Pogačar's Coronation? The Real Costs of Winning a Tour; Tour TV Viewership on the Decline; Trach Athletics and Cycling: Similar Challenges; Remembering Samuel Abt ...

Key Takeaways:

● Pogačar/UAE Dominance: Is It Good for the Sport?

● The Costs of Winning a Grand Tour

● Tour TV Viewership Flat to Declining

● Track Athletics and Cycling Face Similar Challenges

● Remembering Samuel Abt

Defending Tour de France champion Tadej Pogačar carries a more than four-minute lead and seems a lock for his fourth career overall win as the race pivots to Paris during its final week. Pogačar is just 26 years old, and by comparison, Lance Armstrong had yet to win a single title at that age while five-time winners Eddy Merckx and Bernard Hinault had just three and two, respectively. Beyond Pogačar’s precocious personal accomplishments, his UAE team has triumphed in almost a third of the available stages, demonstrating just how much their big budget has allowed them to dominate the current sport – and unfortunately highlighted the stark challenge facing most of the other teams in cycling’s new landscape. Jonas Vingegaard’s Visma-Lease a Bike team has struggled to regain the dominance they displayed in 2023 when they won all three Grand Tours, and hasn’t been able to lean into the reliably-strong Wout van Aert for much-needed stage wins. Visma has already racked up a grand tour this year at the Giro, and will likely leave this race with an overall podium spot and multiple stage wins. However, the rest of the peloton – particularly the mid-to-lower budget teams – is struggling for the table scraps. With only six stages remaining – and several of those being GC set pieces in the Alps – there could still be 15 teams without a stage win by the time the peloton reaches Paris. (Especially now that Soudal just took their fourth win of the Tour atop Mont Ventoux with Valentin Paret-Peintre.)

It can be endlessly debated whether Pogačar’s singular presence is good or bad for cycling, but it may just be that cycling is at a point in time where it is simply dominated by a small number of supremely talented individuals – something which is not unusual in sport. For example, tennis stars Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz have won every men’s major title over the last two years. Prior to that, the sport was thoroughly dominated for close to two decades by the triumvirate of Federer, Nadal and Djokovic – winning a combined 66 grand slam titles. Professional golf has experienced periods of similar domination by a handful of players. In those cases, rather than endlessly debating whether it’s good or bad for the sport, fans have simply celebrated those circumstances as the inevitable outcome of true greatness or tuned in to catch the unlikely moment when a hero falters.

But pro road cycling is a team sport, and no matter how we want to frame it, this new reality is squeezing all the teams that lack these kinds of generational talents. Hence, it’s not surprising that two WorldTour teams, Lotto and Intermarche-Wanty, are reportedly considering a merger prior to the 2026 season (and even heretofore big-budget teams like Ineos are being existentially pushed to the limit for relevance at this Tour). According to Belgian media, their respective budgets for the 2025 season were €15 million (Lotto) and €18 million (Intermarché), suggesting that both organizations have determined that an annual budget in excess of €30 million is required in order to compete in the WorldTour. To illustrate just how much things have accelerated over the last decade, when Team Sky broke onto the scene in 2010, they boasted the sport’s biggest budget with a reputed figure of around €17 million.

This absolute requirement for teams to identify, attract, and sign superstars capable of winning the biggest events, especially the Tour de France, is the primary driver for pro cycling’s skyrocketing budgets. Winning the Tour is the ultimate measure of return on investment for a team’s sponsors, and the exponential climb in salaries to secure that small handful of riders places extreme cost pressures on every team. From 2024 to the present, two of the four completed grand tours have been won by a rider rumored to be making nearly $10 million per season (Pogačar); soon, it looks like this will be three of five. This makes Red Bull paying Primož Roglič a rumored €4.5 million per year to win last year’s Vuelta seem around “market rate” while Visma paying Simon Yates roughly €1.2 million to win this year’s Giro was a steal. There are now reports suggesting that Soudal-QuickStep has already agreed to a deal that allows Red Bull-Bora-hansgrohe to buy out Remco Evenepoel in 2026 (despite the UCI’s August 1 date for transfer discussions). If the team also extends the contracts of wunderkind Florian Lipowitz – who could podium at this year’s Tour de France – and of Roglič, that’s three more of the top riders on just one team, making the market for top-tier racers even tighter. And the teams without such talent will only find themselves squeezed even further.

Early figures for TV viewership of the Tour de France, for the first week, showed a broad decline across almost all markets. The core cycling countries, including France, Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium all showed declines of five to seven percent, vis-à-vis the five year average, while Spanish viewership was down almost 30%. This is in comparison to last year when several of the same countries – in particular the Netherlands, France and the Flanders region all showed substantial upticks. The numbers stabilized somewhat in week two, but even with significant rebounds in France and Germany, the down-trend is clear and particularly worrisome for Spain and the Netherlands. Figures for the non-core European regions of the world are less accessible, but are also presumed to be down. Endemic sponsors – such as those whose sole market resides in a particular country or region – struggle to achieve a return on their sponsorship investment when viewership drops in that geographically defined market.

Our colleague and cycling economics expert Professor Daam Van Reeth points out that audiences in the most important non-European cycling countries of recent years – Colombia, the United States, Australia and Great Britain – are also all fading. He estimates the total U.S. audience in the tens of thousands – a huge decline from the million plus audiences that were watching during the Lance Armstrong era. The reasons behind these seemingly broad declines are less clear. In some cases, like Colombia or Spain, it may be the absence of any star national riders. In other cases, such as the U.S., it may be due to less accessible and perceived lower quality coverage. Or, as discussed above, part of the declining interest may be due to the current Pogacar/Team UAE era of dominance – there is simply less suspense of uncertainty in the sport despite the ever-present chance of a crash or physical collapse upending the outcome. With Pogačar virtually crowned and just a few stages remaining, it will be interesting to see what the final viewership figures look like.

Pro cycling isn’t the only sport facing challenges connecting to fans and revenue streams, according to a recent analysis of elite track athletics. There are several fascinating parallels to pro cycling which have emerged. The pandemic boosted running participation as people picked up the activity for health (and sanity) reasons during the crisis, and this spurred growth in competitive participation. This may have had a positive effect on track and field viewership of the Paris summer Games; track popularity (audience share) and profitability (marketing and advertising via broadcast exposure) temporarily surges every four years with the Olympic cycle. Three supposedly well-capitalized stadium-based track series started up to compete with the existing Diamond League: Grand Slam Track, Duael Track, and Athlos. Tens of millions of investment dollars flowed in, or rather were promised, but only Diamond’s series has been consistent. Many athletes haven’t been paid yet while Athlos and Duael haven’t yet held a meet.

Athletics’ dependency on sponsorship, lack of engagement beyond a core event, and financial instability bear comparison to many of pro road cycling’s challenges as our sport struggles to extend profitability and interest beyond the Tour de France and a few of its other monument races. Alexis Ohanian, backer of Athlos, noted the “lack of viewer interest outside of the Olympics” and the U.S. trials, “Nothing could prepare me for the broke-ness that exists in the infrastructure around this sport.” Pro cycling – particularly its track cycling ventures like the UCI’s Champions League – hasn’t been able to crack the popularity code in non-Olympic years, but this may bear further examination as the new Formula Fixed and StadioBike series, which we have reported on earlier, begin to take flight in the next few seasons.

Although it didn’t get a lot of attention in the cycling world, last week's passing of long-time New York Times sports and cycling journalist Sam Abt at age 91 marks something of the end of a generation. Abt was one of the first mainstream media journalists to introduce cycling, and particularly the Tour de France, to the broader American audience. As a writer at the NY Times and later as an editor of the affiliated International Herald Tribune in Paris, Abt chronicled the rise and successes of American cyclists such as Greg LeMond, Andy Hampsten and Lance Armstrong. At The Outer Line, we were privileged to work with Abt on a number of articles in 2018 and 2019; his style and attention to interesting context and detail were something that is sadly missing in many cycling stories today. In one article in 2018, which we helped Abt prepare for VeloNews, he related an interview he’d had with Donald Trump around the Tour de Trump event in 1989, in which he wrote the following: … (Trump) “was stunning. If he ever goes into politics, I often said afterward, he’ll be a tremendous success.”