The Denver Disruptors is a coed team of sixteen cyclists from around the world who represent the Mile High City on one of two NCL-created teams; the other is the Miami Nights. They'll be competing against eight outside squads.
The NCL was kick-started by Denverite Reed McCalvin, vice president of teams and athletes for the league, after he and entrepreneur Paris Wallace began discussing ways to make pro cycling more accessible for Americans.
“Imagine there are 60 million people in America that play basketball every week,” McCalvin says. “There’s $15 billion spent on basketball hoops, basketball shoes, tank tops — and then there was no NBA. That's cycling. There are 60 million active cyclists in America, there's $15 billion spent on cycling-related things each year, and there's no league for it.”
McCalvin's years of working for USA Cycling made him well aware of why the sport hadn’t gained a foothold in the American market: Races are long, and it can be hard to jump in and know what’s going on at any given moment.
The NCL has attempted to fix that by shortening races to a few hours and giving points to the team that wins each lap. The cyclist who completes each lap first gets three points for their team, second place gets two points, and third gets one. On the last lap, point totals are tripled.
“We have the first scoreboard in cycling,” McCalvin boasts.
Plenty of people seem to believe the format could work, with the founders now comprising McCalvin, Wallace, sports agent David Mulugheta, lawyer Randall Clark, Mark Wilkins — who works for UBS Private Wealth Management — and Georgetown law professor Joe Briggs. Investors include plenty of pro athletes, with Kevin Durant recently joining the fold and many of Mulugheta’s NFL clients involved as well.
Creating the Denver Disruptors was part of the league’s strategy, a response to another aspect of the sport that the founders saw as tricky: Cycling teams are all named after their sponsors, which can fluctuate from year to year.
If the NFL worked that way, McCalvin points out, the Denver Broncos might simply be called “Empower” — the name of their stadium sponsor. And the team wouldn’t have its iconic blue and orange color scheme, either.
The Denver Disruptors don black and gold uniforms in homage to the University of Colorado, and their jerseys feature an image of the Flatirons. The NCL picked the cities of Denver and Miami for its two flagship teams after analysis showed that both places would be good fits.
The Disruptors beat the Nights in the NCL’s first race in Miami, on April 8, just two months before the Denver Nuggets beat the Miami Heat in the NBA Finals.
The Denver Disruptors hope to repeat their success during their home race this weekend.
National Cycling League
“In a few years we want to be able to go to — and we know it's more complicated than this —- but, sort of naively, we want to be able to go, like, ‘Hey, NBA, we managed to pay our athletes and support them equally. What can you do?’” McCalvin says.
That pay has been a boon for Ava Hachmann, a Disruptors athlete who lives in Durango. The 25-year-old studies biology at Fort Lewis University, but aside from that, cycling is her full-time job.
“It was definitely going to get down to a crunch point where it's like I either need to make this make me some money or, probably, would have had to at the very least take a step back,” she says. “I'm super grateful that the league existed exactly when it did and that people wanted me to ride for them."
Hachmann has been training almost twenty hours a week since high school, when she started racing mountain bikes and then began road racing, which had her traveling regularly to Denver from Durango.
“To race for a Denver-based team and be racing in Denver this weekend is really full circle,” she says.
Hayley Bates has a similar feeling. The 26-year-old lives in Pasadena but went to school at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. Her mom is from the Centennial State, as is much of her extended family.
“It was always home away from home,” she says.
That’s why racing with the Disruptors is a natural fit for her.
Bates came to cycling later in life, after being a soccer player in high school. She left the sport before her senior year to train for a family bike trip across Italy, then later joined the cycling team at Colorado College — road racing professionally with Levine Law Group from the time she graduated until this year.
She also does track racing, in which cyclists travel in a loop on wooden surfaces. The NCL is almost a combination of the two formats, according to Bates.
The Denver squad had instant chemistry when its members met for team camp in the spring. “We all like to ride bikes. We all like to eat food,” Bates says. “You get to do that together, and it's really easy to bond over, but I also think there's a certain personality type that's attracted to what we're doing, so we tend to get along pretty well, and that makes it really easy."
One of the most exciting aspects of the NCL, Bates says, is meeting teammates from Europe, South America and South Africa. Plus, league staff is very supportive and helps everyone grow as athletes.
“All my teammates are really cool,” Hachmann says. “Some of them are people I've watched race for a lot of years now.”
At team camp, she shared a room with teammate Leah Kirchmann — who has gone to the Olympics twice for Canada. For Reinardt Janse Van Rensberg, a professional cyclist from South Africa who has completed the Tour de France six times, the potential of the NCL's format drew him in.
“Cycling has been always reliant on this sponsorship mode,” he says. “I was really interested to see if we can make it work with a completely different way of basing the teams, the fundamentals of the teams, also the intensity of the race. It's not hours and hours on end, so I think it's very attractive to crowds, to the public, to actually watch a full race.”
Janse Van Rensberg expects the model will attract new fans, and it’s given him new challenges a decade into his professional career, which he still relishes. The shorter bursts in NCL races have made him alter his training a bit, and he’s had to refine his skills to go quickly around corners on the track.
It’s only Janse Van Rensberg's second time in Colorado. When he came in March to Boulder, it was snowing.
“It was quite a shock, the cold weather and the snow and everything, the freezing temperatures,” he says. “It was the first time I've been in that kind of environment. Now it's much nicer.”
In order to stay in shape and build team chemistry, the Disruptors race in more than just NCL races; just last weekend, on August 5, they took part in the Littleton Criterium.
The team hopes to capture the magic it found in Miami to win again at home.
Typically in cycling, only one person wins a race — despite the fact that cyclists race on teams and help each other for the duration of the event. By contrast, in Miami, the Disruptors all rode a final lap around the track together, passing champagne around on their bikes.
“The big victory lap all together was super cool,” Hachmann says. “It felt way more rewarding than when you just take an individual win."
“Getting to stand there and be with everyone, it’s like, okay, this is one team,” Bates agrees. “The guys and the girls, we do this together. And that was really, really cool.”
The race at Dick’s Sporting Goods Park on August 13 is free to attend, with the men’s portion starting at 2:30 p.m. and the women’s portion beginning at 4 p.m. — but the events of the day actually get going at 9:30 a.m., with a community build and gift event taking place.
There are also junior races and a community ride, per the NCL website. But all eyes will be on the Disruptors.
“It's really important for us to try and win at home, racing in Denver,” Janse Van Rensberg says. “I'm sure we will have a lot of local support this weekend.”
