Thursday Shorts

68 thoughts on “Thursday Shorts”

1. It has been reported here (at the bottom of the world) that the funding for LIv is definitely pulled i.e. the players have been told.

   • Yes, done deal now and the “current macro climate” cited. One Cycling’s problems seemed less about funding and more structural/execution but would PIF have been in cycling for the long haul?

2. Question about Visma:

   Are Visma completely withdrawing, or just cutting back? That is, are they willing to stay but only fund the cycling team to be a mid-tier world tour team? I thought the latter, but maybe someone knows better than me.

   • Cutting back but substantially. Cyclingnews.com earlier reported “Visma is expected to remain as a minor sponsor but is likely to significantly reduce its funding”. It’s a big gap to fill and reading recently that Van Aert’s win could help their search is a bit of a worry as the deal ought to be done by now. All the more reason for Vingegaard and the team to go for every win in the Giro, no gifts.

     • Visma don’t have Pogacar or Seixas but they do have a quality and probably expensive squad (Vingegaard, Van Aert, Jorgenson…) plus some excellent support (Kuss, Tullet, Campenaerts, Armirail…). How will they retain the core of that together with promising youngsters like Brennan, Nordhagen and Piganzoli on a severely curtailed budget? Who will leave?

       IR talks of fuel costs having increased by 50%. They have increased though as yet, at least in this area of France and Luxembourg, by far less than suggested. Many green observers would think that reduced vehicle numbers with better economy, whether in race or team support must be possible, desirable even.

       • As for your second paragraph:

         https://www.cicloweb.it/news/83541528070/il-ciclismo-e-i-conti-da-fare-col-cambiamento-climatico

       • As you say, without a headline sponsor how to they keep the wheels spinning? A year ago today was when it became too late for the Arkéa team to carry on but management kept pushing back the announcement for any kind of deadline to say they’d ran out of road. Obviously Visma-LAB is a much more enticing project but they need some security soon.

         I was thinking of diesel going from €1.6 to €2.4. As you say, reducing vehicles could be sensible anyway but not easy to organise, the big teams especially like their advantages of being able to bring more people and resources to big races. If you visit a team hotel during a race you can visibly see the difference when UAE/Visma/Ineos share the parking with Jayco/Lotto etc with the number of vehicles and the size of some of them.

         • Re: fuel costs. CN reports that last year Cofidis contested more than twice as many races as Ineos and 30% more than UAE. That’s got to hurt the smaller teams fighting to stay up, and again makes you wonder why smaller teams (especially those sponsored by largely local interests, like Cofidis) really want to be in the WT. Then again, the recent Tour of Hainan only had 2 WT teams and a lot of Pro teams. Astana’s presence made sense, but that had to be expensive for the Pro teams even before the fuel cost hikes (though opportunities for a decent points haul with the big teams staying home).

3. Glancing at the news this morning I saw that the Saudis are defunding Liv, which immediately led me to check this site. Wonder how many people thought of cycling when they read that news? Don’t think it’s a big surprise at this point, but it’s definitely a sign that we probably aren’t about to see any big changes in cycling’s business model.
   Which brings us to the ongoing debate about the general health of cycling, and whether races like Romandie are going to struggle for funding. I’m on the side of those who believe that tweaks are needed to ensure that races are able to survive without changing names or formats (see Suisse). Not sure how it’s going to work, but to me it seems there are plenty of reasons for concern.

   • There are huge reasons for concern, only they sit well beyond any possible cycling’s reform scope. Which is a good reason to stay sustainable instead of chasing bubbles.
     When “the new face on USA passports” had that couple of good ideas (or three), most of us knew hard times were coming all over the world (including USA, and except, dunno, maybe China).
     I can’t see how any of One Cycling or JV’s brilliant ideas would make that all much better without at the same time hindering the sport with little options for a U-turn.

   • To be clear, I think that there are several aspects of current cycling which could be improved making it more solid against a crisis like the upcoming one, or just more solid, full stop, which isn’t bad. Only, I never see the immodest proposals spread across the specialist press tackling those, so I guess it’s just my personal opinion which makes me look “conservative”.

     • To be clear, I hate the idea of consolidating the major races into one season-long “league,” and I think that some of Vaughters’ ideas would undermine a lot of what I love about the sport. But it seems like something could be done to spread the revenue better or increase it slightly, although I know there are many interested parties with competing interests, so those cats would be very difficult to herd. It’s definitely above my pay grade!

       • The key issue is that the revenue that Plugge and Vaughters want to have redistributed (to themselves, I might add) does not actually exist.

         • Vaughters is the embodiment of the ??? PROFIT meme from South Park.

         • JV’s been in the sport for four decades and has guided a successful team through extremely challenging times. But I’m sure he’s only in it for pure GREED. He sure chose the wrong sport! 😆

   • It’s clear that sports are some of our most entrenched global institutions. I can’t really think of any examples where a ‘disruptor’ has come in and made a permanent change to the status quo of any long established sport. By which I suppose I mean a sport with roots that got back approximately as far as the era of Victorian/Edwardian rules codification.

     Maybe you could use the example of cricket and the influence of Kerry Packer, but you could say this disruptive input did not actually mature until the advent of the IPL and the explosion of franchise cricket.

     • What about the effect of MMA on boxing?

       • That’s a slightly different example, to my mind. The disruptive effect there was a “new” – or newly packaged – sort of combat sport that took eyeballs away from boxing, the established (fragmented and complacent) player in that market. If you want to think of it that way.

         No room in the comments of a cycling blog to unpack everything here, but I will say that MMA fighters still seek the credibility (for want of a better word) of going to toe to toe with boxers. Boxing, I think, still means more to the non-enthusiast public.

         And that’s where LIV/One Cycling fall down – they still need the Tour, the established races, the institutions, to lend credibility to their offer as disruptors. Further, cycling will do well keep the fluid fragmentation it has now – any kind calcification of the different organisers could well lead us down the road of having the ASO World Title Holder, the RCS World Title Holder, the Flanders Classics World Title Holder etc etc.

4. How about Ineos replaces Visma as sponsor? Then everyone is happy, even Bjarne Riis

   • One Scandinavian IT sponsor leaves the sport and another comes in. One of the gripes of team managers is they’re out there competing for sponsors between each other. What convinced Netcompany to back Ineos rather than replace Visma?

     • For this one, I think visibility in the U.K. rather than the Low Countries
       More plausible than Brailsford’s IT speak anyway

       • Yes, that sounded like total twaddle. And Geraint Thomas seemed uncomfortable talking about it.

     • Danish tech media “Ingeniøren” reported that the reason was Netcompany’s growing focus on the UK market. Netcompany signed a sizable contract with Heathrow back in February and now has its sights set on similar opportunities.

       • With increasing feeling in the UK that many of the state systems should not be allocated to CIA backed Palantir, I wonder if Netcompany are really targeting this business. Their Pulse product seems better suited to the NHS, anyway

5. I often read about World tour budgets and broadcast rights and wonder why the teams don’t all band together to buy global broadcasting rights and make it free.

   I think the total cost would be around 150m which between 20 world tour teams seems pretty good value.

   The teams would then be free to package the broadcast as they wished and add in rider data and other bits and they would get much better value from their sponsorship. The races would benefit too as the broadcast would reach more people and increase the value for their own sponsors.

   Am I missing something?

   • It would still be a lot for the teams, €150m (running with your number, but it could be a lot less) across 20 teams is €7.5m per team, a lot to ask for. Then they’d have to outbid different broadcasters and rights-owners who have different aims, for example ASO values going for a maximal audience on free-to-air TV with its EBU deal; RCS wants revenue more than audience. And remember that there are various laws in European countries about making races free to air, you write about making it free but it almost has to be as you can’t charge per per view for the sport in Europe (or you could try but you’d have to make the Ronde free to Belgians and maybe not many Italians would pay, or the Giro free for Italians so how many Belgians would pay, each time your core audience can’t be monetised).

     If you can stitch the package together the teams are on the hook for the production because cycling broadcast rights are not so high in part because the costs of production are so high with the logistics, eg moving a broadcast crew around the countryside, sometimes for three weeks (this would get us closer to your €150m). Some teams today don’t show great competence in running a youtube channel, but they’d obviously hire in production, something like Euromedia that does the Tour and Giro.

     So the hurdles are getting all teams to agree, these teams each finding the extra money, then the execution of it all.

     • Definitely seems a lot when it’s put like that, but these teams are already paying between 10 and 50 million in sponsorship which has limited reach because in large parts of the world the coverage is behind paywalls.

       Buying the coverage from each race organiser and making it free globally would surely return way more in marketing value than the cost to buy. You could offer it at a cut price (so the teams make a loss) to all state broadcasts who would possibly jump at the chance to put some sport on TV. Especially if the teams can make riders from that country available for a bit of extra media duty.

       But only the teams would see this value, that move would be crazy for any other stakeholder, but the teams would seem to be the ones to gain the most so the interests line up.

       • I think the more I think about it, what I’m really proposing is that the teams stop worrying about reform etc etc. And just subsidise the race organisers enough so that the coverage is free to air everywhere. The teams get much better marketing and the organisers get a more valuable product to sell to their own sponsors.

         • In the UK market, the only reason that the Tour de France is now on pay-per-view is that no free-to-air broadcaster was willing to show the race even if they had the sports rights for free. This suggests the audience is so low that the value to the teams (of the UK market) is negligible. And this is the biggest race in the sport, so what value do other races have.

           PS. Something to bear in mind is that it costs the host broadcaster 10 million euros to broadcast the Tour de France. Making the race broadcasts for any race is very expensive and very few races do much more than cover their broadcasting costs (and many smaller races do not even do that).

         • John, I can’t seem to reply to you, but I didn’t know that the organisers couldn’t give it away. I always assumed the issue was selling the rights at a high enough price to cover the expensive costs of production.

           It just seems something is broken when races disappear behind pay walls. It harms race sponsors and the team sponsors and limits eyeballs. So it seems like the teams themselves rather than trying to earn a bit from a tiny pot that race organisers get should be focusing on spending money to make sure as many people are watching as possible.

         • @John’s comment below is not that accurate.
           ITV could have bought into the ‘umbrella’ contract but decided not to pay. If it was free, they would have bitten the rights holder’s hand off.

6. Cycling does seem to be in the second rank when it comes to marketing, though. I’m always surprised how little team and race sponsors make of their input into the sport when dealing with the general public. When Carrefour sponsored the mountains jersey at the Tour, there was absolutely no reference to the Tour even being on in the two Carrefour stores we visited weekly. (Le Clerc are a bit more forward, but even that is very low key in store, just better than Carrefour at the road side) . I never saw any publicity in the offices of financial sector sponsors, either.

   We have a big Decathlon down the road, with a thriving bike section…..no reference to competitive cycling in store at all. I’m baffled, it doesn’t seem to be a sensible strategy for maximising your contribution. So what they would make of negotiating media rights, as teams or sponsors is unfathomable

   PS When Banette were a race sponsor they had a (real) yellow bike on the front of the stores wherever they could…bravo!

   • I’ve been in Carrefour stores in July and thought “they’ve possibly gone too far with the polka dots”, can remember mini finish line arches over the check-outs and more. But maybe it depends on who owns the franchise for each store and how much they buy into this?

     • Remember that Vuelta stage which sort of started from within a Carrefour?
       ^___^

       • Exactly! Couldn’t maximise more!

         • Unless they’d had a special edition of Supermarket Sweep (crap English TV programme – don’t think it’s still on) beforehand with Dale Winton riding a yellow Tour bike!

   • Lidl are another – nothing to suggest they sponsor (though now own) the American team Trek. You’d think there would be a small section selling some merchandise, and recognising their connection to the sport/ activity.

     • They link the team to the stores. They have promotions in Italy during the Giro, in France during the Tour etc.

       • Same in Switzerland, had the team bus outside a Lidl for the Tour de Romandie

7. I watch a lot of races live and on replay just to have something pretty on my screen while I do whatever. I mean it’s the best travel channel ever, touring some of the most beautiful places in the world. Yet relatively few people watch the sport.

   I know some YouTube channels where they pretty much just video their living room every day and get incredible numbers. Makes no sense to me.

   I know he’s controversial, but I once heard Jonathan Vaughters say, and I’m paraphrasing, that the biggest problem in pro cycling is the lack of thought or design. He might have been a bit polemic, but he said something like, there is zero thought put into the organization of the sport, and that almost any thoughtful reform would be better than none.

   One can say it’s a charming sport, with all it’s quirky nonsense. But I find that a bit irresponsible, and underachieving. The sport should do more to expand its audience. It would be good for the sport and also good for every region the peloton passes through.

   • +1

   • The design of any stage race requires a huge amount of thought. Obvious, but just as JV’s brain is very busy keeping his team afloat, guess what organisers are working on? Yep! Organising races!

     And, speaking of the UCI, the calendar isn’t just a chaotic mess as some believe. It’s a balance of different needs of a number of subjects (organisers of any kind and level through five continents), those trying to spring a whole new race, old races trying to survive, big races like GTs managing their long duration with weather, big events from other sports, the cycling Worlds being held in summer one of every four years (and, even that, rightly so, as the Super Worlds is a good idea and worked great so far, oh, hey, look some thought at work and JV didn’t notice).

     So, I tend to think that the quirky nonsense is the sensation that it’s all confused and works by its own.

     I agree on the audience part, but even that problem is hugely more complex than greedy people thinking a lot about their own interest seem to acknowledge. Re-activate big and ready but recently excluded audience (GTs or Monuments in core countries all out of paywall again)? Power up audience in countries with an unstable potential currently floundering (UK, USA, Germany, Poland)? Create specific projects for individual countries with some love for the sport (Japan, Marocco, Colombia, Canada…)? Go for still partially unexplored big markets (Brasil, India)? China? Southeastern Asia? Just speaking of audience, not just looking for money as with Central Asian states or Petrol States.
     All of the above and more (Turkey, Malaysia) is being tried but it’s not an easy feat, first of all because the different aspects entail a notable degree of contradiction; anyway, it’s been tried hard with huge investments by people even more greedy than JV, but it simply can’t work if the top to bottom process happens along with some bottom up powerful feedback.

     Good things happen all the time in the sport, most of them *not* thanks to any think tank of managers brainstorming or whatever they suppose is “thinking”.

     Real thinking is more often than not “think in action”. Focus on something new and successful, say, Strade Bianche and, in a different note, the gravel USA scene: was that all planned by some marketing genius? They were ideas becoming practices from the very base of the cycling movement, then prompting a whole range of impacts both bottom up and top down. Including managers and marketing geniuses – once the things had started moving by themselves.

     • So what you’re saying is, everything is fine as-is, no need for “think tanks.” And I suppose you’re a big investor in zondacrypto? No reason for concern at all.

       • Think tanks are normally more about tanks than thinking. Metaphorically or not. That is, in more general terms, people trying to justify their ransacking of other people’s resources or work.
         I’ve long exposed here what I believe should be worked on in cycling, so it should be self evident that I think that things should be made better. Only, I think some usual suspects always come up with their usual “ideas”, no matter how much the situation might change, and typically fail to tackle what are real issues of the sport, for example, a worrying number of people killed while training.
         To name a positive example, I think that Rapha’s three-point proposals, notwithstanding a similar general POV, were a bit more meaningful.
         Even if when one reads people claiming F1 or football can make sense as a model the obvious reaction is stopping reading (be it only because how can anybody compare *football* with any other sport or F1, supported by *the car industry*… with cycling?)

         • I was exaggerating of course, I’ve read most of your dissertations, but the point of mentioning zondacrypto is that it’s a bad sign when you’re relying on companies like them or Nexthash, or petrostates for whatever reason they want to be involved. When the face of your sport is hawking crypto on yet another sketchy platform surely there’s a better way?
           It also rankles big time that multiple people are insulting JV when his team has done things the way we want them to, when so many others are questionable at best. I know he’s annoying, but is that enough to disregard his knowledge and experience? Same with Plugge, I’d take him over Gianetti any day.

         • @The Other Craig
           I’ve also said I appreciate a lot the way JV manages his team, only it doesn’t sound like that translates immediately to his POV is as good when the vision of the sport as a whole is concerned. Which is pretty typical.

           Plugge and Gianetti? Hummm, neither created especially healthy environments in their teams but Visma had athletes going vocal on the subject. Gianetti’s personal score as an athlete is legendary on well-known themes, but was it for that we should raise our eyebrows for Vaughters, too. And Jumbo-Visma has a heavy past as a team (involving part of the management in continuity) which is actually worse than everything Gianetti did personally. Then, there’s the way Gianetti kicked out people from the project they had been paramount to create which tells much against him, again. But, frankly, I see shades of dark gray everywhere, generally darker in Gianetti’s case, but very far from making it so easy to pick these other figures as much more entitled to stay in cycling or guide its future vision.

   • Yes, exactly!! The UCI are a governing body…they shouldn’t be running the World Tour. The FiA came under fire from the EU for a conflict of interest 20 years ago…and so ‘outsourced’ their championships to separate bodies, who organise, promote and sell TV rights……

     • The UCI just sets the calendar and do the rules, they don’t do media etc. Even the calendar is just an admin service, ie the Tour choses its date, so does the Ronde etc and things largely fit around. There’s no way the UCI could tell the Tour to move to September or say Lombardia should be run in February.

8. @Elliott Joseph
   That’s a point which emerged some time ago here. A take on that: if cycling is so niche, why doesn’t Discovery accept to sub-license to a company funded by teams with the sole purpose of selling *only cycling* on an online global platform (GCN anyone?)…?

   With a price tag lower than Discovery/HBO/Max but not as much lower as to make it competitive unless you’re a cycling-only fan.
   Say 13 to 17 £/€/$ for month, depending on context. And you get *only* cycling specific content.
   I guess that if cycling-specific fans are so very marginal, the deal should work all the same for Discovery. It could even strengthen the market value of their main deal depending on countries.

   But I suspect that’s the story isn’t exactly what we’ve been told… rather Discovery got aware that in Europe there are solid big blocks of cycling fans, actual or potential, which they consider that can be turned in strong payers through different systems (from initial seduction to later extortion). They know it’s going to be a slow transition, but they feel sure that more and more people can be brought to pay more and more for cycling (facts support this claim until now, to be seen how hard they can still squeeze before breaking the toy).

   And that… *under this very same current model of the sport* – mainly in a few European countries, of course, but high GDP ones.

   Maybe I ain’t got it right. But was it so, as I said above, then it would make a lot of sense for Discovery to subcontract the “hardcore cycling exclusive part” to teams, which could then throw in a lot of added values with their internal contents. I.e., Discovery goes on selling cycling as part of a mix (including HBO!) to general sport fans, or general public, for whatever they consider, but allows a different company managed by teams to sublicence the races on a cycling only platform (shouldn’t be a problem for them, if they really believe too few are watching…).
   Sublicensing is normally relatively cheaper, so the teams’ comoany could invest into own “insider” content production and, much more, into promotion.

   Leave race production to big specialised national services (the French, the Belgian, some Italians).

9. I guess things won’t get so bad that they can’t lubricate their chains, but who knows anymore.

10. Once the Paramount/Warner Bros Discovery take over happens, there will bound to be cut backs etc (especially as the ongoing debt will be $80 billion). So maybe the original plan to break up WBD into two will happen and then the number crunchers will go through everything with a fin-toothed comb. What happens to Max and the sports streaming side of things might well depend on how they think a profit can be made or not.
    (Cycling is lucky being a northern hemisphere Summer sport and does not have to fight as much for TV time like Winter sports do.)

    Would moving Romandie in the calender make much sense? As Switzerland is one of the richest countries on the planet (and lots of teams are “based” there) a lack of sponsors seems disappointing.

11. Wonder how many lifelong pro cycling fans like me don’t watch any live racing anymore because I won’t pay more than the £6 a month I was paying for Eurosport. I thought it was extortion when it was raised from £3.99 a month a few years ago!

    • Just VPN to Australia, it’s all on SBS for free. That’s what I do. I feel no guilt pirating from an org as greedy as discovery

      • Yes, you can get a lot in English this way it seems. You can generally find VPN + public broadcaster works too, but with a language barrier and sometimes different rules, eg an email sign-up required to get a free account.

        • Not if you’ve got Sky Glass – VPN is a no go!

12. SBS also commentate on the race rather than talking about everything other than the action on screen. (They’ve also got a good range of TV series and films)

13. Another thing that bothers me is that as far as I know pro cyclists have no pension.

    • There is a retirement fund where a % of prize money goes into a pot and riders get some of this later but it’s small. Generally a good agent is there to help with this and there are also now specific financial advisers who help here. Readers might remember Nans “the Penguin” Peters who won a Giro and Vuelta stage, that’s his new job now.

      Salaries have grown at a big rate in recent years so that a decade in the peloton as a solid helper can expect to retire comfortably or set themselves up for the future. Most would be surprised how many men are on million Euro contracts, how many are on €200k etc.

      • The UCI reported in December that the median annual salary in 2026 for the 18 WorldTeams and the two auto invite ProTeams (Tudor and Pinarello) is €350,000 for a self-employed rider.

        In more fully professionalised sports, this is typically an area where the players’ union is more active than agents/managers. Unfortunately for cyclists, they only have the CPA which is closer to being a yellow union.

      • Well, in France they should be covered by the social welfare system teams pay so much for…or not? (No idea)

      • Thank you. Appreciate this.

14. RIP Alex Zanardi, passed away at 59 yesterday.

    By my count, his total of 12 World Championships has only been bettered by five other riders. Two of them are track sprinters who have four events every year (Harrie Lavreysen and Arnaud Tournant) and the other three are multiple discipline riders (Jeannie Longo, Marianne Vos, Pauline Ferrand-Prevot) who have not reached Zanardi’s total in any one discipline.

    All of that on top of four Paralympic Games gold medals in cycling, numerous wins in the wheelchair division of major world marathons, the world record for Ironman distance triathlon by an athlete with a disability.

    Oh, and on top of that also a highly successful motorsport career which included 20 race wins and two championships in conventional cars before the crash that took his legs plus another 18 wins and one championship in hand-controlled cars afterwards.

    • Atque in perpetuum frater ave atque vale

      …And in what spirit did he accomplish all that!

15. Dare we say Pogi looked a bit on the heavier side this Romandie? ^___^

    By the way, had Vingo been here, I suspect he’d have taken this GC, although of course one can never say as many things would have gone differently.

    • Would you expect “heavier” because he added bulk/muscle for the spring monuments & cobbles?
      With 8 weeks until TdF, he could lose some weight, no?

      • I’m going with what the team staff in charge of his athletical preparation has been saying. I had this sensation at first due to his power numbers at SB, then I saw the interviews and so on which confirmed that and added that shedding the weight before the TDF was going to be a special challenge this time around. I must acknowledge that probably he also gained more power to weight than I had expected at first, but in addition to the above I think that what we saw at Romandie hinted at a heavier physical build for the Classics (of course) than in previous years. Also note that he was talking mainly about PR during winter, which is where weight is even more paramount. May I add that he probably worked hard on his sprint and under 5′ effort, which probably took something away from him on >20′ efforts.

      • Oh and I hadn’t seen this, either, while writing the above:

        https://www.cicloweb.it/news/466330488326/pogaar-dovr-perdere-peso-in-vista-del-tour-de-france

        Which is sort of last word on the subject. If he usually was at 66 for the Classics, “heavier than usual” must mean a relevant quantity above that, may I and monsieur Lapalisse say.

    • I didn’t follow Romandie, but I noticed Lipo is gaining form. 🙂

      Still, neither he nor Remco, nor Vingo for Seixas will be anywhere near Pogi by June, unfortunately.

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