Cycling's in Rude Health. Shame Hardly Anyone in Britain Can Watch It.

Looking for a voice

At some point during this year's Tour de France I found myself trying to work out how to get hold of the American coverage. Not because I wanted the American coverage, but because Phil Liggett was on it, and I wanted to hear his voice again. He is eighty-two now, calling his fifty-fourth Tour, and I realised while I was googling ways to watch NBC's feed from a sofa in England that I wasn't really chasing the race. I was chasing a sound. The sound of summer afternoons that have been playing in the background of my whole life.

That's when it landed properly. This was the year free-to-air cycling died in Britain, and I'd gone looking for a ghost.

How you make a cyclist

I know exactly how it's done, because it was done to me. I grew up in Cumbria, near the sea, and my brother and I were bike-mad as kids in the way you could be before everything was a screen. There was a ten-mile loop I rode in the evenings when I was twelve or thirteen: out of our village to my nan's village, down to the beach, along the seafront and back up past the estuary to home, near enough exactly ten miles every time. My older brother and his mates were doing the proper stuff, forty and fifty-mile rides at fifteen, taking turns on the front, learning to sit on the wheel before we even knew that was a term.

Then one July my brother got wind that the Tour was on the telly and switched it on, and the first thing we ever watched live was Greg LeMond beating Laurent Fignon by eight seconds on the final day into Paris. Eight seconds, after three weeks of racing. It was Channel 4, and the man calling it was Phil Liggett, with Paul Sherwen beside him, the pair who would narrate the next twenty-odd summers of my life. If you set out to design a single afternoon to hook two cycling-mad boys for life, you could not do better. From that moment we watched the lot. The race starts in early July, so the first week or so always landed while we were still at school, and we'd catch the highlights in the evening, a proper programme in its own right. Then we'd break up, and the back end of it, the mountains and the run into Paris, was ours to watch live, all day, with nothing better to do.

I watched Miguel Indurain grind out five in a row. I watched the whole Armstrong soap opera arrive and eventually collapse. I watched Floyd Landis win the thing and lose it again inside a year, when the testosterone caught up with him. I watched Contador. And then, after years of this being a thing that happened to other countries, there were suddenly British riders everywhere and Bradley Wiggins won the entire race. I'd been watching for more than two decades by then. It felt like being let in on something early and finally seeing it come home.

None of that happens if I can't stumble on it in the first place. That is the whole point.

What we had, and lost

For twenty-five years ITV had the Tour, and Channel 4 carried it before that, back into the 1980s. It was free. You could stumble on it. And the people who made it were extraordinary at a very particular job: making four hours of men riding bicycles through the French countryside feel like the best thing on television.

Gary Imlach anchored it from 1990 with a dry, literate seriousness that treated the audience like adults. In the commentary box it was Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen through the Channel 4 years, the voices that taught a generation of us what the race even was, and later Ned Boulting and David Millar, who had the rare thing where you'd happily listen to them for an hour when nothing was happening, because nothing happening was the point. And Matt Rendell would wander off into the history of some fourteenth-century church or the geology of a col, and somehow that was the bit you remembered. ITV treated the Tour as a three-week drama and a genuine tour of France, the country as much as the race. The riding was the spine, but the flesh of it was the storytelling.

This year all of that is behind a TNT Sports subscription, roughly thirty quid a month, after Warner Bros Discovery took the rights and folded everything into its paywall. There's a nightly highlights hour on Channel 5 and some Welsh-language live coverage on S4C, which is genuinely a lifeline, but the free, all-day, terrestrial habit is finished.

Let me be fair about this

I want to be honest, because it would be easy to turn this into a grumble about the new lot. I found the TNT studio flat and the commentary clinical, but that is a matter of taste, and plenty of people rate the new team. Their anchor, Orla Chennaoui, is widely and rightly respected. The production is, by all accounts, technically superb: every kilometre of every stage, multiple camera feeds, no ad breaks carving up the finale the way ITV's had started to.

So this isn't really "the new coverage is bad." Some of it is better. It's that the thing that made it matter to people who weren't already cycling fans has gone, and the reason it's gone has almost nothing to do with who's holding the microphone.

The bit that actually matters

Here's the real problem, and it isn't about production values or presenters. It's about who can accidentally find it.

The British cycling boom did not come from nowhere, and it did not start in 2012 either, whatever it felt like at the time. The elite success had been building for years: foundations laid by Chris Boardman and others in the 1990s, then a Lottery-funded track programme and Dave Brailsford's marginal gains stacking up medals through the 2000s. But the moment it spilled out of the velodrome and into ordinary life was 2012, Bradley Wiggins winning the Tour and London hosting the Olympics, both live on free-to-air television, ITV's Tour coverage peaking at over three million and half the middle-aged men in Britain going out to buy a road bike. Under all of it is what happened to my brother and me: someone trips over the race, gets quietly hooked on the scenery and the suffering, and never leaves. Boardman has told the story of how his own 1992 gold, watched on terrestrial telly, set a young Wiggins on the path in the first place. That whole chain runs on one thing: a sport you can trip over without meaning to.

You cannot trip over something that costs thirty pounds a month. A paywall is a filter that only lets through people who already care. It is, by definition, incapable of making a new fan by accident, and accident is how almost all of us got here. When only the committed can watch, the sport stops recruiting. It just harvests the people it already has.

Rude health for whom?

The week the Tour finished, the BBC ran a piece headlined that cycling is "in rude health," and on its own terms it's completely right. Tadej Pogacar won his fifth title and is now, fairly, talked about as the greatest of all time. Mathieu van der Poel produced a superhero ride on the Champs-Elysees. Half a million people stood on Alpe d'Huez, a hundred and eighty thousand crammed onto Montmartre. British Cycling reckons 30.2 million people rode a bike at least once here in the past year, the highest since before the pandemic. Next summer the race itself comes to Britain for six stages.

All true. All good. And all beside the point I'm making, because the health of the elite spectacle and the health of the pipeline underneath it are two different things, and this year they started to come apart. The peloton has never been more watchable. It has also, in Britain, never been harder to watch by chance. A sport can be thriving at the very top and quietly severing its own roots at the same time, and mistake the first thing for proof that the second isn't happening.

The voices are leaving three ways at once

What gets me is that the soundtrack of the whole thing is disappearing on three separate exits simultaneously. Liggett is eighty-two and won't be in the booth forever. Imlach has stepped back. Boulting and Millar, unwilling to disappear behind the wall, went off and made a free Tour podcast from cafes and roadsides instead, For The Love of Cycling (also on Spotify), which is a lovely act of defiance and, tellingly, the only bit of the old magic you can still get for nothing. The first words I heard when I found it were one of them asking anyone watching on YouTube to please subscribe. So I did.

That's the shape of it. Aging out, walled off, or exiled to a podcast. The particular texture that turned a bike race into an afternoon you'd clear your diary for is being dismantled from every direction, and the one that actually threatens the future, the wall, is the one being sold to us as an upgrade.

Next summer

Next summer the Tour comes to Britain and there will be kids lining the roads six deep, and it will be wonderful, and the people who run these things will point at the crowds as proof that everything's fine. And it will be, for them, and for me, because I'm already hooked and I'll find a way to watch it.

I just keep thinking about the other kid. The one at home on a wet afternoon, thumbing through the channels, who used to be one click away from falling in love with a bike race the way my brother and I did, and now isn't. We'll never know that kid didn't happen. That's the thing about a shop window you board up. You don't get to see the customers who walked past.