Next summer will be the last when the Tour de France will be shown free-to-air in Britain, from then it will be for Eurosport subscribers only. It marks the end of five decades of free coverage in the UK.
It’s a headache for cycling fans in Britain but also an issue for pro cycling which losses pan-European mass market coverage. And if you live somewhere with free coverage don’t assume it’ll always be that way.
Free-to-air is just that, buy a TV and you can watch what is broadcast over the airwaves or down the internet for free, no subscriptions or sign-ups. This reaches a mass market audience and is the core of pro cycling’s business model where sponsors pay millions for naming rights hoping to reach many millions of people.
Chances are many UK cycling fans, the kind that even read niche blogs like this, will find a way to watch the Tour de France in 2026 and beyond. Plenty already subscribe to Eurosport, others might use VPNs to get free coverage.
But hundreds of thousands won’t clear the paywall or tunnel beneath geo-restrictions. It’s the loss of this casual audience that is a pity. A significant chunk of the UK audience is there for the scenery. In time a share of those people will learn how the yellow jersey is awarded, fall off at traffic lights because they forget to unclip from their new pedals and so on. Maybe you’re reading this blog having started out this way?
The boom British cycling has been in reverse for some time, the glory days of the Yorkshire grand départ, Team Sky, le Tour de Yorkshire, the likes of Bradley Wiggins, Mark Cavendish, Geraint Thomas and Chris Froome in their pomp are over. Ironically British fans have plenty to look forward to thanks to the cohort that got into road cycling around this time and are now World Tour riders.
The Tour coverage in Britain began on Channel 4 in 1986 but in the 2000s its rival ITV bought out Channel 4 to reach a prime audience. All along it’s been made the same production company. Today ITV is one of the main TV channels in Britain but it’s a business with a market capitalisation of £2.9 billion ($3.8bn / €3.5bn) whose stock price has been in the doldrums.
ITV’s Tour de France coverage has included good reportage on the ground from several journalists. But also dreary low-rent ad breaks featuring charity donkey sanctuary appeals and cremation plans. You didn’t need to watch ITV to know this given the number of Britons rage-tweeting every July. Another warning sign was the lack of women’s Tour coverage too, this has been Eurosport-only in Britain. Seen against all this perhaps we can see ITV’s decision to decline the rights from 2026 onwards as unsurprising?
There’s nothing wrong with Eurosport’s coverage. It gets the same FranceTV-Euromedia images as everyone else… but it’s different in tone. Especially the English output, where it does feel like they’re putting their presenters in front of the camera more than the riders at times. Pet gripes aside, fundamentally it’s aimed at at cycling fans.
ITV like other mainstream channels is there for the race but more too. Across the North Sea Dutch public broadcaster NOS typically sets up its daily Avondetappe (“evening stage”) show in the grounds of a châteaux or amid a vineyard for the vicarious sense of travel. These broadcasts might feature rosé wine as much the green jersey. This peddles the soft drug of France in summer with sunflowers, the shade of roads lined by Napoleonic plane trees to a waiting public, long before people become cycling fans and move onto initially niche things like the relative difficulty of each side of the Tourmalet or the three kilometre rule.
All this matters because plenty of ITV’s viewers won’t switch to Eurosport. Some of those that do move wanting their dose of the Tour de France may not stay if they find coverage spends more time discussing aerodynamic socks than softly-lit holiday destinations; if the day’s reportage is about tire pressure rather than ancient caves. Exclusivity maybe good for Eurosport today but in the medium to long term the supply of new subscribers could dry up. The UK TV audience for pro cycling is set to shrink.
This is a challenge for the sport as a whole. If sponsors are interested in reaching a big audience they’ve now lost hundreds of thousands of eyeballs and wallets in the UK. It’s worth repeating British audiences have been falling already. But rather than audience measurement, just imagine a big “X” drawn across the UK as the mass-market reach is gone. It’s not disastrous but it does undermine cycling’s offer: never mind a global reach, it’s struggling to cover Europe.
Americans and Canadians will be saying “welcome to my world”. Alas they’re still worse off than British cousins as the rights to various races are fragmented, rather than all with Eurosport.
Meanwhile if you’re sitting comfortably in Europe today, watch out. For now Tour organisers ASO seems keen on having a wide mass market audience which means you get the Tour and the rest of their portfolio free. But NOS is cutting back, no more Vuelta in the Netherlands. Already the Giro is hard to find outside of Italy. Flanders Classics is in talks with the elusive One Cycling project whose business plan is predicated on bundling up TV rights and private equity is hardly coming in to share, it wants your cashflow. A scenario where cycle races are harder to find is only one or two steps away for many.
The saying “if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product” has been the essence of the Tour de France: free and open to all on the condition of a parade of corporate advertising and the backdrop of La France. It’s gone from a sports even in France to socio-cultural institution and this is why it has ridden out scandals. Yet pay for cycling coverage it’s not like rapport changes and the ads vanish. You still get teams called Ineos, Movistar and Quick-Step, and may well sit through ad breaks and find coverage product-placement. It’s extractive, each to their own on how much to pay.
For now the headache faced by US fans is not on the horizon. Indeed several countries in Europe give certain sports events “protected status” meaning they have to remain free-to-air as they are considered culturally important. In France a decree rules that the Tour de France and Paris-Roubaix must be free for all. Likewise in Italy the Giro and the Worlds… but not the Tour, so Italians enjoying RAI’s coverage today could wake up to find it’s gone behind a paywall tomorrow. Plus if these laws can be written, they can be revised and you can imagine the lobbying reach of the likes of Warner Bros-Discovery keen to corner the market.
There’s a wider lament about losing shared things, it’s a challenge for society when we stop watching, reading and listening to the same media. But just for cycling there will be Britons who would have become cycling fans now but won’t because the serendipity of stumbling across Tour de France is gone, and for a cycling blog that’s wistful enough.
Well written. On a personal note, it was a chance encounter with the Tour on SBS in Australia a couple of decades ago that sparked a life long love affair with cycling. If not for my exposure to that free broadcast, there would be no subscribing to (the former) GCN+, no purchasing bikes, no hours on Zwift…
I remember enjoying watching test match cricket for several hours a day on BBC as a child.
Warne vs Gatting is still my all-time favourite sporting memory. Then cricket lost its reserved status, Sky got the rights and I haven’t watched a single minute of cricket in a quarter of a century.
Excellent piece. I’ve unfortunately seen the US model up close, and your observation about missing out on casual fans is spot-on. Once upon a time the Tour de France was in the American public consciousness, but for very understandable reasons the interest dropped off considerably after the US Postal years. My interest in professional cycling was a result of my dabbling in riding myself, then coming across races randomly on cable tv. Although cable isn’t free, in the glory days of cable packages you could find a fair amount of racing on a decent cable package. Now these packages have completely collapsed, and as you observed, it now requires several subscriptions to watch the entire season. This, coupled with the collapse of the US road racing scene, means that the entry points for casual fans are few and far between. All of this has led to road cycling being more “niche” than it has been since the pre-Lemond days.
Hadn’t read this while writing the lines below, but it’s absolutely spot on. And a shame, because cycling in the USA has had – and atill has – its legendary figures, races, scenes etc. After all, two of the three global Big Brands when road bikes (and beyond) are concerned are still USA-based!
Yep, great piece!
Cycling as a sport and its institutions, organisers, unions or teams included, should have ganged up since long on the fragmentation of TV market instead of trying each to get their slice of the pie by their own. It should have been top priority for the sport, because its mass status is key from several POVs. Of course the idea is apparently staying (relatively) mass in a handful of countries while also going on as a niche sport everywhere else. It may even work, but the risk is that the niche feeling becomes dominant. Not even imaginable in France? You’d have said the same about Italy, but the latter is now flirting with the tipping point. And the situation isn’t well-established in Spain or the Netherlands, either.
UK is a shame after the all around investments, figures weren’t bad but you need the depth to hold and face bad times… just check USA to know what’s a volatile cycling scene (and market).
However, not being a mass sport anymore is a big risk for cycling. The huge deal of public money cycling depends on is flowing in directly and indirectly mainly because of the popular dimension, i.e., the national-cultural aspect and the idea that it can work as a promotion for habits which benefit the society. In Italy RCS is now way more solid than 10 years ago but it’s currently struggling… to draw the route, because a more widespread hostility towards cycling as such. Much more people don’t accept closed roads, imagine spending public money. Being a “coffee machine” sport is a huge added value in order to manage politics and ideology, historically needed by cycling… and potentially “in need of cycling”.
Besides, the way branding works in cycling through team sponsorship is more effective when working on a large and not necessarily passionate public. As we know few ever win, so a lot is about making your brand recognizable, not building up any specific value identity. The idea is for the brand becoming *familiar*. It’s about a vague/mild preference or trust given to a name already heard many times even if you don’t relate it to anything specific, it’s good for new brands or brands entering new markets or brand belonging to markets with many similar options to choose between or markets with an issue of trust. In a sense, even sportwashing belongs to the above categories.
(Working on identity always was more about sponsoring races).
Obviously, you can change your status and sponsorship model along with that. Famously, the sport jumped from technical bike-related sponsors to general commodities from Nivea on. It can track the road back, maybe even back to a TDF for national teams!
Yet, it’s important to be aware of how your model works and how you pretend to change it, be it only to know precisely what you’re going to sell and to whom. Even more so, in order to know who’s not going to buy from you anymore…
Check the list of WT team sponsors and wonder for each of them if they prefer several millions of casual viewers or hundreds of K of cycling hardcore fans. Many wouldn’t even care about the latter. Eurosport tends to be 10% of the open broadcast public.
Another essential issue is whom you’re giving full power on a key segment of your whole production system. Is Discovery-Warner interested in… “the future of cycling”? “The sustainable well-being of the social environment of the sport”? Do they even understand how it works and do they care, or it’s like extracting value when they can, then sell just before everybody notices the toy is broken? Many TVs did care because of political reasons and because of it was a serious middle to long term broad investment for them, even part of their identity (imagine that in Italy it mattered *a lot* when cycling was moved from national public free Rai3 to national public free Rai2). Discovery buys a local product to export, a whole different matter. The sport puts itself in a very risky position which so many other have regretted before (Italian basket, F1 in Italy, MotoGP in Spain… I name markets I know well).
I notice that – in the link you provide – the 2nd favourite contest (after GC) with the public is the polka dot jersey. And yet so few riders and teams seem interested. You would have thought they would be just for the publicity.
I would really hope that Discovery+ would sign up Ned Boulting and David Millar, at the very least. They would be a big improvement to their commentary staff, and they could finally rid of us of Carlton Kirby.
I will not tolerate Kirby slander here. Blasphemy!
If cycling tries to charge too much to its viewers, it will lose most of them. Aside from diehard fans with plenty of spare money, most will baulk at paying a certain amount. Personally, Discovery+ being £7 a month for the 8 months of the cycling season that I’m interested in is getting close to my limit.
Like many in the UK, I discovered cycling via Channel 4’s TdF coverage in the 80s. That won’t happen now, and there is already a lot of competition for viewers. Cycling can only gouge people so much.
That said at least here in Australia the closest parallel would be rugby union which has mostly gone the pay for view model with only few international matches each year on free to air TV. A reasonably well known but not major local sport which has pretty much thrown all chance of gaining supporters down the toilet. Year after year Australian Rugby is less visible and important.
Here in Australia we get the tour “free” on SBS. That is if you put no value on large amounts of adds , large cooking section at the beginning of the broadcast and a desire to play music after each advert break (which i presume they sell on there store). If GCN was still available and was allowed to show the tour here i would pay for it. But i am already someone who is willing to pay. Someone new would never pay. Without GCN om Australia we no longer have any reasonable way to get most races live except the few on SBS. I actually get most of my cycling highlights on youtube.
What’s really perplexing is that Australia has been steadily one of the strongest nations in cycling: since they sort of broke into a “virtual” top-10 of countries at the beginning of this century, they never fell back down again. Of course, the last 3-4 seasons haven’t been as impressing as some 10-15 years ago with Evans, McEwen, Rogers and later Gerrans, but the country is steadily strong with some solid 10 starters at the TDF season after season, Hindley having some great moments, O’Connor too. Vine is an interesting figure to follow and Groves, Matthews or Ewan bring a certain quantity of victories in, although maybe less than expected sometimes. Constant great track success with Olympic medals. Very young Plapp to look forward to with interest. A nationally identified WT team. What’s not to like? Italy would sign for such a situation.
Normally national sporting success brings in popular interest and strong media coverage as a consequence. I recall that racing time zone is an issue, yet it must also be said that there’s a global generalised trend of watching less live and more on demand which could help with that.
Another serendipitous encounter with Channel 4 coverage in 1987 here. Sparked a lifelong interest. Plus far too much money spent on bikes subsequently.
Post GCN (RIP) watching poorly edited Discovery+ highlights that don’t arrive until late in the evening will now be normal all year around rather than just for events outside the Vuelta (disappeared a few years ago from ITV4) and Le Tour.
Also won’t be able to talk about the race with my aged parents anymore.
I quit watching after GCN+ ended – why does discovery want me to pay to watch mostly snooker and skiing when I’m a cycling fan? The live coverage hasn’t worked for me for ages – work meetings coincided with race finishes – so to see races I wanted the on-demand service that GCN offered, not itv4.
I just fired up the Disco+ schedule to see if maybe it’s got better since I chucked it. Cricket, MotoGP. Cycling on for 2 hours total tomorrow (a cx race – not on long enough to cover start to finish – and a highlights package for the same race)
Seriously, Discovery made a choice not to do cycling for cycling fans but to make it a filler sport that might get some drive by eyeballs, do the UCI really think this is doing the sport a service?