A few days ago, I undertook a quick, unofficial survey. The survey asked one simple question and was posed to my colleagues here at the Sports Gazette.
The question was: “Can you tell me who won the Tour de France last year?”
In a room full of budding sports journalists, of the 29 writers and two supervisors, only one person could give me the correct answer.
My findings fascinated me. Four people answered Mark Cavendish, and further two gave the pretty damning response of Lance Armstrong.
I was shocked. Le Tour is the most watched annual sporting event globally, and yet it is so far removed from the British consciousness that not even the next generation of sports reporters seems remotely aware of its existence.
Clearly, then, something has to change for competitive cycling to cast a wider net and attract new viewers and potential talents.
Which is why this past week’s revelations that cycling will no longer be available to view on terrestrial television in the UK, and will instead be hidden behind a substantial paywall, are so utterly baffling.
With ITV having lost the rights to show World Tour highlights packages from 2026 and Eurosport being officially merged with TNT Sports, UK viewers will now have to shell out £31 a month for the privilege of watching their sport, a fee more than four times higher than last year’s Eurosport subscription.
The mind boggles.
At a time when British cycling is in the doldrums, and the divide between the cycling community and the rest of the public has never been greater or more fractious, this decision is, to put it mildly, swivel-eyed madness.
The amateur and domestic cycling scene in the UK has been in steady decline since the heady heights of London 2012; local races are under-subscribed, the 2024 Tour of Britain nearly didn’t happen due to planning issues, and the final British team went out of business last year.
Why would any governing body want to actively make it harder for what few fans it actually has to watch a sport that is already halfway down a slippery slope into abject redundancy?
Cricket made the same mistake. Our last great collective national memory of cricket was the glorious 2005 Ashes. Then cricket went behind a paywall in 2006 with Sky Sports, and it’s current irrelevance is plain to see. That ‘quick buck’ hasn’t exactly manifested itself in the long term either. The only time it came close to returning to the forefront of our minds was the 2019 World Cup victory which, unsurprisingly, was on terrestrial television.
The 2020 Giro d’Italia champion and current Lidl-Trek rider, Brit Tao Geoghegan Hart, has voiced his concern via Instagram.
In the post, he commented: “What do I want to say? For amateur riders, cycling has become a very expensive sport or passion. Now as a (British) fan, following the upper echelons of the sport has also suddenly and massively increased in cost. I think it is now very relevant to realise where this money is going and where it is not. And perhaps to question the monopoly held over the sport’s U.K. coverage.”
And he’s right, of course. Teams do not receive money from the sale of broadcast rights. The increased costs are once again being put on fans during a cost-of-living crisis – just as we are seeing in football, rugby and, indeed, most sports – and that ‘tax’ being levied on a struggling public is not being adequately reinvested back into the sport.
Teams are struggling for survival, broadcast quality is actually diminishing, and professional cycling’s descent into irrelevance in Britain is showing no signs of abating. Additionally, with the arrival of genuine stage races in the Women’s World Tour and women’s cycling booming elsewhere in the world, this proverbial ‘slamming on of the brakes’ is irredeemably without a single positive.
Niche sports like cycling, and many others historically championed by channels like Eurosport and ITV, need exposure to survive and to grow. Without that, they simply shrivel up and die out. Limiting access to and engagement with them for a cynical paycheck is akin to signing the death warrant.
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