Every July the best cyclists take part in the Tour de France. You can have a few exceptions but they often just prove the rule. But what would it take to change this, could you launch a rival race using big appearance fees and a large prize pot?
Golf has seen this with the Saudi-backed Liv venture paying some star golfers hundreds of millions of dollars to drop the PGA Tour for Liv. What would it take to dethrone the Tour de France?
How much would it take? We won’t keep referring to golf but look at the Liv offer and it’s not a priced to tempt players over in a “this could work for me” kind of way. Instead payments are so vast as to almost render calculation pointless.
Cycling can be cheaper than golf. Top riders earn millions rather than tens or hundreds of millions. The payments needed would have to be bigger than the value of winning the Tour. A Tour win isn’t easy to quantify but the salaries of the likes of Pogačar, Vingegaard and Evenepoel are based off it, the same for others like sprinters and others. Payments would have to compensate for this lost opportunity. For illustration, imagine start fees of €5 million Euros each and a prize pot of €50 million. Priced like this and riders tempted by a Tour win would be swayed, financially, by this offer. But it’s for example, go higher or lower if you want: the sum doesn’t really matter.
Forsaking the Tour de France could have another price if there’s a penalty. Golf – the last mention – has exclusivity where Liv and PGA are separated. Cycling sort of has this, races have to be on the UCI calendar and riders can’t take part in unapproved events. But this could be legally challenged, or the new event just put on the calendar for a tiny fee if the promoters feel they can work within the UCI rulebook.
What cycling lacks in massive earnings for those at the top it can make in other ways. It has a large peloton, 176 starters in a grand tour and these days almost all are on six figure salaries. You can’t just poach five GC stars, four sprinters, three climbers and two breakaway specialists. Our rival event would have to sway a large chunk of the pro peloton. That said teams could simply tell their employees what to do, while they bank the appearance fees for the stars on their books.
So far, so easy: spend millions and things bend your way. Only the problem with this proposal is that what works for a handful of riders may not suit their employers. Some estimates say 70% of a team sponsor’s visibility depends on the Tour, although this varies from team to team. Still the Tour counts for plenty, to paraphrase a line from a team DS in July “at the Tour our sponsors are not watching, they are here”. If a team’s top riders were persuaded to race in a desert in July then some sponsors could get cold feet if they’re funding teams only to find the star riders are skipping the marquee event.
One practicality would be that you can’t hold a race in the desert in summer. The tourism project of Al-Ula hosts the Saudi Tour race in January for good reason as daytime temperatures are typically 40°C in July. Take your pick among more clement latitudes for July but note a Saudi-backed project might have to take place elsewhere.
We can get into all kinds of details. A grand tour format with three weeks’ of racing or would one week suffice? The terrain surely needs mountains, perhaps taller ones in order to symbolise the challenging route? It’d have to be scenic too, a significant share of the TV audience for the Tour de France tunes in to watch the landscape roll by.
Even if all these questions on format were sorted who would watch this upstart race, would audiences follow? This is a very big question… but not one for today. In this post the premise is whether you can prise riders away from the Tour de France’s orbit. If so then you can see what develops over time. But the second order effect of actually having building an audience does matter, viewers are a revenue source and having an audience validates an event too.
It’s hard to know if audiences would follow, one the one hand people want to watch the best stars in the sport so poaching the top talent counts for plenty. Yet while plenty say they want to watch the best riders, how invested are they in the individuals themselves; how many core cycling fans are there compared to those who tune in more passively?
Conclusion
Appearance fees are not new in pro cycling but what would it take to buy the peloton to the point of forsaking the prime event on the calendar? They may no longer be at the prestige event but at some point financial compensation could sway them. You could pay star riders to ride a challenger race in July, it’d require vast sums in cycling terms but tiny for a sovereign wealth fund.
Teams as employers could be instrumental in swaying riders. But this is where a major problem comes as their sponsors crave the publicity available in July, it’s largely why they’re in the sport. That’s before all the other details like the format and whether enough people would watch, here there’s a lot to work out that won’t fit in a 1,000 word blog post.
However what if the Tour continued as usual in July? Instead the upstart event with vast start fees and prize pot was held in February or May and used this route not to displace the Tour in a direct contest but set up to gradually attract interest with the hope of rivalling it over time? Maybe.
Hmm… Are you implying with this post that there are some machinations somewhere behind the scenes, involving sufficiently deep pockets, for some kind of Tour-competitor / breakaway?
Any more details on that?
Interesting :).
Be very difficult though. The Tour has such a status. It’s more than just the riders, it’s the background, the history, the variety. Football teams can just join another league – they don’t need to build new stadiums, and even if they did, stadiums are hardly unique and the pitch is standardised!
I believe this explains the piece (behind a paywall though): https://escapecollective.com/one-cycling-is-coming-and-soon/
Disable javascript on the page and problem sorted
Or you could get a subscription
It is worth mentioning that it’s not a ‘paywall’ in the sense commonly understood/the way I think you might be using it.
They are employee-owned, and the subscription pays for wages and operating costs. They produce content that does not need to meet the needs of corporate or VC interests and there is no ‘freemium’ BS.
They are editorially liberated, and answerable only to subscribers.
This model is profound in that it liberates the journalists from advertorials and affiliate-driven listicles and puts out a product that if you value, you can pay for, knowing that your money will fund independent journalism and not ROI for those who want to diversify etc. See also- Defector.
*I have SFA to do with EC or Defector- I just pay for them because I like reading their stuff and in doing so I find more of the same.
But, Ronan Mc Laughlin was recently posted THREE biscuits (cookies for US readers) by Rouvy and he said they (the biscuits) were ‘Nice’, the sell-out!
(I think this public admission of the reporters ‘perks’ help to show their independance BTW).
It’s partly with recent things to mind but also just a long term thought since One Cycling got off the ground, how much money would it take to try and supplant the Tour? This piece suggests you could buy riders and possibly do it through the teams but this way comes complication as the sponsors want the Tour. Therefore it’s probably best not to try and take on the Tour as past projects have explored.
It’s a subject for another day – or a doctorate thesis – but the Tour and some other races are very embedded in socio-cultural history, this is hard to dislodge or replicate and something money can’t buy, at least in the short to medium term.
Be careful for what you wish. The most likely place for such an event, where money is no object is in the Gulf States. This area may well have the money but it lacks history, scenery, tradition, sufficient suitable terrain and much, much more.
The Tour for me. Let decent riders survive on their multi million Euro salaries in Europe.
Part of the Tour’s charm is also the spectators at the roadside, and not just the hardcore supporters avidly reading IR but also the families, schoolkids and tourists there for the ambiance – maybe even something almost edible from Cochonou or a Krys keyring too. All the scenery – if it can be found – can’t compensate for that.
How many riders are on € multi-millions: forty at most? That leaves plenty of decent riders on far less.
What if the Gulf states bought up some of the European races? This way you have the terrain but also a chunk of the sport in a way you don’t get in other sports, eg buy Manchester City or Paris Paris Saint-Germain and you own a club; buy up a big chunk of the cycling calendar and you can end up owning the sport as a whole.
The Gulf States can not just “buy up some European races”. The races are run on public roads, and the local/national authority ultimately decide who will be allowed to run the race on their roads. And under what conditions (such as “free-to-air TV”). The race organisers are always in careful dialogue with local/national government over where and how the race will be run, and what financial contribution will be made to pay for the road closures. We should remember that the French state have replaced the organiser of the Tour before when they didn’t like the organiser, and it can happen again.
Yep, but we shouldn’t forget either that most if not all European countries, whether as a State or through their highest ranked institutions, were keen on giving up their supposed “values” in order to respond to “geopolitical interests” or maybe just personal corruption, especially when the Middle East is concerned.
So I wouldn’t be really surprised if, say, Ryiad had it even easier than RCS in Italy etc.
TBH, I would be watching the Tour and probably ignoring the dusty, burning hot Gulf extravaganza, even if the Tour was all pro-conti riders and all the “stars” were at the latter.
I suspect I’m not the only one. I suspect more than a few riders would also choose the heritage and historical significance of the Tour than the latter, even if the latter made them more money.
Teh most likely way for this to actually happen would been likely an American mega-billionaire deciding to do it for fun and hoping it eventually breaks even. This likely would have to be a season ending race or an April race but at the very least the scenaryt and terrain parts would be covered.
Would be nice to know what ONE cycling “is” or wants to be.
If it’s a small parallel series of races that does not interfere with WT and teams share revenue maybe it would be okay? Or would even that be the first step in the crumbling of UCI & ASO monopoly.
Indeed, the mystery is part of the interest. Launching could be interesting, then seeing whether it can stand up. We’ve had Velon launching with a fanfare but until now it’s been a loss-maker for the teams who accounts show negative equity when it was supposed to be a revenue generator… but perhaps this turns around soon?
I agree, it would be nice to know what it is, right now it reeks to me of financial doping. From the list of players behind the scheme (Visma, Red Bull, Lidl-Trek, etc) it looks a bit like the long-bruited European Super League in football (now moribund, but Madrid are still pushing for it) — so the big get bigger and the rich richer. ONE might have a bit more credibility if teams like Intermarche, Cofidis, DSM and Pro Teams were behind it as well. The calendar being as congested as it is, with new races (TDU, UAE, Guangxi, etc) tacked on early and late, there is no way a parallel series could be viable. The only real option would be to buy out races but that means coopting ASO and RCS who it seems aren’t interested. The massive Saudi cash infusion might make it sort of possible but would also be hard, given the strong regional allegiance for many races and a history of races growing up organically in the culture. Then again, Man City were the blue collar unglamourous underdogs once.
The only way to counter anything like this is for fans to totally boycott it.
I for one would never watch.
Will cycling finally get a budget cap this year?
More and more sports are doing it. F1 has done it, disproving the notion that it can’t be done internationally.
If not, the sport is only going to get more unequal.
And if the ‘star’ riders decided to opt out of the real races for $$$-backed nonsense, let them.
For the top riders to do this, they would have to know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. If you already have a few million Euros, why would you forsake the real races for a few million Euros more?
And yet, you know that many would – billionaires like Ronaldo and Messi play in inferior football leagues so that they can have even more zeros appearing on a computer screen.
For domestiques, it would make sense, both financially and because you’re unlikely to have any historical victories anyway.
Many who have millions want more. Live in Monaco and soon you want a larger apartment, a sports car. Own a private jet and someone on the apron opposite has a bigger one. And so on. Some people may not think like this but it’s safe to assume plenty will, you can see plenty of evidence all around.
Reminds me of this story about the authors Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller: at a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Vonnegut informs Heller that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history. Heller responds,“Yes, but I have something he will never have: I have enough.”
Well Ronaldo and Messi are in the twilight of their careers and probably couldn’t cut it in a major league
There’s that as well; cycling has one or two ageing riders who are still making a very good living from smaller teams too 😉
From the outside some of the Saudi money doesn’t look very shrewd, big sums of money when they could probably spend less to buy the same. But maybe that’s part of the project for them, to look lavish?
Messi could have stayed with Barcelona, if he’d reduced his salary demands (due to the Spanish salary cap).
Ronaldo is apparently looking to leave Saudi Arabia, with top teams interested.
Oops, I see Messi went to PSG for two years between Barcelona and the US (I don’t follow football… and so probably shouldn’t use it as an example!)
“Top teams” is a loose definition.
Ronaldo would not end up at any club with serious ambitions of winning major trophies – although there are plenty of owners more interested in publicity or commercial potential than results, who might consider him. Any parallels with an inelegant former Tour winner are purely coincidental…
How to disrupt the TdF as top dog? I don’t think it can be done.
You would have to join forces. And if Le Tour cannot be purchased outright, I would try the branding sponsorship route. Give the ASO enough money make it the:
“The Gulf Oil State Tour de France”
or similar. Every broadcaster, partner, etc would be required to use the fully branded name
If there were a serious legal challenge, it’s extremely likely that the UCI would lose. Where would this leave things? The UCI would probably have to assume a role similar to FIFA; they could still determine rules for the sport globally, but would no longer have any role in determining if a race is “official” or not. How this would affect the structure of the calendar as a whole, I don’t really know, but it certainly would open the door for a “One Cycling” (or something similar) to organize a race (or series of races). I personally doubt that this could ever compete with the Tour in terms of prestige, though.
That’s how many sports work – and I’m reminded of the European courts forcing the FiA to give up its organising/ promoting of their many motorsport series back in the late 90s – as it was a conflict of interest.
Governing bodies govern, make the rules, etc. Completely separate companies run the sport, promote, sell TV rights, organise the calendar….
This is what the UCI should do with the World Tour; ONE company runs it, decides everything, sells the rights, calendar slots. Race organisers then decide whether it’s for them to sign up to the World Tour…..
ASO don’t want to sign up??? Then their races will be ‘outside’ UCI, and no rider can ride in other UCI races, including Worlds, etc
And Formula 1 ended up being largely owned by one man, Bernie Ecclestone, so that went well.
In football, the big clubs dominate more and more.
Golf, as far as I can tell, seems a mess.
If you let money dominate sports – without the sorts of controls that you see in US sports with the draft system (the commies that they are) – a few big powerful groups will dominate.
That is what ONE Cycling want. This is a small number of people who want to make a lot of money. Nothing more. And they’ll link up with anyone to do this.
Golf is a good lesson of what can happen.
Football is different from cycling because there is a lot of money to be made from it. If you look at English football, club ownership is dominated by US companies. Cycling is not worth a lot of money (and never will be), so those firms aren’t interested. But if sportswashing is your aim, and your funds are pretty much limitless, you don’t care about profit.
Cycling is particularly vulnerable because, for example, in football, the power is with the clubs – and you can’t own all of those. However, in cycling, the power is largely with the race organisers. Let’s say Saudi decides to buy the RCS and Flanders Classics races: I’m pretty confident that there is an amount of money that would be accepted.
But with ONE Cycling, they might not even need to do that. All they need is to get the big teams with the big riders to do their races. I’m sure the TdF would survive this – it makes money – but would other historic races? And even if the races survive, are the best riders there? Or are they at the Saudi Tour?
You mentioned Bernie & Formula1, but you need a bit of educating.
He was the FiA Promotions boss; selling, promoting ALL of the FiA’s series, not just F1; so WRC, ITC, WSC, etc problem was he really only concentrated on F1, and the European Union didn’t like the FiA having a monopoly on their sporting rights.
So, eventually, all of these series were sold & run by other companies, on behalf of the governing body; Bernie ran F1 (a 99 year lease), WRC by ISC (which he sold)/NorthOne……
As I said, cycling needs ONE company to run the World Tour, not all these separate race organisers…..It’s really quite simple. ASO are holding the sport back, and could easily be blown out of the water by proper money/ power.
Sure. Not only was it a great idea to give someone like Bernie so much individual power (and cash), but it’s worked out so well for F1 – it’s not much more boring than it was in the 80s and 90s.
And a few big teams controlling the sport of cycling can only be a good thing.
What’s the brake on the sport, what things are ASO blocking?
ASO decided once not to include their races on the World Tour. The riders were told they could not race in ASO races as a result. ASO told the riders they would be excluded from the Tour if they didn’t ride their other races.
The riders rode in ASO races and the World Tour quickly decided the riders would not be banned.
Which just proves that cycling can’t do anything right; nobody in motorsport would dream of racing in an unlicensed event – they’d have no career left.
Everybody in cycling moans, but has allowed a small private company to dictate everything…….all because they own the Tour. Utter madness…..
ASO’s domination of cycling is not ideal, but cycling being controlled by the individuals who own the teams – many of whom were involved in cheating for years – backed by money from Saudi Arabia is hardly the direction that cycling should beheading.
And on a more general note, teams having control over the sport that they participate in is clearly a terrible idea. ONE Cycling’s plans to make themselves a bundle of cash is almost guaranteed not to be good for cycling as a whole – because their aim is to make money.
Not madness, just the logical conclusion of a specific history and context.
The UCI was mainly focussed on track racing for the first 20 years of its existence while both the TDF and the Giro grew a huge popularity.
It’s also worth remembering than from the 60s to the beginning of the 90s the UCI only “coordinated” two separate international federations which actually worked on their own terms, the most important one being more often than not the amateur one, politically led by Eastern Block countries.
It’s from Verbrugge on that a monetary/financial perspective became really paramount within the UCI. That said, the man left the institution with a substantial economic weakness which would surface again and again in the first years of McQuaid, who started his presidency with intents of continuity and suffered repeated setbacks both in his fights with ASO/RCS and through the various Chinese projects.
Both Verbrugge and McQuaid used heavily antidoping as a political weapon to weaken certain teams, countries and organisers, while fostering others, but I think that we can now all agree that it wasn’t exactly the best idea ever for the sport.
Liv should (and probably will) die.
sounds like a Bond movie 😉
😊
if the top riders decided not to race the TDF then it would diminish the spectacle for me, but not by much.
Much more important is the location, climbs I have been lucky enough to ride and the enormous history of the event.
I would tune in to watch second level riders race round France rather than the top stars race round the desert.
I agree with you. what i fear is that TV broadcast will follow top stars in the desert
It happens in football, doesn’t it? Look at the big money (as in Gulf money, Radcliffe money, etc.) in most of the big teams in the big leagues in Europe and the States. Also, the World Cup has been and will be held on the Arabian Peninsula and they were even able to change the date.
The only advantage I can see for cycling is the deep connection of the Tour de France as the greatest asset cycling has for a mass audience with French history and landscape, which you can’t change and replace with anything.
Another thought:
They managed to bring the Dakar Rally to South America. So, if ASO were bought by someone else who wanted to take the race somewhere else under the same label, I could see a Tour de France Desert Edition (or anywhere else) happening given there is enough altitude. And I can imagine that even that could be achieved by engineers building roads wherever the money allows, or charter flights to take the riders.
Interesting that you mention the Dakar Rally, as it has surpassed the Tour de France as ASO’s greatest money spinner since it was moved from South America to Saudi Arabia from the 2020 edition onwards.
If the One Cycling proposal gets to the point of being a real threat to them, I’m confident that ASO will make a counter-offer which the Saudis will accept for the greater recognition of being associated with the Tour compared to the Giro.
ASO is familiar with the Saudi also in cycling terms as they’ve been organising their Saudi Tour, now AlUla, a new focus after their former sand project had gone down (Qatar Tour). The latter was one of my favs, I must admit, because of the frequent and spectacular crosswinds, with Boonen often having a great time.
I used to like Tour of Oman, too.
Until now, RCS’ sand races have worked better and more steadily from an economic POV, growing gradually and merging into an effective format, but I tend to like them less from a technical POV.
These races have been very lucrative. It’s been a while since I saw the accounts but in the past RCS was making more money from the Dubai Tour than it got for a Giro grande partenza.
But often the stages are plain, you need crosswinds otherwise it’s 3-4 hours for a sprint on a wide road. The Tour of Oman has much more interesting roads but it’s one of the few races not on TV, a pity as the scenery could really appeal to people as a way to show off the country for tourism.
I think it’s a wonderful idea to allow uncontrolled capitalism (freedom) to sell as much of our sport and culture as possible to despotic, bigoted tyrants.
And then when humanity weans itself off its oil addiction and they have nothing, so will we.
I think all this sports funding is mostly because they know that the oil is running out and they see sports as a lucrative area of investment to achieve a high standard of living post-oil (also handy for sportswashing, of course). Tourism to lesser extent (Al Ula, eg), also regional finance and development, like a smaller version of Belt and Road. Cycling is a bit of an odd choice to invest in, but I think it’s more like it got caught up in the shotgun approach rather than a real focus.
I agree that this is them trying to survive post-oil, which is why I thought cycling was pure sportswashing. But maybe you’re right, perhaps the people making these decisions know so little that they think cycling is a good way to make money.
They very well might know that little. Just understand that when WWE (yes professional wrestling) went to Saudi Arabia, the people in charge in Saudi Arabia requested Yokozuna be a part of it. Not knowing that not only had Yokozuna not been a part of the organization for 20 years at that point, he had been dead for over 15 years by then. WWE had to bring in a sumo wrestler from Japan who never worked for them before or after to satisfy the Saudis.
When you realize that, you also realize that they may not understand that what they see on tv might not be incredibly profitable.
Three weeks GT are the product of a century of european roads, newspapers, fans, public administration and political propaganda, but would that be the format for a new project that aims to maximize commercial revenues?
What about a sort of big-summer-indoor-happening with cyclocross and track events?
They could hire a bunch of CX stars (MVdP, WVA, Pidcock, Nys), with some other spring riders (Pedersen, Merlier, …) and some specialist (Iserbyt, Vanthourenhout, Sweeck, …).
Same for the track, mixing specialist and riders from road cycling.
That would be all within UCI, skip the extreme weather, and be $$$ attractive for riders not involved in the fight for maillot jaune, but would leave the Tour as a contest for GC riders and climbers.
(1)…in the recent weeks some voices from Uci (don’t remember if Lappartient?) were talking about points from other disciplines to be added to the Uci team ranking.
(2)…and MVdP came out yesterday with “TdF is not my favourite race”.
Any take over benefits to teams, riders and races will surely be limited, thanks to cycling’s complicated structure and culture. The gains will be marginal, and thinly spread. Just as they are anyway. Why reach for just that bit more from A N Oilstate, when there still riches (with fewer risks) to be had with the status quo – and the cache of being aligned with the history of the sport.
More interesting is the ongoing convergence of race ownership – ASO, RCS and Flanders Classics are already doing the work of the monopoliser. Could a big cash investment into one of these orgs be the real route to a take over. Could race fees and exclusivity clauses mean teams/riders commit to only riding Flanders owned races all year – the “Alula Flanders Classic World Series”, perhaps?
(I don’t think any of this is particularly likely, btw – but an interesting thought experiment. Let’s see what happens)
https://www.sportspro.com/news/saudi-arabia-surj-sports-investment-euroleague-cycling-danny-townsend-december-2024/
‘… spending €250 million to establish a new cycling league.’
My very-personally-skewed (I assume, despite blocking and erasing any cookie I can) Google engine search… still gives back Liv bikes as the first result over the Liv golf series
^____^
Wasn’t there any branding issue with that?
On a different note, I feel that Cairo might be the sort of owner which one day sells RCS to Saudi money, do the Bonacossa have a say on that or strictly on the newspaper, after all the societary internal mix and merge of recent times?
The RCS side is worth watching as the company is putting its sports rights and sports events businesses together into one and has announced plans to demerge this. Is this creating a standalone company so it can be easily sold to ready buyers, or just putting rights and events together into one company that will sit outside? We’ll see. RCS says no sale now but technically they probbaly can’t announce any sale until the company is formally demerged and the sale deal has been signed.
The Bonacossa deal remains unknown. For readers new to the topic, the Giro is not actually owned by RCS but by the Bonacossa family, but RCS have the rights to run the race; similarly it doesn’t own La Gazzetta but has the right to publish the newspaper, buy La Gazzetta and tiny small print mentions this inside. But can this be changed, amended?
“What would it take to dethrone the Tour de France?”
The article focuses on the riders, but (as alluded to in the article) – the terrain is at least half of the race, if not more.
That combination of scenery, variability and history/travelogue makes the Grand Tours richer in content than all other races – and there are few areas that offer this as much as France and Italy (Spain less so on all three counts for me – others will disagree).
So you could of course poach the riders for a gazillion euros – but there is a reason that all of the one week races (UAE, Tour of Britain or wherever) couldn’t step up to Grand Tour status – where would you hold this extravaganza? (Assuming that it would be prohibitively expensive even for petrostates to build an artificial grand tour course in the desert – now that would be something else…)
So an alt-TdF event could of course pop up and gain fleeting traction – but how to maintain a toehold – something even Liv for all its cash is struggling to do. And all golf courses look the same to me…
You could, say, buy the Giro and add a zero or two to the appearance fees and prize fund and see what happens over time, whether this brings in more to the orbit. Assuming this is funded by Saudi millions, they’d would want a key event to be in Saudi, but this could just be the final race of the season, complete with a giant prize fund, bigger than any other event of the year.
All fantasy back-of-envelope thinking but the point was just to explore whether spending a lot of money to lure riders would work (probably) but how the teams are pulled in two directions here, one way for their sponsors and the other as they collect the appearance fees for their riders.
It’s interesting how the Giro itself grew its relative status *and* dimension relative to the TDF in about a decade across the later 00s and 10s but that impulse in less than 5 years turned into a stall of sort. The Giro’s weak point was a kind of anxiousness to transform the race growing success into money as long as they could, which of course soon became a self-fulfilling prophecy of sort. Or maybe they were rightas value was going to decline anyway at some point so they capitalised the most of it in time. All this wouldn’t be an issue for a Saudi project.
Avis the US car company used to advertise itself as smaller than Hertz but with the strapline “When you’re only No. 2, you try harder” and the Giro seemed to embrace this too, and make more of an effort to cultivate an audience beyond Italy, at one point even offering free streaming on their website to parts of the world without the race.
I just think about the Tour of California, which was a fantastic race that drew some great riders over the years. It had everything except rabid local support (most people either shrugged or were annoyed), and it just wasn’t sustainable. It would take a massive investment with the knowledge that it would at least start as a big money loser to get another big race off the ground, and there would still be no guarantee that it would succeed. It’s just hard to see it paying off.
It was a good race although the big wide roads did sometimes feel like a motor racing circuit, the change of scale. But the problem was costs, it was close to a million dollars a day with high policing costs and fees to pay in order to close the roads, and that could not go on.
One thing with the Tour and a few races like the Ronde, Giro, Vuelta is that they benefit from huge socio-political capital. Roads can be closed, the police are on duty. The organisers don’t have to meet the full costs but in return offer tourism promotion, keep the event free to watch etc. They get this unwritten deal in a way that other races in the same countries don’t, let alone trying to establish new events.
Another recent example is the Women’s Tour of Britain – a clean slate race, with no dominant competitor as the TdF Femme was years away from existing, and the Giro Donne offering a patchy experience for fans and competitors. I believe the Women’s Tour of Britain was at one point the richest race in women’s cycling, had free to air TV coverage and took place in a country that was (temporarily, superficially) going crazy for cycling… and yet it couldn’t last.
I appreciate this was sponsor and local authority driven investment rather than a state with a broader agenda, but this race had all the other advantages in terms of market opportunity and it didn’t work out.
Temporary and superficial enthusiasm are all that’s likely to be generated by some rival series – unless it’s taking over existing established sports properties – and that won’t be sustainable as the investors will leave once their aims have been met.
Could you tell me more about your generalisations on Giro Donne?
Maybe that’s precisely what your analysis fails to grasp…
I know you like the race but for outsiders it’s not been easy to watch in some editions outside of Italy. The next challenge is to pick a date that doesn’t clash with other events on the sports calendar.
@inrng
It wasn’t easy because people weren’t buying the rights (which were sold cheap and sometimes even for free) or didn’t broadcast despite having bought etc.
Hard to produce lots of TV if nobody pays. RAI threw in a huge effort to make things happen when money wasn’t flowing.
It wasn’t about the race or its organisers as much as about the peak of machismo the sport was into, during the 00s and later on.
If you don’t recall, check Cooke’s experience in her book or public letters or, OTOH, just what fans were writing on this same blog, along the lines of “why even producing TV for women races, business is business, nobody will ever be watching so the free market makes the rules and no sponsor will ever buy women sport etc. etc. etc. etc.”
I believe I even read somebody writing about “women cycling not being as spectacular as men’s” (of course the sort of person who barely watched any women race ever, who couldn’t tell a junior race from an elite one unless the tellie told him, and obviously couldn’t even define what a “spectacular” race was).
It wasn’t about economy at all, rather about politics and mentality. Which apparently, and surprisingly, was already in place and ready enough (although not really *enough*) within Italy, among some persons at least (*not* RCS), while not as much in other countries…
The Giro Donne through its different organisers has been active (and mostly on national public TV, even if not live) for decades, that’s what a race must do, being raced on and on, the rest are short-lived bubbles which often bring more harm than good to the movement. Ask USA or UK cycling.
Regarding “bubbles” in traditionally non-cycling mad countries, you are absolutely right. In the US, there was a huge bump in cycling interest during the height of the US Postal years, but the bubble began to lose air when the Landis debacle broke and completely exploded when the truth about Armstrong (at the time considered a hero by many) came out. Interest in the sport cratered after that, ironically at the same time that participation in road cycling was actually increasing. Now the road racing scene in the US is in a terrible state, and it’s difficult to see how it will be brought back. As an American with enough interest in cycling to frequent this blog, I would welcome investment in American road racing, but I’m not holding my breath…
“One thing with the Tour and a few races like the Ronde, Giro, Vuelta is that they benefit from huge socio-political capital.”
This is the key problem with any attempt to takeover cycling or even the races. It is unclear why local/national government would subsidize Saudi profits. Instead, they would ask the new race organiser to pay more of the costs of the road-closures. Or just refuse to allow them to run the event.
@gabriele – I think we are in agreement here.
It was precisely the factors around the Giro Donne 10-15 years ago that (from a UK fans perspective at least) let it down. Almost impossible to follow, likely for many of the chauvinistic reasons you mention as well as the related economic ones. Many of us would have grasped a good chance to see more of it. But it wasn’t there. For a global audience – as far as I could tell at the time – there wasn’t an accessible prestige women’s race to watch.
My point was that there was an opportunity for a new prestige race to take root… and it didn’t. The Giro Donne persists with a wider audience, and the TdF Femme is a success. Heritage matters. So what chance should any start up Saudi funded league have when going up against an established calendar of big name (mens) races?
We might agree here too. I’d say very little chance (unless it buys up the old races themselves).
I agree on this take, indeed. I felt that this way to put it down – “and the Giro Donne offering a patchy experience for fans and competitors” – laid the blame on the race, whereas it wasn’t about what the *Giro Donne offered*, rather what was being offered *by media* outside Italy.
Let me also add that actually the experience as such wasn’t that bad for competitors, either, until the money aspect didn’t became *extremely* complicated in very recent years… when most of the athletes who had enjoyed it the most had retired or had no interest in offering a different vision.
Even more so as there was a sudden interest in “attacking” the race to create “space” for other projects, something which has happened to other historic races in Germany, Czech Republic or Spain, most of which couldn’t survive or only did so in a diminished version.
So when some athletes became vocal on what went wrong (and righlty so), such an information immediately found unprecedented echo, contrasting with the total lack of attention displayed until that moment toward the race. Hence you got disproportionated highlights with the “photograph” of a difficult moment without being able to watch the whole “movie”, so to say.
The whole issue about live TV is a perfect example of the underlying strategies which conditioned heavily media representation of the race recently, especially in comparative terms (i.e. if you check what happened instead to other ASO-organised WWT races with similar problems).
But it’s easy to understand how things work when you check this year’s edition. You had live TV coverage as required and professional RCS organisation. You had number 1 and 3 in the world battling together at their best for final GC to the very last inch of racing, plus an excellent GC with also Labous, Uttrup Ludwig and Rooijakkers plus rising stars as Bradbury, Realini, Niedermaier etc.
Now just have a look at *international press and blog* in their *written* recaps at the end of the season…
So often, it doesn’t matter how perfect a race you might be able to set 😉
I’m just grateful for having been on the roadside, say, on the Stelvio when Abbott won, or in Montevecchia when Luperini sealed with a dominant performance her 5th title exactly 10 years after her former one. Or, more recently, for having been able to watch the AVV-AvdB duel on Malga Montasio with the then best climbers Moolman or Spratt tracking them (and the 20yo Labous making the top ten). Etc.
Trump could do this in the U.S.
Right climate, plenty of terrain and infrastructure….and didn’t he run a race once before? I believe I saw it live once in southern PA. And beside his personal royal connections in the Middle East, isn’t his son in law currently in deep with Middle East monies? Besides, we all know how much he adores the French…pitch it to him.
I’d actually love to watch the Panama and especially Groenland editions!
(Canada’s already got its decent races)
Love this site. Have been an avid reader since it’s inception. This is my first post.
Probs only remembered by fans in Commonwealth countries, but a very similar massive upheaval occurred here in Australia in the late 1970’s.
The game of International Cricket had steadfastly refused to ‘modernise’. Players were not paid, their conditions were atrocious, rules needed updating, it was run by a group of conservative men in suits, fans were 95% male, etc, etc.
It had ALL of the things mentioned in this article – Tradition, Historic Locations, etc. However, a local media mogul (Kerry Packer) secretly signed up most of the players, officials and sports grounds from most of the countries who currently played International Cricket. They all swore to secrecy until the whole package was ready to implement as a parallel series to the official model which had been running for more than 100 years.
Once announced, it was realised that this new organisation (World Series Cricket) had been quietly working in the background, and over about 12 months they had constructed a completely new model.
Night games, colourful uniforms, ALL players and officials paid properly, and much more. What was left behind in the hollowed-out traditional version battled on hopelessly for a couple of years, but they were hopelessly out-gunned.
So there was a truce, and the traditional model disappeared into thin air and Cricket has now gone from strength to strength.
An interesting recap on Wikipedia here:-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Series_Cricket
Many parts of the Wiki article seem very similar to Cycling in my mind.
Oops. Forgot to add that antiquated TV coverage was one of the main issues with the Traditional model. This was completely re-modelled in the breakaway model.
Yep, and the Australians were soundly beaten by the West Indies in all formats for the next 15 years.
The antiquated TV coverage had no aaadvertisements.
… and the conservative man in a suit was Don Bradman. Television only came to Australia in 1956 and the first XY test broadcast was in 1959. Antiquated is a bit of a stretch.
@Cadence 66
I agree totally about the adverts. I especially think the Sheffield Shield competition was short-changed in the process.
I was more comparing what can happen if a sport is ‘stuck in the past’ with protocols and practices, and also reluctant to create a proper funding system.
Cricketers of the 70’s had tried for years to get the conservative administrators to come to the party on Remuneration, and many other topics which needed serious modernisation. The administrators told them to ‘Eff off’, and that there were plenty of other players who would take their place.
I also preferred no adverts, but the sport of International cricket in a better place than pre WSC.
I didn’t want to mention Bradman by name, but he was THE main conservative man in a suit.
As this is a cycling blog it is probably worth noting what happens when the TDU or World Championships move from SBS (partially commercial) to fully commercial coverage … cringeworthy.
Agree @Cadence 66. I was very happy when we had GCN. And extremely happy to pay for the service.
I don’t know much about cricket but it has had a similarity to cycling as a slow sport where the action is gradual for long periods but the sport has tried to spice this up and seen massive amounts of money poured in along with this.
Cycling’s challenge is speeding up a six hour race into three hours is relative; and you lose the unique point of cycling being such a tough sport if races become too compressed, some market research suggests part of speciality appeal for audiences is seeing cyclists do things that the public can’t do, like 250km classics or several mountain passes in a day etc.
What you sat is more or less right though cricket was probably more of a radio thing than newspapers.
However, the main element in the change was professionalism versus amateurism.
Professionalism came to the major tennis tournaments in 1968 and it then spread to the other sports. The amateur bodies tried to keep what they had but they had no chance.
This feels a bit like the 1990s split in American Open Wheel racing between CART and the IRL. At the beginning CART had all the better teams and drivers. But the IRL had the Indy 500. Over the ensuing 20 years, most of the best teams and drivers migrated to the IRL. Then the two series merged into what is now just IndyCar racing on a schedule similar extremely similar to the one that was raced before the split. All that happened is the financial pot overall shrunk along with tv ratings and a different owner ended up at the top of it.
I find it especially interesting that the teams are now seriously trying (again) to get a hold on the general management of the sport, plus taking revenues away from the races, not because they might be currently struggling to find their own money flow as some years ago, but probably because *several of them* now feel powerful and rich enough to challenge organisers.
The top two or three teams together now probably have the same financial weight of the Giro and if you join half a dozen of them they probably match the TDF.
Obviously the strength of the races lies in them being backed by organising companies which are approximately four to eight times bigger than the race as such (with the TDF representing a bigger share of ASO than the Giro for the whole RCS), but it’s to be seen how much the owning company is ready to channel into their race in case they needed it to win a financial fight (not much in the case of RCS, probably way more for ASO).
It’s also worth noting that the UCI’s size in terms of revenues is close to… a single team. Probably some very top athletes at the end of their career own more total wealth and assets than the UCI itself, which also explains why is it so hard for the institution to enter some complicated legal fights.
No need to say that these relative strengths were quite different, especially as far as teams are concerned, just 15 years ago…
All feels too prophetic, has someone sent you the One Cycling dropbox password?
I was listening to the Spin Cycle podcast yesterday, and some of the “problems” that they listed were actually things that I like about cycling. For example, they mentioned that races overlap, so there are conflicting interests, but in a sport where only a handful of competitors enter each race with a chance to win, I consider the overlapping races to be a good thing. I think a “One Cycling” season in which the heavy hitters battle each other every week would be awful, and I would be more inclined to look for races on the minor calendar rather than watching the same product over and over. Last year’s dominance of the big races by just a few riders showed how repetitive it could be. For a fan outside of Europe, the idea of the F1-ifying of cycling is terrible, as it could make it even harder to see the kinds of races I really want to see.
People complaining about “race overlap” is a clear sign they’re repeating ready-made arguments rather than actually being cycling spectators.
For obvious reasons, not only there is a reduced number of cases, but more often than not it’s not even a big problem if you want to really watch both events. See the classic Pa-Ni / Ti-Ad example, where different timetables normally allow you to watch the best part of each stage every day.
Suisse / Dauphiné is actually much much more interesting as it is rather than having all the competitors in a single (prep) race. Overlapping races is a great narrative resource, instead.
It sounds like a complete failure at understanding what’s the meaning of the races. It’s to be seen if it’s worth flattening out the sport in order to make it an easier product for those who currently can’t get it (or supposedly so). I think it’s mostly excuses, everybody out there manages to catch what an ancillary race is, and in fact I think they barely watch most of them… same as people complaining about women races until they start watching.
As for the “rider clash” aspect, you told it all…
At present, I believe that the main calendar issue is organising women and men cycling in order to make the most of both.
For instance, nobody seriously stressed what a great year Visma had, winning Het Volk and Waregem, plus the Tirreno and Pa-Ni double… Victories and races in cycling are “semantic” not “quantitative”, it’s not as much about ratching up points although many want it like that. Rather, it’s about performance against expectations and standards. It’s hugely context-based. In that sense, keeping the example above, it’s more notable that Jorgenson won Pa-Ni and Waregem rather than Vingo winning Tirreno and Poland.
To get even more subtle, Vingegaard’s 2nd place at the TDF is less of a defeat than Pogi’s the year before, it’s even a partial victory, all thanks to the surrounding events: and it’s not a “wrong” perspective.
This subjective aspect is one thing investors would want to try and get control of. One way is to launch a new rankings system, backed by a Massive Prize Fund, to tie races in a series together and give newly created events, say the Neom Tour, sudden prestige and meaning. Would it convince people? Unclear but it would generate press coverage, social media buzz and this is the start to establishing it, that at least would be part of the pitch to investors.
I hope that it doesn’t happen, but [investors please stop reading here] I’m afraid that right now and in the immediate future there’s a significant space for a very peculiar reason…
International cycling press, lobbying and opinion-making is more and more linguistically English-based, as the whole sport has naturally (?) become, while growing more international, as a sheer matter of fact, due to the need of a new working koiné (or pidgin) of sort: French and Italian had long worked but now obviously not anymore or not as much (not even by far). English is being taught in secondary – now mandatory – schools, so it’s becoming the obvious first choice in many teams, given that European teenagers and under 30 can manage to use it at unprecedented levels.
At the same time, as far as present adults are concerned (especially over 40), at least three – but probably we could add Belgium – of the traditionally strong cycling countries struggle with that aspect, so part of the massive fanbase, existing teams at lower levels, traditional journalism etc. just gets lost in translation and so fails to be part of any debate.
You can see the effect of such a situation in one of my well-known favs, the riders’ union which is clearly linguistically skewed. It’s not only language, of course, but also the connection between language and personal relationships, which (for a wide set of reasons) now also broadly corresponds to power hierarchies among teams.
You could also check the evolution of bike tech and many other issues.
Of course, if current trends are confirmed, English is soon going to be more broadly and effectively used also in Italy, Spain or France through deeper sections of society, hence allowing a wider and more complex debate. It’s to be seen what will be left of “past cycling” by then.
The only or main protection cycling still has got is its modest economic dimension in terms of monetary profit compared to other dimensions, plus the fact (related to the former) that a critical share of viewers still belongs to the traditional countries…
Lappartient is also a factor partially moderating potential change due to his ties with the sport in his home country and its characteristics there, but what if the UCI is simply left out or behind?
I have not watched any races in the desert and will not watch any in the future. No. It’s not about the money.
Human rights in that part of the world… No.
Cycling isn’t football. Every race has its traditions, its meaning, its place in the hierarchy. This doesn’t happen with football outside of major competitions, and even then its not the same thing.
You can’t just make up a new cycling race and think it will be more popular than races that have a century of tradition. I don’t think the top cyclists will just take money over legacy. A rider’s palmares is still important, to fans and to the riders. That means winning established races, not some made up races in the Middle East. Would Pogacar or Vingegaard give up on the Tour to cash in in some Saudi race? I think the chance of that is 0%.
Could climate change be a game-changer? If ASO decides its no longer ideal to organise TdF in the mid-summer and wants the move the event tot another time frame (eg spring, or later in the year). Could this trigger a chain effect of all kind of changes in professional cycling? Just wondering.
It’s very difficult to see the place on the calendar changing, the race coincides with long holidays in France (10-12 million roadside spectators) and so the race would probably only move if French holidays were moved and even on the worst case scenarios (PDF) that seems very unlikely this side of 2050 etc. It’d be more likely we see timing changes first to the stages, eg morning starts, evening time trials etc.