Surprise and Heroics at the Vuelta; Does the Vuelta Need to be Rescheduled? Evolving Changes in Team Management; Musical Chairs in Sports Broadcasting; Doping Incidents Continue, Unabated ...
Key Takeaways:
● Vuelta Surprises and Heroics
● Cycling Runs into Climate Issues
● Evolving Change in Team Ownership/Management
● Musical Chairs in the Sports Broadcasting Arena
● No End to the Doping Incidents
The Vuelta a Espaňa enjoyed its first rest day after an almost-unprecedented run of open and aggressive racing over the opening nine stages. Superstars Wout van Aert and Primož Roglič racked up two stage wins each, but the on-road action has been marked by chaos, with top riders falling out of the GC competition only to storm back and take immense chunks of time by getting into early breakaways – which the notably softer support lineups of the top GC contenders’ teams have been unable to control. Underlining just how upside-down the race has been so far, the highly-touted Red Bull-Bora-hansgrohe team was unable to control the peloton on Stage 6 which allowed Ben O'Connor from the Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale team to ride clear and win with a staggering gap of over six minutes on the peloton, and he currently leads the race by nearly four minutes ahead of Roglič.
One of the major reasons for this open racing and lack of control in the peloton has been the extreme heat everyone has been forced to endure, from the opening weekend in Lisbon, Portugal, and into the scorching terrain of southern Spain’s Andalusia region. These nearly intolerable temperatures, which have hovered around the high 30s Celsius (or around 100 degrees Fahrenheit), have highlighted the difficulties of holding Vuelta stages in the country’s southern provinces, particularly if the extreme temperatures persist. Organizers should be considering all available options to reduce the impacts, such as starting earlier in the day to avoid the mid-afternoon heat and potentially even swapping calendar places with the Giro d’Italia in the future – a race which has consistently struggled with opposite extreme weather in the form of cold and snow in recent editions. That would be the easy solution, but organizationally and politically such an agreement seems remote.
While the racing for both stage wins and the GC has held plenty of excitement, from an American angle, this edition of the Vuelta may seem slightly disappointing. Defending champion Sepp Kuss – despite his strong showing in Burgos just prior to the Vuelta – appears to lack the form with which he rode to the overall title in 2023 and sits in 14th place overall, over eight minutes behind O’Connor. However, with the lack of control allowing riders to drastically move up and down the GC standings on any given day, Kuss can’t be counted out just yet. Beyond Kuss, the three other Americans at the race have all been superb, with Brandon McNulty winning the opening stage and taking the first leader’s jersey, Matthew Riccitello finishing in the lead group on the first GC set piece on Stage 4, and Riley Sheehan driving the pace on the front of the peloton to reel in the breakaway on Stage 8. These performances continue to drive home the recent theme of high quality (if low in quantity) in terms of Americans at the top of the sport.
Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale’s smooth performance so far at this Vuelta comes amidst a rocky time behind the scenes, with the team’s new management forcibly parting ways with team founder Vincent Lavenu, who had taken a back seat after selling the team to the corporate entity Ag2r La Mondiale in 2022, for the paltry sum of just €8,000 after his co-sponsor Citroën opted not to continue their deal. As pointed out in a recent piece by veteran cycling commentator The Inner Ring, sponsors taking on the role of team owners have become increasingly common in recent years, with EF-Education First taking control of that team after coming on board as a sponsor in 2017, Ineos taking full ownership of the former Team Sky outfit in 2019 and Red Bull buying a majority stake from Bora-hansgrohe team founder Ralph Denk earlier this year. When we consider the vast sums of money now required to support the ever-increasing payrolls of top cycling teams (between $20 and $50 million per year), it makes sense that brands would want an ownership stake instead of a simple naming rights deal. And when we consider the declining relevance and performance of teams like Movistar – still operating under their original founder/owner model – this evolution is likely the best thing for the long-term health of the teams. However, instead of being compensated with a massive multiple of their investment in the way that team owners in other sports have earned in the past, cycling’s original founders are likely getting a very raw deal due to a lack of any real assets and no revenue stream to keep their teams in operation without a big-name sponsor to underwrite the value.
Consolidation, realignment, and turmoil are occurring at a rapid pace in today’s sports broadcasting industry as FuboTV, CBS Sports/Paramount Global, and Diamond Sports Group redefine the landscape. Of immediate importance to pro cycling, an injunction and appeal could decide the fate of FuboTV (“Fubo”) and create further uncertainty for the growth of the sport’s popularity in North America. The planned launch of a joint venture sports streaming subscription service called Venu Sports would have exclusively delivered live sports from Disney, FOX networks, and Warner Bros. Discovery channels ‒ essentially cutting off Fubo and its customers from a wide swath of sports content now and in the future. In its filing, Fubo admitted that it would run out of cash in early 2025 if Venu went live as planned and took away its customer base; more to the point, the presiding judge in the August 16th ruling recognized two key Fubo antitrust contentions: that the Venu Sports venture would restrict consumer choices and competition, and that the loss of competitors like itself would be a pathway to Venu increasing the cost to consumers over time. A Fubo shutdown would immediately impact content availability in the U.S., reducing accessibility and potentially its affordability, and many races might not get carried on any North American service without a competitive content market.
Predictably, Venu’s backers filed an appeal, but many industry observers believe it may be a formality; Disney, for example, doesn’t need Venu and it may be inconsequential to a larger effort to launch a consumer-direct streaming version of ESPN sometime in 2025. However, WBD and Fox might have a bigger stake in play as both parties have massively realigned their sports portfolios and need to monetize that content with subscribers ‒ right now. Meanwhile, a planned consolidation of Paramount ‒ CBS Sports’s parent company ‒ and Skydance is uncertain after a competitive bid disrupted the merger process. Paramount’s entertainment revenues are increasingly dependent on CBS Sports, particularly NFL games, showing just how critical those media rights have become in the broadcast field. The complexity of both the Skydance and competing offer (tendered by none-other-than the executive chairman of Fubo, Edgar Bronfman jr.) will almost certainly lead to higher valuation of NFL rights in the future but may complicate the Fubo/Venu battle that is already underway. And don’t forget Diamond Sports Group ‒ the erstwhile embattled regional sports network broadcaster ‒ which has emerged from bankruptcy with a new model which has driven some league sports to re-adopt free-to-air TV as a primary means of connecting with their fans and has left existing teams in the DSG portfolio unable to fully capitalize on their media rights. Only one thing is certain: sports media rights are an increasingly valuable ‒ and volatile ‒ commodity in the broadcast space and pro cycling is still on the outside looking in as billions of dollars change hands in the quest to acquire consumers and market value.
Doping in sport has been an unavoidable topic all summer, in part due to the stakes of this Olympic year, but also the conflagration between sports anti-doping authorities concerning governance oversight and integrity of the WADA code. Quite simply, too much is happening in multiple directions and across different sports for the heat to die down. Nowhere was this more apparent than when the world’s number one tennis player, Jannik Sinner of Italy, twice tested positive for a potent anabolic steroid, clostebol. He was cleared by the International Tennis Integrity Agency with the explanation that the source was “inadvertent” contamination through contact with his physiotherapist, who was using a steroid cream to heal a wound. The problems with this outcome are multifaceted, but the dominant train of discussion has been how substances like clostebol are used to boost performance in low doses; a miniscule detectable level in Sinners case would more likely be caused from direct strategic use of the steroid rather than “incidental contact,” i.e., the level of detection was low when the sample was taken to show its pattern of use by the athlete, vs. the incidental contact with another actor.
More to the point, the case has widened the schism between the scientists studying doping and the non-scientists who often make administrative anti-doping decisions. From the Chinese swimming case to numerous East African running suspensions, and Bahrain Athletics’s sanction for endemic doping, and – in an unfortunate symmetry that shows pro cycling is by no means immune to the ongoing controversies – even the recent UCI case of Rob Stannard (ironically, a recent signing for the Bahrain-Victorious team). Stannard’s case took an almost comical turn when his team issued a PR announcement which sought to downplay the International Testing Agency and UCI suspension of the rider, issued in June (and backdated procedurally to 2018), in which both agencies concurred that a biological passport (ABP) infraction had been successfully detected. Stannard and his team may have sought to get on the recent train of controversial cases to claim innocence, but the UCI’s strongly worded response (and subsequent withdrawal of social media and other public statements by the rider and his team) may have caused them to reconsider their position. Still, there is no denying the reduced confidence in anti-doping testing, increased skepticism of anti-doping adjudication, and the growing belief that neither are in the right place to reinforce sporting integrity in sports like cycling where this is a priority for public image and sponsor investment. And with WADA and USADA still stoking the flames of conflict, there’s likely no long-term solution in sight.
In a little noted story, researchers last week revealed a technique that would allow the possible hacking of Shimano wireless gear-shifting systems – exactly the kind used by many of the top cycling teams in the world, including most major events like the Olympics and the Tour de France. As if pro cycling didn’t have enough safety and integrity issues to worry about – for example, a reported hack of the Polish anti-doping agency is still being verified, and cycling race live-feeds are routinely intercepted from streaming servers and redirected to pirate and YouTube accounts – a relatively simple radio attack would allow cheaters or vandals to trigger unexpected gear shift changes on a target bike which could jam and lock the bike into the wrong gear. This could potentially be used to “hamper a rival on a climb or, if timed to certain intense moments of a race, even cause dangerous instability. “As one of the researchers pointed out, “… if someone is sprinting in the big chain ring and you move it to the small one, you can totally crash a person's bike like that.”