Re:
But they have to be, because they always need to be courting new sponsors. The ideal thing for the UCI under the current system is we have a whole World Tour made up of teams like Sky: long term investments, big spending and busily promoting the sport on posters and vans around their home countries. The trouble is that pro-cycling believes its own *** about the return on investment for sponsors, you hear 300-400% RoI quoted on 'relatively small' investments. If that were true the FTSE100 companies would be queuing up, so where is everyone? The truth is that Sky are the same as every other company that supports cycling, there's a cycling fan sufficiently high up in the company structure for them to drop a load of €€€ in exchange for some nice VIP hosting opportunities. Hopefully the advertising investment washes its face but these things are so difficult to quantify you can produce whatever bottom line number you want. For the thirty years I've been following it, pro-cycling has always been the best available return on sponsor investment and simultaneously constantly struggling to find sponsors.
And conversely the Tour is pretty much the only race of the year that isn't struggling for cash. Getting/forcing the best riders to make more of a commitment across the calendar would make a difference. Cycling isn't particularly analogous with tennis of course, but in that sport if I turn on a Masters 1000 tournament it will have all the same players I already know from my casual watching of Wimbledon or Roland Garros so I have a starting-off point. But there's no incentive for someone like Froome to ride even LBL or Lombardia so they clear off to the top of a volcano somewhere, and anyone tuning in to the race wonders if this is such an important race why can't the riders they've heard of even be bothered turning up? There's no particular reason why the top 100 in the world can't each be riding two GT's and three Monuments per year. Then you've just got to come up with some way of making them actually want to be competitive in all of those... one of the spin-off benefits is that if Froome needs to be competitive at LBL and Lombardia then those opportunities don't exist for Henao or Moscon (both top-10's in the last two editions) so they're less likely to take support roles which weakens the big trains. Maybe it's time even to acknowledge the unspoken truth that the Tour is the season pinnacle, and contrive a system where the rest of the calendar becomes a qualification system.
DanielSong39 said:UCI has been fully complicit in the Sky dominance though.
But they have to be, because they always need to be courting new sponsors. The ideal thing for the UCI under the current system is we have a whole World Tour made up of teams like Sky: long term investments, big spending and busily promoting the sport on posters and vans around their home countries. The trouble is that pro-cycling believes its own *** about the return on investment for sponsors, you hear 300-400% RoI quoted on 'relatively small' investments. If that were true the FTSE100 companies would be queuing up, so where is everyone? The truth is that Sky are the same as every other company that supports cycling, there's a cycling fan sufficiently high up in the company structure for them to drop a load of €€€ in exchange for some nice VIP hosting opportunities. Hopefully the advertising investment washes its face but these things are so difficult to quantify you can produce whatever bottom line number you want. For the thirty years I've been following it, pro-cycling has always been the best available return on sponsor investment and simultaneously constantly struggling to find sponsors.
thehog said:The real problem here is the Tour and not so much the remainder of the calendar. For the much part Classics, one day races and Giro / Vuelta from a visual watching perspective haven’t been too bad. It’s really when Sky do as Sky do in GTs it turns what could be a visual spectacle into something very boring. The Tour globally outranks all other cycle racing by far so Lappartient is right to seek some form of reform.
And conversely the Tour is pretty much the only race of the year that isn't struggling for cash. Getting/forcing the best riders to make more of a commitment across the calendar would make a difference. Cycling isn't particularly analogous with tennis of course, but in that sport if I turn on a Masters 1000 tournament it will have all the same players I already know from my casual watching of Wimbledon or Roland Garros so I have a starting-off point. But there's no incentive for someone like Froome to ride even LBL or Lombardia so they clear off to the top of a volcano somewhere, and anyone tuning in to the race wonders if this is such an important race why can't the riders they've heard of even be bothered turning up? There's no particular reason why the top 100 in the world can't each be riding two GT's and three Monuments per year. Then you've just got to come up with some way of making them actually want to be competitive in all of those... one of the spin-off benefits is that if Froome needs to be competitive at LBL and Lombardia then those opportunities don't exist for Henao or Moscon (both top-10's in the last two editions) so they're less likely to take support roles which weakens the big trains. Maybe it's time even to acknowledge the unspoken truth that the Tour is the season pinnacle, and contrive a system where the rest of the calendar becomes a qualification system.