Before turning our attention to the relevant data, it should be noted that inevitably, this report also suffers from the methodological limits and pitfalls described in the previous section. We use the reported TV figures for the Tour of Flanders and the Tour de France to illustrate the point. According to the report, total accumulated audience for the Tour of Flanders equals 44.18 million, while for the Tour de France, total audience is close to 2.4 billion. These numbers are so impressive that they were eagerly communicated to the media by the UCI and race organizers. But if one reads the report more carefully, a more nuanced picture emerges. First of all, already in the introductory executive summary, the accumulated audience figures are put into perspective: “The cumulative audience reached 3960 million viewers of which 533 million were generated by live broadcasts” (IFM Sports 2012, p. 6). Inside the report, Repucom also mentions, albeit in small print, that due to the way audiences are measured, “the cumulated audience by events is higher than the total net audience” (IFM Sports 2012, p. 11). Finally, Repucom clearly explains that the grand total audience is, in fact, the sum of the audiences of 4 types of broadcasts (IFM Sports 2012, p. 35): live broadcasts (“live game action of an event or a game”), sports broadcasts (“all sports items airing regularly or irregularly. As a rule, “sports” programmes usually focus on a certain game or event”), sports magazine broadcasts (“summaries of different sports, events or games. They are mostly shown regularly (daily, weekly)”) and news broadcasts (“all sports items broadcast within programs covering news”). News broadcasts have the largest audience and account for an impressive 57 % (or 2.2 billion viewers) of the global cycling audience. Sports magazine broadcasts have a share of 22 %, live broadcasts account for 13 % and sports broadcasts only deliver 8 % of the total audience (IFM Sports 2012, p. 10). This implies that, roughly speaking, worldwide live TV audiences for cycling races are only one-eighth of the accumulated TV audiences. It is understandable that Flanders Classics, the organizer of the Tour of Flanders, prefers to communicate the virtual 44.18 million cumulative audience instead of the more accurate 4.04 million live audience. But are race organizers really aware of the fact that close to 60 % of their cumulative viewers are persons whose only connection to the race is a news broadcast they just happened to watch?