Which is interesting as the Giro had it's highest viewing figures for 10 years this year, despite there being no top Italian riders.
I think Pogacar isn't the huge draw that the media makes out.
Nah, Pogačar is just suffering the same audience fatigue as we often see in other such sports. People forget that when he first burst onto the scene, Sebastian Vettel was wildly popular, interjecting himself into championship business, winning races in the Toro Rosso, and stealing the championship on the last day in Abu Dhabi in 2010. Once the best driver gets into the best car, they just drive away from the field, and the spectacle suffers. The same thing happened to Lewis Hamilton and then to Max Verstappen. People go from wanting to see them upset the apple cart to wanting somebody - anybody - to topple them.
The other thing that I've used is the old combat sports analogy. Combat sports have historically worked off of a pay-per-view model, so you have to have a contest people are willing to part with money to see, hence why those sports have often been heavily dependent on personalities. If the champion is popular, people tend to be more willing to pay money to see them than if they aren't, for obvious reasons. But if you have an unpopular or relatively neutral champion who doesn't arouse strong enough feelings in the audience for them to buy on the strength of them alone, you need either a popular contender who people will pay to see, or at least a contender that the audience believes have a shot. If the champion is unpopular, people won't pay to see them beat a tomato can, because they would be buying because they want to see the hated champion beaten; the contender needs to be somebody the audience
believes has a shot. They don't need to win - just have a shot.
This is the problem cycling finds itself in now. With Armstrong, and to a lesser extent with Froome and the Sky crew, you had issues of a lack of popularity in some audiences, but the new eyes brought to the sport in previously little-tapped markets more than made up for it. They aroused certain antipathy among large sections of the audience, which made rivals into popular figures; however, audiences
did suffer, especially in the Sky era, during periods where there was no credible alternative to Sky winning, and indeed on a couple of occasions the biggest narrative of the Tour was the audience's rejection of Froome as a champion; without credible alternatives, watching a rider you don't like stroll to victory almost unchallenged unsurprisingly did not make for a popular spectacle.
I've yet to see what I'd call anything remotely like the level of antipathy for Pogačar that was around during the height of Sky's domination or Lance's reign of terror. However, neither Slovenia nor the UAE are sizable enough hotbeds of cycling for their domestic audiences to represent something worthwhile to replace the audience turned off by the domination and lack of spectacle, and Pogačar, while he is not unpopular per se, is also not somebody that people are tuning in specifically to see. While there is some interest in whether or not Vingegaard can put up a fight after recent years, of course, the problem is that after Hautacam, that hope was extinguished pretty comprehensively and so the only casuals left tuning in are habitual background watchers, and those who enjoy rooting for the overdog.
As a result, though, I fear we're in for more of the same for the foreseeable future - trying to avoid anything too decisive until deep in the race, much as in 2009 because they didn't know what kind of level Armstrong would be at, they neutered the Pyrenees to keep gaps small until as late as possible, and maybe more Unipuerto or HC finishes that will neuter racing before them in order to reduce the amount of terrain for Pogačar to gain on, in the hope that time gaps can be reduced. If we're lucky we get more TT mileage, and it is worth noting that the organisers' frustrations with the lack of action on the sprint stages, and the relatively strong designs of rouleur stages in the Tour in recent years, could be a positive sign for things to come, so it isn't all doom and gloom, however the problem that they have at present is that not enough people are tuning in
for Pogačar to offset those who are turning off due to a lack of competition or action.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram