GRENOBLE, France — When Gerry Ryan, an Australian businessman, was asked why he owns a professional cycling team, he replied with a wry laugh.

“That’s what my therapist always asks,” Ryan said the other morning before a stage start while standing next to a Subaru station wagon decorated in the colors of his team, Orica-GreenEDGE.

Although teams and their riders are obviously concerned about their race results at the Tour de France, its status as cycling’s most prominent event gives it another, perhaps even more important role for them. Off the road, the Tour is cycling’s annual horse-trading session. Riders are sounding out their employers and other teams about contracts for the 2015 season. Team owners are looking for a way to pay for those contracts, using the Tour’s spectacle and large international television audience in bids to seduce commercial sponsors.

“Financially, it’s been OK,” Ryan said. “I’m just conscious I don’t spend too much money; it’s my grandkids’ inheritance.”

Cycling team budgets are, by U.S. standards, more like a couple of star athletes’ salaries. At the top, Sky, the British team, spends an estimated $40.6 million a year, and about six major teams are in the $20 million range.

Most of that money comes from sponsors. As is the case at most races, spectators do not pay to watch the Tour. Television rights are entirely collected by the race organizers, including the Amaury Sports Organization, which puts on the Tour and several other major races.

The era when bicycle manufacturers like Peugeot, Bianchi, Lejeune and Mercier owned and operated teams for decades is long gone, as are some of those brands.

Although sponsors’ names and logos decorate the riders’ clothing, cars, buses and anywhere else they will fit, the teams are usually owned by small, little-known companies. The U.S. team known to the public as Garmin-Sharp pays its bills under the name Slipstream Sports, a company headed by Jonathan Vaughters, a former teammate of Lance Armstrong. And the team currently called Tinkoff-Saxo, had long been owned by Bjarne Riis, its current manager, who won the 1996 Tour and subsequently admitted to doping to do so.

Even at the best of times, it has been a precarious arrangement, forcing some teams to change names and shift colors almost as frequently as a chameleon. Although participation in cycling appears to be on the rise, professional cycling’s doping-induced hangover means that these are far from the best of times for Ryan or anyone else looking for sponsors.

Like Bob Stapleton, the U.S. businessman who owned a team known as HTC-Columbia when it folded in 2011, Ryan said he believed that the financial uncertainty surrounding teams was a major factor behind the sport’s doping problems.

Sponsors rarely commit for the long term, putting pressure on teams for race results that may persuade them to renew — or to lure a replacement sponsor. That situation also means that teams can offer riders only two-year contracts, forcing the cyclists to perform or face unemployment. Given those pressures, doping often became the answer.

Ryan came up with the idea of GreenEDGE after watching the 2010 Tour in France more for reasons of patriotism than in hopes of financial gain. Some other sponsors seem even less motivated by business. On Saturday, Oleg Tinkov, the owner and co-sponsor of Tinkoff-Saxo, was preparing to ride some of the Tour route, as he does most days.

“For me it is half business, half pleasure,” Tinkov said while checking emails on a smartphone at a team car. “I am passionate about cycling, I am excited to own the team, and basically it’s my hobby, it’s my toy.”

The Tour’s title sponsors are a mixed bunch. The recent decline in noncycling sponsors has forced a return to the past with bicycle manufacturers, who had generally been secondary sponsors, filling the main sponsor void for some teams. They include the U.S. brands Trek and Cannondale, BMC of Switzerland, and Giant and Merida of Taiwan. Trek has gone the furthest and owns its team, which is more or less a descendant of the U.S. Postal Service team led by Armstrong. Few believe, however, that bike makers can afford to be the primary source of financing for teams over the long term.

As for the rest of the title sponsors, there are insurance companies (AG2R), lotteries (FDJ.fr and Lotto), money lenders (Cofidis and Tinkoff), broadcasters (Sky), electronics makers (Garmin-Sharp and Belkin) and consortiums of businesses from the former Soviet Union (Astana and Katusha). Ryan’s current sponsor, Orica, is in a line of business that seems to have little to gain from cycling-related publicity. It makes explosives and chemicals mainly for the mining industry. GreenEDGE is simply the name of the holding company Ryan established to run the team.

A few exceptions aside, notably Tinkoff-Saxo and Sky, which is sponsored by a British satellite television service and Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox, most teams are using the spectacle of the Tour to amaze and lure new sponsors.

Part of Ryan’s pitch is the widespread brand exposure a cycling team can bring for relatively little money.

“Some marketing agency suggested that it’s the cheapest sport to sponsor in terms of exposure, TV coverage and so on,” Tinkov said while zipping his phone into a team backpack bearing his name. “I don’t know if it’s true because we have huge name recognition.”

Another proposed remedy for cycling’s general instability is to adopt a league structure like other sports, in which the teams are fixed franchises that can be bought and sold. The International Cycling Union picks the 18 members of the WorldTour, the teams with automatic invitations to the Tour and other major races, based on the collective performance points of their riders. That allows any new team with enough money to hire top-rank riders to buy its way in, while placing those with smaller payrolls perpetually in fear of elimination from the club.

But as he picked up his bike, Tinkov said he would recommend spending money on a cycling team to anyone.

“It’s fun,” he said. “I think it’s better than just buying a yacht for 80 million or something. For that kind of money, you can sponsor the team for two years.”