Professional Cycling: Free-to-air Coverage

11:00:00

I beg to move, That this House has considered the potential merits of free-to-air coverage of professional cycling. It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Allin-Khan, and I am grateful for the opportunity to open the debate. Growing up, many of us had a sporting hero: a star striker, a gold medal winner or a record-breaking athlete. My sporting hero was Jason McRoy. Most will almost certainly have never heard of him. He was arguably Britain’s first mountain bike superstar. In the early 1990s, when the sport was in its infancy, Jason was a trailblazer. I followed his progress as closely as I could through the media available at the time. It being the 1990s, that was mostly dog-eared copies of Mountain Biking UK which I lugged back and forth to school, reading each month’s copy to destruction, and occasionally via coverage on Eurosport. Jason finally got his break in 1993, as big companies started throwing money at the fledgling sport. The biggest race in the calendar, aside from the world championships, was the Reebok Eliminator, a one-off head-to-head race on the famous Kamikaze course at Mammoth Mountain in California. Having secured entry after his mum persuaded the organisers, Jason—in his iconic black and white Hardisty Cycles kit, from a local bike shop in Newcastle—took on the top US factory race teams. Jason gave it his all, making it to the final against US favourite Myles Rockwell and narrowly losing. However, he had put his name on the sport’s international map. A professional contract with Specialised USA followed the next season and Britain had its first fully fledged superstar rider. We will sadly never know how Jason’s career would have panned out. On 24 August 1995, his Harley-Davidson collided with a lorry at Woodhead Pass on the A628 in Derbyshire. Jason’s father Jim took the call announcing his death at 1.50 am. Without Jason, there might never have been the double Olympic gold medal and world championship-winning Tom Pidcock, and no world championship wins for Gee Atherton, Steve Peat, Danny Hart, Reece Wilson or Charlie Hatton—no Rachel Atherton, Tracy Moseley or Manon Carpenter. Those are not household names, however. Their sporting successes are often difficult to witness as it is. Often the only place to watch those races was on Eurosport but last Friday it was consigned to the history books. Eurosport’s demise is a hammer blow for coverage of cycling in the UK. Owned by Warner Bros Discovery, the inevitable demise of Eurosport was hidden in plain sight. First their cycling-specific GCN+ app was closed, citing a desire to offer more content on fewer platforms. GCN+ provided almost unlimited access to the global cycling calendar. No race was too obscure. Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, check; Scheldeprijs, check; Kuurne-Brussel-Kuurne, check. Cycling bores like me had never had it so good. Parallel to the slow demise of Eurosport, and almost unnoticed to many outside of the cycling media bubble, Warner Bros Discovery had hoovered up the exclusive British broadcast rights to the Tour de France from 2026. That is comfortably the blue-ribbon event of the global cycling calendar and possibly the only race that everybody has heard of.

I commend the hon. Gentleman for bringing this issue for debate. Does he agree there is a national pride that comes from being able to easily access viewing—the success of the Olympics is an example, as he has very clearly illustrated—and being able to get the fervour and the excitement that comes with watching your team perform as opposed to reading results at the end of the day or in the papers the next day? The sport of cycling is worthy of free-to-air coverage, which encourages every child with a bike. After all, that could be your child or your grandchild.

I wholeheartedly agree with the hon. Member’s sentiments. Cycling is one of those sports that people almost fall into by accident. Everybody had a bike when they were growing up; everyone learns how to ride a bike. I think that the inspiration for riding that bike and, potentially, taking that further and wanting to ape some of the successes that we see in the Olympics every four years comes from having that on TV, in front of people. When the move for the Tour de France to Warner Bros Discovery was announced last October, it was described in The Guardian headline as a “blow to free-to-air sport coverage”. At the time, it was to be shown exclusively on Eurosport, but as of Friday, Eurosport itself no longer exists. Cycling coverage will now sit under the sporting umbrella of TNT Sports, also owned by Warner Bros Discovery. The price of a subscription to TNT Sports is £31 a month; Eurosport, when it was not included in an existing package, cost only £7 a month, so there is a more than 400% increase to watch a sport that has limited crossover with other sports in TNT’s portfolio. The Tour de France has been available free to air on British television for as long as I can remember. This summer, ITV4 will broadcast the race for the 25th successive and final time. Before that, Channel 4 had broadcast the race since I was a child. Indeed, I remember vividly the 1994 Tour de France, when it came to this country for the fourth and fifth stages of the race—the first time since an anti-climactic stage on the Plympton bypass in 1974. In 1994, I was enormously excited to get a glimpse of the great Miguel Induráin in his Banesto kit. It was also the tour debut of Chris Boardman, who had worn the yellow jersey after winning the opening stage time trial. Such were the crowds and the reception that Boardman was quoted as saying: “I’ll never forget this day as long as I live.” ITV4 was the free-to-air stalwart. Having covered Le Tour for 25 years—coupled with Channel 4’s coverage before that—ITV4 has been almost singlehandedly responsible for inspiring a generation of young cyclists. Scott Young, senior vice president at Warner Bros Discovery Sports Europe, has stated that providing free-to-air live cycling “is not on our road map…People can choose to make their decision as to how they want to engage with us in the short term.” That short term means a 400% price hike for paid coverage of professional cycling and the complete disappearance of live, free-to-air coverage. Young has stated that there are no concerns in Warner Bros Discovery that putting the sport behind a paywall will stunt the growth of the sport’s support, but the European Broadcasting Union’s 2024 report, “The Economic Impact of The Sports Activities of Public Service Media”, clearly states that free-to-air coverage can also encourage participation in sport at grassroots level. For many, terrestrial coverage of the Tour de France has been their only entry point to a sport that is, fundamentally, extremely niche. The cycling calendar is awash with famous races—from the grand tours of the Giro d’Italia and La Vuelta to the classics such as Paris-Roubaix and Milan-San Remo. Iconic though these races are, they have failed to penetrate our national consciousness, despite British winners in recent years. The Tour de France is more than just a famous cycling race. It is the gateway to a sport that is otherwise comparatively inaccessible and is now made even more so by the decision to remove live, free-to-air coverage from our television screens.

I congratulate the hon. Member on securing this debate. Many of my local cycling clubs have contacted me to encourage me to contribute, and it is also an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Allin-Khan. Does the hon. Member agree with me that it is such a great shame, if Great Britain is to become the host of the Grand Départ of the 2027 tour, for the first time in more than a decade, that such an exciting event will not be available in free-to-air coverage? That is a big blow to inspiring young children to aspire to cycle professionally or for pleasure. That such a huge event will not be on free-to-air coverage is a blow to the sport’s future.

I wholeheartedly agree. I will come on to it in a little more detail later, but I think the hon. Member is absolutely right that it is a tragedy that at the same time as we have been awarded the Tour de France, the biggest race in the cycling calendar, in 2027, the easiest place to be able to see that will be in person, rather than on television. Bradley Wiggins’s Olympic gold medal inspired a generation, alongside his victory in the Tour de France that year—a British first. The following season the torch passed to Chris Froome as he went on to win four times in the next five years. His run of victories was followed by that of Geraint Thomas, another multiple Olympic gold medallist. From 2012 to 2018, three British riders won the Tour de France six times in seven races. The following season, another British rider, Tao Geoghegan Hart, took the pink jersey, winning the general classification in the Giro d’Italia. Geoghegan Hart grew up watching the Tour de France on ITV. It is cited as one of the inspirations that brought him into the sport. On news of the Warner Bros Discovery announcement, Geoghegan Hart publicly stated that “the sport going behind such a large paywall is a huge problem” and that it is now time “perhaps to question the monopoly held over” the sport’s UK coverage. ITV is not blameless in this endeavour. Last year, ITV4 chose not to renew its broadcast rights, opening the door to Warner Bros Discovery. The reassuring tones of Gary Imlach and the encyclopaedic knowledge of Ned Boulting would no longer be staples of cycling fans’ summers. The organic growth in cycling that has accompanied this untrammelled success has been revolutionary, but the cycling boom that formed part of the London 2012 legacy is now in danger of being dropped by the peloton. The Tour de Yorkshire capitalised upon the success of the 2014 Grand Départ, but it became another casualty of the covid-19 pandemic. The 2020 race was postponed by organiser Amaury Sport Organisation in March of that year and after two years of attempts to revive the race, it has never returned, with ASO citing escalating financial challenges and uncertainties. The Tour of Britain, our very own multi-stage race, lacks the global recognition of the Tour de France, but last year’s men’s and women’s races generated over £30 million for local economies in the towns and cities that the race passed through. However, the future of that race is still uncertain. Last year, it was run by British Cycling after its former organiser, SweetSpot, had its race licence withdrawn because they had failed to pay the fee for it. Subsequently, SweetSpot went into liquidation. Last year also saw the demise of our last two remaining continental-tier teams, Saint Piran and Trinity Racing; last autumn, both announced that they were folding. As recently as 2021, the UK had five men’s continental teams in Trinity Racing, Saint Piran, Ribble Weldtite, Canyon DHB Sungod and SwiftCarbon Pro Cycling, but now none of them remain. In addition, RideLondon has been cancelled this year. The event was part of the London 2012 legacy, with its first iteration in 2013, and it had been run every year since. The event’s chief organiser, Hugh Brasher, has said that over the past decade it had: “inspired more than 300,000 people to get back on a bike or cycle more and also raised more than £85 million for charity”. Those are phenomenal numbers for a cycling event. However, the strategic pause of RideLondon in 2025 raises concerns that it, too, may not return in 2026 or beyond. Even British Cycling’s membership numbers have steadily dropped, after a fivefold increase from 30,000 to 150,000 in the decade between 2010 and the pandemic. The last year has seen the demise of major British races, race organisers and domestic teams. Since 2008, the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award has been won by cyclists more times than by participants in any other sport. Nevertheless, last year’s BBC SPOTY event all but announced the end of British cycling’s golden era with Mark Cavendish’s lifetime achievement award after his incredible 11th-hour achievement of eclipsing Eddy Merckx’s Tour de France stage win record, and tributes were paid to both Bradley Wiggins and to Chris Hoy, following his diagnosis of terminal prostate cancer. In many ways, the demise of live free-to-air cycling TV coverage is a metaphor for the crisis that has befallen professional cycling in the UK. My own deeply mediocre recent career in racing cyclo-cross was born from watching Mathieu van der Poel take on Wout van Aert and latterly Tom Pidcock. If I had not watched obscure Belgian Superprestige races and finally decided to get stuck in myself, I would not have joined British Cycling, bought myself a bike from eBay—n+1, I don’t make the rules—found my local grassroots race series and dragged myself off for an hour of the hardest, most heart-pumping physical activity that I have ever participated in. I mean that literally, because men of my age are not meant to hit 200 beats per minute. Mathieu van der Poel I was not, but it was fun to pretend that I could be. I would never have taken up cyclo-cross if I had not had access to watching the sport. Cycling is so much more than just a sport. It has changed lives and saved lives, and given people both purpose and freedom. It is one of our greatest sporting success stories, but, like all things, its continuing success depends upon the next generation being willing to pick up the torch. To do that, children need to be inspired and parents need to be enthused. Although the next generation of cyclists to emerge are already in the pipeline, there are limited options available to them domestically, and now they will almost certainly need to go abroad in order to take the next step in progressing their career. Cycling is not football, where we are never more than a stone’s throw from a pub to watch a game in. We see mainstream sports all the time. Even just a glimpse on a news bulletin can be enough, but cycling rarely gets a look in. A British cyclist reaching the pinnacle of their sport and winning the coveted world championship rainbow jersey barely registers in the world of sports coverage. If a British tennis player so much as gets a bye into the second round of a Grand Slam tournament, they carry the hopes of a nation. In an increasingly fractured media landscape, one in which even our national broadcaster struggles for relevance, linear TV finds itself staring into the abyss of obsolescence, and sports coverage is all but the preserve of those who can afford it. The inclusivity that sport offers appears to be at odds with the options available to consume it. Cycling is not a wealthy sport. The careers of professional cyclists are hard and precarious; only those who achieve superstar status will make their fortune. For many, it is a journeyman sport, and for many more it is a career too hard to sustain. To be popular, a sport must be visible; to be visible, a sport must have a television presence. The Government would never allow the FIFA world cup, the Olympics or Wimbledon to be put behind a paywall. With an estimated 12 million spectators attending the race each year, the Tour de France is easily the most attended sporting event in the world. Will the Government consider how it can inspire a new generation of Froomes and Cavendishes to take up the mantle and consider what they are doing to restore a sporting jewel, in which we have enjoyed such recent success, to the masses, lest its absence from our screens causes the sport to wither on the vine? Not so long ago, Britain had a golden age of cycling that made us unassailably the best in the world. Olympics, world championships, Tours de France—they were ours for the taking, and other countries could only look on in envy at the Union Jack-clad winning machine that British cycling had become. Now, the slow puncture of managed decline has reached the point where even the visibility of the sport will be limited to slightly overweight, middle-aged men like me, who pootle around on a Sunday morning in their Lycra, inspiring very few. I ask the Minister what can the Government do, and what they are doing, to arrest that slide and put British cycling—with a small c—on the right trajectory and stop the sport from fading into obscurity? What support can they give to the grassroots, and what help can they give to the struggling professional scene? What guarantees can they offer that the Tour of Britain and the world championships across all disciplines will not disappear behind the TNT paywall as well? What will they do to use professional cycling as a catalyst and inspiration to get the next generation out onto two wheels and matching their existing commitment to active travel schemes? I finish with a shameless plug for my constituency of Huntingdon. If anybody from British Cycling happens to be watching this or reading it in Hansard, Huntingdon is a beautiful part of Cambridgeshire with endless rolling countryside that would look fantastic in the helicopter B-roll they use in the Tour de France. With the race returning to the UK with the Grand Départ in 2027, we have a ring road that sets up perfectly for a spectacular sprint finish. For many that may present the best opportunity to actually see the race.

11:15:00

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Allin-Khan. I congratulate the hon. Member for Huntingdon (Ben Obese-Jecty) on securing this important debate. His commitment to cycling in all its forms is obvious. His speech was incredibly interesting, thoughtful and, at the very beginning, very moving. Professional cycling is enjoyed by many across the United Kingdom. It captivates fans with its exciting races and inspires people across the country to get their bikes out every weekend, as the hon. Member spoke about. It is also the sport of many remarkable athletes. During one of my very first visits as the Minister for Sport, I was lucky enough to see the Olympians in action during the road race in Paris. Their speed and athleticism were fantastic to see. I would also like to take this opportunity to congratulate Sir Mark Cavendish on his recent retirement—as the hon. Member rightly acknowledged—and Geraint Thomas OBE on his up-and-coming plans to do so. Their long and illustrious careers demonstrate their dedication, and we will miss watching their excellence on the road. On the issue of broadcasting that the hon. Member has raised today, I will discuss the need to balance revenue, growth and access. I acknowledge right at the start that I very much appreciate the points that he has made, but before I address those points, I want to highlight the contribution that cycling makes both to our economy and to people’s health, wellbeing and enjoyment. It is important to acknowledge that the wider cycling industry has recently faced significant headwinds. Despite this, the industry is stabilising, with some retailers reporting positive financial performance, and there are several signs of potential growth in key high-demand areas such as road, gravel and electric mountain bikes. More broadly, in October last year, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport published new research measuring the impact of the sport and the physical activity sector on the economy, based on 2021 data. That research showed that the sector directly and indirectly contributed £53.6 billion to the UK economy in 2021. This means that the sector was worth over 2.6% of the UK’s economy. Among the sports that were assessed, cycling contributed the third most of all summer sports to the economy. This was across all three forms: off-road, road and track cycling. These generated £5.4 billion to the UK economy in 2021. As a Government, we will continue to encourage and support the growth of cycling and the rest of the sector into the future, including through active support for professional cycling. As part of the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic and Paralympic cycle, UK Sport has committed long-term investment of over £38 million of Exchequer and National Lottery funding for British Cycling. That is an uplift of under £1 million from the previous cycle, and it will go towards supporting all aspects of the Great Britain Cycling Team, including equipment development and competition costs across road, track, mountain bike and BMX. That is hugely important for inspiring the next generation, because no one can become a professional without proper opportunities for grassroots cycling. The hon. Member has been a passionate advocate for enhancing cycling infrastructure—I believe he has asked some questions in this place on that issue. On 12 February, the Department for Transport announced the details of almost £300 million of funding for local authorities for active travel in 2024-25 and 2025-26 to provide high-quality and easily accessible active travel schemes across England. The funding will enable an additional 30 million journeys on foot and bike every year, with 53,000 people walking or cycling more regularly, including 15,000 children and young people. Investment in active travel helps to revitalise high streets, improve air quality and support people to live longer, healthier lives. Although active travel is the responsibility of the Department for Transport, the DCMS is of course committed to working across Government to ensure that everyone, including children, young people and those with disabilities, have access to and benefit from quality sport and physical activity opportunities. Sport England provides long-term investment to British Cycling, the national governing body for cycling, which receives up to £26.6 million over five years to invest in community cycling initiatives. That funding allows British Cycling to invest in sporting pathways, supports the next generation of talented riders and volunteers, and helps to extend its work into England’s diverse communities. The Government are also supportive of the UK hosting cycling events in line with our global reputation for hosting major events successfully. When Scotland staged the UCI Cycling World Championships 2023 in Glasgow, 95% of Scottish residents said they were proud to see their region host the event. Visit Scotland also reported a boom in interest in cycling across Scotland, in part due to those championships. Our 2024 manifesto committed to delivering international events with pride, as well as seeking new opportunities where we can to create a legacy to inspire the next generation of talent, promote exercise and healthy living, and create safe and cohesive communities. Given the variety of formats and events in professional cycling, it would be difficult if not impossible to keep up with the sport through physical attendance alone, so it is unsurprising that so many people enjoy TV coverage. I sympathise with the points that the hon. Member made about the cost of TV packages, not least following the decision to integrate Eurosport, the long-time broadcaster of professional cycling, into TNT Sports. That will mean that many will see their subscription to watch cycling, alongside other sports, increase to over £30. The hon. Member is right that, for many people, £30 a month is a lot of money. I am sure that TNT Sports will be thinking about the balance between generating revenue and ensuring that cycling continues to be seen regularly on TV, helping to grow the sport. As the Minister for Sport, I also appreciate the importance of TV revenue in sustaining these sports, and I recognise that commercial matters need to be considered carefully when making such decisions. I am sure that the hon. Member would agree that it is not for Government to intervene on those decisions. On the point the hon. Member made about the Tour de France being on free-to-air television, I recognise that many will have taken great pleasure in watching it on ITV in the last 25 years. It is a matter for the broadcaster with the rights to the Tour de France to determine whether any coverage will be available to free-to-air television in the future. Any discussions would not be a matter for the Government. I am aware of the speculation around the Tour de France taking place in the UK in 2027. We have in the past made no secret of our ambition to host the Grand Départ here again, following the success of the 2014 event in Yorkshire, in the hope of inspiring more people to enjoy cycling and bringing lasting benefits to our communities. However, nothing has been decided, and it is a matter for the organisers. This debate has offered a fantastic opportunity to discuss the continued success of professional cycling, and of cycling across the UK. It is a sport that we want to see continue to grow in this country for the economic value it has, for the sporting heroes it generates, which the hon. Member for Huntingdon spoke about so passionately, and for the inspiration it provides to many. I thank those who contributed and the hon. Member for bringing forward the debate. Question put and agreed to.

11:23:00