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What if a YouTube channel had a pro team in Paris-Roubaix?
No, not a channel like Mr. Beast and his nearly 300 million subscribers. Think of a real deal team with all the aspirations of a pro team, with the backing to support it. Well, it’s real: The Unibet-Tietema Rockets made it to Paris-Roubaix.
UCI ProTour team Unibet-Tietema Rockets started life from a popular cycling YouTube channel. It has quickly struck up a relationship with the ASO to be offered a wild card place for the Tour in the near future. Sounds wild, but that’s because it is wild.
We had the chance to spend Paris-Roubaix with the team to figure out exactly what it takes for any team, much less one tied so deeply to YouTube, to get ready for the Queen of the Classics.
If you’ve seen Unibet-Tietema Rockets in their electric blue and sunset-orange kit over the last three seasons, you may have thought that they’re a standard team, you know, the usual set-up. Think something along the lines of one that spawned from a club or elite-level team and moved up the rankings.
They gained some results, had a passionate manager behind them to find sponsors, and eventually grew the team into a pro-team category squad.
It’s a common thread running through multiple teams. But it’s not how Unibet Tietema Rockets started out.
Back in 2019, Bas Tietema decided to head to the Tour de France with his mates, a video camera in hand, and capture some antics with the pros. Tietema himself had quite a handy background in racing, including a stint with the BMC Development team and racing for Belgium’s registered Pro Tour team Bingola.
If you’ve been an avid fan of the sport and watched YouTube videos over the past few years, you’ll undoubtedly have seen his most viral video from that Tour. One film turned out to be on the final day of the race. The premise is simple, the execution is perfect, and the results are wonderful, such as handing out pizza to the riders who’d finished the Tour.
The channel grew to the point where Bas thought it’d be a good idea to start a team. You know, that standard train of thought!
And that’s where he and his crew are at now, three years into running a UCI Pro Tour registered team. But why?
From talking to Bas, it would seem he’s coming at it from a different angle than pretty much every other team out there. He wants to tell stories, and what better storytelling machine is there in sport than a pro cycling team.
Be it wins, losses, or a full squad all getting DNFed at a race, just great stories. He and his team are going about it in one heck of an interesting way. That includes branding the team as The Rockets so that it has an overriding image beyond just being named after a sponsor, to thinking about the long-term story.
The way the team gets to tell their stories, I believe, far surpasses any other team in the peloton. For starters, it feels genuine, fresh, and with a reason behind it, rather than a necessary product to show the sponsor’s logo off.
To go about this, the team has a talented and large media team, even compared to the major squads on the WorldTour, which fluctuates from nine to 15 staff at any one time. And they have plans, too. This year, they registered the team as a French UCI Pro team, just one step in buttering up the ASO with the hope of attending the Tour in the near future.
Beyond the stories they tell on YouTube and on social sites, they also have a film crew following the team with plans of either producing a movie or a Netflix-style documentary. It’s a team with a unique and bold vision for their future, and I had the chance to spend some time with them at this year’s Paris-Roubaix, the first monument that they’ve ever been invited to.
To be blunt, the time with the Rockets resulted in me looking at every other team and asking myself, “Why hasn’t anyone else figured this out?” I’ll delve more into what I think these guys are achieving in the second episode of this series, as it’s a team everyone should be taking note of.
So here we have it, the first part of a two-video series. The Rockets at Roubaix.
Enjoy,
Dave
