The economics of the Tour de France
thehustle.co
thehustle.co
It was considerably less difficult in the 480p analog days.
Here's an older example of the aerial camera work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSmhgOFGl_M
Also the live video feeds from the camera operators that ride pillion on motorcycles chasing the riders. That presents its own unique technical challenge.
France used 576 25i in analog days. And why would analog be any easier than digital? A WMT will give acceptable pictures for this type of shot at about 5mbit which is far less than 8MHz. You can get about 40mbit on an 8MHz channel which gives cracking pictures even at 2160 50p
- Creative business models: L'Auto's original inspiration.
- Routing and right-of-way economics: playing towns off one another for course rights.
- Advertising. - Risks of authoritarian collaboration and/or short-term thinking.
- Winner-take-all (or much: the 1st-place finisher is awarded about 20% of all prize money) economics.
- Business-vs-talent returns: most riders earn minimum wage.
- Patronage/sponsorship models and risks.
- "Buying" success.
- Tradition and mythology vs. business.
Where so you get this from?
There is a mandated minimum that is around the median salary of my country, so much higher than minimum wage of most countries.
New young riders in the UCI Pro Tour level reportedly get a fair bit more than the minimum, on the Tour they are not usually fielding a more experienced team and earn more. If they prove themselves the earnings go up fast.
Cycling pays little compared to basketball, football etc. but they are well paid compared to the general population at Tour level.
You might have a hard time living in say California on that wage but in parts of rural Europe you could get by comfortably. You definitely could in Michigan.
Plus federal income, FICA, state income, sales taxes, and Michigan’s famously high car insurance prices? Add on saving for retirement / emergency healthcare expenses.
Doesn’t leave much for a comfortable day to day life, especially if you have or intend to support a family.
Private Insurance is there to prevent you from losing your home or racking up a massive debt, not pay for every single medical expense.
The point is $35k per year gives you no breathing room, and certainly doesn’t quality as comfortable. Even for single young people in great health, they can’t build any wealth and they will lose whatever they do get due to various health/auto/etc issues that come up.
A significant minority of the insured (and close to a majority, in the Bay Area) have HMOs, which are mostly no-deductible.
If they're 22 and married with two kids with their partner not working yes it would be tough. However the average income in Detroit is less than $30,000.
I do think income inequality is a problem, however.
Most of the world has been occupied or has had wars fought on its territory in the past 150 years. Most of the world lives in a country that has a neighboring country of similar heft, and usually much bigger, that interferes with local politics much more than the US has ever had foreign intervention. Most of the world lives in a country which isn't basically an entire continent's worth of resources. Most of the world doesn't live in a country where per capita incomes are among the top 10% in the world and the middle + upper classes are 200+ million strong.
I lived in Africa a couple years as well, and Americans have such a distorted sense of what poverty is. Travel to other places and gain some perspective.
They better do. Professional cycling is a dangerous sport. This year, stage 1 saw a crash of 30-ish riders that broke a rider’s kneecap (he finished the stage, but didn’t start for stage 2), the thigh bone of another (happened so close to the finish line that he would be allowed to start stage 2, but he didn’t), broke a few ribs of and gave a pulmonary contusion to a third rider (he is still in the race, and hopes to contribute to his team’s success in the later stages), gave a fourth one an elbow injury (he hit a spectator taking a photograph. He tried staying in the race for about a week, but eventually retired)
There also already were a few broken collarbones in week 1. Add in a zillion abrasions.
Seen in that light, $35,000 isn't much.
For the major US pro sports, some or all of their draft is from colleges in order to encourage post-secondary education and leave players with more options after their career. I'm not sure how many pro cyclists do college, but I knew some folks when I went to college who were fairly high amateur and I believe looking to go pro.
The first few individual finishers would do okay for themselves — but bottom-tier finishers would make more working in retail for 3 weeks than racing in one of the most prestigious cycling races in the world
> ... riders must formulate their Tour de France strategy around maximizing visibility for sponsors.
> Winning the tour is fantastic — but not necessary — for brand exposure. Often, you’ll see lesser-known riders break away from the pack to give sponsors media time, even if it isn’t technically the best thing to do.
> “The entire Tour is about getting eyes on the company on your jersey,” an ex-pro who wished to remain anonymous told us.
Trek at the time and their legal department caused millions of dollars of damages to Greg LeMond and his bike business he had licensed to trek. It turns out LeMond was speaking the honest factual truth all along about what an absolutely terrible human being Armstrong was. All later admitted by Armstrong, and by members of the former US Postal team in sworn depositions.
> "for years, Greg LeMond has done and said things that have damaged the LeMond brand and the Trek brand as a whole"[1]
Given that they regarded LeMond's whistle blowing as against what Trek stands for you have to ask your self, what does Trek stand for?
1. https://web.archive.org/web/20120609190914/http://www.trekbi...
Trek also managed to take the brand name licensed to them by one of the people who can reasonably lay claim to the title of "inventor of the mountain bike", Gary Fisher, and run it into the ground.
Other major brands are almost as bad. Giant was the sponsor for the T-Mobile team of the late 1990s and early to mid 2000s in the Jan Ullrich era, which was just as rife with organized doping. They knew full well about the doping allegations (also all later proven and admitted by the team members once retired) and did nothing as long as the financial figures looked good.
Every single sponsor of the uci protour teams from 1990 to about 2015 knew how absolutely ingrained systemic doping and cheating was, and continued to funnel money into the western European Continental cycling races and team corporations.
3 hours of traffic and waiting ...
And then the anticipation ...
The 'zoom ... zoom zoom zoom' - in 1 minute it's over. That's it.
On the last leg in Paris, you get 5x that, but still.
It's nice to see once but 'paying' for so many reasons is out of the question.
Nice to see a newspaper find a way out of the scourge ...
If it isn't a spectator sport... why do you have to wait in traffic to get to it?
Seems like a 'nobody goes there it's too busy' sort of argument?
No one goes to the Kentuky Derby to watch the horses run for 90 seconds - that's much better done on TV.
So... it's a spectator sport?
Its 3 hours of 'prep' because the courses are usually way out there, way far away from anything, and near the route traffic is upside down, maybe there is parking maybe there is none, nobody knows.
It doesn't happen at a 'venue' that's designed for sport, it happens out there in the French boondocks.
So you make a day of it ie sightseeing.
It's an excuse to get out and see the country.
Such climbs often are over the only decent roads up the mountain, and those roads will be closed down an hour or so before the riders arrive.
There also will be competition for the best spots (in the outside of corners, where you can overlook the road)
Because of that, for many, it’s easily 3 hours of (traffic and waiting), even ignoring traffic time. But that need not be bad. You bring food and drink, sit in nice weather (hopefully), and watch the stage on tv.
On flat terrain in the middle of a stage you might be able to just park up and wait for 30 minutes but you’d also be missing the spectacle surrounding the race itself.
Because someone's closed a bunch of roads :)
Seriously though: You can sell tickets at the starting and finishing lines, or by putting a loop in the course and sending the riders past the spectators 10 times.
But for the rest of the course, the riders will shoot past in a few seconds.
Look at this density of spectators: https://youtu.be/2ytb_ajLCFw?t=160
You can't sell a 'party atmosphere' or pad the entertainment out with dancers and marching bands and food trucks because the spectators are spread out over the entire course.
And even if you decided to charge for tickets despite that - the course isn't fenced off, so people without tickets can just walk in. And if you added fences and bouncers checking tickets, you'd need loads of them because the course is far too long to funnel everyone through a single entrance like a music festival does. And even if the fences and bouncers somehow made economic sense, you've gone from blocking a section of road for an hour as the race goes past to blocking it for a day or two as the fences get built.
Ciclocross is different. They have as much as 100k paying people (on venue) in the Netherlands and in Belgium. It's also great to be able to move around the track and see the cyclists in different spots. Probably this is possible only in smaller events. I have experience of races in Italy.
MTB, no direct experience. Looks great on TV and YouTube.
And if all cycling would go on pay TV, goodbye. I'll be a little sad but I'll look at something else. I'll keep cycling tough.
Bike racing? As you say, it’s hours if not days of effort and travel, for about five minutes of seeing the riders zoom past. Motorsport? At least they’re on a circuit and go past lots of times, but it’s actually very hard to have a tactical appreciation of what’s going on from the side of a track. Sports within a stadium (for example soccer, cricket) are better, but it’s still very hard to have a decent appreciation of what’s going on second to second, versus a decent TV presentation. Small court sports (e.g. basketball, tennis, badminton, etc.) are probably the best but there you are very dependent on the quality of the seating position you purchase.
But... this ignores the enjoyment of the travel and being present at the event. Yes, you get a much better appreciation of the racing watching the Le Mans 24 hour race (or indeed a TdF stage) on TV. But travelling, camping, barbecuing, partying, experiencing the event, with friends? That’s a life experience that far transcends enjoyment of the sport of self.
Basically the race and teams ownership are separate. As a result you have a few big teams and the rest scrambling for pennies
Some teams have tried to access the viewing money but the lack of solidarity amongst teams has failed. Also the owners of the tdf own a lot of the big races
This isn't a problem per se. For example, this is how it works in football in most countries and I think most people would agree that football would be enhanced by following a US cartel system.
A distribution of money would also allow money to develop woman's cycling and the sport globally
It's been tried by Oleg tinkov and Jonathan vaughters. Ultimately tinkov left the sport
The fans: yes, the obscure & filthy rich owners of the big teams would not.
I would give my left arm when we would equalise the playing field where it comes to signing football players.
https://cyclingtips.com/2016/08/when-the-post-tour-crits-don...
In terms of the economics of these races, they are much better spectator events as they take the form of laps around the centre of a small city. The audiences still doesn't pay, but it's much easier to go watch- so the city will pay the race organiser, both to put their city on the map and for the economic benefit of all the food and drinks the spectators buy, often from stalls or trucks that have paid the city for a license...
http://www.alpsandes.com/posts/2016/7/28/jurgenmettepenninge...
Another possibility could be an organized coup by the 2nd place team, then it essentially becomes a team time trial between 2nd and 1st place teams, while the rest of the peloton is battling for the sprint victory. Unlikely but not impossible.
Flat tire or some massive crash in the last km or so might happen, of course, but I think it never did (or at least never influenced overall podium standings).
If the last stage was mountainous or a time trial, perhaps. But it hasn’t been in a long time (or ever?)
Also, I don’t think a guaranteed banking of the second place cheque would ever prevent a rider from going for first. These guys want to win, not make a few extra euros.
1989[1] is the most famous.
The difference in energy required to ride on the front of a small break away vs in the middle of a peloton can be as high as 50% on a flat stage.
Given that, realistically what would happen if you attack on the last flat day is that the peloton would just follow you and wait for you to tire yourself out.
The domestiques on the front of the peloton can we swapped over time to give them a rest so that the peloton never slows and in fact increase its speed over time.
This is why the sprinter's teams almost always catch the breakaways and why the beakaways are allowed to go up the road in the first place.
Sometimes the peloton gets the sums wrong or doesn't factor in the affects of the wind and the break succeeds but not very often. By the last day of the Tour the leader can have minutes on second place so the chances of them making that up in a break are pretty small.
Aerodynamic inefficiencies and tradeoffs are one of the things that make cycling such an interesting spectator sport for TV.