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Re: Re:
The other problem with the analogy is that you can always go and watch another league of comparable standard, or just watch other people's matches within the league because only 2 teams play at any one time against one another, rather than being a pack sport like cycling is. A more appropriate football analogy would probably be PSG anyway, whose wealth has made Ligue 1 almost unwatchable as a spectacle because most matches PSG are in are one-sided and most matches without PSG in them have been reduced to irrelevance.
As to samhocking's point about other teams making themselves more attractive, that depends entirely on the safety of the sponsorship money long-term, which we know is a long-standing issue. Only a handful of teams have the kind of longevity that means they can be considered fairly stable sponsorship-wise, and teams like Lotto and Movistar have their own internal espoir programs to develop riders and don't have the budget to compete with the likes of Sky for the superstar young talents anyway, notwithstanding that Movistar is ridiculously top-heavy at present anyway. The problem is, so long as Sky can snap up all the young talent as they are doing at present, the harder it will be for other teams to secure the kind of long-term investment from sponsors that will enable them to compete, because why plough money into something over such a long period, when all you're going to get in the biggest races is scraps to feed off? I mean, BMC, the second biggest budget in the péloton, abandoned their U23 team because they couldn't stop Sky creaming off the best talent, and so BMC were investing in the development of riders and spending that money on them, while Sky were spending no money at that stage, waiting to see who got good, and then spending the same money that others had spent on the rider development on the contract to get first dibs on them, which the other teams couldn't match because they had the costs of running their development teams to take into account. For a lot of teams, that's a real dissuasion from developing riders, unless it is your modus operandi or has become it, like Savio's new niche as a proving ground for South American talent he can then take a payment for when a big team wants to buy them out of their contract.
And of course not all of them will become superstars and some of them will wind up elsewhere in a couple of years' time anyway. But it's going to be very hard to buy riders as threats to or challenges to Team Sky's hegemony if they're the same riders that Team Sky jettisoned because of not being as worth keeping as those youngsters they keep, right?
It's the first time in the WorldTour era that we've really seen a division killer like this, as previously outsized-budget teams have often thrown money wildly at big names to get off the ground or have been in the pre-biopass era that enabled them to focus singularly on a couple of goals leaving the rest of the calendar untouched, so how the sport reacts now could be key to the next generation. Whether it be ushering in an age of a small handful of super-teams, introducing a salary cap, bringing in a number of pseudo-national money-sponsors to combat Sky's might, or an era of lopsided domination that sees audiences fall away and smaller teams struggle for sponsorship as they're reduced to break fodder, we don't know yet, however how the sport - the authorities, the sponsors, the other teams, the riders, the fans, all of them, both individually and collectively - deals with having a team who are so dominant across the sport both on and off the bike, and both ruthless and amoral in how they sustain that position, is going to be very important indeed.
It's also not a good sport to compare because they are two entirely different types of sport. Even if a team is dominant one can still enjoy their style and quality of play, which is obviously more difficult in cycling.[/quote]kingjr said:
The other problem with the analogy is that you can always go and watch another league of comparable standard, or just watch other people's matches within the league because only 2 teams play at any one time against one another, rather than being a pack sport like cycling is. A more appropriate football analogy would probably be PSG anyway, whose wealth has made Ligue 1 almost unwatchable as a spectacle because most matches PSG are in are one-sided and most matches without PSG in them have been reduced to irrelevance.
As to samhocking's point about other teams making themselves more attractive, that depends entirely on the safety of the sponsorship money long-term, which we know is a long-standing issue. Only a handful of teams have the kind of longevity that means they can be considered fairly stable sponsorship-wise, and teams like Lotto and Movistar have their own internal espoir programs to develop riders and don't have the budget to compete with the likes of Sky for the superstar young talents anyway, notwithstanding that Movistar is ridiculously top-heavy at present anyway. The problem is, so long as Sky can snap up all the young talent as they are doing at present, the harder it will be for other teams to secure the kind of long-term investment from sponsors that will enable them to compete, because why plough money into something over such a long period, when all you're going to get in the biggest races is scraps to feed off? I mean, BMC, the second biggest budget in the péloton, abandoned their U23 team because they couldn't stop Sky creaming off the best talent, and so BMC were investing in the development of riders and spending that money on them, while Sky were spending no money at that stage, waiting to see who got good, and then spending the same money that others had spent on the rider development on the contract to get first dibs on them, which the other teams couldn't match because they had the costs of running their development teams to take into account. For a lot of teams, that's a real dissuasion from developing riders, unless it is your modus operandi or has become it, like Savio's new niche as a proving ground for South American talent he can then take a payment for when a big team wants to buy them out of their contract.
And of course not all of them will become superstars and some of them will wind up elsewhere in a couple of years' time anyway. But it's going to be very hard to buy riders as threats to or challenges to Team Sky's hegemony if they're the same riders that Team Sky jettisoned because of not being as worth keeping as those youngsters they keep, right?
It's the first time in the WorldTour era that we've really seen a division killer like this, as previously outsized-budget teams have often thrown money wildly at big names to get off the ground or have been in the pre-biopass era that enabled them to focus singularly on a couple of goals leaving the rest of the calendar untouched, so how the sport reacts now could be key to the next generation. Whether it be ushering in an age of a small handful of super-teams, introducing a salary cap, bringing in a number of pseudo-national money-sponsors to combat Sky's might, or an era of lopsided domination that sees audiences fall away and smaller teams struggle for sponsorship as they're reduced to break fodder, we don't know yet, however how the sport - the authorities, the sponsors, the other teams, the riders, the fans, all of them, both individually and collectively - deals with having a team who are so dominant across the sport both on and off the bike, and both ruthless and amoral in how they sustain that position, is going to be very important indeed.
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I think you're overanalyzing Sky's dominance as a bad thing, when teams should be seeing it as a target to smash down, not a barrier to blunder along doing things out of tradition. There's nothing unique about Sky as a company that sponsors cycling. If they exist, others do to. Obviously Brailsford and Kerrison are seen within the peloton as currently the best at what they do and so initially, it's not even about money, it's about vision and that costs nothing.
- May 15, 2011
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The argument that teams shouldn't be frustrated by sky but rather motivated is, just like the argument that instead of a budget cap the UCI should help smaller teams to get a bigger budget, simply nonsense. I mean how do people think this sport works? Teams are running at 50% and when a super power arises they can suddenly be twice as good by the power of motivation? Those teams have always been doing their best it's just that they don't have the resources to be even better.samhocking said:
- Jun 27, 2013
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My god, the level of delusion is astounding :lol:
If this is trolling, then Rick James needs to take notes because you actually do it well.
Brailsford being seen as the best at anything in the peloton is funny enough by itself, but the claim that it's not about money is simply hilarious.
samhocking said:
My god, the level of delusion is astounding :lol:
If this is trolling, then Rick James needs to take notes because you actually do it well.
Brailsford being seen as the best at anything in the peloton is funny enough by itself, but the claim that it's not about money is simply hilarious.
- Feb 20, 2010
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Re:
That was what the point of the final paragraph was about. This is the first time in the World Tour era we've seen a team that is so dominant in terms of front end results, depth and recruitment, and how the sport reacts is going to be key. That could be via the UCI introducing some restrictions to prevent a team financially strong-arming all opposition into submission, it could be via the introduction of long-term franchises in the style that Jonathan Vaughters was promoting a few years ago, so that other teams have the security of long term invites that would enable them to provide more attractive propositions to young riders and sponsors alike (because while the franchise idea had a lot of weaknesses discussed at the time - including potentially killing off the ProConti tier almost entirely and dissuading anybody from starting up new teams due to the impossibility of developing ground-up teams or entering the World Tour from scratch without the baggage of a previous team - at the WT level in isolation, it does look to help others compete without imposing any undue restrictions on Sky themselves), it could be via other teams being forced to source high-level long-term investment (which considering the amount of major teams who've struggled for sponsors or gone bust when a sugar daddy pulled the plug in the last 10 years seems a very high risk strategy as I doubt there are sufficient sponsors willing to fund teams - on such a long-term deal and with the vastly elevated budget compared to the current situation, in order to compete with the likes of Sky - to finance the whole World Tour, and it would otherwise only exacerbate the 'haves' and 'have nots' problem), or it could be to leave things as it is and simply cross fingers and press thumbs that the ensuing spectacle doesn't get so one-sided and predictable so as to impact audience figures too heavily (after all, the lower the audience reach, the harder it is to attract those long-term high-spend sponsors).
Suggesting Sky's dominance should be seen as a target to smash down and that vision costs nothing is pure Supply Side Jesus fallacy. Seeing somebody who is richer than you will make you strive to be as rich as them. "They say that your teaching is misleading, Supply Side Jesus, and your teachings make the rich richer but the poor poorer" "Ah, but Pilate, average income is going up!" Vision might cost nothing, but imparting that vision into reality does have costs, as Aqua Blue Sport, Leopard Trek, Cult Energy, Pegasus, PureBlack Racing, Cervélo Test Team, Colombia-Coldeportes and all manner of other teams launched with a great deal of fanfare only to crumble - and even a few who've become established World Tour teams but not at the level originally envisaged, such as Trek or Dimension Data, can show you. And even if you have a long term big money sponsor willing to commit for several years, that's no guarantor. We just had a team like that, which built up from the ProConti level thanks to a rich team leader with many years' experience of cycling and an invested long-term sponsor. That's exactly the kind of team that ought to be seeing Sky as a target to smash down, right? It was called BMC and it closed its development team because Sky kept outbidding them for their own talents.
Plenty of people have had long term visions that came crashing down quickly when either things got harder than anticipated or it became clear that the vision would not become a reality.samhocking said:
That was what the point of the final paragraph was about. This is the first time in the World Tour era we've seen a team that is so dominant in terms of front end results, depth and recruitment, and how the sport reacts is going to be key. That could be via the UCI introducing some restrictions to prevent a team financially strong-arming all opposition into submission, it could be via the introduction of long-term franchises in the style that Jonathan Vaughters was promoting a few years ago, so that other teams have the security of long term invites that would enable them to provide more attractive propositions to young riders and sponsors alike (because while the franchise idea had a lot of weaknesses discussed at the time - including potentially killing off the ProConti tier almost entirely and dissuading anybody from starting up new teams due to the impossibility of developing ground-up teams or entering the World Tour from scratch without the baggage of a previous team - at the WT level in isolation, it does look to help others compete without imposing any undue restrictions on Sky themselves), it could be via other teams being forced to source high-level long-term investment (which considering the amount of major teams who've struggled for sponsors or gone bust when a sugar daddy pulled the plug in the last 10 years seems a very high risk strategy as I doubt there are sufficient sponsors willing to fund teams - on such a long-term deal and with the vastly elevated budget compared to the current situation, in order to compete with the likes of Sky - to finance the whole World Tour, and it would otherwise only exacerbate the 'haves' and 'have nots' problem), or it could be to leave things as it is and simply cross fingers and press thumbs that the ensuing spectacle doesn't get so one-sided and predictable so as to impact audience figures too heavily (after all, the lower the audience reach, the harder it is to attract those long-term high-spend sponsors).
Suggesting Sky's dominance should be seen as a target to smash down and that vision costs nothing is pure Supply Side Jesus fallacy. Seeing somebody who is richer than you will make you strive to be as rich as them. "They say that your teaching is misleading, Supply Side Jesus, and your teachings make the rich richer but the poor poorer" "Ah, but Pilate, average income is going up!" Vision might cost nothing, but imparting that vision into reality does have costs, as Aqua Blue Sport, Leopard Trek, Cult Energy, Pegasus, PureBlack Racing, Cervélo Test Team, Colombia-Coldeportes and all manner of other teams launched with a great deal of fanfare only to crumble - and even a few who've become established World Tour teams but not at the level originally envisaged, such as Trek or Dimension Data, can show you. And even if you have a long term big money sponsor willing to commit for several years, that's no guarantor. We just had a team like that, which built up from the ProConti level thanks to a rich team leader with many years' experience of cycling and an invested long-term sponsor. That's exactly the kind of team that ought to be seeing Sky as a target to smash down, right? It was called BMC and it closed its development team because Sky kept outbidding them for their own talents.
- Feb 20, 2010
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Sean Bennett to EF confirmed.
https://www.efprocycling.com/sean-bennett-steps-up-to-the-worldtour-with-ef-pro-cycling/
https://www.efprocycling.com/sean-bennett-steps-up-to-the-worldtour-with-ef-pro-cycling/
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Anderis said:
So it'll be Sam, George & Sean in the peloton (shame we can n't find a Ringo then we could call them the Fab Four
... god, I feel old )
- May 5, 2010
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The commentators on Polish Eurosport mix up Sam and George on a regular basis. I can only imagine how much harder it will be for them to tell Sam and Sean apart then.Robert5091 said:Anderis said:
So it'll be Sam, George & Sean in the peloton (shame we can n't find a Ringo then we could call them the Fab Four
- Aug 29, 2009
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you are right, I didn't double check his age, thought he was younger. He is not listed as a neo-pro on the UCI websitetobydawq said:
He still signed on a two year deal though, as confirmed on the official website
https://www.efprocycling.com/magnusson-joins-slipstream-sports/
- Mar 13, 2013
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Sport works the same as any other business. Another business launches a better product and so you launch an even better one. That is business development, no different than team development.
Sky do not have ANY influence on other teams funding, have no influence on other teams sponsors budget in cycling and have no influence on how any team manager decides to run their team. If those team manager and their sponsors want to compete with 50% less, again that is not anything Sky have done. Sky want to win bike races, they do what is required to win bike races, cycling exists for someone to win bike races.
Sky is no different to step changes in cycling such as Peugeot in early 1910's, again in 1950's, or Alcyon in the 1920s, Molteni in 70's, La Vie Claire in 80's, Banesto in 90s, Postal in early 2000's, Quickstep today. Teams have always come in with bigger budgets and/or better methods and then dominated, that is expected, that's how a bike race is won by a team.
Libertine Seguros said:
Sport works the same as any other business. Another business launches a better product and so you launch an even better one. That is business development, no different than team development.
Sky do not have ANY influence on other teams funding, have no influence on other teams sponsors budget in cycling and have no influence on how any team manager decides to run their team. If those team manager and their sponsors want to compete with 50% less, again that is not anything Sky have done. Sky want to win bike races, they do what is required to win bike races, cycling exists for someone to win bike races.
Sky is no different to step changes in cycling such as Peugeot in early 1910's, again in 1950's, or Alcyon in the 1920s, Molteni in 70's, La Vie Claire in 80's, Banesto in 90s, Postal in early 2000's, Quickstep today. Teams have always come in with bigger budgets and/or better methods and then dominated, that is expected, that's how a bike race is won by a team.
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http://www.teamcoopsykkel.no/index.php/29-nyheter/nyheter-2018/660-krister-hagen-blir-profesjonell
Team Coop's 29 year old Krister Hagen, after re-signing for 2019 on the 9th., is now off to Denmarks's Riwal CeramicSpeed Cycling Team according to http://riwalcyclingteam.dk/da/teame...-kontrakt-sidste-seks-ryttere-offentliggjort/
Hagen did well in the heat in Portugal & at the Arctic Race this year.
Just to make it even more confusing the team will be called Riwal Readynez Cycling Team from Jan 1st 2019 because of new sponsors.
Team Coop's 29 year old Krister Hagen, after re-signing for 2019 on the 9th., is now off to Denmarks's Riwal CeramicSpeed Cycling Team according to http://riwalcyclingteam.dk/da/teame...-kontrakt-sidste-seks-ryttere-offentliggjort/
Hagen did well in the heat in Portugal & at the Arctic Race this year.
Just to make it even more confusing the team will be called Riwal Readynez Cycling Team from Jan 1st 2019 because of new sponsors.
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Their results stand for themselves. Theres a collective GT experience at wining GTs in other teams totalling 1000s of years spread racross other teams staff and Brailsford beat them from zero years experience at how to win a GT. In fact initially he beat them with the same budget too!
GuyIncognito said:
Their results stand for themselves. Theres a collective GT experience at wining GTs in other teams totalling 1000s of years spread racross other teams staff and Brailsford beat them from zero years experience at how to win a GT. In fact initially he beat them with the same budget too!
- May 5, 2010
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Anderis said:The commentators on Polish Eurosport mix up Sam and George on a regular basis. I can only imagine how much harder it will be for them to tell Sam and Sean apart then.Robert5091 said:Anderis said:
So it'll be Sam, George & Sean in the peloton (shame we can n't find a Ringo then we could call them the Fab Four
Also the Tour de Pologne Graphics Department… You'd think being able to tell the riders apart would be one of the requirements for having a job like that. Especially when you consider that Sam and George aren't that similar, and Sam didn't even ride!
Re: Re:
mmm... considering the amount (and length of contract) he agreed to pay Wiggins, as well as the 'transfer fee' he paid Garmin and the names of the other 26 riders back then, I find that hard to believe.samhocking said:
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Wiggins was on £300k at Garmin. Brailsford signed him for £900k and paid Garmin £2m. Contador at the time was on £3.96M in 2010, so it would be more expensive to sign Contador than Wiggins, so Brailsford actually did more with less £ in fact.
Even by 2016, Katusha's budget was reported by lequipe to only be €2m less than Sky. Factor in exchange rate from sterling to euro and then back again, even BMC is roughly the same budget.
Even by 2016, Katusha's budget was reported by lequipe to only be €2m less than Sky. Factor in exchange rate from sterling to euro and then back again, even BMC is roughly the same budget.
Re: Re:
“Sport works the same as any other business. Another business launches a better product and so you launch an even better one. That is business development, no different than team development”
Well, if that’s the argument, consider that’s why we have anti-trust laws in the U.S. and EU, and in fact those need strengthening as we can see in today’s marketplace.
And it’s why all the major U.S. sports leagues, which most certainly are the “business world,” have a salary cap!
“Sport works the same as any other business. Another business launches a better product and so you launch an even better one. That is business development, no different than team development”
Well, if that’s the argument, consider that’s why we have anti-trust laws in the U.S. and EU, and in fact those need strengthening as we can see in today’s marketplace.
And it’s why all the major U.S. sports leagues, which most certainly are the “business world,” have a salary cap!
The difference between sport and business is that when a business launches a better product, it's good for cusomers, but in sport, when one team outperforms the others by too big of a margin, it's bad for the viewers (maybe not all, but most) because the spectacle doesn't rely on how well the best team performs but on several parties being able to take fight to one another. When disparities are too big, the unpredictability level drops and the spectacle for anyone who is not a fan of that dominant team suffers.
It's hard to blame Sky for maximising the opportunities they are given to dominate the opposition but the budget disparity is really killing some sports (I stopped watching F1 recently for the very same reason because there's no point in watching when every race has the same result) even more so in present than in the past because with increased professionalism in sport that financial edge can be used to one's advantage with much more consistent results than in the past. If there is something we can do to prevent it, I'm all for it.
It's hard to blame Sky for maximising the opportunities they are given to dominate the opposition but the budget disparity is really killing some sports (I stopped watching F1 recently for the very same reason because there's no point in watching when every race has the same result) even more so in present than in the past because with increased professionalism in sport that financial edge can be used to one's advantage with much more consistent results than in the past. If there is something we can do to prevent it, I'm all for it.
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I still think, even with a salary cap Sky would win. Their performance is not simply related to annual salary. A Team Budget cap I would agree, that would begin making differences as Sky can afford to look for staff outside cycling from more expensive sports and even F1 & Sports Science areas that already pay more than in cycling.
Sciatic said:
I still think, even with a salary cap Sky would win. Their performance is not simply related to annual salary. A Team Budget cap I would agree, that would begin making differences as Sky can afford to look for staff outside cycling from more expensive sports and even F1 & Sports Science areas that already pay more than in cycling.
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I just don't see it that way. People say the SkyPostal train makes cycling boring and boring racing means TV viewing is down, but TV viewing was up for Postals years, so it's not a clear observation to me. When Indurain wont Tour 5 years in row, not be seconds, but tens of minutes, nobody was saying Banesto are killing cycling. I know they did for Merckx, but that certainly wasn't so much his team, that was simply he was the strongest.
I don;t know, I just think for a sport that pays riders so little money, to reduce their wages even more is not proactive. The sport struggles to find sponsors not because of Sky, it's always struggles to find them long before Sky came along and that is far bigger issue than worrying about how much one team pays their riders to me. More worrying at least looking at the bigger picture and ignoring Sky anyway.
Anderis said:
I just don't see it that way. People say the SkyPostal train makes cycling boring and boring racing means TV viewing is down, but TV viewing was up for Postals years, so it's not a clear observation to me. When Indurain wont Tour 5 years in row, not be seconds, but tens of minutes, nobody was saying Banesto are killing cycling. I know they did for Merckx, but that certainly wasn't so much his team, that was simply he was the strongest.
I don;t know, I just think for a sport that pays riders so little money, to reduce their wages even more is not proactive. The sport struggles to find sponsors not because of Sky, it's always struggles to find them long before Sky came along and that is far bigger issue than worrying about how much one team pays their riders to me. More worrying at least looking at the bigger picture and ignoring Sky anyway.
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US Postal/Lance would have brought in the US viewing market. Thus TV numbers would have been up just based on the US market with a US based team and US rider being the ones dominating. You likely won't get that with another market.
With Indurain and Banesto I'd guess it may have something to do with a long time established team and a team highly unlikely to have had twice the budget of anyone else in the peloton.
samhocking said:
US Postal/Lance would have brought in the US viewing market. Thus TV numbers would have been up just based on the US market with a US based team and US rider being the ones dominating. You likely won't get that with another market.
With Indurain and Banesto I'd guess it may have something to do with a long time established team and a team highly unlikely to have had twice the budget of anyone else in the peloton.
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The problem is, how is one to 'ignore' Sky without turning their back on so many of the biggest races (in the stage racing arena at least)? The stranglehold in which they have been able to hold GTs with their brand of racing has rendered many of them almost unwatchable as a spectacle, because even if you decide that you'll just accept that Sky will win and be happy to watch a battle for the minor places, the depth that Sky have and the stifling technique that they employ so effectively means that the battle for the minor places is often simply a matter of who can hold on to the pace set by the domestiques longest, which is hardly a spectacle worth going out of your way for. There's no point in watching three hours' live coverage of it - may as well just have a perusal of the results later and decide whether it's worth tuning into the highlights. It's not all Sky's fault, but riders who are more afraid of losing time than willing to gain it are becoming more common, and I'm sure that races like 2012, where Mick Rogers was able to happily tell Froome and Wiggins not to worry about GT winners like Evans and Nibali attacking from deep, because the pace he was tapping out would catch them comfortably due to the number crunching of the wattage needed, have factored into that. Once a few of the dying breed like Nibali have gone, we'll be left with a generation of contenders who've never known Grand Tour racing to be anything other than sitting in the wheels of Sky's domestiques hoping you can hold on enough to preserve your 7th place.
The sport may have always struggled to find sponsors, but when there's such a clear divide between haves and have nots, and the amount of exposure that a team can get in the biggest races is reduced because one team is bogarting all of the coverage, that does unsurprisingly make it harder to convince a sponsor to stump up the cash - and even harder still to convince them to take the risk of stumping up enough cash to try to compete with the current pacesetters. Now, Sky are in part in that position because they've invested far more wisely than BMC or Katyusha. They're in the position to exert a long-term and long-standing level of control, by calling first dibs on every strong young rider that emerges, to ensure they will always have the best ones, and the opposition will be left with the talents that Sky either cast aside or didn't consider worthy in the first place. But market saturation can impact market interest. Let's not beat around the bush here - the sport has for decades thrived on small and medium-sized businesses with cycling interest; that kind of level of sponsorship was sufficient to compete for a long time, but not enough to really grow the sport. The rise of the big corporate team and the pseudo-national projects like Sky, Katyusha, Astana and so on means that the kind of budgets afforded by those regional or hobby sponsor backers can no longer be competitive. That impact is being keenly felt in the World Tour, but even more so at ProContinental - less than a decade ago you had wildcard teams on the podium of multiple GTs, but today, break fodder and the occasional sprinter is all they can afford, and competitive wildcard teams are a thing of the past. The kind of sponsorship commitment needed to compete with Sky is above and beyond the capabilities of such enterprises. It needs big national- and multi-national companies, for many of whom the sport is the Tour de France, and sentences like "we got a podium at Paris-Roubaix" and "we won the Tour de Suisse" may as well be Klingon, and who teams can't necessarily imbue with the same kind of loyalty that the strong regional interest has engendered in sponsors for teams like Movistar and FDJ - just look at how Team HTC went to the wall despite all of their victories, because there was no real regional identity for the team and as they'd been coasting on the T-Mobile payout, the kind of sponsorship commitment required just to keep them at the same level they were already at was more than anybody was willing to fork out. And their stranglehold on the top of the sport could potentially have a direct impact on other teams' sponsorship potential, in that there are progressively fewer scraps to fight for results- and exposure-wise, making smaller teams less attractive to prospective sponsors, meaning they struggle even more to compete against the might of the teams like Sky at the events they need the exposure at to even hope to attract the sponsorships that could make them less uncompetitive. Yes, the sport has a sponsorship issue, but you can't look at the bigger picture and ignore Sky, because the impact that Sky individually, and the large corporate sponsors and national projects in general, have had on the competition level of the sport, very much is the bigger picture.
Well, in fairness, the broadcast types have changed wildly since Indurain's time. Maybe if people had had the chance to watch the race in the kind of depth that we do now, there would have been a higher backlash against him and Banesto at the time. I find it hard to imagine it would have matched the backlash that Sky are receiving for two reasons, really. Firstly that Banesto were very much a regional sponsor whose budget was not really superior to others at the time, and so there wasn't that feeling of them buying out the competition or creaming off the best young talents, because they were a long-established team who had their own developmental systems which they brought young riders in from. And secondly that Indurain and even Echavarrí were an awful lot less immediately dislikable as personalities off the bike than Brailsford and co., and didn't come with the baggage of a decade of disingenuous corporate claptrap that made them sound like walking executive-speak automatons. But still, there would likely have been more of a backlash if coverage was in greater depth. And regardless of whether they're down because of the racing style or a simple dislike of the dominant team, the viewing figures ARE down - combat sports time again: Armstrong was divisive as all hell, but in his market the audience increased - the globalisation drive coincides with Armstrong years and he was very much a face of that. He was a champion that some people wanted to see regardless. Sky's current domination isn't even holding audiences in its home market, with the UK audience figures down by 15% this year; they're, for the most part, holding the role of an unpopular champion, but one facing challengers that audiences don't really believe has a chance of beating the champion. Why would you buy a fight between a guy you can't stand and a guy who's just cannon fodder to him?samhocking said:
The problem is, how is one to 'ignore' Sky without turning their back on so many of the biggest races (in the stage racing arena at least)? The stranglehold in which they have been able to hold GTs with their brand of racing has rendered many of them almost unwatchable as a spectacle, because even if you decide that you'll just accept that Sky will win and be happy to watch a battle for the minor places, the depth that Sky have and the stifling technique that they employ so effectively means that the battle for the minor places is often simply a matter of who can hold on to the pace set by the domestiques longest, which is hardly a spectacle worth going out of your way for. There's no point in watching three hours' live coverage of it - may as well just have a perusal of the results later and decide whether it's worth tuning into the highlights. It's not all Sky's fault, but riders who are more afraid of losing time than willing to gain it are becoming more common, and I'm sure that races like 2012, where Mick Rogers was able to happily tell Froome and Wiggins not to worry about GT winners like Evans and Nibali attacking from deep, because the pace he was tapping out would catch them comfortably due to the number crunching of the wattage needed, have factored into that. Once a few of the dying breed like Nibali have gone, we'll be left with a generation of contenders who've never known Grand Tour racing to be anything other than sitting in the wheels of Sky's domestiques hoping you can hold on enough to preserve your 7th place.
The sport may have always struggled to find sponsors, but when there's such a clear divide between haves and have nots, and the amount of exposure that a team can get in the biggest races is reduced because one team is bogarting all of the coverage, that does unsurprisingly make it harder to convince a sponsor to stump up the cash - and even harder still to convince them to take the risk of stumping up enough cash to try to compete with the current pacesetters. Now, Sky are in part in that position because they've invested far more wisely than BMC or Katyusha. They're in the position to exert a long-term and long-standing level of control, by calling first dibs on every strong young rider that emerges, to ensure they will always have the best ones, and the opposition will be left with the talents that Sky either cast aside or didn't consider worthy in the first place. But market saturation can impact market interest. Let's not beat around the bush here - the sport has for decades thrived on small and medium-sized businesses with cycling interest; that kind of level of sponsorship was sufficient to compete for a long time, but not enough to really grow the sport. The rise of the big corporate team and the pseudo-national projects like Sky, Katyusha, Astana and so on means that the kind of budgets afforded by those regional or hobby sponsor backers can no longer be competitive. That impact is being keenly felt in the World Tour, but even more so at ProContinental - less than a decade ago you had wildcard teams on the podium of multiple GTs, but today, break fodder and the occasional sprinter is all they can afford, and competitive wildcard teams are a thing of the past. The kind of sponsorship commitment needed to compete with Sky is above and beyond the capabilities of such enterprises. It needs big national- and multi-national companies, for many of whom the sport is the Tour de France, and sentences like "we got a podium at Paris-Roubaix" and "we won the Tour de Suisse" may as well be Klingon, and who teams can't necessarily imbue with the same kind of loyalty that the strong regional interest has engendered in sponsors for teams like Movistar and FDJ - just look at how Team HTC went to the wall despite all of their victories, because there was no real regional identity for the team and as they'd been coasting on the T-Mobile payout, the kind of sponsorship commitment required just to keep them at the same level they were already at was more than anybody was willing to fork out. And their stranglehold on the top of the sport could potentially have a direct impact on other teams' sponsorship potential, in that there are progressively fewer scraps to fight for results- and exposure-wise, making smaller teams less attractive to prospective sponsors, meaning they struggle even more to compete against the might of the teams like Sky at the events they need the exposure at to even hope to attract the sponsorships that could make them less uncompetitive. Yes, the sport has a sponsorship issue, but you can't look at the bigger picture and ignore Sky, because the impact that Sky individually, and the large corporate sponsors and national projects in general, have had on the competition level of the sport, very much is the bigger picture.
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