Key Takeaways:
● Even ASO’s Route Designers Can’t Defeat Pogacar
● Heat-Forced Changes Reveal Cycling’s Key Weaknesses
● Excess Talent Concentration = Effective “Salary Cap”
● Initial Tour Viewership Figures Decline
● Mainstream Media Shifts Towards Sports Coverage
● Courtney Signs with FDJ
Tour de France organizers publicly admitted that this year’s route was specifically designed to limit Tadej Pogacar’s early dominance and ensure that the GC remained undecided until the final stages – but it seems no one told Pogačar. He has been at or near the front every day, and exerted his will over the Col du Tourmalet and the race’s pretenders on stage 6. Pogačar has already built a dominant near three-minute lead over Jonas Vingegaard and most observers concede that – short of a crash or illness – the race is already over. In fact, course designer Thierry Gouvenou tacitly admitted that Pogačar is so strong that there is probably no route that can be designed which will really stop him. And the race for second place might be over as well, with Vingegaard showing a grit and determination that, in any other era, would have already won him several more Tours than the two he already has under his belt.
Thus, the big question going into the second week may be who will fill that third step on the podium. Pogačar’s teammate Isaac del Toro currently sits in third but is only seconds ahead of established contenders like Remco Evenepoel, Florian Lipowitz, Juan Ayuso, and rising French sensation Paul Seixas. Both Del Toro and Seixas are making their Tour debut, and both rode the first week with a composure that suggests the real challenge to Pogačar will eventually come not from Vingegaard but from the generation that grew up studying him. The only question is when? Pogačar is a worthy champion and any previous hesitations about referring to him as the greatest rider ever are quickly dissolving away. But with each passing race, it also becomes clearer cycling has an emerging marketing and promotion problem – if everyone assumes (often correctly) that Pogačar will simply win every race he enters.
The stifling heat wave in Europe finally provoked a safety-related change as the race snaked through the Massif Central in temperatures consistently above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. While positively received, the shortened stage illuminated two glaring problems in pro cycling that extend well beyond just the Tour de France. First, it was the French departmental government which forced the course change on Tour organizer ASO – not the good governance of the race organization itself, the UCI or SafeR (the UCI working group focused on race safety). The health and safety of the citizens and visiting fans in the area apparently took higher precedence than the health and safety of the riders, teams, and race entourage. This is a disturbing indictment, and a reminder of the sport’s frequent lapses of common sense and self-preservation.
Yet simultaneously, the curtailed stage 9 produced one of the Tour’s most exciting stages in several years. The tighter parcours created ideal conditions for blitzkrieg breakaways and a thrilling near chase-down uphill sprint finish with a popular winner. Thus, on a single fortuitous day, forces outside of the ASO and the UCI managed to successfully “trial” one of the sport’s key proposed stage race reforms – shorter stages that reduce the smothering control of super-teams and encourage open tactics. Whether a formal sport-wide change around this racing philosophy would translate into increased fan interest remains to be seen – but it clearly underlines the fact that the sport’s tradition of endless stalemate kilometers and unnecessary suffering doesn’t make the grade as a modern sports entertainment product anymore: shorter is better for television.
Other than the dangerous heat, stifling team tactics, and the continued dominance of a single rider, another main topic of conversation around the Tour has been its economics. While the sport continues to struggle with fractured distribution channels and an emerging realignment of key players (Flanders Classics’ excellent execution of a revamped and compact Tour du Suisse, for example) cycling remains inevitably transfixed on the mid-season Tour de France. While we can celebrate this three-week “moment” for its viewership and financial benefits, those impacts may not always be quite what they seem. Viewership is down again – more on that below. Broadcast channel paywall and subscription constraints outside of cycling’s core European market has lowered the viewership ceiling, while penetration into the world’s more profitable North American and Asian sports viewing markets continues to struggle – in terms of availability, access and cost. And in the U.S. market, there is a rising concern among U.S. viewers that they are paying for a stale product – one which is in desperate need of broadcast innovation and new personalities just to maintain current levels of interest, let alone attract new fans.
Initial figures for Tour viewership once again appear to be declining, according to our colleague and cycling TV economics expert, Professor Daam van Reeth. In a brief and preliminary post this week after six stages of the race, van Reeth estimated a four percent decline across six key European markets. This is part of an expected “see-saw” effect, in which cycling viewership tends to be down slightly during years which also feature a summer Olympics or FIFA World Cup (which we surmised would eat into Tour interest in last week’s AIRmail). On the other hand, the extreme weather which most of Europe has been experiencing would suggest that more people would be staying inside and watching television. The figures for Spain were up, as might be expected given the race’s start in Barcelona. But the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy were sharply down. It will be interesting to see how these trends unfold over the course of the full three weeks of racing, particularly as the World Cup wraps up and temperatures presumably return to a more “normal” state.
Last week saw a public conflict emerge between Evenepoel and Lipowitz within the Red Bull-BORA-Hansgrohe team. Following stage 6, Evenepoel had an emotional outburst in front of the Belgian media, declaring his anger that Lipowitz had apparently refused to give him – as the team’s best-placed rider – a lead-out into the finish line in Gavarnie-Gedre. This could have provided him with a time bonus and important gains in the overall GC battle. This spat uncomfortably highlighted the problem in bringing two more or less co-equal leaders to a race; if there’s not a pre-established hierarchy between the top riders, it seems inevitable that this sort of conflict may emerge. (We’re immediately reminded of the famously documented civil war between teammates Greg LeMond and Bernard Hinault in the 1986 Tour – captured in the Slaying the Badger book and film, as well as the infamous 1987 Giro d’Italia battle between teammates Stephen Roche and Roberto Visentini.)
Interestingly, Evenepoel and Lipowitz stand in stark contrast with the cooperative pairing of Tadej Pogaçar and Isaac Del Toro on the UAE team. In that case, even though Del Toro also seems potentially able to win the Tour, Pogacar is clearly the team leader, and Del Toro understands and executes his role as a support rider. A team management strategy of making these responsibilities clear seems infinitely more desirable than placing two top riders in the middle of the Tour’s pressure-cooker to battle it out for team leadership instead of the GC. After their huge off-season spending spree, it’s not clear that Red Bull even has a specific race strategy for the Tour.
This kind of public spat is never good for the sport, but in a more subtle way it may effectively function as a sort of equalizer or informal “salary cap” trigger. When a single team begins to collect too many top stars – as many allege UAE has done – it is likely to eventually run into these types of internal problems and conflicts. While the team manager might love to have three or four top stars on the team, the riders themselves are bound to eventually become unhappy if they have to serve their peers rather than compete for their own career-defining victories. Hence, this sort of potential for internal conflict may roughly function in the same way that a salary cap would – effectively preventing a single rich team or team from hoarding too much talent. Spending huge amounts of money on competing talent and then failing to manage it properly seems like a rookie management mistake.
Seen from this light, UAE, Visma or Red Bull would be smart not to spend too much time and money trying to sign top riders like French wunderkind Paul Seixas – a talent who’d immediately demand a starring role. UAE has arguably already veered into this territory of trying to buy up too much talent, with the Juan Ayuso departure last year. Del Toro will clearly want his chance to shine before too long, but thus far he is happy to sit in Pogacar’s shadow. The lesson seems clear: at major races like the Tour de France there really is only room for one leader, or patron, per team.
The number of mainstream media outlets refocusing on sports coverage continues to increase, as we noted a couple weeks ago. Not only did Vanity Fair recently publish an entire issue dedicated to sports figures, now the global political newsroom POLITICO seems to be jumping into the market; more and more outlets recognize the drawing power of sports coverage even if this wasn’t a prior topic in their genre. As recently noted by Front Office Sports, CNN has reportedly hired several new sports reporters. Even the venerable New Yorker magazine published two different covers during the month of June, celebrating the city’s Knicks basketball team and their wildly-supported run to the NBA finals. “We’re in the golden age of sports storytelling,” says Jeff Fellenzer, a USC professor of sports, business, and media. “There aren’t enough days left in the history of the universe to cover all of the stories in sports.” But not every publication is trending in this direction; the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post just eliminated its sports section altogether.
It was announced this weekend that Kate Courtney is joining the FDJ United-Suez WWT team effective immediately. Courtney is one of the most popular and versatile bike racers in the United States, with a pedigree that includes multiple MTB World Championships, an Olympic team and many gravel races. Speculation had been growing that she’d sign for a European road team after winning the U.S. Pro Road Championships in West Virginia earlier this summer, as such a move would allow her to earn UCI points and race reps in an attempt to qualify for the LA28 Olympic road team. Hence, the signing was not unexpected; it was only a matter of which team might grab her. With a large Instagram following, a popular blog, and her own foundation, Courtney is a potentially huge marketing asset for Specialized, her new road bike sponsor. While her race schedule is no doubt still coming into focus, the team already has Courtney entered in a pair of French UCI 1.1 races followed by her first World Tour road race, the Lloyd’s Tour of Britain. Presumably, she’d then be part of the U.S. team for the UCI road worlds in Montreal in September.
Too bad for Allied bikes who just lost one of their star athletes. But good for Kate though and that road nats win was impressive.