JimmyFingers said:
A beautiful bit of utter speculation without anything empirical to back it up whatsoever. Bravo
No, it's common sense. There is absolutely no way imaginable that there are over 2 billion TV sets in the world who's owners find cycling interesting enough to sit down and watch 20 consecutive minutes of it. No more than a tenth of that number could care about professional cycling (and that is being extraordinarily generous), or else, it would be a huge sport, up there with the likes of football in terms of the money generated. Especially since its primary fanbase and popularity is in wealthy, developed countries, where there are plenty of easy dollars to be made.
Of that significantly reduced number, fewer still will be fanboy idiots enough to not watch something because their favourite star got banned. And even fewer still will take a moral stance and refuse to watch it because the doping is officially back. Even amongst proper cycling fans, I don't think it is unreasonable to assume that the overwhelming majority will return to view Tour after Tour, at least for a few minutes at any time over the three weeks. It is also reasonable to assume that even those who do decide to not watch the Tour will still add some sort of corporate value to the race, by familiarising themselves with what is going on in the race (i.e. paying attention to media coverage); so that they can come on websites like this and participate in informed discussion about doping in the sport. If the average Tour viewer had any concern for the integrity of what he is watching, then the Tour would have been finished as a spectacle after Lance, if not after Festina.
Only those people who care about cycling in the slightest will care about there being doping. The overwhelming majority of Tour de France viewers cannot be cycling fans, otherwise, as I said, we would have empirical evidence of it in the form of the sport being right up there as among the most lucrative and most well known in the world. And it is this overwhelming majority of casual viewers who're only in it for a quick 20 minute Tourism France advert, who the advertisers, the broadcasters, and thus the UCI, set up everything for. As long as they keep coming back then nobody's going to care what any other demographic of Tour viewer does.
Until such time as Vincenzo Nibali is as instantly recognisable anywhere in the world as Cristiano Ronaldo is, it is entirely incorrect to argue that banning people and doping scandals will make a difference to the bottom line for the UCI, the ASO, and every other organisation with a financial stake in the Tour. I think Dazed and Confused has seen right to the heart of the issue, which is that the advertising dollar is now the most important thing in every single sport worldwide, and the sentiments of the actual, participative, emotionally invested fanbase are entirely irrelevant to the quest for ever increasing profits.
Sure you can argue that some companies would withdraw their sponsorship in order to go into PR damage minimisation mode, but once again, these companies are in a significant minority; otherwise, after the endless doping scandals we have seen throughout cycling's history, no company would want to sponsor any cycling team. Of course that isn't the case. Today you see huge multinational companies with theoretically a lot to lose getting involved, like Sky. But once again, the average viewer doesn't care who sponsors who (because what kind of ****ing saddo opens an account with Rabobank circa 2010, for instance, just because they liked Robert Gesink?). Neither do the broadcasters, the UCI, nor the ASO. All the latter want is to flog the TV rights to the highest bidders, and all the former cares about is presenting impressive viewership stats to would-be advertisers, who are going to purchase spots in the commercial breaks, promoting goods and services completely irrelevant to professional cycling and thus completely insulated from whatever doping scandal may be going on.