You can also point out that there's more to the Sky budget than the declared, or at least there was, due to the blurred lines between the commercial Team Sky and the national entity British Cycling, with staffers of the latter fulfilling functions ostensibly for British Cycling but serving for Team Sky - even if we take out the infamous jiffy bag, what was Simon Cope doing providing weeks of motorpacing training for Bradley Wiggins in aid of? Obviously there's plausible deniability - it's about helping Wiggins with the Olympic RR etc., which are undertaken by the national team - but it's outside of his remit within British Cycling (he was a women's coach) and served to benefit Team Sky. Few other teams have the same access to supplementary staff and resources in the same way (some of the other pseudo-national teams like Orica or Astana may), because Cope's salary at the time was not part of Team Sky's budget - enabling them to use more of the budget if so required for the riders etc..
The other side of it is that the inflated wages offered at the top prices the ProContinental ranks out of the game and means they cease to be a viable alternative for most riders of the requisite level to be competitive at the top ranks. Therefore it's a lot easier for the big bucks teams to sign up successful riders from the ProContinental ranks because they can recompense them much more to be helpers than they can make being leaders at the smaller teams. ProConti teams are reliant on UCI points for their position so losing a lot of their best points scorers in this way widens the gulf between the top elite teams and the second tier. This isn't just a problem of the big money teams though, although Sky signing the likes of Leopold König and turning them from GT top 10s to third in line climbing domestiques is obviously a major negative impact of it; narrowing marketplaces are also a problem where the ProConti market has already thinned, such as in Spain where Movistar frequently abuse their position as Spain's only surviving premiere team to raid Caja Rural of any talented youngsters, paying them off in return with their offcuts and older riders (e.g. Javi Moreno, José Herrada, Rubén Fernández, Carlos Barbero and Jaime Rosón have gone one way, Ángel Madrazo, David Arroyo and Sérgio Pardilla have gone the opposite). It has been sustainable for a period, but Caja Rural's constantly being raided for their talents - in addition to the riders taken by Movistar, they've lost David de la Cruz, Michał Kwiatkowski, Omar Fraile, Pello Bilbao, Hugh Carthy and Zé Gonçalves - has reached the point where they are struggling to be as visible outside of the depleted national calendar. They were never going to be able to keep all of those talents, but if they'd been able to rely on them for a couple more years their results could have helped improve the team's visibility and garnered more invites, giving them better rider development opportunities and strengthening their foundation as a wildcard team. Likewise, the radical downturn in the number of teams based out of Italy, coupled with RCS' decision to branch out with their wildcards, which in some ways is admirable, has really hurt the national scene in Italy, where less than 10 years ago there were 5 or 6 Italian ProConti teams fighting over the wildcards, there were teams who could contest the GC or the sprints (or both) at every race on the Italian calendar and make a good living doing so, providing a worthwhile alternative to being a domestique or secondary hand at the WT level. Hell, Przemysław Niemiec was making a solid living as a Continental Pro until he was 31 due to the strength of the Italian scene. Now, even the well-established teams like Savio's are reliant on picking up teenage wunderkinds and hoping that they can get a good option when they move on.
The gulf between Continental Pros and Pro Continental is getting smaller, and the gulf between Pro Continental and World Tour is getting bigger. And even more so, the gulf between low end World Tour and the top of the World Tour is getting much, much bigger. I remember when HTC went under. The most successful team the previous year, but no successor sponsor could be found. At the same time, even guys like Matxin and Savio who had terrible reputations could keep their teams going. This is the risk that we take. The tradition in cycling is, let's face it, fairly inward-looking and parochial. Lots of the most established teams and long-lasting sponsors are comparatively low budget. And that's all well and good. But we have to strike a balancing act, because if there is a big blowout and those big money sponsors like Sky leave, as happened with HTC, then we're going to need those lower budget races and teams in the sport's traditional homes to fall back on. Hell, we'll need them anyway, to develop young riders in anyway. But if we keep inflating the wages and prices, and increase the number of flyaway WT races, the budgetary requirements will become more than long-standing regional sponsors like FDJ, Lotto or Ag2r can handle if they want to be anything other than pack fodder, the equivalent of the old Minardi team in F1 in the 90s. And the other thing is that we have to look after the spectacle, because essentially that's what keeps people tuning in. Cycling isn't like football or other team sports, where if you don't like the dominant champion, you just watch other people's matches instead. And the more the strength is concentrated into the hands of the few, the less reason there is to care about those outside those few teams with the biggest budgets too, because they cease to be a relevance. That's the difficult balancing act that the sport has to consider. Don't innovate and push the boundaries, and the sport can stagnate and feel parochial, as well as shutting out developing markets from being able to build on successes. But allow too much dog eat dog, and run the risk of strangling the grass roots of the sport and turning fans away with a substandard spectacle determined by budget. For the moment, the UCI seems happy to ride the gravy train, but the frustrations about the spectacle in recent years have been hard to ignore, and especially once a handful of individuals like Contador and Nibali - who bring that intangible factor of fan enthusiasm, thanks to defying, or attempting to defy, the formulae into which racing has devolved - have retired and we're left with a generation of riders who've known nothing but the current formulae, we could see the same kind of backlash as F1 saw in the early 2000s as fans grew tired of watching the same product in different packaging race after race.
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