Olympic Cycling Kicks Off; Tour Audiences Were Flat; Doping Concerns Still Overshadow Olympics; Reshaping the Balance of Power; Pogacar Opts Out; 21 Condoms Apiece for Olympic Athletes ..?

Key Takeaways:

●        First Olympic Cycling Medals Awarded

●        Tour de France TV Audience Was Flat

●        Doping Concerns Overshadow the Olympics

●        Reshaping The Olympic Balance of Power

●        Pogačar Skips Olympics To Focus on World Championships

●        Organizing Body Provides 21 Condoms to Each Olympic Athlete!?

The Olympic time trials took place in Paris on Saturday with some surprises, but ultimately with two worthy winners. Rain throughout the day unfortunately became a deciding factor in the outcomes, as it predictably mixed with oil and other residue on the Parisian streets to create a virtual ice rink in some of the course sections. Crashes and extreme caution characterized both the women's and men’s races. On the women's side, Grace Brown of Australia stayed upright and pulled out a swan-song effort (she will retire from pro cycling after this season) to win gold, with Anna Henderson (GB) and Chloe Dygert (USA) rounding out the podium. Brown’s victory was reminiscent of Fabian Cancellara’s career-bookend win at the 2016 Rio games. Although she already won Liege this year, she may have more in store for fans in the remaining Women’s WorldTour. The men’s race was taken by a heavily favored Remco Evenepoel of Belgium, with Filippo Ganna (IT) and countryman Wout van Alert finishing just behind. While one might question the integrity and safety of the course, no one could fault the winners.

More viewership information from this year’s Tour became available last week, and hopes that the numbers would at least be on par with the 2023 edition were set back by multiple statistics. As announced earlier in the week, viewership in France dropped from 42.5 million to 40 million, while figures elsewhere in Europe were also either flat or showed only modest improvements. Australian broadcaster SBS provided an excellent example of why it’s best to wait until after the event finishes to publish such numbers. At the end of the second week, SBS claimed 5 million viewers had cumulatively tuned in; but after the race concluded it updated its total viewership to just 5.7 million ‒ a scant 700,000 jump, given the attention placed on the final week’s mountain summit stage coverage. (It must be remembered that the Tour had to compete with the UEFA Cup and Wimbledon for attention, as discussed last week.) On one hand, the measurement methodologies and interpretations of what does or doesn’t qualify as a “view” on linear TV or stream is inconsistent throughout the broadcast industry – a well-understood phenomenon in pro cycling and particularly the Tour de France. On the other hand ‒ and even with well-intended and generous interpretations of the viewership data ‒ interest in the sport seems to be trending flat. This theme doesn’t just apply to the Tour; the contraction of GCN, the geriatric age-skewing demographics of the Giro d’Italia, and middling performance of Netflix’s Unchained series indicate that the sport’s content delivery model and supportive storytelling is in need of new ideas and directions.

The model that drives pro cycling’s potential broadcast revenues has been stagnant for decades; however, there are alternatives emerging, especially when the market and fan base creates the demand. Pro cycling’s distribution model is in many ways akin to the U.S. regional sports network (RSN) market – with rights carved out to such a degree that many fans are unable to watch their favorite teams due to regional restrictions. Diamond Sports Group (which is at the center of the current RSN model shakeup) lost and/or had to divest some of the exclusive regional rights it held for hockey, basketball, and baseball teams during its ongoing bankruptcy; in some of those instances, another broadcast provider picked up the media rights to deliver the content over free to air TV. These deals may seem counterintuitive but the upside for the license-holder is the ability to sell premium advertising for their market, knowing that the fans are tuning in to the events at specific timeframes, and for sports content which has guaranteed viewing lengths and known market demographics. This may be an inevitability; even the biggest players, like Warner Bros.-Discovery (WBD), are being faced with the prospect of unbundling sports content from their content packages because fans are increasingly willing to drop those subscriptions in favor of more economical content choices. This factor may have contributed to TNT Networks’ (part of WBD) recent loss of its NBA content rights.

The psychology of fan behavior has been largely reshaped by social media and related personalized web content consumption patterns, and has destabilized factors such as “team loyalty” which previously created value and revenue in the exclusive regional sports TV model. Fans are looking to personalize the bundles of content they would like to enjoy ‒ even with the aid of AI services ‒ and the way in which licensing rights are being packaged may actually be a roadblock. The NBA sought to extract more value from its digital distribution (Amazon) while broadening its free to air and linear (cable) options. Meanwhile, it was assumed that cycling fans would jump at the chance to pay premium fees if it meant having an ad-free/limited ad-interrupted streaming experience, but with that cost increasingly becoming a barrier (and with highly repetitive advertising saturating Peacock viewers for this year’s tour content), perhaps what is old will be new again ‒ especially when it comes to acquiring new fans for pro cycling. As more sports jump back into free-to-air TV, more new fans can access and get hooked on the action; this is vital to unlocking pro cycling’s financial future. If there’s any good news, the SBS numbers show that you can drive fan interest if you deliver a great production, and ‒ at least in France ‒ you can still capture a broad market share. It remains to be seen if the same market forces which dismantled the RSNs could hit cycling, but sports content has undeniably upended the market and a shift in strategy could help us reach and retain a broader and younger audience.

News on the global anti-doping front has unfortunately been an ongoing distraction for all of sport. With the Olympics now underway, there is continued criticism over the inclusion of swimmers embroiled in the Chinese swimming controversy – generally aimed at WADA, as those athletes and others with prior or potentially looming doping bans compete at the games. But rather than defuse the situation to focus on the ongoing games, the IOC waded directly into the fray to threaten cancellation of the recently awarded 2034 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics if the U.S. does not end Federal investigations into WADA’s activities over the China affair.  The position and framing language by the IOC ‒ calling for USADA and other national anti-doping bodies to respect the “supreme authority” of WADA in the global sports framework ‒ was both chilling and laughable in the same sentence. The scare factor intended in the statement (and consecrated in the letter that the IOC forced the SLC organizing committee to agree to) is that the IOC is somehow aggrandizing and elevating its UNESCO charter to put itself at the pinnacle of elite sports governance, even positioning itself over the sovereign and criminal laws of an actual nation. This seems a hollow threat, as the IOC is loath to give up the guaranteed cash source provided by the United States, and is increasingly limited in its ability find hosts for future Olympics.

At the same time, the IOC’s attempts to control the fortunes of elite sport are being systematically dismantled by the professionalization and organization of athletes across all sports. This is illustrated by the ongoing wave of legal rulings in the U.S. which have reshaped previously “amateur” athlete rules used by the NCAA and the IOC to control athlete rights and earning power. Athletes are unionizing and have the capability to negotiate anti-doping oversight, just like several sports leagues, including the NBA and NFL, have already done. And World Athletics, the international oversight federation for track and field, has already announced that it will pay medal winners at this year’s Games. The IOC basically seems to be “jumping the shark” – showing that it is more interested in preserving its brand and revenue sources than the integrity of its actual sporting product. It seems inevitable that the IOC’s charter will lose some of its importance and luster in the next few years, as more athlete and human rights cases are resolved. More critically, in terms of WADA, criminal activities which enable doping or the corruption of anti-doping activities may destabilize and reshape the sports integrity landscape at the IOC’s expense. Only one thing is certain: the crisis isn’t over yet, and we hope that detente and cooperation leads to meaningful reforms.

Somewhat unexpectedly, Tadej Pogačar opted not to participate in the Olympics for his home country of Slovenia, understandably citing fatigue after recently accomplishing his Giro/Tour double. But he later admitted that part of his reluctance to join the fanfare in Paris was because his girlfriend, Urska Zigart, had been improbably left off the Slovenian Olympic team, despite being both the current road racing and time trial national champion. Zigart initially accused the national coach of “looking for a way not to include” her, and Pogačar himself weighed in, saying “I have no words for this.” In other controversial team selections, Ecuador left 2020 Olympic road race champion Richard Carapaz off its team. And the U.S. team struggled with its own selection process rules until Taylor Knibb voluntarily gave up her spot on the women’s road racing squad.

In this week’s perhaps surprising and somewhat baffling "feel good story," the Paris organizing committee announced that it was providing the roughly 9,000 attending athletes – as well as their coaches, trainers and other staff – with “free condoms, lubricants and intimate gels.” In total, every person staying in the Olympic Village will receive 21 condoms each; this for an event that lasts 17 days…. In total, the organization will distribute 250,000 condoms to athletes. “It’s very important that athletes feel happy and content, in a framework of a lot of communication. We wanted to create places and environments where athletes of all genders can meet in a friendly, pleasant setting,” said Laurent Michaud, director of the Olympic Village in Paris.