How the Tour de France became a $100M business
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Fangirls ref: https://airmail.news/issues/2023-5-27/girls-just-want-to-f1 [subscriber only]
DTS was a big part of the F1 rise in the states, but it is but one part of the story. Things really started to change when Liberty Media acquired F1 and brought in new management. F1 needed to make the sport more accessible by opening up on social media, giving away broadcast rights to ESPN, adding more race weekends both in the States and abroad, and of course (re)introducing the sport to many via Netflix. Which is all to say that there was a full on effort and strategy by the sport to change with the times.
Italy is as good as dead when it comes to pro-Cycling, the same goes for Spain, and France... France is always on the edge of the precipice and of “we’ll never ever going to win La Grande Boucle again! Long live Hinault and Virenque!”, so I’m not so sure about them.
Long story short, the big cycling money is in the Anglo countries, I’m sure California-based clients alone purchase more professional bikes in a year compared to the whole of Europe. And that’s good for Californians.
At some point they'll embrace the 21st century and have real contenders again
It's true that a race from the TdF won't be in the US, but I don't believe there's anything other than a lack of interest stopping UCI from having a 3 week race inside the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Least_Expected_Day:_Inside...
For me, constantly seeing /r/formula1 in my feed was an inciting factor for me. F1 also did well to adjust race durations to make them short and sweet.
Lastly, the variety of locations is extremely interesting to me. F1 is one of the few global sports.
Sold.
Edited now that I started watching it: Narrated by Jon Hamm. about 40 minutes long.
Half-way in: I'm suddenly realizing this is made for americans with the express purpose to excuse Lance Armstrong ("because everyone else is also doing drugs"). It's still funny though.
Lance Armstrong: "It was like a pistachio nut in a dirty bird's nest."
Buahaha. A truly great obscene movie.
Naturally, modern tech—smaller cameras, better microwave links and television drones etc. have helped enormously but even so it's a huge credit to all those involved.
I have been watching Grand Tours since I was a kid; watching together with my dad was our family ritual and I am emotionally attached to it. However, this year I was a bit busy and I did not watch Giro d'Italia. But I found time to watch content made by NorCal Cycling and The Vegan Cyclist.
I know live-streaming a huge event like Tour de France is not comparable to making videos about a personal experience and publishing them after the race. But GoPros and drones made possible videos like [1] - as a cycling fan, I find that really exciting. A talented filmmaker and storyteller (like The Vegan Cyclist, in my opinion) can make a lot of bang for the buck with them. And what is especially enticing about this kind of content is the experience of "being inside" - personal attachment to the protagonist and a lot of footage from within the peloton. And pro cycling is not very good at it yet.
Maybe that was the hole the Netflix documentary was trying to patch? I have not seen it yet. I have seen the first two seasons of "The Least Expected Day: Inside the Movistar Team" and I think that was a good idea, although they should hire someone like The Vegan Cyclist to make it interesting (BTW, I have no affiliation to the guy).
It might seem crazy that I see events like Tour de France competing with "amateurs" but those amateurs might be able to attract a lot of attention for a dollar and I already see some money going in - like The Vegan Cyclist being sponsored by Canyon and a bunch of other companies.
Moreover, their interests often turn professional and when they do they're usually good professionals because their work is more than just a job.
My interest in television started much earlier than before I was professionally involved in TV, it grew out of an interest in electronics as a kid which I did as a hobby, this developed and that became one of my professions.
I do have one concern however, amateur interests, sports and others often risk becoming too big. When that happens big money usually gets involved and that can ruin the amateur status for all but a few elites at the top. We've seen this in the Olympics, football, etc.
As of today, it is finally easily available cheaply via streaming.
- Peacock TV streaming service which is $5 a month (I got a $20 annual plan deal a few weeks before TdF)
- GCN+ Streaming service which is $8 a month (or $50 a year)
The GCN stream is available globally. I think it is also available on France24 and Sky Sports' streaming app.
If this feels like bad distribution to those reading this, you have no idea how far we have come. TdF used to be on very obscure cable channels only, like Outdoor Network that required very premium satellite plans as it was only included as a specialty channel and not available via many cable or satellite providers, making it entirely inaccessible to most people.
NBC eventually moved it to NBC Sports, which made it better. It was available through almost all providers now and available on more basic packages.
We finally got our first streaming options (meaning you didn't need to have a cable/sattelite subscription) about 6 or so years ago, but it was on a terrible app that had terrible infrastructure and it cost $80-120 per TdF season!
So with mainstream streaming, it is finally pretty accessible, just not discoverable. If you are looking to watch it, you can get it. It's also finally cheap enough for more people to justify it without needing to be a mega-fan. Again, on peacock it is only $5 a month. If you sign up and cancel immediately starting and following the TdF you can watch it all in one billing cycle. So that's pretty fair.
Also, to NBC's credit, they are trying to make it more accessible. The first stage was actually on the main NBC channel, which I think is a first. Stages 2-7 have been on USA Network, which is on all basic cable packages. Stages 8+ now require Peacock. It's obviously not perfect, but progress deserves to be recognized!
It's great to get them but unfortunately they haven't bothered to edit them in a dramatic way. It is literally just splicing together the 5 hour feed, so it makes for some choppy viewing. You don't really get the "gist" of the stage unless you pay really close attention.
Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSpycUnuU0IVF7gGIhGojhg
Yesterday's (Stage 7; 8 will probably drop in an hour or so): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMpFcgyXl8s&list=PLg3WzTG3Lf...
I can see myself having a subscription just to have Tour de France running in the background while I'm working, had I thought about it and if I had an extra monitor or TV in the office.
I think it has to do with the cost of the various right for different events in each country, and purchasing power. It's really an area where the EU has absolutely failed, licensing of content should be union wide, but in reality it's still country by country. That might be a good thing, because €135 is a hell of a lot more in Hungary, compared to Denmark.
Don't get me wrong, 999DKK is actually a pretty good deal. I'm not into sports in general, I only watch Tour de France, rowing and a few winter sports, but 999DKK is actually within what I'd pay for that.
It doesn't look like you can get Eurosport as a standalone subscription.
please name some?
My grand parents when they were still alive absolutely loved the Tour de France. They'd be glued to the radio and later the TV for three weeks in a row while it happened every year. It was a very commercial event even in the seventies and eighties. The the whole circus would plow its way across France in that time and there would be heroes, drama, falls, etc. These days it has to compete with the day to day madness elsewhere and it's just not the same anymore.
But I have good memories watching men like Lance Armstrong, Miguel Indurain, Greg Lemond, etc. do their thing on some mountain top. Just the brutality of them crushing their opponents and leaving them behind driving uphill on the fifth mountain of the day after a grueling 200km bike ride is amazing to watch. Never mind they were more than a bit chemically and bionically enhanced. It was the closest thing to super human performance you could watch outside of the cinemas.
That's kind of the problem, right? The tour was (is?) set up in such a way that you practically need to be "super human" – even by professional athlete standards – to even finish it. This is different from, say, the 100M dash or even a marathon which anyone can finish with a bit of training, and you only need to be "super human" to set world records.
IIRC, his resting heart rate was 25. The average human heart at rest pumps ~5 L/min, so his was pushing out ~200 mL/beat. According to the story, his wife wouldn't sleep in the same bed as him because his heart shook the bed so much every time it beat.
Since the stroke volume of the heart is more or less fixed in the short term, the fact that he could meet his needs at such a low heart rate indicated that his maximum cardiac output was in the neighborhood of 35 L/min (max heart rate 175 x 200 mL/beat, he could probably get his rate higher but the heart would not fill completely and so stroke volume would be a bit less).
I have no way to know if this was true, but he wasn't known for exaggerating.
It’s an unfortunate truth about professional road cycling. But with the generation of cyclists you mention, there was an unintended consequence on U.S. culture at least. There were a lot of people who, inspired by the narrative and excitement, got off the sofa and onto the roads. I rode avidly with a number of people who began serious cycling in those days.
The whole sordid Epo affair is unfortunate; but through a combination of a winning (albeit false) story and the all-too-human tendency to suspend disbelief, a lot of common joes benefited in this way.
Instead of what? All elite athletes are on the juice.
Artickle: ...one of the world’s most challenging....
It's almost as if the headline needs clarification.
*Aside: just wondering how Orica Greenedge(!) enjoyed the Yates's 1, 2.
The cycling establishment refuses to allow equality for women. The women's Tour didn't even exist before 2022. The current women's tour is a pale shadow of the men's. The women are not allowed to ride the same tour, they can only do 8 stages and almost none of the 8 correspond to the men's race (they're 50-100km shorter). The 2023 women's edition got one time trial and one mountain stage. It's pathetic.
The entire UCI behaves like it's the year 1800. There's a written rule that women are not allowed to race the same distances and times as men. It doesn't matter that they can. It doesn't matter that they want to. It doesn't matter if they raise the money to. The rule is, women must be inferior to men in cycling. It's just like with marathon running, you literally have older men in power holding women back for no reason at all.
Women just want to cycle. They aren't demanding the same rewards or the same prize money. They just want to ride the same race! Why wouldn't we allow that? There's pretty good evidence that women are actually better endurance athletes than men. I wonder if one day we'll see the Women's Tour actually beat out the men's.
PS: Someone in a reply said that clearly women can't do this. We know women can. And they can even beat men at it!
Take the RAAM (Race Across America, a gruelling almost 3000 mile race, nearly 5000km). Women are allowed to join in. This is even longer than the Tour. Not only have many women finished RAAM, in Leah Goldstein actually won. Not the women's category. The race outright. Period.
Or the Transcontinental Race (TRC, similar to RAAM but across Europe and without a support team, between 3000-4000km depending on the year). Not only have many women participated and completed it, in 2019 a Fiona Kolbinger won. And again, not the women's category. She won the 10 day race beating out the best man by 10 hours!
They could indeed open the race to anyone so that both men and women could compete in the race, but then women would trail men and have no chance of winning. This means they would also have to impose a number of women per team as otherwise no team would hire women.
So it's not a simple issue.
But to play devils advocate:
There has been a women's Tour de France for a while. It existed between 1984 and 2009. It struggled financially that whole time and was never profitable to the UCI. They canceled it in 2009 and brought it back in 2014 through 2021 as a single day event in Paris on the same days as the men's final day.
The UCI was been exploring bringing back a multi-stage women's event for at least the past several years but they had been unable to nail down a title sponsor. Apparently Skoda (the primary men's sponsor) was in early negotiations to sponsor it in 2020, for the 2021 season but then dropped out because of COVID uncertainty.
The break last year finally came because of Zwift (who financially performed well during Covid) offered to sponsor the event as a title sponsor. NBC did a lot to support and promote them as well. So we are seeing progress.
There was a lot of criticism around it only being 8 stages compared to the 24 of the mens, but most of the women actually said 8 stages was plenty because that is larger than any of their other tours (I think tied with Giro d'italia).
Progress is happening is my point.
With that being said, yes there is significant sexism still prominent in all sports, and cycling too.
The UCI is following the money, and to their credit they have been honest about that. They have routinely said, there isn't enough money in the women's sports and that's why they don't pursue it.
What we need is for the UCI to recognize the potential in women's cycling and to invest in it, knowing it might not be immediately profitable, but that over time it will gain popularity like the men's events and become profitable for them. Luckily Zwift seems to be willing to take this role for now. Time will tell. But the good news is that TdF Femmes (women's) is back for 2023. So maybe we at the beginning of what will eventually lead to a happy ending.
[0] https://www.cyclingweekly.com/racing/more-exciting-when-its-...
Taking the Tourmalet (one of the recent climbs on the TDF) at Strava [https://www.strava.com/segments/4951896], the fastest time for men was 47 minutes while the fastest time for women was 56 minutes.
Women do a shorter race because they are slower over the same distance.
TdF is too commercial but it's still nice, even with the doping scandals in the not so distant past. Check out last year's womens' Paris Roubaix documentary on YT. I think Specialized paid for it, my memory is a bit foggy.
Also encourage the women around you to pick up cycling, even for the sake of keeping in shape. It's quite rewarding and also helps a lot mentally. While cycling through the forest, I met a woman walking her dog and asked for directions. She was quite happy to chat and she also told me she stopped riding the bike after an accident she had. I encouraged her to try again and told her I had several accidents myself, but there is still much to gain from cycling after getting over trauma.
Even though women compete in races like RAAM (Race Across America, ~5000km) and the Transcontinental Race (TCR, ~3500km) and have actually beaten the men at them. Those aren't UCI races because they wouldn't be allowed to join if they were.
In my experience, very few of the women racing actually want longer distances. When I was involved with putting on races, one or two loud voices would advocate for it, but come the day of the event, races that were equal length in the pro/cat 1 fields would have dismal attendance if they were the same length as the pro/cat 1 men's fields. Of those that did show up, the abandon rate was much higher than normal for those same local fields at other races. We even went as far as surveying all the teams and racers before one stage race, and overwhelmingly the women did not want the men's length (for road races) and times (for criteriums). Admittedly, at the pro-tour level this might be different, but to get to the pro tour level, racers must start in amateur and local pro levels.
We mandated equal pay outs at the state level, and some races dropped off the calendar because their budgets couldn't support it (or lowered men's payouts to compensate). Those that didn't saw no increase in attendance in women's fields after the increase either. That wasn't really a surprise, as most people are motivated more by the racing itself than some payout until you get to pro-tour levels. Men and women both effectively pay for the privilege to race in all but the most elite fields. More than being sexist, cycling is incredibly classist. The equipment is obscenely expensive, and the time it takes to train and get better is out of reach for most people with "normal" jobs. The funnel of junior racers coming in decreases every year, and the only fields we see growth in are masters categories (who can actually afford to race).
That's not exactly true, there has been many variation of it before its return in 2022.
Jeannie Longo was (is?) a quite popular rider in France (despite doping affairs).
The history is somewhat more complicated, but not less sexist. "Tour de France Femmes" has only existed since 2022.
You're right that there were other races, some officially related to the Tour, some unofficially related. There was the 1955 women's tour and the 1984-1990 tours which kept getting shorter because the owner of the Tour did not want to include women. Eventually they killed off the format and organizers weren't even allowed to stage their own. There were basically bootleg races under a different name (The Grande Boucle) in the 90s and early 2000s.
This messy history underscores one thing: women just want equality with men. Just let them ride the same race.
In motorsports (like the "24 hours of Le Mans" for example), we see organizers running multiple races at the same time. We have hypercars racing at the same time on the track as the GT3 cars. hell, this year they even let Nascar run a car in its own class along side the other cars.
In my example the results are still separated. The hypercars aren't competing against the GT3 cars, they are just all riding the same organized event. The commentators routinely rotate through the event to capitalize on viewers watching to see all of the events. This way the governing body gets the best of all worlds. They only have to host 1 event, but they get entry fees for hundreds of participants across many classifications. Those offering coverage can pool together people that might be interested in several different classifications and only have to pay for the expenses of one broadcast, while pooling together all of the viewers for maximum ad revenue. It is also good, because smaller classifications (like the single-car Nascar entry) can compete on the same track and same event to bolster interest in their sport. Everybody wins!
I don't know why the UCI doesn't do the same thing. Let the women and the men race together. They could still have different classifications if they wanted to, but they would only need to support 1 event. The television coverage is already there and it might bring in new viewers that are interested in a women's event, which bolsters ad and sponsorship revenues. Furthermore they can get more entree fees from teams, to further support the costs of the event. It has to be far cheaper than trying to run two events, while also getting better coverage and interest.
Also spectators would have to follow two races at the same time?