When Trek CEO John Burke talks about ladies’s biking, he frames the corporate’s funding much less as a advertising marketing campaign and extra of a query of company objective.
“One of many issues we do with the bike firm is we attempt to make a distinction on the planet,” he informed Fortune.
Since its founding in 1976 in Waterloo, Wis., that philosophy has taken a measurable type. It got here into full view between 2021 and 2025, when Trek paid out roughly $308,000 (about €263,000) to match prize cash for girls cyclists at races the place feminine winners had been awarded lower than their male counterparts.
The corporate’s most pointed instance got here on the 2021 Paris-Roubaix Femmes, when the ladies’s winner obtained €1,535 (roughly $1,815 in 2018) whereas the boys’s winner obtained €30,000 (about $35,490 in 2018).
Trek lined the distinction, and since then, has continued doing so at different races.
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The quantity Trek must pay out has been reducing, based on the corporate, as a result of extra race organizers have begun establishing equal prize purses for women and men. That’s partially on account of publicity from Trek’s checkwriting and partially on account of stress. Trek’s intervention seems to be doing what it was designed to do: embarrass the outdated system into altering.
For Burke, the difficulty turned apparent round 2017, when Trek CFO Chad Brown walked into his workplace after visiting ladies’s races in Europe.
“He goes, ‘Have you learnt what’s happening with ladies biking?’” Burke mentioned. “He mentioned, ‘I used to be simply over there in Europe, and it’s embarrassing. Many of the ladies are making lower than $10,000 a yr. They get secondhand bikes. They keep at s—-y accommodations. They’re flown within the evening earlier than the race. No one cares.’”
Burke responded like anybody who could personal a five-decade-old biking firm and who was outraged by the rising publicity surrounding the U.S. ladies’s soccer crew’s salaries. At the moment, that they had simply received the primary of two back-to-back FIFA World Cup titles.
“Why don’t we simply purchase a ladies’s biking crew?” Burke recalled asking Brown. When Trek was unable to purchase one, it began its personal.
“We mentioned we’re going to deal with ladies the identical approach the boys are handled,” Burke mentioned. “We’re going to pay them livable wages, we’re going to present them the very best gear, we’re going to present them nice teaching. We’re going to take actually excellent care of them the identical approach we care for males. And no person was doing this. This was a revolutionary thought.”
One of many riders Trek signed was Lizzie Deignan, who was pregnant on the time and unsure about her future within the sport, regardless of being ranked primary worldwide after getting topped the 2015 world highway race champion.
“I felt extremely grateful to Trek for the chance to hitch the crew, as a result of after I introduced that I used to be pregnant, I didn’t know what my future regarded like within the sport,” Deignan informed Fortune. “Regardless of being ranked primary on the planet on the time, I didn’t have a safe crew.”
What stood out to her, she mentioned, was that Trek didn’t deal with the transfer as symbolic.
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“Trek got here in, and there was no tokenism about it,” Deignan mentioned. “They actually got here in on the high stage and gave me an incredible alternative. And it was actually particular to have the ability to win some actually iconic races with Trek on my jersey due to that.”
The equal-prize-money effort, Deignan mentioned, was a part of a broader set of initiatives that modified the tradition across the crew. She recalled being approached by a former Trek worker who informed her she had obtained £50 due to Deignan. The worker defined that when the ladies received races, Trek workers would get cash too.
“Due to that, it had this ripple impact of momentum and pleasure amongst the Trek workers,” Deignan mentioned. “Easy initiatives like that truly constructed a extremely robust basis and fan base, even inside the firm.”
Ripple results
As a result of males’s biking groups have been round for for much longer, some of us didn’t know in regards to the logistics and even guidelines of girls’s biking, and have by no means had the expertise of working intently within the sport.
“Outdated-school employees, who’ve been within the sport for years, who’ve by no means identified something about ladies’s biking, knew that truly they needed to get on board with this, as a result of Trek had been taking it extremely critically,” Deignan mentioned. “So their perspective instantly was about welcoming us and understanding that this was a mutually useful relationship.”
Burke mentioned he wasn’t even chargeable for Trek’s prize-money matching program—proof, he says, of the dedication that had turn into embedded within the firm’s tradition. He remembered studying that Trek had hosted a World Cup cyclocross race and supplied equal prize cash.
“We had been the one occasion that did that,” Burke mentioned. “I didn’t make that decision, however the crew did. Nice thought.”
He solely discovered of Trek topping off prize cash at skilled races after receiving a notice from bike owner Ellen van Dijk.
“She goes, ‘I simply wish to let you recognize that is actually significant, not simply within the cash, however simply in what Trek does,’” Burke mentioned.
That distinction, between the monetary worth and the sign it sends, is central to Trek’s argument. Burke mentioned corporations typically attempt to quantify the return on purpose-driven investments too narrowly.
“To me, you may’t quantify it,” he mentioned. “There’s one thing about doing the appropriate factor, and there’s one thing about what do you stand for as an organization.”
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Burke rejected the concept each initiative wants a direct return-on-investment calculation.
“On the finish of the day, after I’m useless and gone, no person’s going to say, ‘Nicely, his return on property was clean,’” he mentioned. “However they could look again they usually mentioned, ‘Trek took a long-term view, they usually tried not solely to construct the very best bikes on the planet, however in addition they tried to make a distinction.’”
Ladies’s biking, he added, is without doubt one of the areas he’s proudest of.
“The largest factor that we do is be an instance,” Burke mentioned. “That’s how we multiply our influence. The influence that Trek’s made on ladies’s biking isn’t the Trek crew. It’s the entire groups who noticed what Trek was doing, they usually made massive modifications.”
Deignan says these modifications are actual, however incomplete. Prize cash is just one a part of the financial hole in ladies’s biking. Media protection, sponsorships, salaries, and the essential potential to coach full time nonetheless lag behind the boys’s facet.
“There are positively nonetheless gaps,” Deignan mentioned. “This earlier weekend, Paris-Roubaix, as an example, the race that I received, there nonetheless wasn’t full TV protection. Though their followers are rising, they nonetheless solely get to look at 50% of the race, and that solely tells half the story.”
“It all the time takes, in each sport, the primary particular person to do it,” she mentioned. “I suppose I did just like that in biking on a smaller scale, however with the help of Trek from the very starting.”
For ladies cyclists, pay can be straight tied to efficiency. Deignan mentioned ladies’s biking has solely had a minimal wage within the final 5 – 6 years, and that the change is now starting to lift the extent of competitors.
“To be an expert athlete in each sense of the phrase is transformative when it comes to efficiency,” she mentioned. “There’s no approach that anyone who’s managing all these further issues that include a second job has the capability to carry out on the similar stage as somebody who’s full time.”
On the finish of the day, it was much less about Trek doing one thing to get one thing in return, and extra in regards to the tenacity of being an expert athlete, as Deignan additionally put it.
“Too many individuals are targeted on the brief time period and on what they get,” Burke mentioned. “Doing good issues builds a model over an extended time period.”
