O'Connor Set to Lose Red; Broadcast Options Becoming More Confusing; Sean Kelly Weighs in on Doping; WVA Loses Historic Double Opportunity; Concerns re Team Principals in the Broadcast Booth ...

Key Takeaways:

●        O’Connor Losing Battle for Red at Vuelta

●        Sports Broadcast: Ever More Confusing for Viewers

●        Kelly Weighs in on Doping in Cycling

●        Notable Absence of the Sport’s Top Three Riders

●        Van Aert Crashes Out on Vuelta “Double” Opportunity

●        Team Principals in the Broadcast Booth: More Controversy

With the Vuelta a España entering its final week, surprise overall leader Ben O'Connor of Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale holds onto a scant five second lead over second-place Primož Roglič, but faces an upcoming time trial in which it seems certain that Roglič will retake the jersey (if not before). While O’Connor has struggled to keep pace with both Roglič and Enric Mas on every summit finish, he has honored the jersey by hanging on to it ever since his surprise solo win on stage 6. This Vuelta continues to serve up unexpected twists at nearly every turn – and watching O’Connor attempt to maintain his lead as his GC rivals try to pry it away on the final few mountain stages should make for intriguing drama. Despite the “will-he-or-won’t-he” drama through the rest of the race, and in spite of how hard-fought the battles for stage wins has been, it has also been difficult to shake the feeling that this Vuelta is missing a key ingredient: the podium of the most recent Tour – Tadej Pogačar, Jonas Vingegaard, and Remco Evenepoel, each of whom has recently spoiled fans with mind-bending performances. In the absence of this current Big Three, we have been reminded that the advancements in training, nutrition, and tactics used in modern racing mean that the level of parity is so high and margins between competitors so small that virtually anyone except these generationally great riders have to ride conservatively on the hardest mountain stages – because the potential cost of overextending is greater than the potential benefit of aggressive racing.

However, the presence of ultra-aggressive stager hunters – mainly Wout van Aert and the previously unknown Pablo Castrillo – have certainly kept things interesting. Unfortunately, Van Aert, who racked up three stage wins and was primed to win the points jersey and the king of the mountains jersey, abandoned today after a hard crash. His willingness and ability to get into breakaways and chew up the points available on the early climbs should not be overlooked as a factor which set the tone for this edition. It’s another example of “what could have been” in a season marred by crashes – as up until stage 16 Van Aert looked set to be the first rider since José María Jiménez in 2001 to achieve this near-impossible double-jersey win. The 23-year-old Castrillo, despite not having a single professional win to his name at the start of the race, has now won two out of the last five stages and delivered his Equipo Kern Pharma team the crowning achievements of their existence to date. These first major victories for the team, which operates at somewhere around ten percent of the budget of some of the sport’s larger teams, was especially meaningful – as the team’s founder, Manolo Azcona, sadly passed away this week. With the emerging Spaniard’s contract expiring at the end of the year, we can expect a bidding war for his signature. He has already been linked to Ineos, where his results thus far this year would be nearly superior to the expensive team’s entire output this season.

Just when it seemed the sports broadcast market couldn’t get any more confusing for viewers, DirecTV’s deal with Disney to carry ESPN in its programming packages expired on Sunday and cast millions of fans into a content blackout. DirecTV is the third largest subscription carrier brand in the U.S. and has a sizable subscriber base with significant market reach. According to many sources, DirecTV is pushing for smaller bundling options with Disney channels like ESPN that cater more closely to its market needs. Meanwhile, however, Disney is only offering variations of the packages it used to restart cable service delivery with Charter Communications after a similar impasse about a year ago ‒ something DirecTV feels is less valuable in its market today. Most observers see a deal getting hammered out soon. However, with Disney pushing the envelope with its digital offerings ‒ including a standalone direct-to-consumer streaming version of ESPN in 2025, a multi-party aggregated streaming platform called Venu Sports (with FOX and Warner Bros. - Discovery) that we analyzed last week, and rumored multi-team licensing packages on ESPN that could finally bury the regional sports network model ‒ the number of platforms for sports content delivery is narrowing to just a few channels. And this will have the effect of dramatically reducing consumer options.

While the Venu Sports project is temporarily tied up in an antitrust lawsuit from FuboTV, we wonder what opportunities niche sports like cycling will have as the licensing fees become further stressed by fewer outlets in fewer markets. Peacock is currently the main U.S. source for many of the top WorldTour races and ASO’s portfolio, but as we know, cycling is the sum of a wider variety of events. And the nascent Women’s WorldTour is deserving of a wider distribution framework. It will be interesting to see what kind of agreement DirecTV and Disney land on ‒ if one is forthcoming ‒ and if FuboTV (which delivers a wide selection of races to the North American market) can survive if Venu Sports does finally get off the ground.

In a welcome development, doping news was thinner last week – as WADA and USADA continue their entrenched campaigns for the heart and soul of sporting integrity. The only notable development involved the alleged leniency concerning USADA’s handling of a Paralympic high jumper – which some saw as a weak counterbalance to the whole Chinese swimming debacle that initiated this ongoing mess back in April. Cycling received an unexpected doping-related sound bite when iconic former rider Sean Kelly, while commentating on the Vuelta, postulated some reasons as to why certain riders filter out to the back of the race on difficult mountain stages. Kelly used some surprising phrasing in his distinctive Irish inflection, hinting that the riders who are repeatedly dropped are either not doping or are too tired to be competitive – the unspoken inference being that perhaps other riders were doping. “The UCI have to do something about it because if it continues on, (the) last three, four or five years, all of the races, they all want to make it more difficult than the (last) one, and it's just getting out of hand, I feel." Many anti-doping critics immediately took to social media to amplify their interpretation of Kelly’s observations in terms of perceived ongoing doping in cycling – due to the sustained higher speeds of the modern era. Some also noted that “King” Kelly himself has a checkered past (he had a suspended ban for a stimulant in 1983 and was one of the PDM riders who abandoned the 1991 Tour de France after receiving spoiled intralipid injections). As a counterpoint that we have noted before: equipment, training, nutrition and racing tools like power meters and race radios have advanced the sport far beyond the standards in Kelly’s era some 35-plus years ago.

Observers at the Escape Collective were more nuanced, pointing out that the difficulty of racing the Vuelta at the end of a long season can become an incentive to dope for riders who need to keep up with the pace or else potentially be out of work next season, and suggested that the UCI needs to step up and set better standards for stage composition to make the workload more humane for the riders, thus dissuading doping. (It should be noted that top tennis pro Iga Swiatek made similar comments on her sport this past week.) In the shadow of the ongoing WADA - USADA “war,” cycling has done more than most sports to stay on top of the doping problem, but it is disadvantaged by its niche status and weak economic structures that rely on sponsorship revenues. Hence, the majority of pro cyclists still have the incentive to dope today – due to career brevity and limited contract opportunities. However, we would still argue that Vuelta stages should not necessarily be made easier; after all, the “third Tour” is an opportunity for many under-raced riders to shine, and likewise, for riders in smaller Pro/Continental invited teams to sharpen their knives on the stone of grander WorldTour competition. Only one thing is certain: all of us recognize that WADA and its NADO-signatories need a political truce and more focus on the science of detection and innovative investigative techniques to continue cleaning up sport. Kelly calling out what he sees as his sport’s deficiencies is not a weakness but a call to arms on many actionable levels.

One story which flew under pro cycling’s radar last week happened in pro football when NFL legend Tom Brady may have handicapped his nascent broadcast career with his concurrent intent to become a minority owner of the Las Vegas Raiders team. In a recent podcast, the likelihood of Brady having to give up an estimated $375 million contract with FOX Sports as a broadcast analyst was deemed high, given the restrictions the league owners are seeking on his activities in the role should he successfully buy into the Raiders. Brady may be prevented from commenting on Raiders players, games the Raiders will play, players that the Raiders may seek to acquire, and other league-related activity to which Brady would essentially be an insider or could otherwise influence. These concerns may sound familiar to cycling fans, where it has recently been common for WorldTour team principals and directors to enter the broadcast booth mid-race, to provide background, information or opinions about teams, riders and tactics – sometimes including commentary on their own teams. There are some instances where this kind of input adds invaluable flavor to the sport, but it can also create conflicts of interest and work to the detriment of broadcast integrity and sponsor perception – as we noted during the Tour. The NFL’s example with Brady ‒ essentially the “Eddy Merckx” of quarterbacks ‒ is one that perhaps other sports like pro cycling should bear in mind as the structure, investment profile, sports betting, and broadcast market opportunities evolve.