You might have heard the news already. Almost 14 years after he first created CyclingTips, our founder, Wade Wallace, is leaving.
While Wade is playing down the significance of his departure and what it will mean for CyclingTips, this is a seismic occasion for the site and for all of us that work here. We hope you’ll indulge us for a few moments as we reflect on Wade’s legacy of him.
For those that aren’t familiar with CyclingTips’s origin story here’s the abridged version. After moving from Canada to Australia for an engineering job back in the 2000s, Wade created a blog as a way of sharing all the riding knowledge he’d picked up over the years. He ran that CyclingTips blog from his kitchen table from September 2008 through to early 2013, writing almost all of the content himself, while also working to build the business.
For those of us who have been fans of CyclingTips since the beginning, those early days are some of the most memorable in the site’s history. Every day we hung out for Wade’s short but insightful riding tips (here’s the very first post he wrote), or to follow along with his latest cycling adventure, or to be educated or inspired by the guest authors he pulled into the fold (one such post played a formative role in the creation of Everesting).
In early 2013, Wade took the plunge and moved CyclingTips from his kitchen table to a small one-room office in inner-eastern Melbourne. He started hiring his first employees from him, and before too long that small office was too small for the whole team.
As CyclingTips continued to grow and started bringing in staff from around the world, Wade continued to forge an ambitious path forward for the site, helping us to adapt to the changing media landscape along the way. He invested heavily in greater coverage of women’s cycling (first through Ella CyclingTips, which then morphed into increased coverage of women’s cycling under the CyclingTips banner), and guided us through several periods of change as we were acquired by BikeExchange, and then Pinkbike, and more recently, Outside.
In concert with Andy van Bergen, Wade built the membership program we now know and love as VeloClub, which has helped the site pivot away from an exclusively advertiser-funded model, to a membership-backed site, ensuring the longevity of everything we do.
It’s been years now since Wade wrote for CyclingTips on a regular basis. And while Caley Fretz leads our editorial efforts today (and Neal Rogers did before him), Wade’s always been there in the background, making little tweaks here and there to ensure we’re always on the right path. To ensure CyclingTips is being the best it can be.
CyclingTips has clearly evolved a lot since 2008. We don’t write nearly as many tips as Wade once did, we focus a lot more on professional racing than Wade ever did, and these days CyclingTips is much more than a one-person blog. But those early articles from Wade, written for a primarily Melbourne-based audience, set the tone for what CyclingTips would become.
At the heart of it all, underpinning everything, is a love and passion for our great sport. It was there when Wade first started blogging back in 2008, and it’s still here today, guiding everything we do. There’s a reason our tagline is “The Beauty of Cycling”.
In the end, it’s pretty simple: CyclingTips wouldn’t exist were it not for Wade. But it’s also hard to overstate the impact he’s had since, both on the site itself and for all of us that have worked with and for him. In truth, the words here do little to convey the magnitude of the role he’s played and what his departure from him will mean to us all.
We’ll miss his positive energy, his vision for a better future, and his ever-supportive and encouraging nature.
So, Wade, thank you for everything you’ve done for the CyclingTips family, for the site, and for everyone that’s read CyclingTips at one time or another. All the time, energy, and care you’ve put in are appreciated more than you know.
We can’t wait to see what you get up to next.
The CyclingTips team