Predictable Early Season, Crowded with Events; WADA Blinks in USADA Case; Scarcity Value Drives Sports Rights; More Upheaval in Broadcasting; Cycling Salaries

Key Takeaways:

● (Another) Crowded Week of Racing

● 2025 Season Picks Up Where It Left Off in 2024

● WADA “Blinks” in Legal Stand-Off with USADA

● Continuing Upheaval in Sports Broadcasting

● Scarcity Value in Sports Rights

● Cycling Salaries Going Up, But Nowhere Near Other Sports

Despite the flurry of stage racing over the weekend, and with four major stage races running concurrently – the UAE Tour, Volta ao Algarve, Ruta del Sol, and Tour des Alpes-Maritimes – the takeaway is concise and clear: pro cycling is in pretty much the same place that it was at the end 2024. Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard are again head and shoulders above the rest of the GC competition; while Pogačar romped to a blowout overall title at the seven-stage UAE Tour, Vingegaard had to go full gas to overtake UAE’s João Almeida and Jan Christen in the final time trial for his impressive come-from-behind victory at the five-stage Volta ao Algarve. The contrast between the red-hot Pogačar – laughing as he (somewhat recklessly) broke every rule in the book by jumping into early breakaways on sprint stages and attacking near the bottom of Stage 7’s final climb, versus the ultra-focused Vingegaard grinding out a GC win while building up his early-season form – was quite stark. However, Vingegaard’s sole focus is on winning the Tour de France while Pogačar is chasing multiple Monument wins this spring, so it’s quite possible that Vingegaard and Visma could give Pogačar a serious run for his money at the Tour. It seems like that is the only potential obstacle to Pogačar winning his fourth Tour de France title in July.

With UAE’s Pavel Sivakov quietly winning the title at the five-stage Ruta del Sol, the other theme of the weekend was the rise of the entire UAE team – not just as a vehicle backing Pogačar’s continued dominance, but as a force to be reckoned with at any race the team enters. Visma has a strong starring support core of Wout van Aert and Matteo Jorgenson to supplement Vingegaard, RedBull-Bora-Hansgrohe has bolstered its 2025 squad with some deft transfer moves, and Lidl-Trek remains a strong and diversified team. But they all pale in comparison with UAE, which has stacked its roster over multiple off-seasons with the most talented young stars. These moves have imbued the team with unmatched depth to support any strongest UAE rider at multiple successive races. Rival teams, like Visma, have all put significant resources into young rider recruitment and have been successful in signing multiple young stars, but no other team has been able to push them along quite as quickly as UAE – many of its young riders have had immediate impact at the biggest races. To wit, UAE has four riders under the age of 23, including Juan Ayuso, Isaac del Toro, Jan Christen, and António Morgado, who have already racked up a total of 21 pro wins. Meanwhile, Visma has struggled to get their young recruits to a place where they can replace the contributions of their old guard; its U23 riders so far have a total of just three wins.

A bit lost in the news shuffle this week was the fact that WADA dropped its defamation suit against USADA and its executives, regarding its controversial handling of the positive doping test findings of 23 Chinese swimmers prior to the Tokyo Olympic Games. Readers will recall that WADA faced stiff criticism from almost all corners after allowing the swimmers to compete anyway, a controversy which escalated substantially after several of those athletes won gold medals and when it appeared to threaten the upcoming Salt Lake City winter games. As a result, the U.S. withdrew funding for the international anti-doping body – a stance which it continues to maintain today. WADA admitted no wrongdoing, and indicated that it was dropping the suit because “it is futile to argue with somebody who is unwilling to accept clear evidence, whose only goal is to damage WADA and the global antidoping system.” However, USADA’s statement strongly contradicted that suggestion, saying that “WADA’s actions were nothing more than retaliatory, wasteful and abusive attempts to suppress the truth and the voice of those seeking answers ....” A disinterested bystander might be excused for concluding that WADA knew it couldn’t win the suit and decided it needs the American financial support. However, the battle royale seems set to continue, with WADA again threatening the U.S. with losing out on hosting international sporting competitions if it doesn’t come back into the fold.

Last week, we discussed how the exponential increase in cost for popular sports media license rights is starting to crowd out niche sports from broader distribution opportunities. Now it appears that not even Major League Baseball – one of the “big four” U.S. leagues – is immune from this effect, and this is critical to pro cycling because of its outsider status in the broader sports broadcasting economy. ESPN announced this week that it is opting out of its broadcasting contract three years early – leaving MLB with a $1.5 billion revenue shortfall after the 2025 season concludes. Generally speaking, ESPN’s baseball viewership wasn’t pulling in the necessary advertising sales to justify the content licensing costs, even when compared to some of the network’s talk show ad sales.

Many sports industry strategy and economic pundits are picking Amazon Prime as MLB’s likely future deal partner, due to the intrinsic consumer engagement value that it could use to connect into the MLB fan base. Such a development could bode well for pro cycling, which is a smaller but similarly stressed popular niche sport. Baseball has a tightly concentrated and loyal local market fan base – not all that dissimilar from cycling’s content consumers – that has bolstered a league-wide uptick in stadium attendance since the pitch clock and other rules changes made the games shorter and arguably more dynamic to watch in recent years. An Amazon deal could capitalize on the league’s broad streaming investments (via the MLB.com platform) and provide teams with a potentially more profitable local market affinity sales model than its current regional sports network carriers can currently provide.

The combination of fan loyalty, on-demand and subscription package viewing, and targeted product sales is precisely the sweet spot where pro cycling could find itself in the future, if it can get itself organized around a single broadcast production technical standard and deliver consistent race presentation. And that leads us into our central theme of this AIR edition: content saturation and broadcast economics (see next paragraph as well). This past weekend, no fewer than four major cycling races were being contested at the same time but on different terrestrial and streaming platforms, making it almost impossible for fans to follow all the action. This might not be a problem during the high-focus Classics weekends and the grand tours, but the majority of the sport’s overall calendar is not just in that handful of major men’s WorldTour races. For pro cycling to be a truly consumable modern sport, it should be packaged as such – to drive the value with a major carrier in which the licensing cost is offset by subscriber growth and ad revenues, and with value-added features that enhance the fan experience. If we look at the MLB’s conundrum, the impasse with ESPN has opened new doors to consolidate its content delivery (including multi-frame streaming so that subscribers can view multiple games within a single screen) and maximize league and local team revenue opportunities with a partner like Amazon; pro cycling could do the same in the near future – building value for sponsors in new markets, sustaining its myriad smaller WT and WWT races, and creating a more valuable slice of a larger revenue pie for its Classics and grand tour race organizer powerhouses.

The resounding success of this past weekend’s 4 Nations hockey playoff may herald another new direction and trend in sports viewing. As pointed out by Front Office Sports and others in detailed analyses this week, “people will tune in for must-watch, live appointment-viewing events in sports.” Citing the recent audience figures for events like the recent Super Bowl and the Tyson–Paul fight last fall, if there is a big event coming up and with enough marketing lead time, people tend to tune in. This may also be part of the secret for the NFL’s recent and overwhelming success vis-à-vis other sports, particularly in terms of viewership and the value of broadcasting rights. NFL teams only play seventeen games a year, as opposed to the much busier schedule of basketball and hockey, and the ridiculously long 162-game baseball season. As we have pointed out for years in terms of the pro cycling calendar, there is some scarcity value factor at work here, and many sports – like cycling – have such a crowded schedule and plethora of events that, at some point, people tune out. As FOS put it, in the case of the NFL, “you know your team plays only once a week, and you have to see it. There’s simply not as much motivation to catch an early-season NBA or MLB game.” Strategically reducing the number and overlap of races is a concept that cycling might also further contemplate.

Professional cycling has seen a recent surge in the pay grade of top riders, with Tadej Pogačar able to parlay his incredible 2024 season into a long-term contract that pays him €8 million per season and unproven young talents able to command long-term deals nearing close to seven figures annually, but Sportico’s recently published and meticulously researched list of the 100 highest paid athletes in 2024 shows just how far cycling has fallen behind in the athlete compensation race. While it makes some sense that Cristiano Ronaldo, a massive star in the world’s most popular sport, would be able to make a staggering $260 million in 2024, it’s harder to understand how Jannik Sinner, an Italian tennis player who is far from a household name and who is a now-tainted star of a relatively niche sport, pulled down $52 million last year. Even Daniel Jones, a quarterback deemed so average or surplus that he was waived mid-season by the New York Giants, made roughly 500% more than Pogačar – likely one of the best cyclists of all time. While the average cyclist wouldn’t have cracked this list at any point in modern times, the gulf between cycling and the top-paid athletes in other sports is rapidly growing due to the explosive growth of salaries in major sports leagues like the NBA, MLB, and NFL. The lagging compensation of top riders may not be an acute issue, but it does serve as one indicator for how much money athletes leave on the table when they lack the umbrella of an organized union or player’s association. On the flip side, the much lower compensation levels may reflect why cycling is so much more accessible to the general public: other sports leagues maximize revenue by locking their product behind extremely high ticket prices and premium TV packages, but many of cycling’s most important events can be accessed in their traditional regional TV markets and at the roadside for free.