Most watch brands that want a piece of cycling do the same obvious thing. They pay a champion to wear the product, take the photograph, and bank the exposure. It's clean, it's cheap, and it asks nothing of anyone except a wrist on a podium.
Tudor looked at that arrangement and decided it wasn't enough.
In late 2022 a small Swiss outfit took out a UCI ProTeam licence. By July 2025 that same team was rolling down the start ramp at the Grande Boucle. And by the time the 2026 season opened, it had earned guaranteed start rights at every WorldTour race on the calendar — all the cobbled Classics, the Ardennes, all three Grand Tours. From a standing start to the biggest races in the world in under four years. That does not happen by accident, and it does not happen with a chequebook alone.
The man who built it, not just badged it
Here's the thing about Fabian Cancellara. He never needed cycling to take him seriously. He'd already seen to that himself.
Two Olympic time trial golds. Four world titles against the clock. Paris–Roubaix three times, the Tour of Flanders three times, Milan–San Remo once — the kind of record that earns a man a nickname, and his was Spartacus. When he rode off the front of a Classics field on the cobbles, nobody went with him, because nobody could. For the better part of a decade he was the single strongest engine in the bunch.
So when he retired in 2016, he could have done exactly what every other retired great does. A few ambassador gigs. A watch deal. A seat in the commentary box and a comfortable life telling stories about the old days. Instead he built a team. Not a logo rented onto someone else's jersey — a team. Riders, mechanics, soigneurs, a bus, a directeur sportif, the whole apparatus that it takes to put eight men on the start line of a Grand Tour. And he put a watchmaker's name on the front of it.
That distinction is the entire story. Cancellara spent his career as the rider who respected the work that nobody sees — the wind tunnel hours, the recon laps, the craft the French call le metier. It tracks that the team he built would be the real thing rather than a marketing exercise. He'd have known the difference better than anyone.
2025: the debut that wasn't a token
Plenty of small teams get a wildcard to the Tour de France and treat it as a victory lap. Show up, soak in the atmosphere, get the sponsor's logo on the helicopter shots, go home happy. Tudor didn't read the script that way.
They arrived at the 2025 race with a squad built to actually do something — Alaphilippe, Marc Hirschi, Michael Storer, Matteo Trentin and a hard-working supporting cast — and they raced like a team with a point to prove. The high-water mark came on Stage 15, when Alaphilippe took third on the day and Storer rode away into the break to claim the combativity award. They came within a few seconds of a stage win. For a team in its first ever Tour, that's not a participation medal. That's a statement.
And it counted for more than pride. Those results, stacked on top of a busy season, banked enough UCI points to move Tudor up the rankings far enough to secure automatic invitations to the 2026 WorldTour calendar. The debut paid for the future. As Cancellara said over the winter, having those invitations in hand "gives some peace" — no more waiting on a phone call to find out whether your season has a centrepiece. You're in.
If you want a sense of what that kind of margin feels like from the inside — third place, a few seconds, the difference between a career day and an anonymous one — it's the same conversation we keep having with the time trial specialists on the podcast. David Millar and the riders who live against the clock talk about it constantly: the sport runs on margins most people never even notice.
2026: a squad that means it
The 2026 team is where the ambition stops being implied and gets written down in black and white. Three clear leaders, three clear targets.
Julian Alaphilippe takes the Ardennes. The two-time world champion, the man who animated more Tour stages than anyone of his generation and won Milan–San Remo off a Poggio attack that still gets replayed — he's the marquee name, and the punchy hills of Liège and Flèche are exactly his terrain. Stefan Küng leads the cobbled Classics. The Swiss time trial champion is one of the strongest pure power riders in the bunch, and Tudor signed him specifically to go after the Tour of Flanders and Roubaix — the same roads Cancellara once owned. Then there's Michael Storer, who carries the Grand Tour general classification hopes, with the Giro d'Italia squarely in his sights.
The shape of it tells you everything. This isn't a roster assembled to chase one lucky breakaway a year. It's a team built to contest the Monuments, the week-long stage races and the Grand Tours all at once — the full calendar, the way the big teams do it. Alaphilippe and Küng even combine for the Tour de France after their spring campaigns. Cancellara has been blunt that the team isn't where he wants it yet, which is precisely the tell. Outfits that have arrived stop talking like that.
Not watching from the VIP tent
This is the part that makes Tudor different from every other watch brand that's ever flirted with cycling, and it's worth being really clear about it.
The watch industry loves cycling from a safe distance. Tissot times the Tour de France and releases a commemorative model every July. Richard Mille pays Pogačar and Mathieu van der Poel to race in six-figure watches and takes the photograph in the mud of Roubaix. Lovely images, all of it — but it's spectatorship. The watch comes off after the finish line and goes back in the case. Nobody from the marketing department ever has to explain a missed time cut.
Tudor is in it. There are Tudor riders in the bunch on a wet Wednesday in March, fighting for position into a crosswind nobody at home will ever see. There's a Tudor bus in the car park and a Tudor mechanic kneeling over a bottom bracket at midnight. They're also the official timekeeper of the Tour of Flanders and the whole Flanders Classics spring block — so on those roads they're both running the clock and sending riders out to race against it. No other watchmaker in the history of the sport has done both. None has even done the first one properly.
It's the same instinct you see when other established brands stop sponsoring from the sidelines and actually commit bodies to a discipline — the way the gravel super-team has dragged serious money and serious riders into a scene that used to be all dusty individualism. There's a difference between backing a sport and joining it, and the people inside the bunch can always tell which one you're doing.
Why this one's worth watching
I wrote a companion piece to this one — Tudor's Bumblebee and the watches that timed the Tour — about the watch itself, that vivid yellow chronograph the brand dropped this month, and the long history of timekeepers who measured the race. And before that, a wider feature on cycling's oldest obsession with the clock, from the Hour Record to the race of truth that made a time-triallist like Cancellara who he is in the first place.
But this story is the one that actually rides. The watch is the easy part. Any brand can make a beautiful object and hang a cycling story on it after the fact. What Tudor has done is harder, stranger and a lot more interesting — they've spent four years and a great deal of money becoming a genuine racing team, run by a man who knows exactly how much the craft costs because he paid it himself.
Keep an eye on the start sheets this season. Follow the racing through the Tour de France hub when July comes round. And if you'd rather be in the conversation than watch from the outside, come and join the Roadman community on Skool — where serious amateurs talk about this stuff the way it deserves to be talked about. The whole point, after all, is that you're in the sport, not watching it.