This is not necessarily the sector where the Suns superstar was expected, but Kevin Durant decided to invest in the NCL, the first professional cycling league in the United States, created at the end of 2023. It is via a press release from Boardroom Sport Holdingof which Kevin Durant is the co-shareholder, that the announcement was made, and as usual, the 2017 and 2018 NBA champion confirmed the information on his Twitter account with a simple but effective “Let’s go NCL racing”.
According to Rich Kleiman, Durant’s friend and co-shareholder of the company, the goal is ” to help the league grow and bring more visibility to the sport”. Maybe Bradley Beal, his new teammate at the Suns, gave him the idea since the former Wizard was part of the first round when the competition was created.
A rather attractive racing system
After women’s soccer, pickleball, volleyball and lacrosse, cycling is a booming sport in the United States with some 50 million cyclists across the Atlantic. More specifically, the NCL is a championship made up of 10 mixed teams (like the Miami Nights and the Denver Disruptors) with a format that looks more like car racing than classic cycling competitions as we know them in Europe. The runners compete in a race of 25 to 30 laps of the track (up to 3 kilometers in total) to score points in the general classification.
The rider who crosses the line first in each lap gets three points for his team; the 2nd runner scores two; the 3rd scores one. Those points are tripled in the final lap, with the first scoring nine, the second six and the third three.
Clearly, it’s not about who is fastest from start to finish, but it’s about how many points a team can rack up during the race, and that’s what makes it rather appealing this format.
The popularity of Kevin Durant, and by association the NBA, can only help the American cycling league to grow.
