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GFNY is the world’s largest endurance sports marathon series with over 30 events held in 15 countries. The story of Uli and his wife Lydia starting the GFNY is nothing short of remarkable. Uli had a job in finance at a Swiss bank in Manhattan, and he and Lydia literally took a leap into the abyss when they decided to start the GFNY 15 years ago.

 

It’s a tale of two highly driven people who had a vision to bring the Italian Grand Fondo to the Big Apple. In the process, they built a life for themselves around cycling events and traveling the world. This is The Business of Cycling podcast.

 

So Uli Fluhme, very nice to have you on the show today.

 

Thanks for having me.

 

Yeah. Where does this podcast find you?

 

This podcast finds me in Italy, in Tuscany, beautiful place of the world. Very happy to be here. Where are you?

 

I’m in Torino, so we’re not that far away from each other.

 

Not far away. Okay, nice.

 

Yeah. So we got in touch. I had seen some writings that you did on, I think it was on LinkedIn, and I wanted to reach out because I had been wanting to talk to someone that is in the events business that could give me some insight and give my audience some insight about, you know, bicycle events.

 

And I thought GFNY is an amazing kind of an international granfondo. And so I’m excited to kind of dive in today and hear more about the event, about you, about how you got into this business. And so, yeah, I mean, if you just, if you want to get started, maybe tell me a little bit about where you’re from and kind of your early life studies, those types of things.

 

Yeah, for sure. I think it also helps get, I think a better idea about GFNY to hear that because it is linked, I think, to my upbringing and my hobbies. What I do now, more than anything else.

 

I grew up in Germany and was always into sports, played basketball, but wasn’t good at it. Got injured all the time. And that was for me the reason to quit.

 

Eventually, I was like 14, 15. And at the time, my dad was a bike tourer. And I kept riding with him, even in mountains, I really enjoyed that.

 

And I wanted to do something. So that’s the sport I jumped into from basketball. First riding around, and then there was a beginners race.

 

Got into the beginners race, did those, had fun with it, and then started racing junior, which was my first year when I was 17. And after one year of junior, I got into amateur racing. I was immediately selected in an elite team and got a contract for one year.

 

But it was like either you win two races or place 10 times top 10 or you’re out of the team. I never thought I would be able to do that in a year, because back then the races was like, as we talk in the early 90s, 150, 200 guys. And unless you were a fast sprinter or like super talented to do a breakaway, there was no way to keep those win races just like that.

 

We’re talking about road cycling.

 

Yeah, road cycling. Okay. So, you know, I did that.

 

I really had fun, you know, got kicked out of the team again, and then finished school and started to get an apprenticeship at a bank, which meant I didn’t have as much time for cycling training as I had, especially because of the darkness in winter. So kind of like training in the dark is sort of dangerous. Trainers were not as much a thing back then.

 

So I stopped bike racing seriously and got more into triathlon because I always wanted to do an Ironman, just wants to see how it feels like. I was 20 years old. I trained a half a year for that, some running, some swimming, which you can do in the dark, and then did the Ironman and loved that.

 

So, you know, wanted to do it once, ended up doing this professionally also for a couple of years in my 20s while I was studying law. And at the same time, never lost sight of cycling, road cycling, because that was my first passion. And I particularly always laughed about road cycling, the long distance road cycling, not criteria, not circuit races, but really long distance, like professional races, 200 kilometers, lots of climbing.

 

Even though I’m not naturally a climber, I love climbing. I love the challenge of it. And even already back then in the 90s, those kinds of races, the farmers were going away.

 

They were just road closures where we got becoming too difficult, too much traffic. So what was left was criterion racing and the odd road race.

 

Where are you from originally?

 

I’m originally from Germany and was racing at the time, mostly in the German speaking area, also in Switzerland and in Austria. What city in France as well?

 

What city in Germany?

 

In Tübingen, which is in Stuttgart.

 

That’s where you’re from?

 

The South. That’s where I’m originally from.

 

That’s where you’re originally from. And you said you studied law?

 

Yes. That was sort of like a family thing. I didn’t really know what to do with my life.

 

So let’s study law. You can do a lot of things with that. And I was always about the sport and gave me the freedom also to train and raise.

 

I could study for myself. I didn’t have to go to a lot of classes. So I could learn, study early in the morning and late in the evening and train during the day, which was worked perfectly for me.

 

I really like that kind of lifestyle. And although I was never like at a world class level athlete, I enjoyed the racing and being part of it and traveling, more so in triathlon later than in cycling. Because in Ironman, you really have those opportunities with races all over the world to do that.

 

At the same time, never lost road cycling out of sight. And we’re still doing road races, but not the classic ones, but the Granfondos, as you mentioned, in Italy, when I had a chance to go to Italy. Or in France, the Secret Sportives, which are basically all commerce races.

 

In Italy, it was like if you didn’t make it as a pro after racing U23, you raced Granfondo. Teams and everything, super competitive.

 

It can be, yeah. Like maybe we can just give people a quick overview of what Granfondos are. Because I don’t, honestly, I live in Italy, but I don’t know if it’s, I know they do a little bit of Sportives in like the UK.”

 

You probably know better than I do, but Granfondos are amateur races, or amateur, not even races, they’re more amateur events with typically, correct me if I’m wrong here, typically three distances, like a short, mid and a long, and they go from typically like 80K to 250K with, you can go from 5,000 to 7,000 meters of climbing depending on where the event is. But in terms of-

 

Most, not really. So there are races, I would say, just as much as a marathon is a race. I always compare it with marathon running.

 

So you have the guys at the front who are professionals. And you have also at the Grand Fundos professional riders at the front. So it’s not just amateurs, it’s people that have like lower tier pro contracts or don’t go for the pro contract, but they are paid riders who are actually doing those Grand Fundos mostly in Italy.

 

That’s where it comes from. When I compare it with a marathon, so fast guys at the front, guys in the middle trying to get a PR or a good place in the age group, and guys in the back trying to beat the cutoff time. So essentially just like a marathon, which you could call a race as well.

 

Yeah, that’s a great way to look at it. And in France and Germany, are there comparable events?

 

Yes, I would say since the last 10, 15 years it has spread around the world. In the beginning, since the early 90s, where it really started, it was just in Italy and in France. Whatever else you had, especially in the UK, the sportives, those are not the same thing.

 

Those are bike tours. Usually in open traffic, there’s no timing. So these are not racist.

 

And nowadays it’s unfortunately also so that there’s many Grand Fundos who are not actually Grand Fundos, because they’re also just bike tours. You see this a lot in the US, for example, where they call events Grand Fundos, but it’s at the end just a bike tour.

 

Well, yeah, the Grand Fundos, they actually closed the streets. It’s actually quite a big event.

 

Yes.

 

In my experience, and some of the biggest ones are the Grand Fondo Stelvio, Dolomiti, Maratona delle Dolomiti. What are some other big ones that come to mind in Europe, in your opinion, Uli?

 

Well, in France, you have, for example, Marmot, which is a similar thing to Dolomiti, but in the French Alps with a lot of riders. And it’s really in those two countries. But nowadays you have also in Germany, in Hamburg, you have a huge race.

 

We have very big races now also in Europe, as GFNY, and of course in, it’s all over the world now. That’s what we do as a brand, as GFNY, putting on these confundos all over the world, literally, you know, Latin America, Asia, in Africa. It’s becoming, it has been becoming more popular in the last 10, 15 years.

 

So this was something that you were introduced to once you stopped racing professionally or doing triathlons. You said you had done some, you did some tri, some Ironmans. And so then you kind of were drawn towards these Granfondos.

 

And then you were studying law. Did you finish your law degree?

 

Yeah, I did finish the law degree. I mean, actually got already my first Granfondo when I was 20 years old in Italy. I was always drawn to this because I saw the category racing was not giving me what I would like to have out of a road race.

 

I was always more like copying the professionals doing those kind of courses. And many Granfondos are doing the same routes as professional racers in distance also and in the climbing. So you get to do that as an amateur at the end.

 

I did finish my law degree and then got back into working and worked and brought me to other countries, first to Switzerland and to Ireland. And from Ireland to New York, I was working as a lawyer for a Swiss bank, but always passionate for cycling and endurance sports instead of what I was doing. But being able to travel the world helped me to stick with the job for a while at least.

 

So you are a lawyer, you’re working for a Swiss bank, must be a really important job to send you all over the world. How did you then, I guess, go from being an international banker, we’ll call it, to starting this event? I’m really curious.

 

I mean, important job is definitely something that paid well, but it’s also something that you really have to enjoy that is not for everyone. It was definitely for me and definitely not the type I realized. Who can sit in an office and fill a day pretending to work, if there wasn’t work?

 

That was never what I wanted, looking out the window, nice weather, I want to be on my bike and I want to be in the office. But it paid well. They sent me around the world, so it was hard to quit that.

 

But then I met my future wife in New York, because we were both running for Central Park Track Club at the time. And she was a triathlete at the time. She was doing Iron Man.

 

“And I remember one winter lunchtime break, we were sitting there eating and I told her about Gran Fondo in Italy, what it’s all about and that it’s essentially the same thing as triathlon but for cyclists. So you get to do everybody’s racing together and on a big loop and it’s challenging. And something like that did not exist in New York.

 

In New York, you had either the category racing, which is mostly in the parks in Central Park and Prospect Park. So you’re doing loops in your category or you do bike tours in open traffic, you get out of the city, but you ride in open traffic. And so this kind of like middle of both of them, putting them together, race, but race long distance didn’t exist.

 

So we said, yeah, we should do that in New York. We have to organize it. No one’s doing it.

 

So let’s get it done.

 

And so there weren’t any, there weren’t any organized races?

 

No, the North races. Yes. Your races.

 

Yes. Road races, circuit races, think five mile loop, six mile loop. You do it 10 times.

 

“That’s what racing was like in the parks.

 

Criteriums sort of.

 

Criterium, either that, which is a mile loop, say, or shorter where you get points with every lap, or longer, five, six miles where first across the line wins, but you still have to do loops. It doesn’t have this same appeal to me as the adventurous that you get into the France, over the high mountain passes, battling against the weather. It’s a different kind of bike racing, one that I always looked at as, for me, that is bike racing, the sort of European style that did not exist.

 

Closing roads is extremely expensive in the US. You need police to close out all the intersections. So closing roads for 100, 150 guys just wasn’t an option any longer since, I want to say, like the early 90s in the US.

 

In the 80s, you still had races, road races, but that was just gone. And there was a trend all around the world starting in the 90s. So bring in that, you know, cycling marathon.

 

So you and your wife had this, or would have been your girlfriend at the time, or friend?

 

Yes. Girlfriend, yeah.

 

And so you guys kind of had this idea, like, wouldn’t it be great if…

 

Yeah.

 

That was it.

 

Exactly. And so that was it. She wanted to see it, of course.

 

I said, okay, let’s go to Italy. There’s several gondoliers every weekend from February to October, so we can just pick whatever is available when we have time. In May 2010, I had time, I could take some time off from work.

 

I took her to Italy. And as I said, she’s had done 15 Ironman at the time, including Kona. So she was a hardcore athlete, but she loved the experience of racing and gondolier.

 

Said it was one of the hottest things she’s done, definitely the hottest thing she’s done on a bike. And she said, yeah, we have to do that. Let’s go back to New York and start planning for the following year.

 

Wow. And what was she doing for work?

 

She was doing her MBA in finance, also at NYU at the time, and was about to start a job. But she said, okay, I want to do that. That’s also my passion sport.

 

“And you need some business experience as well to start any business. So that didn’t hurt to have that for sure.

 

So you and what’s your wife’s name?

 

Lydia.

 

So you and Lydia have a mission. You have a dream, it sounds like. So what year are we talking here?

 

Like 2008, 2009?

 

That was 2010 that we planned for to have it the first time in 2011 in May. That was our goal.

 

Did the great financial crisis have anything to do with this? Or were you guys were still working?

 

No, I had my job. They didn’t fire me over this. I actually started working in New York.

 

A day before that crisis started was an interesting time.

 

Wow, so you had front row seat of…

 

I had front row seat.

 

Barers, Stearns, all that stuff.

 

All of it, exactly. But they still needed me, lawyers, but probably you need always. And the business that I was in was a sideshow of all of it.

 

So they kept me. I don’t think it was going much longer, but it was a two-year contract in New York. And after the two years, they wanted me back in Switzerland anyway.

 

So the contract wasn’t up yet in 2010 when we decided to do it. So my wife started doing it full-time, preparing for the race. And I offered to the bank and said, my contract was up in September 2010, said they wanted me back in Switzerland.

 

I said, yeah, I want to stay in New York. I could work part-time. I think I can do this job part-time.

 

And the other half of the time, I would work for GFNY. They said, no, we want you back in Switzerland, and we don’t want you to work part-time. I said, okay, then I quit.

 

So I quit my job as well in September 2010. My cousin’s a lawyer job at the Swiss bank.

 

Yeah.

 

Wow. So I definitely would be in a different place today, financially and in many other ways, if I would have continued. But I also said, I don’t know if I would have actually survived, that I wouldn’t have shot myself because it was really not for me.

 

I felt like really like a prisoner in this role, and it was not the fault of the bank and the job. It was really me who was not made for this kind of working. So I owe them for sending me around the world and all of that.

 

But it was too dry for me. It felt like purposeless in the end and not my passion. So finding something that was my passion, and it was never planned to be something long-term, but it was kind of like the right time.

 

I didn’t have kids, I didn’t have any responsibility.

 

So yeah, you wanted to take a shot.

 

Yeah, I took the shot. I said, this is gonna happen once and never again, and that’s fine. Let’s see what I do after that.

 

This GFNY thing was never to be something longer.

 

No, and that’s actually a pretty reasonable risk to take. You had some experience, you saw it, you got a couple of years under your belt. Sounds like you had some success already.

 

So you’re like, if I’m gonna try this, I need to try it now. Because once you do get into a family and obligations and everything like that, it gets to be much more complex. So I mean, for sure.

 

I tell Mike, from that perspective was not hard. Like other people taking that step in a different situation for sure. Like in being independent and financially, I said, I’ve never been spending what I earned, because I’m not a big spender on things.

 

So that also gave me the confidence I’d be fine for a year without making any money. That’s cool.

 

I tell my kids, they’re in school age now. And I say, you have to find something that is kind of an intersection between what you’d like to do, what the world wants, and what you’re good at. So you do have to also, you have to be all those things, like the world needs what you’re doing.

 

You have to be able to like it, and to actually be able to do it. So it sounds like you thought to yourself, it looks like the world needs this. I like it.

 

I guess we’ll find out if I’m good at it. Is that kind of where you’re at?

 

Yeah, I think the world needs it. It was not even the perspective. I like doing that.

 

I want to, my wife and I, we build stuff that we like.

 

Right, but there weren’t any events like that in?

 

No. And I saw what it is, how big it is in Europe, how much people love it. And so why wouldn’t it work in New York?

 

You got a New York City Marathon that’s usually successful. Why shouldn’t this work for cycling? Why shouldn’t people from all over the world travel to New York to ride their bikes and not just for running?

 

It should be possible.

 

Tell me about what did it look like the first? Did you guys just sit down and say, I mean, did you hire someone that had events experience or what did you guys do? You just started saying.

 

No, we’re bankers, we’re business people. I can’t be rocket science foot on events. If you get that done, no problem.

 

And I think the event itself was not… How did you promote it? How did it work?

 

Did you guys just start handing out flyers? What did you do?

 

Well, the toughest part was obviously getting the permits to be allowed to do it. And that was much harder than we anticipated. If you’re in Manhattan, which is considered the New York state, if you say New York, you got to leave the island, you got a tunnel and you got a bridge.

 

So you got a Lincoln Tunnel and you got a George Washington Bridge. You get to New Jersey to do more of a course than something short through Manhattan, which is not feasible. So the most of people who ride in New York, they head over George Washington Bridge and head north into the hills that are there along the Hudson River, the Hudson River Valley.

 

“So it’s like that’s kind of the course we needed. So we’re like, okay, how do we get people, we need to close roads to get them off the island in the morning. Whether it’s Lincoln Tunnel, we’re like, no, through a tunnel, it’s not so nice.

 

So we have to close George Washington Bridge, which is only the world’s busiest bridge, most traffic actually. And we start somewhere in Manhattan, we get over the bridge and then the course will be out there. Maybe we finish on the other side of the bridge, so not to come back in the afternoon.

 

But we need the bridge. So we started with the bridge because if we don’t get the bridge closed, we don’t have to bother trying to get the race. So it was Lydia going to the Port Authority, which is the operator of the George Washington Bridge, among others in New York, and said, I would like to close the bridge for a second bridge.

 

And they’re like, yeah, no, it’s not going to happen. And what I did not know as much as I do now is that Lydia does not take no for an answer. So she called and kept harassing them and said, but we have to do this, but you have to allow that.

 

Until they gave in and said, yeah, okay, it’s going to cost you $100,000. You can close the bridge if you pay that. And they’re like, all right, let’s do that.

 

We are confident to get enough from registrations and entry fees that we can pay that. And they didn’t think we would commit to that. And so there we were.

 

The bridge was closed. We had the bridge we had.

 

That was the first step.

 

That was the very first step.

 

Very first step.

 

We had the bridge.

 

If you didn’t get the bridge, it was a no-go.

 

Yeah, no bridge, no getting off the island in New York, no the Grand Fondo in New York.

 

Okay.

 

You would be outside. Then we went to…

 

This is insane, Uli. This is insane because you quit your job. This was after you quit your job or before?

 

That was kind of like, I think I was still working at that time, but I had the prospect of by a month or two later, you were going to have to go to Switzerland or quit the job.

 

Right.

 

So it was sort of like in limbo, I think, at the time, if I remember correctly.

 

So you and Lydia have the permission to close the George Washington Bridge, but you got to come up with $100,000.

 

Yeah, exactly.

 

Then what happened?

 

Well, then we said, okay, now we have to need to start in Manhattan. And so we went to the police. First, we went to One Police Plaza, which is downtown, a big building.

 

And we asked, we went there and asked at the reception, if we could please meet someone who would be responsible. And we got, you know, guided up to the first floor, top floor and put into a meeting room and handed some donuts, very classic New York police style, to get some donuts, we waited 15 minutes and then an officer came in and he started yelling at us. How dare we get up to this level here?

 

We didn’t have a meeting, just what are we thinking? And we were escorted out of the building. Police escorted out of the building.

 

They were like, oops, that didn’t go well. So they must have made a mistake at the entrance, at the reception and just say, okay, these guys have a meeting, which we didn’t. We never said we had a meeting.

 

We said we would like to meet, but it was a misunderstanding. So we said, okay, we go to the Northern Precinct, which is in uptown Manhattan, and ask them if we can at least start somewhere, say a couple of miles from the bridge somewhere. We’re still in Manhattan, and got a bit of better discussion.

 

But at the end, it was also, no, it’s not going to happen. You cannot, you will not get the permit. There’s no one getting a permit in Manhattan.

 

For any event, that’s longer than a block. And I think that’s still the case that started, I think in mid, in around 2000 or after the 9-11, there was a moratorium on new events. There was no more road closures.

 

So everything that is a new event has to be not longer than one block, no other closures. So like, okay, so now we don’t have that. We spoke to the Port Authority, what are we going to do?

 

And then they’re like, start on the bridge. It’s not New York City property, so it’s not the police, the NYPD who has anything to say there, it’s us. We’ll find that that’s actually pretty cool to start on the middle of the George Washington bridge with Manhattan on one side and the sunrise on the other over the Hudson River.

 

It’s a spectacular start line. Let’s do that. And at the same time, we sort of like one course you can do for 100 mile race, if you go north of New York, that everybody does.

 

And we figured out how we can pack a few more hills in. So we went from town to town and asked for the permit and explained them what we would like to do. And most of them were understanding, no one knew what it is.

 

They’ve heard of the Tour de France. They saw the crashes at the tour and said, you’re going to bring 5,000 riders. Like we don’t have enough hospitals for the crashes you’re going to get.

 

So it’s quite a lot of explaining to do because there was just no understanding of what an event like that would mean. And we got all the permits. So we started promoting in September of 2010 for me.

 

The only date that we got from Port Authority was Mother’s Day, which in America is an extremely important day. No one wants to do anything because you have to be with your mother and celebrate that. But we were not giving any other day.

 

So like, okay, we have to do it. We can’t be choosing here. And start promoting Facebook was pretty new around that time.

 

So we’ve leaned heavily into promoting on Facebook using social media.

 

I had, you had a course, you had, you had spoken with some, some of the towns around. So you guys go for over to off the island.

 

Into Rockland. Yeah, right.

 

Off the island. And then so you just kind of went around and said, hey, look, we want to do this. And so how do you specifically the jurisdictions, how do those work?

 

At that point, are you looking at like, town by town, town by town.

 

It was 15 towns. It was three parks. It was, you know, another bridge agency.

 

So it’s a lot. It’s incredibly complex, but, you know, one by one. And Lydia, with her being stubborn and getting things done, it was just calls and keep going there, meeting people, meeting mayors, and explaining it to them.

 

And, you know, the thing that I learned about America and appreciate so much is that you’re given a chance, which, you know, in Europe is very different. If you can’t show that you’re part of like the system, it’s really hard to get as a fairly young person a chance. I was in my mid-30s.

 

I was an unknown. So with Lydia, she was late 20s. And we just show up and tell them we want to do that.

 

So they all said, you have to pay for the police and it’s going to cost you that. So the bills were like, you know, growing, but we were confident. We said, well, it’s going to cost $200 entry fee and we’re going to get 5,000 riders.

 

So we’re going to have a million dollars to play with. So it’s going to be fine.

 

That was, you were doing the back of the napkin math.

 

Yeah, totally.

 

So you were like that, that had, but you sort of had an idea of what you thought it could draw. And your confidence in this, like, were you, did you like do a study or anything like that?

 

Or you’re just like, No, just having, having seen, knowing New York, knowing, running there, well, from competing there, doing all the events, knowing the Grand Fond events that existed in Europe and around the world, just being a nerd for the sport, really knowing everything about it. And I think I can’t say that without arrogance. There’s no one in the world who knows the sports.

 

But New York is also my business.

 

New York is New York. And it’s not like I’m not surprised that you guys would have. Because at the end of the day, you’re not selling Uli, you’re selling New York, right?

 

Yeah, of course. Yes, there was like, how can we not sell? Who would not want to do this event?

 

It’s New York City, right? Every cyclist in the world will want to do that right away. So we set ourselves targets that we have to reach, that we say, okay, by February we need, I think we said 3,000 riders or 4,000 for us to be confident to continue to do it in May.

 

So the event was in May of 2010?

 

2011 at that point.

 

May of 2011. And so you guys, what was the date where it was like, go, start promoting it? This is a confirmed…

 

September.

 

September, so you had from September to May, so you had around seven, between seven and eight months to get 5,000 people registered.

 

Yes, exactly.

 

And so when you guys were like, okay, here we go, did you have any funding?

 

No, this was self-funded. I had some money on the side from my banking job, as I said earlier, that I was willing to risk for it. But we said, no, it’s gonna fund itself.

 

You’re gonna get some sponsors. We did get some sponsors very little in the beginning from the cycling industry. We get to promote this, but just through entry fees, we’re gonna be able to make this fine.

 

It’s gonna be fine. Like if you have 5,000 riders, as I said, paying us $200, we’re gonna have a million and that will cover the cost of the race. So we set ourselves sort of like these thresholds that we have to reach to say, okay, we’re gonna do this.

 

We said February, I don’t remember the numbers. I think it was like 3,000 riders registered by February. Then we’re gonna continue.

 

We had 1,000 in February.

 

You had 1,000 in February?

 

We had 1,000. Yeah.

 

In five months, you had 1,000.

 

Yeah. So we were expecting 3,000 at that point. We were like, we could at least have 5,000.

 

Yeah. And if we don’t reach that, we said in September, we’re not gonna do it. We just refund people, say, sorry, it’s not gonna happen.

 

Right.

 

We can’t take that risk.

 

And where were you?

 

We just kept going.

 

We just kept going.

 

So where were you? You had a website. I mean, just from a technical standpoint, you had a website, you had links from a Facebook page.

 

And so people were just, you were using some sort of a checkout technology to take the other.

 

Yeah. Eventbrite is one of those registration companies that were used in the beginning. They worked with us.

 

They were new at the time. They were very supportive. We were excited to work with us because we were first sporting event for them to do.

 

Then promoting on social media, working also with Bicycling Magazine because it was a new thing at the time in the US. So they’re very excited about what we’re doing. So they’re running some ads for us, which helped in sort of like a media partnership.

 

So we tried all the angles. We talked to the journalist that we knew or made contact with in Europe, through all the experience I had in Europe. So we were all setting up and doing what we could.

 

 

And we felt like everybody knows about it. Little did we know that actually no one really knew what we’re going to do. And we got a lot of headwind in the beginning from in the first year, from like everybody, from the local cycling community, from clubs, from the National Federation, like bad mouthing, people telling they don’t have the permits, it’s not going to happen.

 

It was really hard. It was really also sad to see, hard to see for us to see that we didn’t get support for it, that people were like, oh, these are guys are carpet baggers. Lydia came to New York when she was 10 years old, so she’s a New Yorker through and through.

 

I came to New York four years before we started that. So these foreigners just come here, they’re charging $200 for this. It’s ridiculous.”

 

Why would you do this? It was very, very hard for us also. Then we had mayors who said, no, you’re not going through my town.

 

You can do loops on Meadowlands, which is like this huge park in New Jersey, but there you come through my town. So you start a new business, so you know this. It’s hard.

 

People are supportive. It’s America, so many give you a chance. But the ones who are established, who’ve done this for a long time, there were a lot of people who always wanted to do an event like that, but never got it done and were jealous.

 

And we’re really trying to sabotage it. So that was hard, but we stuck to it. We said, we’re going to make this happen, and it will happen.

 

And it did happen in the end. It was May 8th, we had 2000 riders registered in the first year. I was like, well, my savings, they’re going to keep going out the window.

 

So you got 2000.

 

2000 riders.

 

2000 riders. And how much did you have to burn in your own cash? More or less, you don’t have to give me the exact…

 

I think it was 200 grand in the end.

 

You spent $200,000 of your own money.

 

I did, I did, yeah. And people were still like, yeah, you’re just getting rich from it. You’re working for this two weeks a year, and then you do nothing for the rest of the year.

 

That was like your whole life savings. Gone.

 

Yeah, yeah, pretty much gone. Yeah. But I was, you know, even when I was at the start line, I had tears in my eyes when the race was starting.

 

It’s like, and if this never happens again, I finally did something in my life where I actually worked for something that I see instead of just reading contracts, fixing contracts, making rich people richer, which is what it felt for me in the past, it’s like really not a satisfying kind of job.

 

You were happy. You were happy.

 

I was happy. I was happy. It was like, it was the money that I saved from the bank was well invested into this once in a lifetime.

 

And you had an idea that this thing is going to work at that point.

 

No, not really. It was like, you know, we said like, okay, now we did the first year and now people have seen it and we could have more riders now that we can show what we’re doing. So we didn’t stop.

 

We continued. We didn’t right away open registration. We thought a few things through and then opened registration for the following year.

 

That was then in September 2012. And that really worked. There was a lot of people coming in.

 

You waited a whole year.

 

We waited half a year from May to September. We went back to Italy to talk to companies that were in the industry to get more sponsors. We wrote some grant funders ourselves.

 

We went to expos. We promoted our race in Europe. We spoke to two operators and then opened registration in September for the following year for 2012.

 

And then when the registration opened, a lot of people registered. It was really also the time of a boom of this kind of event in the US. And then it worked.

 

Okay.

 

So you went through, you were licking your wounds a bit. You were saying, okay, what did we do right? What did we do wrong?

 

You want to do a little more research, it sounds like, to try and learn from whatever mistakes were made. I mean, I’m just trying to understand the mentality that you were going through, because you had to burn through your life savings. You had to, but it sounds like you and Lydia were a really strong team.

 

Yeah, I think we complement each other well. And also, I feel like we saw this first year was good. People had a lot of fun.

 

They were like, so what am I going to do for a year now? I want to do something like that next weekend again. I was like, well, we’ll do it again in a year, but just go to Italy, do any grand funder, you’re going to have a great time.

 

People are like, yeah, no, probably not. But we saw that people loved it. We got good press after the event.

 

We said, okay, we didn’t have enough writers to make it financially work, but next year we will, and it will cover our losses. So we just said, we’ll try it again. We just had the confidence.

 

You felt like you had some, what do we call it?

 

Momentum, maybe.

 

You had some momentum. You had almost like a case study that this thing can work. It has worked, just me and her.

 

We did all this. It’s like, could you imagine if we actually had some resources? So that must have been, I guess, at some point where you’re like, yeah, I mean, this thing definitely has a potential.

 

So at that point, it was research and then partnerships. You were started looking for partnerships at that point, I presume.

 

I have sponsors, I would say yes, to get money from that side. Then we hired our first employee for this, who was helping us with the logistics. Great guy, we had a small warehouse space.

 

“He was running our warehouse at that time, which was growing fast with all the inventory of things that you had, that you needed. And with that, open registration, and then started working on the things that didn’t work, and had four and a half thousand people at the start line the following year.

 

Four and a half thousand.

 

Yeah. Which then financially was great, so we didn’t lose money in that year. I think we covered even the losses from the first year.

 

But we didn’t scale our production in the way we should have, with this amount of riders. And also we got a lot of riders in who didn’t understand what we were offering. At that time, many events that used to be bike tours, like Century Rides in the US, started renaming their events Grand Fundos.

 

So they were the same thing. They were bike tours and open traffic. They were the same thing they’ve always done.

 

But now you got a pasta instead of a bagel at the finish, and now it was suddenly Italian. And they called it a Grand Fondo. So we had a lot of riders who expected that kind of experience of a leisurely bike tour.

 

Yeah, this is not.

 

Now we’re like a mass participation race. You don’t have to be fast. You have to, I think minimum speed is 10 miles an hour.

 

We take care of everybody until the last person. But you have to do your best. You’re not taking off your shoes at an aid station.

 

You got to keep moving forward at your best. And if you have 10 hours to finish this thing, but you got to keep moving. And if that’s your best, that’s great.

 

That was always our motto that we catered from the first to the last the same way. We created the motto, be a pro for a day, that every rider can feel like a pro on that day for us. And that year, we got a lot of riders who didn’t understand that.

 

They didn’t understand the cost of closing roads. We, even in this second year already, we had half a million dollar cost for closing roads with police and the bridge. Like so much police, over time, minimum of four hours on a Sunday.

 

It was staggering because there’s no other event. At the time, within three years, it was more expensive than the Tour de France stage, our event. People didn’t understand that.

 

They were used to bike tours. They’re like, well, the eight stations were kind of okay. And not having to stop at a red light was a nice touch.

 

And it was that nice touch where they actually had paid for and not the eight stations where when you do a Gran Fondo bike tour, you get chocolate fountains at the eight stations, but you’ve got to stop at a red light. You don’t have chip timing. It’s a different experience.

 

So we had sort of like the wrong people at our event.

 

Sure, you had some cultural kind of friction.

 

Yeah, so they needed more catering at the eight stations than at the trash traffic lights, which then made the event not a good experience for quite a few riders and made it hard in the following year. We had less riders than in the third year because of that.

 

Okay, so you were kind of dialing in, having to dial in how to promote it. You were getting these more casual, I think I would say like a rag bry style riders. Yeah, probably.

 

Not at all competitive where this is more of a pretty fast.

 

Not even that. As I said, we have very slow people, but these slow people do the best they can. What I don’t like is a guy who takes seven hours for 100 mile ride, but just because he’s too lazy, he does it in eight.

 

That’s not the point. Don’t spend money on that. Save your entry fee and go riding yourself with friends and buy a bagel on the road.

 

For that, you don’t have to do a GFNY. For GFNY, you need to benefit from not having to stop and just staying with that group. It doesn’t have to be fast.

 

It just has to be your fastest. And the majority is not fast racers. That’s not the point at all.

 

But if you look at the New York City Marathon, the majority is running between four and six hours. That’s not fast at all. But they’re doing their best.

 

They’re not stopping at the stations.

 

There’s a certain amount of… It sounds like you’re talking about the intensity of the pace.

 

Yeah, that’s good. More like your personal intensity to say, that’s the best I can do.

 

It’s not a recreational intensity. There’s some level of intensity. So you go into the third year and sort of had a little bit of a blip.

 

But I guess my question is, when did you get to the point where you wanted… Because I see you guys have really scaled up this organization. You’ve got events all over the world now.

 

Yeah.

 

 

It sounds to me like between you and Lydia, you guys were able to really stay focused and make this thing work. I mean, from what you explained to me, it sounds to me like that was going to be… You know, after you did make it through the first year, that this thing was going to work in New York City on hell or high water.

 

When did you decide to make it bigger than just New York City?

 

As I said earlier, in the beginning, people came to us, this was amazing. I want to do this again next weekend. And I just said like, well, go to Italy, go to any ground fund or there.

 

There’s websites that show where you go and do those. You’re going to have a great time. People never did it, language barrier, or whatever issues it was.

 

So we saw that, that people come to us and say, I want to do this. And then after three years, we’re like, well, maybe we have to put on a ground fund in Italy, as crazy as it sounds, for the international audience, because they trust us. They’ve done the race in New York.

 

They know what GFNY stands for, and we can provide them that experience in the motherland of ground fund in Italy. And a friend of ours, Italian, he’s a race director. He was saying, okay, I can help you get it done.

 

And so in 2014, we did our first GFNY, which was not in New York. And it was also at the time where we dropped the term ground fund from our name in New York, because it was in America, all the other ground funders were not what we do. So there was this confusion about what we’re doing.

 

The racer said, I’m not going to do GFNY at this thing because it’s a bike tour. And the bike tourer said, I’m not going to do the GFNY because it’s a race. So we were like trapped in between that and people didn’t understand what we’re doing.

 

So we said, okay, let’s call it GFNY. It stands for nothing but GFNY. And GFNY stands for cycling marathon.

 

That’s what you’re getting from us. And then doing this in Italy, announcing that we do this in Italy, we had people who have done our race in New York said, I want to do this in my hometown. So we had a guy from Mexico, we had a guy in Germany, we had a guy in Colombia who pretty at the same time came to us, I want to do a GFNY in my country.

And they were like, all right, that seems to work. So let’s branch out. And we had to start figuring out how we can make sure that this experience that we are providing in New York can also be done in other countries, that people who trust us for our event in New York, when they trust us to go somewhere else, get that same experience.

 

Of course, with local flair, but with the key ingredients that we provide that are important to us and what makes a GFNY.

 

So at this point, so you had the ability, you had some knowledge about how to run these races. You had some experience around how to get the permits. And so you said, I think we can do this in other cities.

 

And so you began to scope out additional events. And you said the first one was in Italy?

 

That was in Italy, yeah, that we put on ourselves together with a friend who’s a race director in Italy, was in Lazio, in Terracina, which is south of Rome. It’s a beautiful area. It’s a beach town where the Romans go in the summer.

 

And we did that in September after the summer season, beautiful riding into the hills there. And a true Italian granfondo, it was just GFNY Italia, 500 riders, and really what makes an Italian granfondo for what I love them with the older passion. Italians like no others bring to the sport and have fun with it.

 

So it was a great day for me. But already when we produced that event, two months later, there was the one planned for Cozumel, Mexico. I’m an American who’s living in Cozumel, who’s seen GFNY.

 

I said, I want to bring this to my island, Cozumel, a small island near Cancun and the Riviera Maya, and said, I want to put on a GFNY on that island. So working with him, traveling to Cozumel, we knew Cozumel from Lydia racing Ironman there. We said, absolutely, we want to have a GFNY there.

 

 

It’s a beautiful island. And then working with him to help him produce the event there, then having a Colombian in Bogota saying, I want to do a GFNY in Colombia and helping him. And basically, it started like that, traveling around the world to events, to GFNYs and help put them on and make sure there are GFNYs.

 

So it’s sort of a franchise model?

 

Exactly. It was a franchise. So we were taking a small percentage of the entry fee, you know, with no minimum, just to make sure that the event is a success and really didn’t cover our costs, but making sure that it grows and is a successful event from the get-go.

 

That people who do a GFNY in Colombia can also know, okay, I want to do this somewhere else, I can do this in another place of the world, and I get the same great experience.

 

Right. And so you have a built-in, these people have a kind of a built-in audience that they can kind of draw on because of the popularity of the GFNY. And so it looks like you guys are doing how many events now?

 

35 next year.

 

35 in 2025?

 

Yeah.

 

And how many are you directly involved in, in terms of organization?

 

Yeah. The headquarters are owned, as we call it, about 10 of them, all of them in the US. Plus in Italy, we will have one in Tuscana, which will be ours, and we will have one in Sweden.

 

Not sure yet which ones are ours, but the others are franchise. We always try to go to new races to be there as well to make sure. But I can’t go to all 35 events anymore.

 

We have sometimes weekends with three GFNYs and different places of the world. So that’s not possible. But we still, especially in the first year, are working very closely with the local organization to help them and make sure that the riders getting a GFNY experience there.

 

Where do you live in Toscana now?

 

Around the world more than anything. I would say a big time in Toscana and also now because I have three little kids. Two of them going to school now, probably similar ages yours because we had the same talk with the eight and 11 year old just a few days ago in terms of.

 

Like what you want to do with your life?

 

Yeah, exactly what they should do. And I have a conflict with my wife because she’s like telling my oldest, he needs to learn ten finger typing, where I tell him, no, no, you learn how to talk to JetGPT. That’s all you need to do.

 

But we really don’t know what the world of work looks like in 10 years, but I think the safe bet is always, you got to be passionate about something. And if you have passion, then that’s a good start for work ethic is always good. But I think passion is what’s the most important part.”

 

Like I said, I think one thing, one discussion that I have with my kids that I’ve had a few times and that a good friend of mine once told me was, you need to make sure that they’re aware that the lifestyle that you have, that they grew up with, in order to have that lifestyle, there are certain jobs that can afford that lifestyle, and certain careers and areas of study that can afford that lifestyle, and then others that probably can’t or would be harder to. You just give them that kind of that. And I try to do that because I think that’s a pretty objective way of saying, look, this is where the world is going.

 

And so if you want to have this, here are the jobs and we can sit down and we can look at it. But obviously, engineering, medicine, some of the more professional, but also even trades now can be really lucrative. But you just want to, I think in my opinion, those you need to try and give them as much of a purview of what is out there and then things are going to change, obviously, but that’s all we can really do as parents.

 

Well, you have more than one, so they’re all different also. It’s kind of interesting to see where you know, he’s going to be fine. That one, I’m not so sure.

 

That’s true. And that time will tell, right? Anyway.

 

So yeah, no, that’s true. So you have three children and they’re going to school in Ghana between that and Italy and New York.

 

So we spend a lot of time in New York where they go to an American Italian school as well. So they used to back and forth. They grew up with us traveling.

 

So when we the oldest was born in 2013, it’s just about when we started branching out to doing race around the world. So he grew up in day cares all over the world, whether it’s in Ecuador or in Chile or in Indonesia. He’s very used to that.

 

Also the second one, they are, they know traveling, they know, they’re very open kids making friends with other kids. They have each other, which is great for them too. But they used to, for other languages, they do speak two languages.

 

So I think they are, at the end, fortunate, they’re tough. They’re cool with that. You put them in a new school for a month, and they’re like, yeah, I’ll be fine.

 

So I have a lot of respect for that, because I did not grow old like that at all. But I think they also give them something for life. That’s at least what I tell myself, that this experience is also invaluable for them.

 

So I wanted to turn the discussion maybe towards managing these events. So I’ve seen a lot of these events. I’ve been to some of these events.

 

And I can see that you guys had this really clear vision about what a Gran Fondo is, what New York is, and then you just sort of took those two ingredients, stuffed them together, and that is a great product, hands down. What makes, aside from having New York City and Gran Fondo and all that, what makes a great Gran Fondo? What does it take, in your opinion?

 

First and foremost, safety. I think you’re not always having full road closures at those events. Sometimes you have always right of way.

 

You have some cars here and there. It may be from either the legislation or the local area where you are, not make sense, not be possible, not make sense to close all the roads, trapping people into their homes if they could just drive from A to B quickly and be around the cyclists might be the better solution. But at the same time, it always has to be safe.

 

So that is the most important part, finding a course. And the ability to provide a safe racing experience is everything stands and falls with that. That is the biggest thing.

 

The second biggest is timing, to have professional timing and timing that works, being able to provide results right after the race. And the third thing that a rider is looking for, should be looking for, is not getting lost. It sounds very simple to do, but I’ve gotten lost in events in a lead group of a race.

 

It’s even being led wrong by a lead car. And I’m not saying it hasn’t happened to us at events of ours, but those are the sort of like the three things that you really have to nail in an event. And then, you know, from there on, there’s a lot of a lot more things.

 

Take the rider seriously. Don’t just give them any number. Make sure that the fast people are at the front.

 

So it’s going to get a good spread. The people who are going for the win, there’s organizations that don’t care about that. They look down on you to say, oh, you’re a little amateur cyclist.

 

It doesn’t matter. You know, have a good day on the bike. You’re not a professional, so we don’t care about you.

 

We care about every rider, even the last ones. They have a right to have those intersections closed and be taken care of. The aid stations need to be stocked that everybody has everything until the end.

 

So it’s really taking care about everybody and making everybody feel part of this event and being taken care of and not just, let’s invite this professional rider and he’s the superstar and he’s, let him be the hero. Maybe he signs your jersey. We don’t do that.

 

We have sometimes professional do our events. They have to wear our race jersey as well as everybody else, or they’re not participating because our hero is the rider, every single one of them. That’s what I like personally as a rider to come to these events.

 

That’s what Lydia likes. And so we always just apply what we as riders do ourselves. And in the beginning of GFNY, we were doing a lot of our events ourselves.

 

Once they were standing on their own feet, we were helping beforehand. We didn’t have to help with the productions. We were able to do our own races and really enjoyed that.”

 

So we got to travel the world to our own races. There’s some things that money just doesn’t pay for. Getting these experiences, creating those for us, has been an amazing blessing in our life.

 

Yeah. And these events, they’re special in a lot of different ways. They’re dynamic.

 

Hats off to you because these are like really unpredictable beasts that you’re dealing with, right? Like anything can happen. Yeah.

 

And anything does happen.

 

Anything does happen.

 

We have done over 150 of those now, whether directly produced or as a franchise GFNY. So we have seen everything. You get used to the challenges, you get better at them.

 

I think that’s also the strength of GFNY and being part of the series, is getting all that knowledge. That we have to make sure it’s gonna be a good event because we know what to look for. And we’ve been through, we’ve made all the mistakes, whether it’s in year one or in year three.

 

No one’s perfect. We’ve been through this. We’ve gone into this, I think, naive and arrogant, a combination of both, for sure.

 

Maybe it helped us to do it at all. Maybe if we would have to be, if we would have been more humble, we wouldn’t have done it. So it’s also a blessing in disguise, but sure, we’ve made mistakes and learned from them.

 

What do you look towards, what do you look for in a partnership, like in a sponsorship that you’re going to work with? Like what are some of your goals and what? Because I know that this is something that my audience, a lot of my audience works in the industry.

 

And I kind of wanted to speak to how you see sponsorships, and what makes a good partnership and a sponsorship for a grand funder like this?

 

Yeah. For my side, it’s first that I have to like the product, because if I don’t like the product, I’m not going to promote it, and I’m not going to feel good doing it. So I’ve said no to things that I don’t like, that are not with our philosophy.

 

For example, at our expo, we don’t have supplement companies exhibiting because I’m a very much anti-doping kind of person. I feel like supplements are, if they’re not doping, a waste of money and time. I don’t want that.

 

I don’t want people taking pills to do cycling. I know that some have to, and it’s everybody’s personal decision. It just doesn’t fit my philosophy.

 

So we don’t do that. We don’t have exhibitors that sell pills. That’s something we don’t do.

 

So products that I like myself, products that I would use is a good start. And then in terms of an audience, I would say people that are events from what we see, from our experience, from our research that we do, it’s a high-end demographic. It’s people who can afford expensive bikes.

 

They have good discretionary income. So it’s a good audience also for the industry to be part of that. Those are passionate people.

 

They think twice before they spend their money. But if they spend it, they spend it in good stuff. We have riders who come to our race in New York from Latin America without a bike and could fly home with a $10,000 road bike that they buy in New York.

 

So that’s the kind of audience we’re having. We have people that come with private jets. So while there is everything there, there’s also very rich people.

 

We have people that had to do the race with private security because of who they were. So it’s sort of like a sport that beyond say the traditional countries like Italy, France, Belgium, it’s more of a high-end demographic, just like triathlon, endurance sports. And as such is a good audience for cycling products.

 

High-end bikes, which are very expensive road bikes these days. So we have those clienteers. And I think compared to doing marketing over social media, I still value very much the touch and feel.

 

So people get to come to the expo and try out products and showcase the products. During COVID, for example, when many event organizers put on virtual events, we said, no, that’s not us. We are very much a touch and feel community event.

 

You see other people, you talk to them, you’re out in nature. That is what makes GFNY. So they’re like, okay, it might be a good business decision to offer those virtual events, but it’s not us, so we’re not gonna do it.

 

So at the end of what we did, we organized group rides on platforms, but never races. We said, no, that’s not us. Others do that.

 

Well, we don’t stand for that GFNY, especially in the days that we are in now, where we’re all the time on our phones online. I personally enjoy cycling very much and try to get out when I can, two, three hours without the phone. It’s so good for your brain, so good for your mental health.

 

“And having those events and organizing events is that people getting together, people having a goal to train for that and then have this event also as mental health and not just for physical health. I think it’s super important to have events. Because riding around, you can do this as well, but having something in the distance as a motivating factor to keep going and actually also push through sometimes when it’s hard, I think is great.

 

Yeah, I mean, it’s a great product. And so you are able to provide these sponsors with an incredibly targeted enthusiast audience. And road cycling in particular, I guess, where do you see in the macro?

 

I know that COVID brought a lot of new bike enthusiasts, not necessarily, but new riders to the business. I always ask, how did you guys weather COVID? I guess maybe you want to go back to when things shut down and then kind of what you’re seeing now in terms of interest from your vantage point.

 

Of course, it was brutal for us. Our business within two weeks was from 100% to nothing, just stopped completely. We had to get people part-time work into part-time work.

 

We still did what we could. We were able to do a race in Florida. We were able to do a race in France, for example.

 

We were the first non-professional race that was held in France in COVID in August 2020, for 100 French riders who made their way into the Alps, who were allowed to go with the most ridiculous COVID guidelines that made no sense in the open air. We did what we had to do to hold these events and struggled through the whole time. We were not allowed to do the race in New York for two years in a row, which is still our marquee race.

 

And we did learn that if you’re gone for a year, you’re really gone out of people’s minds. And it did feel like in 2023, we started from scratch. We had to get known again.

 

People did not know who we are. We had 25 or 28 races before COVID in 2019. And we’re back to that level amount of races by 2023, but people didn’t know us anymore.

 

Half the events globally were gone. In some countries, two-thirds of the events didn’t come back.

 

That surprises me because I thought that COVID brought a new kind of energy.

 

Yes, as we said, we just have to get through this. We have to find a way to survive this financially. And it was brutal to survive this.

 

If we survive it, the majority will not, and we’ll be there, and it will all be the new cyclists, and they will do our events. It’s going to be great for us. But the new cyclists didn’t know that they could do events because they grew up without events.

 

They grew up as people who did not know they could participate in events. Then people changed also their travel habits. People stopped traveling.

 

They didn’t travel as they used to. So they rode from home. And we are to a large extent still events where people have to travel to.

 

We try to be where riders are. And one of our goals is to be near every road cyclist in the world with an event. So traveling is not a big factor for GFNY.

 

But the reality is, many people have been traveling and travel has not come back in no industry to what it has been. We see this a lot. So it’s become a lot harder to put on events because in many regions there are less riders.

 

In other regions, we have a lot of riders. Our French events are doing amazing. We have a new race in Germany that opened with 500 registrations within the first four weeks for a race that is nine months away next year at the end of August.

 

So you have to find the pockets where people do it. I’m not worried about cycling. Cycling is 130 years old.

 

That’s not going anywhere. If you watch the professional racing, the interest of the fans is there. It’s just still getting through this sort of now the cycling industry is doing bad as well.

 

We get double remi. We got first cycling industry sold well. During COVID, we did nothing.

 

Now the cycling industry as a whole has a problem, which means we have a problem too. So it’s tough for us, double tough if you want COVID. But if you would ask me, would you prefer this now or just from the financial perspective?

 

Obviously not what COVID did to health of people and humans. Not have COVID, I will stay. I still prefer having COVID because for us in 2019, the event space was very saturated.

 

We really, the market was saturated. It was much harder for us to create new markets. We created back in the 2010s, the market in Latin America.

 

We were the first in Colombia, in Ecuador, in Chile, in Argentina, to put on events like that and created those Grand Forno events there. But by the time it was 2019, sort of the world of cycling was saturated and COVID interrupted that. COVID took away events, took away the events that were smaller, that were not well organized.

 

So the stronger ones survived. And I appreciate that because it’s now, it’s a more open market, even though it’s hard and it’s still hard. I prefer that and a challenge and change.

 

I’m really a person that is also getting excited about change, even though it’s hard, even though it’s not good for the business in the short term. I like it because it gives me opportunity. I like what it could do.

 

So where do you, it sounds like you, 23 was tough, it sounds like 24, if I understand correctly, is going in the right direction.

 

It’s going in the right direction. Many events doing better. We figure out what is good.

 

We still have events that work for a year and then they don’t work for a year. And we get support, we don’t get it. So it’s not the long term we had.

 

We have still, that Mexico race still exists. For example, it’s going into its 12th edition now. And our goal is always to have a new event and have this as long standing as possible.

 

That’s also at the end, what makes an event successful the first year is hard. And it only becomes profitable after two or three years. But sometimes it just doesn’t work.

 

You have to try things and try events in areas. And if it doesn’t work, you have to move on to something new. But we’re definitely doing better.

 

It’s looking good for next year. And we have the opportunity that now destinations talk to us, wanting a GFNY that would have never talked to us five years ago, because they already had three races that have gone now.

 

So, and you mentioned that the part that the brands and things are having to sort of cinch a little bit their purse strings because of the crisis. But overall, just from talking to you today, it seems like you’re pretty reasonable in terms of like the investments that you make. So it sounds like even with some of the bumps that you’ve gone through, it feels like your company is stable.

 

Absolutely.

 

And that the project continues on its way.

 

Yes, absolutely. I mean, again, it was tough, but we’re definitely profitable now. Twenty-two, twenty-one, it was not clear because when it happened in 2020, no one knew it would take so long.

 

We said, we can sit out a year after year. We realized you have to sit out two years. And it was getting really tough.

 

But we’re both athletes, I think. We’re both, Lydia and I, too stubborn for our own good sometimes, probably. But we’re also really tough and can sit out things and work hard and find other avenues to make it work.

 

And whether it means selling more apparel, we have our own apparel brand. When it was the time when people were buying in 21, focusing on that. Or just for every event at the end that you see that GFNY gets that has, there’s 20, 30 we tried to make happen.

 

So it’s just a lot of business development, hard work that people don’t see that.

 

No.

 

Just now.

 

No, they don’t.

 

No. And that’s okay. No one knows anybody else’s job.

 

And we want to provide people great experiences. They don’t have to feel sympathy. They need to look that they get out of our event.

 

That’s what they want from them. That’s all that counts. And largest series in the world.”

 

We did for first professional race in New York this year, something that we wanted to do for 10 years. And my goal was always to make GFNY an outcomeless race, just like at the New York City Marathon. We have the pros and the amateurs really all starting together.

 

Short-seccing is different with the team cars and all the team aspects. So it’s harder to integrate that with a mass field. But I still think that in certain races, you can do that.

 

You have three from one team, professional team, start at the front and have to race against everybody. Because that concept of racing against the best, that chance for an amateur, only in doing sports that’s possible. In football, in tennis, you can’t do that.

 

And I just always loved that in running or in triathlon. And we always wanted to apply that in cycling. We tried, we had some pros do our races.

 

But if you don’t have UCI points, they’re not going to do it. So this year for the first time in New York, we had a pro race that started 10 minutes before the amateurs did the same course. And it was great to see how they did it and how the amateurs basically chased them.

 

How some pros got dropped out of the field, got swallowed by the amateurs. And we want to apply that around the world at our events, wherever it makes sense and have more of those. And really go from 35 to why not 100 races, 100 GFNYs around the world, to be near every cyclist.

 

And it’s really a global sport now. We see races in Indonesia where we have a lot of young people in their 20s doing our events. It’s a market that we in the west don’t really know, but it’s fascinating to see how the sport is done in other countries.

 

And this time, for the first time in France, I was not seeing guys of my age or older doing the GFNYs, but suddenly, you know, young guys in their 20s and women in their 20s doing it. And I was like, wow, I’m suddenly one of the old guys. And we old guys were fading out.

 

There is a new generation coming in. So there was a bit of a gap, but I’m seeing, I think an optimist by nature, but I also think it’s founded on seeing it, what’s happening in the sport. And I’m optimistic.

 

It’s going to be great future forwarder sport.

 

Well, I was really happy to have you on today, Uli. I know we’re running up on an hour, a little over an hour here. So I want to be respectful of your time.

 

But yeah, this was really interesting. I think it was one thing that I took away was, you see an event like this from the outside and hearing the struggles that you and Lydia have gone through to get where you are today. This is something that I’m learning.

 

Like from the outside, everything looks so, I don’t want to say easy, but it does look like things are smooth and they’re absolutely not. And it takes an awful lot of sweating and pushing and going. And I’m really happy to congratulate you and Lydia on the success that you guys have had.

 

And that’s pretty amazing. So if anybody wants to reach you, where’s a good place that they can find you if they want to get in touch with you?

 

gfny.com is the best way, gfny.com. All the rates listed, the contact is listed there. And if you want to reach me, you found the contact there and just say, ask for Uli and they will get to me.

 

I think you can also, on Twitter, I’m also UliF, at UliF, you’ll find me there as well, can contact me. So I think what you said for events, I think it’s important for anybody who does events to understand. The race directors are always passionate people, passionate about the sport.

 

None of us make a lot of money. We do this out of passion. It’s just not to complain how hard it is.

 

We could do something else. Like I’ve done other stuff. And if I don’t like it anymore, I can walk away from it.

 

That’s my own problem. I don’t want sympathy. But don’t think like entry fees are ridiculous.

 

They are what they are because they have to be like that. And obviously it has to make sense for you. If you say this is too much for me to do a bike race, I don’t want to do it, then that’s fine too.

 

But they cost what they cost because of the end cost, what it costs. You’ll see GFNY for 59 dollars, 59 euro in France because producing it there is much cheaper than in New York where it costs 300 dollars. Not the entry fee.

 

So it’s usually a reflection of that.

 

Okay. Well, thank you again, Uli, for coming on. It was great talking.

 

Thanks for having me.

 

Okay. Take care.

 

Thank you.