A rare break in racing, yesterday and today don’t have a race on the calendar to time for a quick review.
No wins but XDS Astana have had a strong start in their points quest, only Movistar, Red Bull and UAE have scored more. It’s still the start of February but momentum matters and the early season is packed with races.
Australia’s summer of cycling is done and the identical complaint as last year: more please. Too many bunch sprints and soft stages mean it’s not often compelling racing, you can tune in for the last 10-15 minutes of a race and catch the action with barely an exception. One difference this year is that TDU organiser Stuart O’Grady was asked if the racing was too easy and his response is it can be hard to plan in case of high heat, where more climbing and greater distances could be too much. Fair enough but then should his race have so many ranking points?
Did any British and Irish readers set their alarm to get up and watch? Continuing the trend of cycling becoming more expensive to watch, Eurosport as a brand and channel is vanishing in the UK and Ireland. Now Americans and others around the world look on thinking “welcome to my world” but it’s a big deal for a channel that has been broadcasting since the 1980s. But it’s been taken over several times and the Eurosport brand became confusing as it sat alongside other sports channels under the same corporate umbrella and signals that more niche sports like cycling are not a priority, the fact that it gets parcelled around and then binned says something.
British and Irish cycling fans now have to take out a subscription to TNT which is a premium channel that shows the Premier League football and more, a big price jump and paying for something many won’t want or need, it’s like wanting an inner tube but being forced to buy a wheel when ideally the Internet was supposed to offer more choice than cable and satellite monopolies. So much for that…
The concern for audiences across Europe is they’re next if cycling on Eurosport gets bundled up into a premium channel but this also depends on the patchwork of rights in local markets: who shows La Liga in Spain, Serie A in Italy and so on. One difference is a lot of cycling in Europe is on public TV, free to air. A lot but not all… for example people in Spain can’t watch the Giro, the Vuelta isn’t easy to watch in Italy and so on. Worse all this flux is set to continue as Warner Brothers Discovery has announced plans for a big demerger so chances are whatever packages and deals exist today will be altered soon again. We’ll look at VPN options in the coming days.
Onto bundles of a different kind and the UCI has added to the regulations with a new rule to prevent riders from putting bidons and other objects under jerseys and skinsuits in search of aero advantage. The idea here is that for some riders an empty bidon can be used as a fairing to help fill the space between the chest and the arms and risers/handlebars. The idea came from triathlon and we’ve seen Remco Evenepoel among others try it; but those with longer memories might recall Frank Schleck at the Critérium International and his Camelbak.
Staying with UCI regulations and calendar reform… of sorts. another change but is that World Tour teams won’t have race every event on the World Tour calendar next year but can opt out of one race beyond the Monuments and Grand Tours. The Tour Down Under and the Tour of Guangxi are the obvious events for teams to skip but the choices could be more revealing. Each team will have their priorities from sponsors and also for the payments races give to the teams; the TDU for example covers transport costs but maybe the Copenhagen sprint won’t. If a World Tour team doesn’t go the organisers can fill the space with a local team. This is small tweak but symbolically significant given the whole point of the World Tour is a calendar of compulsory events, now the principle is unpicked.
More UCI and there’s a now ban on carbon monoxide re-breathing. A lot of the press release is about banning “commercially available CO re-breathing systems”. Anyone determined to abuse this will or would probably continue as it’s hard to detect and enforce – and by extension possession of DIY systems involving balloons is not banned – but the UCI has now signalled it’s off-limits. The technicalities matter but up to a point: a component of this ban is outward looking, the story blew up during the Tour de France and this can at least give the sport a response… much like waving tablets over frames for the motors issue. This isn’t to be cynical here, it’s a tidying up exercise but the regular “cycling = doping” stories will presumably move onto something else when the Hautacam climbing record falls this July.
The last UCI news item is the Worlds in Rwanda which could be under threat. You’ve probably read plenty already but there are four points to add here. First the event could be in jeopardy if sanctions were applied on Kigali but that’s a big if, as it depends which countries apply them and what they are. The second is the IOC and its concept of the “Olympic Truce” where countries are suspended if they invade another is another instance of jeopardy but has Rwanda invaded Congo? Not really, at least no direct invasion and therefore no suspension. Third is that both the UCI and the Kigali government are really incentivised to sustain the Worlds bid, there’s a hosting fee to collect while David Lappartient’s UCI bid was based on taking the sport to Africa and so is a component of his IOC Presidency candidacy right now too; all while the Rwandan government wants the publicity of being open and hosting an international event although you’re literally now reading about armed conflict, displaced people and have looked at a picture of the Rwandan border controlled by a militia member rather than Rwanda. Still, and the fourth and final point is that the UCI can hardly say “actually we have a Plan B” as this would be rude to the hosts so while the press release from the UCI says there are no plans for an alternative worlds, there might be pre-plans, contingency discussions or whatever else you want to fish out from the thesaurus and Switzerland with Martigny as a back-up could be activated. In short a lot has to happen for Kigali not to happen.
Even the single CO inhalation for purposes of medically supervised measurement of Hb mass is enough to give you a headache. Plus, if you can do this every 2 weeks, you’ll still get circa 2 to 5 days of CO-bound Hb per 14 days.
Also, they’re not specifying a limit for CO in the blood. So, how do they enforce this?
Even if they get WADA to specify a limit, how are they going to take blood samples regularly? Logistically this is far far more demanding. There are few, if any, health risks to a rider being waved cubicle by retired sports enthusiast who has volunteered to act as an ADO observer, and having them watch the pee stream into a cup and then seal it up. Taking blood samples is a whole other level – the random retired sports enthusiast won’t cut it as a plebotomist; and the cold trailer in a car park or field, trampled with mud from a plethora of riders shoes over whatever rainy spring weekend, may not cut it either in terms of hygiene.
This seems to be addressing a non-problem, other than hysteria in the cycling press.
All this does is make AD controls more complex (and potentially at odds with medical ethics). While making it so that only riders/teams who can afford 3+ week stays in a limited number of high-altitude hotels can get the Hb stimulus benefits of hypoxia.
The calendar reform is a little more nuanced than just choosing one event to skip outside of Monuments and Grand Tours. The UCI press release adds a couple of other guidelines: no more than four UCI WorldTeams may be absent from the same event, and teams will not be permitted to be absent from the same event more than once during the three-year registration cycle.
This means that a World Tour team skipping the TDU can only do it once in three years, and that an unpopular race is still going to have 14 WT teams even if it is REALLY unpopular, and any teams skipping that race will be there for the next couple of years anyway.
I think it is a good reform and will help the less popular international races. It will also probably convince those teams that raced the TDU but bailed on the CEGORR to stick around for a little longer in Australia.
In the US, the internet/cable provider Xfinity is now offering a bundle of some of the most popular streaming services, including Peacock which owns the rights to ASO races. If this sounds like a return to cable television of 20 years ago, it probably is, with unavoidable ads and all the rest. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Was GCN+ just a dream?
Monopolistic, anti-competitive behaviour by Warner-Brothers. I used to pay something like €30pa for Eurosport. Discovery upped it to ~€6pm / €72pa. Grumble, but I paid. WB in the meantime managed to acquire every sports broadcaster in the Celtic Isles, bar Sky Sports – acquiring BT Sport and merging with Discovery in 2022.
Now, having a near monopoly (and a total monopoly on cycling, as Sky Sports doesn’t show any), they are doing what all monopolists do – bleeding the customer for everything they can. They want €372pa! That’s just extortion.
I am not paying to subsidise their huge spending on football rights. I have no interest in football, cricket, baseball, boxing, etc.
I will be using VPNs. Hola works well as a browser extension; Proton as a system VPN. I’ll be watching coverage in dutch where possible (NOS and VRT are very good), and probably also learning some French, Italian and Spanish by osmosis at times.
The sport is shooting itself in the foot. ASO, FLCS, UCI and other rights-holders need to have a serious think about whether they want:
1. A healthy cycling audience for the long-term
2. To milk what money they can from a tiny minority of hard-core in the short-term
Cause these 2 things are not compatible. Pursuing the second, via deals with rapacious monopolists like WB, will *kill* the former and hence *harm you financially* overall, and much sooner than you think.
It’s ironic that two big subjects on this blog recently have been the way the UCI allocates points to races to try to make cycling more international and the ways that it’s become more and more difficult to watch the races on television. How valuable is a race outside continental Europe if no one is watching?
On the Australian races, I was surprised to see that a number of WT teams who had taken the trouble – and air miles – to ride the Santos Tour didn’t feel it worthwhile to stay for the following WT race (Cadel Evans). I understand that Visma-LAB and others don’t need the UCI points but the decision still appears odd. Why?