Good Ideas Are Worth Stealing: What Cycling Can Learn from Québec — and Elsewhere

A lot of my early success in education came from one fairly simple habit: I was good at spotting a good idea and working out how I could use it myself.

When I worked for the education authority, my job exposed me to an enormous amount of classroom practice — some excellent, some less so. I was there primarily to make sure young people were having their needs met properly, and at the same time I was quietly taking notes.

If I saw a teacher handle a difficult transition particularly well, I remembered it. If somebody found a clever way of engaging a young person who had previously switched off, I wanted to know why it worked. If I saw something that encouraged independence, confidence or better behaviour, I thought about how I could adapt it to my own practice. I didn’t need to invent everything myself.

That habit probably accelerated my professional development more than almost anything else. By the time I was developing programmes of my own, I had spent years building a personal library of good practice.

I’ve always been a bit of a professional magpie.

And it applies just as well to cycling.

Québec — not because it’s “better”, but because it’s interesting

Which brings me to the Fédération québécoise des sports cyclistes — the FQSC.

Before anybody says, “Here we go, the bloke from Québec telling us Québec does everything better,” that really isn’t my point.

I lived in Québec for more than 20 years and, growing up there, I don’t remember thinking of it as this enormous cycling powerhouse. Certainly not in the way Britain or Wales sometimes talks about cycling as part of its sporting identity.

But something has shifted. When I look at the FQSC today, what fascinates me isn’t simply the athletes who are winning races. It’s the way the federation projects cycling.

It makes cycling look like something you want to be part of.

And I think that matters.

Recognition throughout the year

Of course the FQSC celebrates elite success. It should.

Its Athlete of the Month programme also gives regular recognition to developing riders across BMX, mountain bike, road and track.

The federation is quite open about the reason for doing it: one annual awards event can only recognise so much.

That point feels particularly relevant here in Wales.

Beicio Cymru has its annual awards, and they absolutely have a place. But once-a-year recognition can only recognise so many people, once a year.

The Québec approach gives young riders opportunities to be recognised throughout the season, while the achievement is still fresh.

Think about what that says to a 14-year-old rider:

We noticed you. What you did mattered. You belong here.

The same approach extends to coaches, officials, volunteers, clubs and organisers.

A cycling culture isn’t built entirely by medal winners.

Put something behind the invitation

This is probably the part that interests me most.

It’s easy for a governing body to say that we need more young people cycling, more events and more clubs recruiting members.

Fine.

But what are you putting behind that?

The FQSC operates Embarquez, Québec’s delivery of Cycling Canada’s HopOn youth programme. It recruits and trains instructors and takes structured cycling activity directly into schools and communities.

At the 2026 UCI Road World Championships in Montréal, representatives from national cycling federations were shown the programme working on the ground.

There’s something powerful about that.

Here’s the programme. Here are the instructors. Here’s the equipment. Here’s what it looks like when it actually happens. In 2026, the schools element of the Tour du Silence involved 850 pupils across five schools. When the federation talked about it, the schools, public bodies, police, volunteers and partners involved were recognised as part of the achievement.

That creates a much clearer picture of how people can participate and who makes the activity possible.

A culture of saying thank you

Spend a little time going through the FQSC’s output and you notice how many people appear in the story.

Sponsors, volunteers, clubs, coaches, schools and organisers all get space.

Commercial partnerships are connected to things people can actually see. Thule, for example, supports the Athlete of the Month programme and provides prizes for developing riders.

That makes the relationship tangible.

If I’m a sponsor, I can see what I’m associated with — an actual programme, rider or piece of community activity rather than a logo sitting somewhere in the background.

If I’m volunteering, I know somebody noticed. If I’m a young rider, I see people like me being celebrated. If I’m a club, I can see where my work fits.

People tend to stay involved with organisations that make them feel useful and appreciated.

They even have an artist

Then there is perhaps my favourite example.

The FQSC has an official artist.

France Malo is a painter, sculptor and ceramicist whose relationship with the federation has included creating work around cycling and cycling events.

I absolutely love that.

It might sound like a quirky extra, yet it says quite a lot about the way the federation sees the sport.

Cycling there can be racing, art, community, identity, education, volunteering, business and culture.

There are lots of ways to see yourself in that picture.

You might be the world champion. You might be the parent, volunteer, commissaire, sponsor, artist, teacher or eight-year-old trying a bike for the first time.

That’s a much richer projection of cycling than:

race → result → medal → next race

The structures underneath it

Now, Magdeleine Vallières-Mill did not become a world champion because somebody at the FQSC is good at Facebook.

Good communications don’t produce elite athletes by themselves.

Québec has formal Sport-Études structures for cycling, allowing young athletes to combine serious training and competition with education while maintaining links with their clubs and coaches.

Behind the public-facing stuff are the less glamorous things that actually make development possible:

Coaching. Development. Education. Clubs. Racing. Pathways. People.

The FQSC happens to be very good at showing people that those structures exist.

The success is getting difficult to ignore

There have also been some striking world-level performances from Québec riders across very different areas of cycling.

Magdeleine Vallières-Mill became the first Canadian to win the elite road race world title when she took the rainbow jersey in Kigali in 2025.

In a completely different discipline, Jean-William Prévost took silver at the 2025 UCI BMX Flatland World Championships in Riyadh.

That breadth interests me.

Can I prove that good communications increased participation, which enlarged the talent pool and eventually produced those results?

No.

However, I do think the pieces influence one another.

Clear communication can help people find opportunities. Recognition can help volunteers and riders feel valued. Visible partnerships give sponsors a clearer reason to stay involved. Add clubs, coaches, Sport-Études, development programmes and good racing opportunities, and you begin to create an environment where talented people have a better chance to thrive.

That’s the bit worth studying.

Québec certainly doesn’t own all the good ideas

This isn’t an argument that Québec has solved cycling and everybody else should copy it. So I went looking for ideas elsewhere that were genuinely different — rather than another country’s version of something we already know through programmes such as Go-Ride.

France — make the pathway visible

The Fédération Française de Cyclisme runs a programme called Elles arrivent, linked to the Tour de France Femmes.

For 2026, 48 U15 and U17 female riders are being selected for two three-day immersions around the Tour de France Femmes.

They ride the closing kilometres of stages, experience the atmosphere of the race and go behind the scenes, where they can discover the different jobs and people involved in professional cycling.

I think that’s brilliant.

You’re taking one of the biggest shop windows in women’s cycling and saying to young riders:

Come in. See it. Ride part of it. Meet the people. Imagine yourself here.

That is far more tangible than expecting a 14-year-old to understand where a development pathway might lead from a diagram or a document.

USA Cycling — back the people already doing it well

USA Cycling has another idea that caught my attention.

Its Centers of Excellence programme identifies clubs and teams already doing a strong job developing Junior and U23 riders, then puts money and support behind them. For 2026, $45,000 in grants was distributed through the programme, with recipients assessed on areas including coaching, safe development environments, racing opportunities and their record of helping riders progress.

I like the principle.

Find people already doing something well.

Recognise them.

Give them resources to do more of it.

That creates a very different relationship with development clubs from simply giving them responsibility and leaving them to get on with it.

Different countries, different answers

So there are three quite different ideas here.

Québec does a particularly good job of making its cycling community visible and valued. France is putting young female riders inside one of the biggest events in the sport so they can experience where cycling might take them.

USA Cycling is backing organisations that have already demonstrated that they can develop riders. There is no reason those approaches have to look the same.

The useful part is looking around, understanding what works elsewhere and deciding whether any of it could be adapted to your own environment.

What you make visible matters

This is probably the FQSC lesson I keep coming back to.

What an organisation chooses to show tells people what that organisation values.

If most of the public output is elite results, then elite results begin to look like the most important part of the sport.

Show young riders, beginners, volunteers, clubs, coaches, officials, sponsors, schools and community programmes alongside the elite athletes and the picture changes.

People can see where they fit.

That makes communication part of development rather than something that happens afterwards.

And once you start looking at it that way, the question becomes quite interesting:

What else could we borrow?

Steal the good ideas

And I use “steal” affectionately.

It’s what I’ve been doing since I worked in education: see something good, understand why it works, adapt it and make it appropriate for the people you’re actually working with.

For cycling organisations, that might mean:

• Recognise developing riders throughout the year and across every discipline, rather than waiting for an annual awards night.

• Make volunteers, coaches, commissaires, organisers and clubs visible.

• Give sponsors something meaningful to be associated with — an actual programme, rider or piece of activity people can see.

• Make calendars and opportunities incredibly easy to find.

• Give clubs practical support through funding, equipment, expertise or promotion.

• Show young athletes what the next level looks like and let them experience it where possible.

• Build structures that allow talented athletes to combine education and sport.

• Share what worked, including the people who made it possible.

• Try something unexpected occasionally — even if that means appointing an artist.

None of that requires reinventing the bicycle.

Look around

That habit I developed in education — quietly spotting good ideas and adding them to my own practice — has followed me through pretty much every part of my working life. So when we find ourselves asking how we get more people involved, how we support clubs, how we attract sponsors, how we retain volunteers or how we make young riders feel that they’re part of something, perhaps the first response doesn’t always need to be another strategy meeting. Somebody, somewhere, has probably already tried something interesting.

Go and have a look.

Take what works. Adapt it. Improve it. Make it fit your own community.

Because a good idea doesn’t become any less good simply because somebody else thought of it first.