The petroculture peloton: Bridging the hypocrisy gap

Elite cyclists racing through sweeping mountain landscapes make for a powerful image of a clean sport. This is exactly the image the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), the sport’s governing body, wants to project. But follow the money, and the picture changes fast: many of the sport’s biggest organisations run on fossil fuel sponsorship.

In 2026, cycling team budgets on the men’s WorldTour total 663 million euros (~756 million U.S. dollars / USD) – a rise from 379 million euros (~432 million USD) in 2021 – with 87% of teams’ revenue coming from sponsors. The sport’s biggest teams, such as Tadej Pogačar’s UAE Team Emirates – sponsored by XRG, the gas and chemicals subsidiary of UAE state oil company ADNOC – and Netcompany-INEOS, owned by the British petrochemicals giant INEOS, have budgets in the region of 50 million euros (~57 million USD), while smaller teams operate on around half of that.

The UCI’s total revenue in 2025 was 42.66 million Swiss francs (CHF) (~52.9 million USD), of which 12.52 million CHF (~15.5 million USD) – almost 30% – was generated by commercial rights.

As part one of this investigation analysed, cycling has become a trusted vehicle for fossil fuel companies to create positive brand association.

“Sport provides a great platform for shaping public opinion due to its strong social value and highly visible properties such as teams, events and athletes”, Dr Aravind Reghunathan, associate professor at Loughborough University London’s Institute for Sport Business, tells Play the Game. “As fans connect deeply with these properties, fossil fuel companies leverage on them and transfer positive associations in the minds of fans to their own brands and activities, distracting attention from the environmental harm they cause”.

Part two of this investigation asks whether the UCI is fulfilling its responsibility to lead the sport’s response to climate change and what it would take to make it act – regardless of whether public initiatives like Edinburgh’s fossil fuel advertising ban, set to apply when the city hosts the 2027 Tour de France Grand Départ, force its hand first.

Governing the status quo

The UCI applies no restrictions to fossil fuel advertising among its stakeholders. When asked about its responsibility to regulate the issue, the UCI told Play the Game that, according to the governing body’s regulations, “teams, organisers and riders are authorised to grant visibility to such brands in the context of cycling events”, adding that each stakeholder is responsible for ensuring compliance with national legislation and any sponsorship bans.

In November 2025, the UCI published its second sustainability report. Although much of it focuses on the organisation itself – such as reducing its own emissions by 15% compared with the 2019 baseline – a few commitments touch, albeit tenuously, on fossil fuel sponsorship.

The most notable is a questionnaire sent to teams and event organisers earlier this year by the UCI's Professional Cycling Climate Action Working Group – which brings together representatives from teams, event organisers, riders and UCI marketing partners. The survey’s goal is to assess their sustainability commitments, identify challenges and encourage the gradual integration of sustainability into the sport. This signals that any meaningful action on fossil fuel sponsorship is not imminent.

In addition, the governing body is embedding sustainability regulation into team and event licensing procedures, and has laid the groundwork for a sustainability ranking system across all disciplines. Whether any of this will extend to fossil fuel sponsorship remains unclear.

The sustainability report also includes progress on the UCI Climate Action Charter: eight voluntary principles in line with UCI’s commitment to becoming carbon neutral by 2030. This includes pledges such as “ensure that the effects of climate change are factored into our future plans”. Apart from the number of signatories increasing from 80 to 104 since the charter was created in 2022, the report does not detail progress.

The list of 104 signatories does not include Netcompany-INEOS or oil major-sponsored Team TotalEnergies, but it does include UAE Team Emirates-XRG and the Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO), organisers of the Tour de France. ASO declined to comment on their commitment to the charter.

Freddie Daley is a research associate at the Centre for Global Political Economy at the University of Sussex. He is also a campaigner for Cool Down and Badvertising, two organisations pushing to end high-carbon advertising in sport. Speaking with Play the Game, he says that “a meaningful Climate Action Charter would mean teams have to question their ownership models and how elite cycling is structured when they are owned and operated by fossil fuel firms”. He acknowledges that any change would be difficult to push through, especially for the biggest and most successful teams like UAE Team Emirates.

As the organisation selling rights for the sport, the UCI is responsible for implementing ethical guidelines that prevent the promotion of companies directly implicated in climate change. This extends to anything that could hinder cyclists from hitting peak performance, including heat stress, air pollution, or protest disruption. “If the UCI is serious about sustainability, I would argue that they have a reputational imperative to look at it”, says Daley.

During the 2023 World Championships road race in Scotland, activists from climate action group This Is Rigged glued their hands to the road, halting the race for more than an hour. One of the four activists said the cycling community was “complicit and ignorant about oil and gas companies sponsoring their races”.

Specialists point to a safeguard against physical or reputational risks linked to association with high-polluting brands: the use of "boilerplate clauses" in contracts – terms that give organisations leverage over sponsors and allow them to exit problematic deals without incurring financial penalties. According to the law firm Irwin Mitchell, such clauses could allow sports organisations to terminate deals and claim damages when conditions are not met. Badvertising suggests they could also give sustainability and decarbonisation assurances.

A playbook borrowed from Big Tobacco

What makes detangling from fossil fuels so difficult is that they are deeply woven into the fabric of modern cycling: from the carbon fibre in the bikes themselves to the fleets of team cars and buses that follow every race, making them far harder to escape through advertising bans alone.

“The true strength of petroculture lies in its pervasiveness”, says Theo Frixou, PhD candidate in Sport and Environmental Sociology at Loughborough University London, in an interview with Play the Game. “Modern sport helps reinforce petroculture via taken-for-granted practices and social expectations that often come at a high carbon and ecological cost – normalising the cultural legitimacy of fossil fuel capitalism".

Frixou exemplifies this with the increase in sports organisations acting as lifestyle brands – championing fast-fashion collections made from oil-derived polyester – and the routine platforming of carbon-intensive industries, from automakers and airlines to fossil fuel companies and the banks that finance them.

Research shows that almost half of people across the European Union support banning fossil fuel advertising. In a Friends of the Earth survey, 78% of people backed those responsible for pollution (i.e. fossil fuel companies) paying more to help fund environmental action. In June 2024, UN Secretary-General António Guterres called upon “every country to ban advertising from fossil fuel companies” because “fossil fuels are not only poisoning our planet – they are toxic for your brand”.

Reghunathan says that supporters of advertising bans “want to raise public awareness of fossil fuels’ impact on the environment in the short term”. In the long term, he adds, “this could strip the social legitimacy of these companies to piggyback on fans’ beloved sport teams and events, and broadly accelerate climate action”.

But he cautions that advertising bans only work as a first step and need to be followed up by broader, coordinated efforts to stop harmful practices: “individual responsibility will always remain a hallmark of good citizenship, but it is the duty of governments and public organisations to build a system that holds corporates accountable for their actions”.

The most effective precedent and supporting evidence for a fossil fuel advertising ban is the international ban on tobacco advertising. But fossil fuel companies’ influence on contemporary sport runs deeper than tobacco companies in the 1980s and 1990s. “Fossil fuel corporations have gone beyond sponsoring to actually owning massive stakes in clubs and setting up leagues”, says Reghunathan. He adds that state-backed sponsorship, like the one with UAE Team Emirates-XRG, “indicates the ability to link their actions with foreign policy implications”.

The New Weather Institute’s Dirty Money report recommends that sport organisations introduce a complete tobacco-style ban on fossil fuel sponsorship, rather than a partial ban, which could lead to companies pivoting their advertising spending to other channels.

What looks like a great deal for fossil fuel companies could be a far worse one for the organisations that take their money. “As a method of promotion, sport is a really smart one because it creates this buffer between the public and a brand”, says Daley. The criticism, in other words, falls on teams and governing bodies, not the fossil fuel companies behind the sponsorship.

And that buffer may not hold. In Badvertising’s report on screening out polluting sponsors, Daley writes that ongoing deals with polluting businesses sour relations with prospective sponsors and commercial partners, ultimately shrinking future opportunities and revenue.

Lessons from other sports and industries

There are numerous examples of other sports organisations successfully restricting or eliminating reliance on fossil fuel sponsors. In 2022, Tennis Australia dropped a multi-year partnership with oil and gas giant Santos after just one year, following public backlash.

Fearing a similar outcome, the English Rugby Football Union declined a multi-year partnership with oil and gas conglomerate ExxonMobil, while the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, made it clear that oil companies were unwelcome as sponsors of the 2024 Olympics.

There are also examples from the arts. The National Portrait Gallery and Royal Opera House in London both ended decades-long relationships with BP (formerly British Petroleum) after hard-fought campaigning. Public pressure also led to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam dropping Shell, the Canadian Museum of History ending its relationship with the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), and the Perth Festival ditching Chevron.

But almost all these instances were motivated by public backlash, rather than proactive internal motivation. Unlike the sports and events mentioned above, cycling lacks ticket revenue and relies on sponsorship to survive. Revenue distribution is unlikely to significantly alter teams’ fortunes either.

Although cycling is an elite sport, many of its riders are not paid like elite athletes. “I would hope that with any changes to governance touching sponsorship, the UCI would really countenance what it would do for riders’ salaries, because they are the sport ultimately”, says Daley.

In February 2026, UCI president David Lappartient penned a letter calling on cycling stakeholders to work together to reform the sport’s structure. He writes, “cycling is a hugely popular sport. However, its media exposure and the revenues it generates do not match its popularity. There is considerable room for improvement”.

He continues that the UCI “is ready to consider significant developments in a sport renowned for its conservatism”, calling for contributions on topics including the “calendar and participation” and professional cycling’s “economic model”.

For cycling teams to reduce their reliance on sponsorship revenue, Reghunathan suggests they could “collectively lobby for a share of broadcast rights and ownership of events” – a strategy successfully adopted by cricket clubs in the Indian Premier League, where each franchise takes home around 45% of the league’s overall media revenue.

“Cycling teams and events possess a unique positioning to attract sponsorships from greener industries that also provide excellent image congruence with the sport”, he adds.

Aligning action with ambition

The UCI addressing fossil fuel sponsorship in its consideration of “significant developments” seems unlikely. The governing body’s sustainability report claims to have laid the foundations to “raise awareness and invite all cycling stakeholders to join the UCI Climate Action Charter”, but it stops short of committing to any concrete action. The UCI declined to comment about this.

A firmer approach may be the only way forward. Speaking with Play the Game, cycling journalist Matt Rendell argues the UCI Climate Action Charter should be “totally mandatory”, with rules governing who can own and sponsor teams. Likewise, ClientEarth lawyer Jonathan White agrees that establishing a climate-aligned sponsorship policy would be a sensible first step to making fossil fuel sponsors less attractive. Failing a strict ban, Daley recommends the UCI adopts a due diligence framework defining “high-climate risk sponsors” and publishes its approval criteria for transparency.

A matter of principle

The UCI describes “the role of the bicycle as a sustainable and health-positive form of transport” as “essential”. The recommendations this article offers could help make fossil fuels “less promoted, normalised and attractive”, shifting demand towards healthier alternatives such as… more cycling, rather than car companies or the fuels that power them.

The governing body writes in its sustainability report that “partnerships are an important lever enabling the UCI to advocate at the highest possible level for governments and cities to commit to cycling as a mode of transport that is not only sustainable but also active, keeping their populations healthy”. But if its stakeholders continue to be sponsored by fossil fuel companies, this is a contradictory ambition.

“The preaching of saying one thing and doing another is profoundly unproductive and derails a lot of action on climate because you are immediately called out as a hypocrite”, says Daley. “Having that integrity and consistency in a sports organisation that is pursuing sustainability and is serious about doing it is really important”.

On its Climate Action Charter web page, the UCI writes: “not acting to reduce emissions in a rapid and far-reaching way will cost society and the sport of cycling far more in the future”. It remains to be seen whether the UCI will step up a gear and heed its own warning, taking on the climate challenge as part of cycling’s 2030 Agenda.

Should the 2027 Tour de France Grand Départ in Edinburgh fail to urge the UCI into action, the governing body risks having fossil fuel regulation forced upon it by outside forces, when it may already be too late.