A niche within a niche: A dilemma for cycling fans

As cycling goes behind a harder TNT paywall, are we ready to stump up the cash?

This is the end, beautiful friend. Except of course it probably isn’t. It’s just the end of a niche service for a niche audience. If you wanted to watch cycling, all cycling, you had to stump up for a Eurosport/Discovery+ subscription of £6.99 a month, as Eurosport and cycling becomes part of TNT (home of so much football, rugby and tennis) you’ll have to stump up £30.99. “No way,” say many cycling fans, “no way will I pay that to watch just cycling.” But of course many of us will once the dust settles.

I, like many people, came to cycling through ITV’s coverage of the Tour de France. It was a great way in, but once you were in it was lacking something. GCN and Eurosport added some much-needed vitality to the sport. ITV was for boring old men, Eurosport is trying something else to bring new people in and has given cycling the support it needs. The commentary teams are great, the pre- and post-show are engaging and have great presenters in the likes of Orla Chennaoui. They show pretty much every race you could hope for.

And so here lies the dilemma. TNT wants cycling as part of a larger package — perhaps a sign of belief in cycling as a product. Obviously they want to grow the audience otherwise what’s the point? But how can you grow a sport within a niche subscription service? GCN+ was great for cycling fans, but how does that bring in new people? By bringing cycling into TNT’s overall mainstream package, one assumes that the powers that be are trying to grow the audience to the already strong audience (millions) of sport fans they have. Perhaps it’s just wishful thinking…

I don’t want to pay £30 a month as much as the next person, but would I pay for a few months a year to watch the classics, Giro d’Italia, Tour de France and Vuelta a España? Yes probably, and then I’d cancel my membership the rest of the time.

When Formula 1 went behind a pay wall I was beside myself. I had always watched it on ITV, BBC and Channel 4. I thought it was the death knell for the sport. But what happened was Sky Sports really improved the product and Formula 1 appears to be growing and doing very well. Since 2019 viewership of F1 has grown 60 per cent. Now in an ideal world I’d pay £30 and get both F1 and cycling, but that’s not the case.

Cycling moving behind a harder TNT paywall doesn’t worry me as much as ITV losing live coverage of the Tour de France. If you want to support something be it sport or journalism or entertainment I believe you should pay for it, these things cost money to produce. However, there needs to be a gateway, something more accessible. I hope at the very least that a high-quality highlights package of the Tour de France can stay on free-to-watch TV and that YouTube will be resplendent with free cycling content that can draw people in, not to mention the continuation of things like Netflix’s unchained (and of course written journalism).

I’m not happy about losing Eurosport cycling, but I’m a cycling nerd, of course I want a service for me. But I also want the sport to grow and for that we need new ideas and new investment. I hope that is what will come with TNT, but of course I could be wrong, beautiful friend.