Q&A with Derek Bouchard-Hall

The new CEO at USA Cycling is a former professional cyclist and management executive with a plan to take a leadership role on the sport’s biggest issues.

It is always difficult to replace a CEO who has become a fixture of the organization. But when Derek Bouchard-Hall was selected to replace the retiring Steve Johnson at USA Cycling in June, the national governing body found a person with an ideal background to move the sport forward. After earning degrees from Princeton and Stanford, Bouchard-Hall raced from 1994–2002, winning the 2000 U.S. Pro Criterium and competing that year at the Olympics. He later earned an MBA from Harvard and worked for McKinsey, a management consulting firm. Since 2011, he served as a key executive at online cycling retailer Wiggle. Now, the 45-year-old is settling in to his new post at USA Cycling, with strong opinions about the toughest issues facing the sport.

In this interview with SportsTravel’s Jason Gewirtz, Bouchard-Hall discusses his interest in the job, his approach to anti-doping and the growth of women’s cycling.

What interested you in the position at USA Cycling? 

What attracted me to the job was it is an amazing combination of my two professional lives, one of which was being a professional bike racer and the other was being a manager. The role I had been playing for 13 years after my cycling career was really in organization management with a focus on trying to help organizations get to a new level of performance. So for me, I saw USA Cycling in a position that despite the amazing progress it had made, was also poised to make another step forward. And cycling has never left me even though I left the sport. I’m still an active participant and fan and occasional racer myself. It was a very logical fit.

To read the rest of this Q&A in the digital edition of SportsTravel, please click here.