Cycling continental circuit

Continental Grand Tours

Tour de France, Giro d'Italia, Vuelta a Espana, three big competitions where the best riders in the world take part and compete against each other. But what about the riders that don't reach this level yet or anymore? Don't they deserve their own little grand tour?

 

Locations

Continental and even procontinental teams doesn't have a lot of budget to make big travels for races arround the world. That's why we should look to spread them all around the world. We should also notice that the locaations where cycling  already is popular already have grand tours or big races so we should hit up countries where there is less budget for cycling races. That's why it would be more realistic to think about tours of 10-14 race days.  

I was thinking about the following locations:

South America: Colombia

Europe: Central Europe (Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary)

North America: USA (Colorado, Utah, Navada, California) or Quebec

Asia/Oceania: Japan or Australia

I've choosen for these regions because cycling already has some popularity there and they have no major race yet.

 

Competitors

Currently we have a lot of riders that only take part in races on their continents in one day races or stage races of only a few days. But they don't have one major event where all the best of them can compete against each other as we have less or more globally for the World Tour riders in Tour de France for example. These grand tours would be  a good opportunity for the U23 riders that often ride in continental teams to compete against the best mature riders from the ProContentinal circuit. It would be simmilar to what American U23 riders did when they took part in Tour of Callifornia. 

It would be good for the development of U23 riders, good for talent scouts but also good for the older riders that are not able to ride the grand tours but still can compete against all other best riders from their level in a prestigious event like this.

 

Second tier

You could argue if their would even be interest for second tier grand tours but actually it was already quite succesfull in football where many people watch second tier continental competitions like the Europa League and the Copa Sudamericana. It unites fans from all over the continent and made teams able to improve by meeting the best teams from outside their domestic leagues. 

Cycling would also grow in popularity in the host countries and taking part in a major competitions would also become cheaper for those that didn't grew up in a country without many major races. 

Conclusion

My idea is problably not something that is going to be something that is going to be realized soon but problably it's something that could give inspiration to real organizations to make cycling more globalized and more accesible.