Re: Re:
King Boonen said:
This gets difficult as it crosses both the legal and illegal ways of dominating and relies on some assumptions.
The number of winners isn't that unusual, It's happened twice before in about 5 periods where one team was dominant. Usually it signals the end of that teams dominance and a short period of single wins. The "traditional" angle is also a difficult discussion that is going on elsewhere, I'll just say I don't believe that Sky have some secret formula other teams don't. Money and corruption are much more likely.
Is it the winners or the team that are the issue? If Landa had won would he be getting as much scorn as Thomas? If Bernal takes over in the next couple of years will he? It'll be interesting to see if the second case happens and clearly it ties in with the perceived natural ability of the rider.
I'm not old enough to remember much before Indurain but I do remember his wins being very, very predictable. I don't remember enough to know if it was as boring as the two periods that followed, someone else might.
As to making it entertaining for casual fans for hours that's just not going to happen. How many casual fans sit down and watch 5 days of a cricket test match? Or 9 innings of baseball? Or 4-odd hours of NFL or however long it takes? If you want cycling to appeal to the masses then you need to arrange short races (and this is where track racing and crits appeal). Otherwise you have to design courses that are predictable enough that you can centre TV and advertising around it, and that will in turn ruin the racing for proper fans. It's not an easy thing to grow and it's why cycling is, I think, unlikely to gain massive popularity beyond the more dedicated fanbase. As for bad for business, I'd like to see proof of that, i.e., viewing figures for the Tour pre USPostal and Pre Sky and during their dominance. If anything, in a sport like cycling, I wonder if it's actually the opposite?
I think the types of winners plays a part, particularly when 2 of them are of the same type, 1 is borderline inexplicable, none showed GT-winning pedigree until relatively late in their careers, and all are the same nationality. It all suggests that one team has such an inherent advantage that they simply have the ability to pick and create Tour winners, even from material that is obviously high quality but relatively speaking have not been perceived to be in the very elite in the 3-week discipline. I agree, it's not totally unprecedented, but it's far from exciting. If it was Bernal next I think that would be a little more interesting, since he's quite different to the others, but the dominance and methods, if they stayed the same, would still have a dulling effect on the quality of the spectacle.
I wonder if being Australian has clouded my interpretation of casual fans of the Tour. Here, the race is on from around 9pm-1am at nights, on free-to-air TV. The late nights do take their toll, but it's otherwise just about the perfect viewing time - there's no work or other things in the way, mostly you literally don't have to give anything else up to watch it. The result is that there are many Aussies who are either 'July fans', or who watch mostly for the scenery, but will watch even more and get into the action if the quality of the racing is good. So casual fans are an important element of the Tour coverage here and the broadcaster knows it and builds its product around it. Sky's dominance has hurt their viewing figures noticeably (although Porte constantly crashing hasn't helped either). But I guess all that doesn't apply for other countries apart from NZ.
Nonetheless, no question on the whole I'm sure more people are watching than in the 1990s, simply through the greater exposure and access the sport has now on a global scale. But the recent trend seems to be downward again, based on these admittedly very incomplete figures:
https://cyclingtips.com/2018/07/today-at-the-tour-okay-that-was-boring/
Surely Sky's continued stranglehold on the race, and the predictable nature of too much of it, compounded by the unsatisfactory handling of Froome's AAF, are significant contributing factors towards this. Some sort of well-considered shake up is needed, or the value of the event and its product will start to decline.