Jumbo-Visma Sets a High Bar; But How Will the Team Race in Week 3? Cable TV and the Impact on Sports; AVV's Legacy; Gravel and Alternative Racing; The Future for Women's Sports
Key Takeaways:
● Sepp Kuss Headed to Unlikely but Well-Deserved Victory?
● Jumbo-Visma Setting a New Bar for the Sport
● Collapsing Cable TV – and Its Impact on Sports
● The Legacy of Annemiek Van Vleuten
● Gravel Championships and the Tour Divide
● After World Cup, A Bright Future Foreseen for Women’s Sports
Jumbo-Visma’s 28-year-old American climbing specialist, Sepp Kuss, holds a surprisingly strong lead on the Vuelta’s final rest day, entering the closing stages with an almost two-minute lead over teammates Primož Roglič and Jonas Vingegaard, and with the closest rider who isn’t one of his Jumbo teammates being Juan Ayuso at 2’37 back. Of course, anything can happen in a grand tour (and it often has so far at this Vuelta), but with the remainder of the race leaning heavily towards Kuss's climbing strengths, it is looking more and more likely that he could hold on to become the first American since Chris Horner at the 2013 Vuelta to win a grand tour – something no one foresaw at the outset of the race. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the final week will be how the internal team dynamics of Jumbo play out; will Roglič and Vingegaard ride for their popular and loyal teammate – who has been of invaluable assistance to both in prior grand tour victories, or will we see a breakdown of cooperation and competition within the team? This will give us some great insights about the future of the current Jumbo-Visma “dynasty.”
The fact that Kuss’ Jumbo-Visma team is on the verge of a historic sweep of all three 2023 grand tours, as well as the three podium spots at the Vuelta is a testament to the strategic vision of team leader Richard Plugge. As we have detailed in the past, Plugge took over a struggling Rabobank team in 2012 and has transformed it from a struggling and scandal-ridden team to an historically great organization, mostly with a relatively modest budget and thoughtful roster construction and rider development. For example, the team’s talent scouts found and signed all three of the current Vuelta leaders when they were unknown riders that weren't recruited by any other first division teams and have nurtured their careers as they have evolved into stars. For comparison, during the same rough time period, the sport’s former dominant team, Ineos, was winning bidding wars with other outfits to sign the sport’s supposed GC superstars of the future (e.g., Mikel Landa, Leopold König, Iván Sosa, Pavel Sivakov), but failed to develop any of these highly-touted talents into grand tour winners. Although Jumbo-Visma has gradually developed one of the larger budgets in the peloton, its trajectory once again shows that money isn’t everything in this sport. We’ll have more to say about TJV after we watch the team’s performance and behavior this week.
Jumbo’s success should be seen as a positive model for the sport – but it hasn’t stopped grumbling across the sport and in the media about the team’s dominance. Predictably, parallels are being drawn to earlier Team Sky iterations – which dominated grand tours with their heavy-handed and dull tactics, along with questionable medical ethics. Some, like the now-discredited former French pro and team manager Jérôme Pineau, reactively questioned if the team’s 1-2-3 finish on the queen stage was the result of motor doping. Obviously, without any kind of proof, these types of accusations are useless, indeed irresponsible – and they also overlook the facts. While it may be shocking for some to see Jumbo on the verge of sweeping the final podium, it makes complete sense for those who follow the sport closely; with Soudal-QuickStep’s Remco Evenepoel flaming out of the GC competition in spectacular fashion on Stage 13, Jumbo’s trio are simply better climbers than the rest of the GC “group.” Movistar’s Enric Mas and 20-year-old Juan Ayuso are talented climbers but have never won on a summit against any of the current top GC talents, or even a European stage race at the professional level. But bear in mind that the Jumbo trio finished just seconds ahead of the rest on that Stage 13. Additionally, Kuss’s current GC gap isn’t the result of any particularly spectacular performance, but is rather due to a massive miscalculation on stage 6 by Ineos, Movistar, and Soudal-QuickStep, which basically “gifted” a three minutes-plus breakaway advantage to a dangerous rider.
A late and hard-fought negotiation may have saved the cable business model and reset the power balance in sports content distribution. As we discussed in last week’s AIR, Disney and Charter Communications have been at loggerheads over the fees that the U.S.’s second largest cable subscription provider pays to “the Mouse” for the ESPN sports portfolio and other premium Disney channels. Ultimately, those fees were unprofitable for Charter and other cable platforms, who then charge more to their customers and hasten subscriber exodus to digital-only streaming services. Charter could have jettisoned the sports programming and refocused on value-based core content programming subscriptions – an earthquake that could have massively reshaped the terrestrial broadcast model and content marketplace. However, Disney blinked – it can’t afford to lose the cable distribution pathway due to slow uptake of its Disney+ streaming platform and would face massive revenue shortfalls otherwise. Charter retained the ESPN channels to the benefit of sports fans but dropped a slew of Disney’s niche channels from its packages. Other cable platforms will likely follow Charter’s lead which may lead to more competitive subscription pricing, but we learned two lessons from this broadcast market earthquake: sports are an anchor for customer loyalty, and rumors of “the death of cable TV” are premature.
Nowhere is this cable market more important than in NCAA football, which has quickly entered a new world where licensing rights, athlete rights, and even civil rights have completely upended traditional structures and created new economies. First, the rapid realignment of inter-league college conferences has shattered the legacy regional rivalry model. Well-capitalized and successful football programs are breaking away from outdated and undervalued television deals in their historic conferences to reshape the conference landscape – and much of that new money is coming from the aforementioned ESPN/Disney portfolio. The primary drivers are Division 1 football and basketball, but a side effect is the disruption of other sports in the collegiate landscape, with baseball, track and field, gymnastics, swimming and other programs now faced with larger travel burdens and often at greater frequency when compared to a football team’s one game per week schedule. But with hundreds of millions of dollars on the table for schools that realign into more competitive conferences with guaranteed TV deals, the changes are inevitable.
Rapid growth of Name/Image/Likeness deals that non-professional amateur athletes can strike to earn money during their NCAA careers has helped drive this massive shift in college sports – funds which can be paid to the athlete via powerful university collectives which pool money to attract and retain so-called “blue chip” athletes. We have suggested that the NIL model could be used to fund academic and collegiate level cycling development programs, to expand talent discovery and support underprivileged riders. But much like the strain college realignment is placing on the collegiate sports model, NILs are coming under increased scrutiny for the ways in which the athletes who benefit from them can also be manipulated. Companies which front large amounts of money to a blue chip in exchange for a cut of that athlete’s future earnings are in the spotlight for allegedly taking advantage of, and potentially bankrupting their athlete clients, as in the ongoing case of Gervon Dexter.
At August’s Tour of Scandinavia August Annemiek van Vleuten authored yet another of her textbook GC victories – the last of her illustrious career. While the stage race provided “hometown” favorite Cecilie Uttrup-Ludwig with multiple opportunities for stage wins, van Vleuten came away with the GC win by staying at the front of the pack and profiting from a strong time trial. “AVV” raced at the elite and professional level for 16 seasons, the last ten or so at the very top of the sport. Her first major win was the now defunct La Route de France in 2010, but truly hit the top starting in 2014 with a win in the Belgium Tour (repeated in 2016). Her infamous crash in the 2016 Rio Olympics road race – while leading and in position to win – truly sparked the renaissance that defined the rest of her career. The competitive fire created by that missed opportunity led to a dominant streak of one-day Classics, Grand Tours, and world titles culminating in the 2021 Tokyo time trial gold medal and three straight grand tour wins from 2022 into 2023. But she was also a tactically astute and strong-willed team leader for multiple Dutch international teams, a mentor to younger riders in her trade teams, and a role model. Her professionalism and ability to target races has left an indelible mark on pro cycling for women and men alike, and she leaves the women’s sport better than she found it: stronger teams, a nascent and growing WorldTour landscape, and a host of riders hungry to take up her mantle.
Elsewhere in cycling, the inaugural national gravel championships were held over the weekend, with Keegan Swenson and Lauren Stephens claiming victory. Held in a small town in western Nebraska, the event was by all reports well-organized and a resounding success, with a number of top professionals in attendance. Meanwhile, endurance cyclist extraordinaire Lachlan Morton braved all kinds of elements to set a new record for the 2,670-mile Tour Divide, completing the route in twelve and a half days, and breaking the old record by more than a day. This came just after he raced the Leadville 100 mountain bike race, the six-day Breck Epic and SBT GRVL. Still riding in the colors of the EF Education First team, even though he has pretty much ceased road racing, this was just one more in the list of Morton’s extreme endurance accomplishments – including the GB Duro, Everesting, an unsupported Tour de France, rides to Ukraine, and numerous other unique one-off challenges. We can only hope that EF is paying Morton handsomely, because it often appears that he brings the brand more goodwill, and greater visibility and awareness than the rest of the team combined.
The women’s FIFA World Cup may have recently concluded, but ongoing analyses of its economic, cultural, and policy impacts won’t be fully addressed for several more months. However, the short-term findings have long-term implications for the women’s sports market and the prospects for women athletes throughout the world. First, viewership hit record highs across the world, even when accounting for the antipodean time differences which created difficulties in some markets. The Spain vs. England final was watched by nearly 12 million viewers on BBC’s terrestrial channels and four million on its digital service, while similarly dominating Spain’s RTVE state-run channel with a peak 70% share. The England vs. Australia semifinal held a 90% share in the Aussie market and may have been the exclamation point on the co-host nation’s government green-lighting of nearly $200 million AUS ($128M USD) of investments to boost women’s sports infrastructure in the country. One takeaway from this edition is that the competitiveness exemplified by dominant US Women’s teams of the past has caught up within the rest of the field, and investments like Australia’s will deepen the parity in future Cups. The final global viewership tally hasn’t been published but is estimated to be approximately 2 billion, and once that is made available we would like to see how that breaks out among the other nations – and importantly for cycling, how that spreadsheet and its indications for women’s sport content consumption could inform cycling’s Women’s WorldTour media planning in future years.