, and now suddenly we’re too old.”
Besides the lack of Continental teams, Britain’s road racing scene also lacks quality races. With the calendar virtually devoid of top-tier UCI events beyond the men’s and women’s Tours of Britain, it’s a discouraging drought. “It would be so nice to have something like the Rás in Britain,” says Martin, referring to the Rás Tailteann, an eight-stage international road race held annually in Ireland, in which he finished second this year, and Shoreman won a stage.
One possible solution would be to enable riders like Armstrong and Martin to race the Tour of Britain Men, which is currently open only to World Tour and Continental teams, plus a national squad from British Cycling, which includes Wood. “Wheelbase is the top team domestically, with Tom [Armstrong] and myself sitting one and two in the National Road Series, and it would be nice if we got the opportunity to race for the national team at the Tour of Britain,” says Martin.
(Image credit: Andy Jones)
Armstrong agrees, and suggests that Tour of Britain selection could be proposed as an incentive. “It would definitely make a more competitive road series, because if you were offering a spot to the winner on the national team for the Tour of Britain, I’m sure a lot of people would come back and race all the National Series races.”
For now, like many road riders, the two Toms will see what opportunities come their way during the gravel season, although Armstrong predicts that that scene is on the cusp of a change too. “Next year, with the introduction of points [in gravel events] counting towards UCI road rankings, I think you’ll see a lot of the World Tour teams that are hunting around for points at the end of the year doing a lot of gravel, and that will potentially change things. It’s part of an evolving sport.”
Assuming a change in fortunes doesn’t come about by way of gravel, will next year see him back competing on the road? “I haven’t thought that far ahead yet,” he admits. “More of the same probably… unless some big contract appears. And it’s probably not going to happen at 32, is it?”
