I can watch 2 or 3 hours live coverage of the Lotto Thuringen tour, yet I can only get one day's live coverage of a 3 day WWT race in Britain - This is after the 2021 TOB WWT had no live coverage and the 2022 live coverage is yet to be confirmed.
Anyway, BEX need to allow breaks to have the next two stages to protect the GC - Four stage wins is enough.
SweetSpot and the other UK organisers are pretty good at getting the on-site side of things sorted, the UK races always draw good crowds and seem to get good attention locally, but the coverage that was once at a high level has basically never improved or even really changed at all in almost a decade now, and looks decidedly passé given the amount of progress that has happened around it.
I have some major issues with the design (as I mentioned in another thread, as an example, they literally cycle straight past the steepest climb in East Anglia twice in the first stage of the Women's Tour - and while I get that they're happy to open up with a sprint in these stages in the region, which is very supportive of cycling, just having something that would create a platform to attack from or even just give out the QOM for something reasonable would be nice, you know? Take the Stowmarket stage a few years ago, there's a climb of around 750m at 6% not far out of that town, they rode past it twice on the finishing circuit. It's not like that climb is going to settle the race, but it adds something for riders other than sprinters to work from), but I get why they try to go past e.g. schools and similar to try to attract a bit of interest and inspire children - that side of the game is something they're really good at.
It's good that they have an MTF this year, as a bit of variety, like with the ITT last year, it may overbalance and make things all about one stage, but there is serious danger in the Women's Tour of things growing stale. I don't even think they need to move the race too much, after all repeat hosts are clearly supportive of the sport so should be rewarded for that continued support; they could just maximise the terrain of the areas they are using and the race would be far better. Growing the RideLondon Classique out from just being a crit (which never deserved WWT status, and hey, the prize pot meant it would have drawn a good field regardless) is a positive sign, but does it mean all that much if nobody gets to see it (see also: Madrid Challenge before Ceratizit came on board) until that crit stage, if your "tougher, hillier stages" are still won by the same sprint specialists as would be contesting the one-day race?
It just has this vibe that, when the Women's Tour started out, they sold it as this big deal, and the crowds, the coverage and the media attention it got absolutely justified that - the course was pretty lacklustre but they sold it fairly as needing to establish it and they would develop it in time. But given all the changes that have taken place for women's cycling in the last decade, the pace of progress with the Women's Tour has been glacial, and they are now hard pushed to sell it as being what it was when it started, let alone what their ambitions were. And I know people in the media are keen to go softer on SweetSpot than some of the other organisers who haven't got as much goodwill cached - but the Giro basically got turfed out of the WWT for trying to run their race whatever it took in 2020 - and it showed, so they were punished. The Women's Tour kicked the can down the road a year to get a free pass - RideLondon kicked it two years - and yet they still weren't able to comply with the minimum requirements and got a reprieve. Yes, the Giro had a few other organisational problems, issues securing sufficient prize money for the race's standing and so on... but from the outside looking in, it sure looks like the British races are being given a lot more rope, and are not doing a lot to justify it, resting on past laurels because a decade ago they were ahead of the curve, and not recognising that now, they're behind it.
RideLondon will always be fairly restricted by being centred around London, but could be a decent three day race with some moderate hills. The Women's Tour of Britain could legitimately be a centrepiece in the calendar, being far enough removed from the Tour and Giro and off the back of that Spanish mini-season for the climbers. The men's Tour of Britain is a middling 2.PS whereas the women's was one of the biggest races on the calendar and drew an A-grade field. Now, they need to recapture some momentum to avoid becoming no more important to the women's calendar than the men's race is to its.