Tuesday Shorts

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

51 thoughts on “Tuesday Shorts”

  1. 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.

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  2. 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.

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  3. 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?

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    • My local Xfinity provider includes Peacock in my subscription so it’s “free” to me. But as you point out, it’s only the ASO races. Last year I subscribed to Max for the Giro and many of the classics (via the Bleacher Report Sports add on) for $9.99/mo w/ads. No additional charge for B/R last year – not sure about 2025. Biggest downside of Peacock is they dropped the International feed and the only option for commentators are Phil and Bob Roll (pack up your suitcase of courage!). Considering Flobikes + VPN for a single source, but it’s a real patchwork here in the US.

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  4. 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.

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    • 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?

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    • I suspect the race organisers are aghast at what Warner Bros has done. They know they need eyeballs on the race. They don’t pay the teams in any currency than viewership figures (allowing the teams to obtain sponsors). And the local area needs people to view the race to justify closing the road (it is advertising by local government for the local area). The problem is that free-to-air tv stations largely aren’t interested in showing cycling in the UK or North America.

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      • “ The problem is that free-to-air tv stations largely aren’t interested in showing cycling in the UK or North America.”

        Well, the only major race I can remember ever being covered free-to-air in the US was the Tour, and that was decades ago. It’s hard to say that there’s no interest when it’s something that has simply never happened. Is that due to a lack of interest from broadcasters? It’s impossible to know. If you have any evidence that it is, please educate me.

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      • Indeed. But RCS opened the doors for this with the ES exclusivity deal abroad. Maybe they think they can step back anytime, but it’s to be seen if the magic moment when national free-to-air broadcasters were paying to show the Giro in Spain or France (with excellent results) is coming back so soon or as soon as needed. It was already perceived as a daring move, but the Giro was also seen as a strong product with a steady growth, now that’s not the case anymore. Personally, I believe it would work decently even now, but I understand that it’s currently way harder to sell the idea than a decade ago or so, whereas consistent broadcasting would have reinforced its own base.
        RCS’ bet was a national-popular product in Italy, sold as such to the niche abroad.
        For now, it has worked great as a defensive strategy of damage reduction, which didn’t maximise opportunities but which also limited negative impacts. We’ll see what next.

        So often, it’s not really about what might actually work, rather what decision-makers can be convinced of. And decision-makers in our society aren’t necessarily *that* good in picking the right decision, but it’s them who are in the position to do so… the rest can only manifest opinions, or campaign at most.

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      • For now the worry at the race organisers is ASO and their loss of ITV in the UK, it means a European country without free-to-air coverage of the Tour.

        Eurosport has been a growing part of the audience but much smaller than the main TV options.

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      • The teams are not happy either since their existence is based on being cycling billboards and if the races go behind expensive paywalls and viewership drops, sponsors may bail.

        I’m sure ASO is not happy about this, but the broadcast rights are already sold and being redistributed. Out of there hands for the short term.

        For the most part UCI has nothing to do with broadcast rights.

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        • It also depends on the teams, many value the reach of public, free to air TV in Europe and it forms a big part of the value of their sponsorship. But some are also into VIP invites and internal communications…but a part of this relies on big races being “things” as in on TV, existing in the public space etc.

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  5. 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?

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    • Expense is part of it – teams have to pay hotel bills for riders and staff staying in Australia for an extra week. And the travelling out and back occupies a number of days when riders could be training for events in Europe and that’s not taking into account such things as jet lag. The new rules, however, will mean that they all do have to stay for the Cadel Evans race, except for once in a while.

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      • The Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race is one of the “new” WorldTour races that are not mandatory for WT-teams.
        (The general idea was, I suppose, to soften the blow, so to speak. And perhaps to prod the arrangers or the hosts of the new races to come up with sufficient financial incitement to the teams that wouldn´t otherwise be interested…)

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        • Thanks. So, my question now would be, with this new rule, will those races still be optional?
          If so, then teams could opt to skip the TDU and the Cadel, and thus not go to Australia at all.
          That would surely make the races in China and Australia as the top choices of races to miss, as they’re the most expensive to attend.

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          • Teams are paid to travel, for example the TDU offers Singapore airlines business class. The Tour of Guangxi is a long way and unloved for its late season slot alike but many bike sponsors are keen for teams to travel there, for example for Decathlon sales in Asia including China matter.

            It’ll be interesting to see which teams opt for this rule and where, it’ll be specific to each team.

          • Participation in the “new” races will no longer be on a voluntary basis.

            In other words, my interpretation – that the teams now could opt out of one of the “old” race as well as any number of the “new” races – was completely mistaken (and in hindsight unfathomably stupid).

            PS It would perhaps be interesting to see the statistics: which races have had the largest numbers absentee teams and which teams have opted out of the largest numbers of races?

      • The Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race is one of the “new” (that is to say since 2017 or 2019) WorldTour races that are not mandatory for WT-teams.

        (The general idea was, I suppose, to soften the blow, so to speak. And perhaps to prod the arrangers or the hosts of the new races to come up with sufficient financial incitement to the teams that wouldn´t otherwise be interested…)

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    • That was going to be my question! But seriously, I don´t think UCI will ever have to sit down and figure out how to reach a decision. I´ll be surprised the day a WT race commences with four WT teams absent!

      PS I imagine UCI will simply suggest that the teams concerned will talk it out among themselves 🙂

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      • I suspect that race in China will have a full quota of missing teams every single year. Unless they pay teams to appear.
        And if there was only one WT race in Australia, it’d be the same there. It’s just logistics and costs.

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        • Tour of Guangxi was already an optional race (added in an expansion after 2017) and they still had 16/18 WorldTeams on the start line last year.

          The race does have additional reasons for teams to appear, as it essentially operates as a major trade show.

          Copenhagen Sprint is a more likely race to have a max quota of opt outs, as its current date makes it an orphan race with all the detriments of an intercontinental race (long distance from Dauphine, Suisse and Belgium Tour which are on around the same time) but without the fly away race benefits of the organisers providing transport and team vehicles.

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        • Until now they’ve had nearly always a significant number of non-starters among WT teams, with only 15 teams at the start in 2019 before a string of cancellations and as few as 14 in 2023. So, yes, they’re definitely a candidate for a “opt-out” card from the teams who might have an interest to do so. Others will be looking for points (EF or Jayco are among the teams never skipping a WT race for obvious reasons), others again might be interested in the commercial or geopolitical aspect. I suspect that the UCI was urging WT teams to go anyway, notwithstanding the official rules, because I suspect they even struggle to lure Pro Conti team there: if the latter travel to China, is normally in hope to score victories, but making the effort only to be crushed by WT teams, well…

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  6. There be racing in Australia this weekend with the Melbourne to Warrnambool race which has been rolled I to the new ProVelo Super League … and it will be televised free to air.
    This is the second in the series which runs through March. Not world tour but racing just the same.

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  7. Sadly events in DRC seem to have taken a turn for the worst, I’m not sure how bad the optics have to get for the UCI, I’m not sure I’ll be comfortable with a worlds in Rwanda knowing that they’re backing rebels involved in atrocities across the border…
    It’s all horrible frankly

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    • It seems that uniformed soldiers from the Rwandan army are involved in the invasion of DRC, whether with the approval or their senior officers or not.

      That said, it didn’t seem to bother the UCI that Rwanda was already an oppressive regime. I’m not expecting the latest developments to lead to a location change, or any major countries to boycott, as either of those would require principles that are rarely on display in cycling or any other sport nowadays. See the Winter Olympics in Sochi, or the Summer Olympics in Beijing, or the World Cup in Russia or Qatar, or… or… or…

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    • The UCI is going to be cagey about what they say about Worlds in Rwanda. Lionel B. mentioned on the Cycling Podcast that he talked with Amnesty International. I was intrigued to hear their take, but the clip didn’t make it on the pod.

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  8. The UCI, ASO and others have the tricky tasks of simultaneously growing the aport worldwide in new geographies and earning money.

    One strategy to do this would be to ‘monitise’ TV rights in countries where cycling is embedded (eg Europe and possibly US) by selling to the highest bidder. While making it free to view via national broadcasting in new and burgeoning markets.

    I don’t think if they are doing this with the current deals. But it could be the underlying motivation.

    This way you bring in money via

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  9. At the Etoile of Besseges, we’re having cars on the course again, after they caused an accident on stage 1. Part of the teams now decided to stop racing. So, apparently, this is not an issue which needs coordination by the CPA. Note how smaller teams are motivated to race all the same, which of course is not necessarily a good thing, but it’s a good reference to imagine if it was really “all the riders” who decided not to race rainy days at the Giro. But in that case “safety issue” were so a-hem radical that the appropriate behind-the-scene work was done in order to show off a supposedly united block of athletes. This time, instead, after the events on stage 1, some short bla bla was delivered, but nothing was really done, and the riders were not prepared in order to react as a common front in case the same was going to happen again, which it duly did.
    Remember this situation the next time anyone tries to sell you how worried they are about rider safety.

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