July's world showcase event for cycling, the Tour de France, put much of the focus on the return of seven-time Tour winner Lance Armstrong. The future of the sport, however, is in the hands of another American. Bob Stapleton is the owner of Team Columbia Highroad and he is taking professional cycling by the handlebars.

Bob Stapleton has a very enviable lifestyle. The 51-year-old sold his telecommunications company for US$50 billion to Deutsche Telekom in 2002 and, since then, has divided his time between his California home, Australia, Qatar and the finer parts of Europe. Yet Stapleton is not the man of leisure that his fortune might afford him. Far from it. In fact, Stapleton tours the world with his cycling team, Team Columbia Highroad. A real innovator – possibly even a visionary – Stapleton entered men’s cycling in 2006, created his team and has very quickly moulded it into arguably the greatest cycling team in the world.

As the owner and manager of a professional road cycling team, Stapleton is unique. Not only is he an American in a field dominated by Europeans, but he is also a businessman in a job ordinarily filled by an ex-cyclist. In fact, when asked if he can think of another team manager with a non-cycling background, Stapleton ponders for a while before answering: “I actually can’t think of another…actually, there’s one other – the guy who runs Team Rabobank now. He’s a banker,” Stapleton chuckles. “I don’t know if that’s a really handy skill right now, I’m not sure.”

Stapleton came into cycling when the sport was at its nadir. Drugs scandals had riddled cycling for some years but, in 2006, the situation was akin to an infestation. Team T-Mobile, funded by Deutsche Telekom since its foundation in 1991, was all but crippled by the fallout of a Spanish doping investigation codenamed Operacion Puerto. Jan Ullrich, one of the most celebrated cyclists in the sport’s history, and a T-Mobile rider to boot, had been implicated in the scandal. The T-Mobile name had been completely tarnished and the decision to withdraw completely from the sport was an easy one.

Deutsche Telekom had turned to Stapleton when they had wanted to buy into the wireless telecommunications market in America. And they turned to him again when they needed to overhaul their cycling team. Four years previously, in 2002, Stapleton had negotiated the sale of his American telecommunications company, Voicestream Wireless, to Deutsche Telekom. By the end of the negotiations, Stapleton had not only become a billionaire, but he had also become a cycling nut. Telekom installed Stapleton to oversee the two-year period of transition as the company became T-Mobile USA; they also gave him the keys to his own cycling team.

“We started a women’s team that ran parallel to the men’s,” Stapleton explains. “It was operated with the US Cycling Federation and it was focussed on American girls and getting them into the Olympics. But that really connected me more to the athletes and I realised that these were very deserving athletes in a sport that wasn’t widely followed but I thought deserved good support. When I left the company in 2004, I took over the management team myself. I actually ran it out of the house – my wife and I and another guy.”

By 2005, Stapleton’s T-Mobile funded (and branded) women’s team was the most successful in the world. Stapleton was planning to find independent sponsorship for the team but had an agreement with his German backers that would see them bridge him for one more year. Stapleton takes up the story: “Then, in 2006, I said, ‘you know what, I’m going to take this on and look for sponsorship but you should really keep this and you should support it internationally. It should be a platform for all your countries and markets; it’s really inexpensive and it’s supporting women’s sports. And you’re already spending dramatically more than this, why not figure this is in?’ They said ‘Ok, but we want you to look at all of our sports marketing efforts and give us some guidance.’ They were spending a lot of money at the time on sports, and on cycling in particular. So, when Operacion Puerto broke in 2006, it was really a bombshell for their team. They had multiple athletes involved and they were deciding whether they were going to stay in the sport at all. And they asked me if I would take over the whole programme because they wanted a manager that they knew and trusted. And I agreed to do that.”

Telekom had seen that Stapleton’s first few years in cycling had been an unmitigated success; hardly surprising given his business track record. The young Stapleton graduated with an MBA in chemistry from the University of California. He started his professional life working in various hi-tech companies across his home state before, in his late twenties, spotting a gap in the market that would change his life. Stapleton explains, “The wireless business was on the horizon in the mid-80s and I saw a chance to get into a business that was potentially going to change the way people communicate and that was wide open – a business that a young guy could get into and hopefully build a big career.” And what a career it was.

In 1989, Stapleton joined a mid-size telecommunications firm intent on tapping into the budding wireless market. That company was Voicestream. When Stapleton joined the company, it had about 80 employees. By the time he sold it in 2002, it was a nationwide company with a staff of over 23,000. A very affable man, Stapleton jokes that his time at Voicestream “carried me through to my grey hair,” but he clearly relished building the company from the ground up. “It was an exciting time at every level,” Stapleton explains. “Revolutionary technology, very rapid change. We were a challenging brand; we were a young, aggressive company competing against telephone companies. Our whole method of business was about understanding everything the competition was doing and finding ways to beat them – move faster, quicker, smarter, better marketing and better execution. It was also important for us to partner with handset manufacturers, relevant technology companies, so that we could build a better service offering.”