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The 3/4 viewership figure on Sporza is hugely encouraging for anyone interested in the women’s side of the sport.
Libertine Seguros said:Seeing as we've discussed over in the Danish talents thread the many ways in which Cecilie Uttrup Ludwig is awesome, she's also added 'calling out ASO on their BS' to the list, raising that it's a real shame that two races of high prestige and, with the link to the men's races, potential crossover audience, are not broadcast live - and are also the first WWT races of the year not to have any live coverage.Libertine Seguros said:At least the UCI's producing summary videos means the cameras actually get switched on, they just only produce highlight videos rather than doing any live broadcasting, heaven forfend we miss any of the action when the men are 120km from the line - after all we know how often the men's Flèche Wallonne descends into chaos with important moves early on. Aside from spamming their social media outposts, and fans have done that for some time, I'm just not sure what would have an impact on ASO. They're too busy patting themselves on the back for giving the women La Course, even though they just about killed off an eight-day stage race in France to make room for it, then tried to kill off a long-established seven-day stage race in another country entirely for their experimental version last year.RedheadDane said:Do you know where - if anywhere - it might be possible to contact ASO to lobby for them to actually show F-W and L-B-L?
Made a comment on a FB post (the le Tour de France page) which - after the obligatory "Valverde gonna win" for the men's race - actually mentioned how we shouldn't forget the ladies' race... because apparently everybody can just go to Belgium...
As fans have pointed out, this is clearly a matter of will rather than resources, because freaking ASO organize the races. And also, given how much we bewail the taming of racing in the Ardennes classics that make the men's races into uphill sprints, the opportunity to watch the women who have a) yet to get to grips with the Liège course so the problem of everybody knowing the decisive moments and how to ride them has yet to develop, and b) have provided racing well before the final climb in recent years in Flèche, would be a pleasant tonic as, especially in FW, it's not like we're likely to miss anything in the men's race even if they just showed the final 10km. Trofeo Binda, which is not organized by a larger organization like RCS or Flanders Classics, had an hour and a half of live footage. But ASO can't manage it (they could manage La Course when the women got to parade up and down the Champs, though).
Useful audience figures from AGR too - on Sporza they had over 3/4 the audience that the men's race had, and on Dutch Eurosport there were actually more viewers for the women's race than the men's, though the audience share is much, much smaller and the men's race had a more mainstream channel covering it too so that figure can't really be taken as representative as it's quite likely many who watched the women's race on Eurosport because it was the only available coverage would then have chosen another channel for the men's, plus many will have watched the men's race on NOS or whoever was covering it and not known there was coverage of the women on Eurosport so whether or not they would have had the interest in watching it is impossible to gauge; Sporza with over 500k viewers on the other hand can be considered not an unrealistic representation.
The 3/4 viewership figure on Sporza is hugely encouraging for anyone interested in the women’s side of the sport.