Roy Knickman Has No Regrets
When the Lux Cycling Development Team ceased operations at the end of the 2022 season, longtime general manager and coach Roy Knickman expressed sentiments of both sadness and satisfaction. “I couldn’t be any prouder of what we were able to accomplish over these past many years,” he said about his work with the country’s top under-19 team. “Our efforts aided in bringing a whole new group of young athletes to the WorldTour and top U23 teams.” Indeed, three of the Americans who raced in last year’s Tour de France came through the Lux Cycling program: Brandon McNulty, Quinn Simmons and Kevin Vermaerke.
Knickman didn’t start Lux Cycling, but in the program’s third year of existence, 2014, it was clear that he was the best man to run the Southern California-based outfit. Knickman turned professional after taking a bronze medal in the 1984 Olympic team time trial, and in a decade-long pro career he raced with such teams as La Vie Claire, 7-Eleven and Coors Light, winning stages at the Critérium du Dauphiné and Tour de Suisse. After finally retiring in 2000, he coached the U.S. national junior team as well as the U.S. national and Olympic teams, and he subsequently worked in team management with domestic squads Mercury Cycling, Autotrader.com and Prime Alliance.
Knickman’s experience of working with young riders proved invaluable for Lux Cycling. “There are different levels of development, and my skill set was for a higher level of development,” he said in a recent interview. “For example, I could use my European connections to get us into races. Also [important was] being able to find this talent, get them to some bike races [and] teach them what is important. It is very important how you treat a young athlete and get them through bad moments. I really enjoyed doing it.”
“I couldn’t be any prouder of what we were able to accomplish over these past many years.”
Under his guidance, Lux Cycling made major changes. “I realized quickly what was needed to develop at a higher level and that was more time in Europe,” Knickman said. “It led to some realizations that to do this right I would have to look through the whole country, which I was against at first because I wanted there to be a group who could train together. But the reality is if you are going to go to Europe, which we had to do, you can’t take six kids from your local town and expect them to even be able to finish.”
One of the first out-of-state riders Knickman chose was McNulty, an Arizonan. “I could see this huge untapped potential. He showed up to camp with no bike. I think he brought his power meter wheel. He came off the plane and hopped on a bike. We did a short, 8-mile time trial and he was 20 watts higher than when he got second at [junior] nationals to Gage Hecht.”
Knickman’s capacity to multitask was critical in finding the talent necessary for Lux Cycling’s goals. “It’s a combination of things because I think somebody can make it to the WorldTour for different reasons,” he explained. “One of them is how big is the engine? What are we seeing in riders, not necessarily wins but in the way they ride? The style they ride. How hard they ride. How well do they train? But some of the kids aren’t big-numbers kids. And they are really, really good. So the other side of it is what is their mentality? How strong are they mentally? How hard do they work?”
“I realized quickly what was needed to develop at a higher level and that was more time in Europe.”
“Some of it is what don’t they have,” Knickman added. “The kid who got fourth at nationals who had no coach, had shitty equipment, barely got to races, versus a kid who had everything and won. I can do so much with this kid who had nothing. You give him a race schedule. You give him equipment. You give him a coach who knows their shit and then a director who believes in them and teaches them to believe in themselves. There are four different places where you are going to see big improvement versus the kid who is already polished.
“And there were occasions where a kid who was polished would ask to come to the team but more often than not we were taking kids who weren’t the ones winning. You’ve got to look at it in many different ways and be ready to be wrong and be surprised. We put kids on the team because we knew they were good kids and came recommended, but you are not sure if they’ve got the engine or mentality to do it at that level and they just continue to improve.”
Roy explained one of his key recruiting policies: “There was an open door for people who were more development-oriented to give me a call and make a recommendation because I was realistic in that I am not everywhere and I can’t see everything—and definitely not all-knowing.
“I didn’t know who Quinn Simmons was. Ned Overend sent me an email and said there is this kid in Durango you have to put on your team,” Knickman recalled. “So, I called up Ned and talked to him about it and told him that the team was full. Ned was like ‘Dude, you have to put him on your team.’
“I called up Quinn. He was super-motivated, so I added a spot on the team and told him I could take him to Valley of the Sun [stage race in Arizona] and few other races; and he goes to Valley of the Sun and wins. Two months later he got third in the junior Ghent–Wevelgem having done two road races in his life!”
Also read: Vuelta a San Juan S3: Quinn Simmons surprises the sprinters
Listening to other people and trusting them turned out to be a great policy for Knickman and his team. “There were a number of kids like that,” he said, “where a coach said, ‘Here’s my kid. It’s all I, or our team, can do. He or she is ready for what you are doing. Give them a look.’ And that’s how we got a number of our kids.”
Knickman looked to his roots when he determined how he would support the team’s riders. “My whole thing was ‘everybody supported me as a junior,’” he said, referring to his first amateur team directors, Doug Knox of Santa Barbara BC–Centurion and Michael Fatka of Levi’s–Raleigh. “I had all my travel paid for. I was always supported.
“I think the biggest draw for the [Lux Cycling] kids was that they would have a chance to go to Europe. We had established that we took good care of the kids, but most were surprised when we paid for all the plane tickets. We paid for all the food. We were going to supply you with bikes to use and if you leave the team and really don’t have anything to continue with we will give the [bikes] to you. We tried to do everything like a pro team because I didn’t want to have anybody excluded because they didn’t have any money.”
Knickman wanted the program to be total immersion in European racing. “Going to Europe for two and a half weeks is a summer-camp trip,” he said. “It is a really cool experience, but it is not going to get you the adaptation you need. You are not going to get invited onto a U23 team because you have been learning how to race your bike for a couple of weeks in Europe.
“We tried to do everything like a pro team because I didn’t want to have anybody excluded because they didn’t have any money.”
“I found that between eight and 10 stage races a year in Europe was the minimum to effectively have adaptation and development and get these kids recognized. And that’s expensive when you are trying to do it in Europe and you are trying to do it around the U.S., finding higher level races, and when you are racing them up-category because the standard of European juniors [is so high]. The Redlands [Classic] Pro 1-2 is an easy, medium-level junior race in Europe.”
Having such an extensive European program cost money and that meant sponsorship was critical to Lux Cycling. “It was build a budget and just try to piece it together,” Knickman continued. “Everybody thought we had lots of money and all these great sponsors, and although we had great people and sponsors involved we never had enough money. I was always fundraising. We had key people [donors] and sometimes it was found money. Len Pettyjohn [the former general manager of Coors Light and other elite teams] came to me four years ago and said, ‘We should be putting money back into the sport and I would like to set up an endowment to help you.’
“Our title sponsor, Sideshow [maker of Lux toys], would do auctions and other things like that to give us plane tickets from frequent flyer miles,” Knickman added. “Their involvement was more infrastructure, making us look good like giving me a web guy and helping me with email blasts…. Last year, we spent $400,000 and what we did on $400,000 was ridiculously amazing.”
Knickman also partnered with the USA Cycling junior development program and its director, Billy Innes, to share riders and costs. “We worked together, and I would consult with him, and we would build a schedule and coordinate with what the national team could do and what I could do,” Knickman said. “Some of the kids were on the straight Lux schedule and others would fill out the spots on the national team.
“That worked really well. It was clear that it was very difficult for me to be able to afford to do this on my own and USA Cycling couldn’t do it on their own, because just bringing a kid to four stage races in Europe, which is two racing blocks, still isn’t enough. In Europe, the best kids were doing at least three racing blocks and having their club teams support them.”
Then, in 2021, USA Cycling canceled its European junior program because of budget difficulties. “I tried to work without USA Cycling trying to make up for them having no program and it wasn’t that effective,” Knickman explained. “Part of the problem and part of the demise of the team was that we were trying to run two teams [men and women] on half the money we needed to do it. We had no staff, no infrastructure. Two years ago, the guys were in Europe for three months and then the women went to Europe.”
At the same time, he said, sponsorship was also becoming more difficult. “We had some people short us this [past] year because of the economy and they said they were definitely out for next year. After struggling financially the year before, I just had to throw in the towel.”
The usually indefatigable Knickman was starting to burn out. “I would get up at 4 in the morning on a day when I was working at the fire service and do plane tickets for three hours until I had to show my face at 7 o’clock,” Knickman remembered. “I would go back to my room when I was done at the end of the day and work on social media. I was working around that while I was [also dealing with my kid’s bone] cancer [treatments].
“I retired from the fire service about three years ago and I thought I would have less work, but since USA Cycling stopped running its [European junior] program I ended up doing more work. I was just fried. I needed to take my life back and not be stressed and up late every night worrying about how I am going to make things work.”
Knickman said he has no regrets about how he ran Lux Cycling, “but I wouldn’t do it any other way. One thing I refused to do was to say ‘we can only afford to go to Europe for two weeks and only go to three domestic races and nationals.’ The time and effort I was putting into it was like I am going to be creating experiences, but I am not going to be effective at getting any of these kids to Europe [on pro teams]. That was my goal, so I either do it all in, in a way that I know is effective, or I don’t do it.”
“I was just fried. I needed to take my life back and not be stressed and up late every night worrying about how I am going to make things work.”
For a decade, Lux Cycling was highly successful in getting riders into the European pro peloton. Besides McNulty (now with UAE Team Emirates) and Simmons (Trek-Segafredo), two other Lux graduates are on WorldTeams—Vermaerke (Team DSM) and Sean Quinn (EF Education-EasyPost)—while Matthew Riccitello, Luke Lamperti, Jared Scott, Viggo Moore, Jesse Maris, Colby Simmons, Cole Kessler and Michael Garrison are on Continental and U23 teams in Europe. On the women’s side, Kaia Schmid and Makayla MacPherson ride for Human Powered Health and Zoe Ta-Perez, Kathrine Sarkisov and Claire Windsor are with the brand-new European-based U.S. team, Cynisca Cycling.
What’s next for Roy Knickman? “At this point I am going to advise and sit back and enjoy these kids who we played a small part in,” he said. “I definitely don’t claim to be the guy who made anybody. I looked at it as helping to facilitate growth and being a very, very small step in an athlete’s development.”
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