A new Freedom of Information request sheds light on the demise of the RideLondon cycling festival.
London Marathon Events (LME) announced the festival’s “indefinite pause following operational and financial considerations of the event’s future direction” in February after having gone “on hiatus” in 2025.
Founded before the London 2012 Olympics, the festival at one point comprised men’s and women’s WorldTour races, sportives that imitated the Olympic Road Race course and visited several London landmarks, and the Brompton World Championships.
However, the event was gradually scaled down following two cancelled years due to the Covid-19 pandemic, with the men’s London-Surrey Classic not returning, and both title sponsor Prudential and Surrey County Council withdrawing sponsorship. The event subsequently moved to Essex, and the women’s Ford RideLondon Classique became a three-stage race, with the final day comprising a London circuit with a sprint finish on Pall Mall.
In June 2024, LME announced the Classique would not be held in 2025 due to the UCI “unilaterally” moving the dates of the stage race to an unworkable date. The latest FOI shows the Classique was unable to be held alongside Trooping the Colour, a large-scale royal parade held in Central London. With funding for the sportives partly reliant on selling media rights for the Classique, the entire event was subsequently placed on hiatus in September 2024.
road.cc subsequently reported that Transport for London’s reluctance to close the newly-built Silvertown Tunnel for 15 hours also factored into LME’s difficulty in preparing an alternative sportive route. The FOI information was provided by road.cc reader Alex Baxevanis, who also submitted the latest FOI request for correspondence between LME and TfL.
A strategic review subsequently began, comprising ‘Internal brainstorms’, ‘Stakeholder workshops’, and TfL internal meetings over seven months.
The FOI also includes a slideshow from a meeting on the 30th April, where LME presented a possible route that appeared to gain TfL’s approval but also suggested that parts of the festival needed to be competitively tendered to other interested event organisers. The proposed route map is among several details withheld from the FOI document, primarily for commercial concerns that Baxevanis plans to challenge, and it is not known if the route would have used the Silvertown Tunnel, though it’s proposed closure is touted as an opportunity to carry out maintenance work.
However, it is clear from the subsequent documentation that the proposal could not be carried out, as the next available documents, from January this year, detail the communications strategy for announcing RideLondon’s complete cancellation. An FAQs document issued to local authorities and stakeholders also sheds light on the funding difficulties that appear to have scuppered the festival.
Among the given reasons for cancellation are LME being “unable to maintain” its subsidy for stewarding costs, participation numbers declining 6.8 percent in 2024 compared with the previous year, and “a general background of decline in sponsorship opportunities against a challenging macro sponsorship environment.”
But the document also details a contractual inability for either the Greater London Authority (including the Mayor of London’s office) or TfL to fund either event. As London 2012 Games legacy events. “there was a commitment that the events would be held at no cost to the Founding Stakeholders (GLA & TfL) or the taxpayer.” It’s unclear from the documentation if RideLondon at any point appealed to renegotiate the terms of the event, or if there was a willingness among the authorities to step in.
In the announcement of the RideLondon’s “indefinite pause”, the organisers touted their “ten successful editions, inspiring more than 500,000 people to take part in one of its mass participation rides. The event has also raised more than £85 million for charity, making a lasting impact on communities and causes across the UK.”
They added that “future efforts will focus on expanding access to cycling and promoting active travel across London and beyond.”
London Marathon Events’ latest accounts, submitted to Companies House, showed a post-tax profit of £11.7 million to December 2024, up from £6.7 million the year before. The Board of Directors subsequently recommended a £10.5 million Gift Aid donation.
1 thought on “Trooping the Colour, Olympic legacy pledges, and uncertain sponsorship – FOI reveals how RideLondon fell apart”
I was never interested or involved in the race/distance events, just the family-friendly Freecycle.
In the last few years before the 2025 “hiatus”, I noticed that while the distance of the Freecycle remained the same the additional stop points with other elements/activities had been drastically scaled down.
The biggest being at Green Park which was pretty much gone.
So I predicted that the Freecycle itself would disappear, but not the main events which would continue for sporting/commercial reasons.
I guess money and timing were the coffin nails for those.