The future of road racing in Britain
In a couple of weeks time the field in the Tour of Britain will be sprinting up the main street in Warkworth. Once again, the grassy bank below the castle will be the perfect spot to watch the sprint unfold, and the tea shops and cafes will do a roaring trade. It’s the third time in five years that picturesque Warkworth and its castle have featured on the Tour’s route.
The relevance of this to the future of road racing in Britain probably needs to be explained. I’ll try and help. When the parcours for the 2015 Tour of Britain was decided the route through Northumberland, with its scenic images of castles and the coast, was chosen not by a cycling organisation, but by the Culture Heritage and Tourism department of Northumberland County Council. Many of the same attractions and sites will be passed again in 2019.
The dirty little secret of British bike racing isthat at the highest level the principal sponsors of the sport are not commercial organizations but the public sector, using big cycling events as a form of place branding, as a way of putting their place on TV. At somewhere near a quarter of a million pounds a day it’s not a bad investment, and offers more control than, say, supporting one of those TV advertorial series where an actor with some charisma left and an audience who remember when he was younger and more sexy wanders around a location talking to people who do interesting things who’ve come to the attention of the local authority.
At the bottom of the place branding television tree is Celebrity Antiques Roadshow, but let’s not go there, eh? There’s only so much tolerance in my life for interns at TV companies who phone up and say ‘we’re filming on your patch this week with two antique dealers you’ve never heard of, can you suggest somewhere for the two and a half minute cultural insert where the presenter gets to talk to camera?’
I know a bit about all this. I worked with the Culture team at Northumberland Council in 2015 and up to my departure in 2017; I’m now Town Clerk of Berwick upon Tweed, and hope to see some of you at our stage start for the Tour in 2019. Don’t get me wrong, I’m quite convinced cycling events are a great contribution to place branding, and sometimes are even good value for money, but I don’t think you can plan a future for British cycling and not mention the biggest spenders in the sport.
Cycling needs to understand where the money at the top of the tree comes from, and to either direct some of that money further down the tree, or accept that that model won’t work for all the sport. Cycling does well out of TV because it’s similar (in the TV sense) to golf — it offers hours of TV where there’s something interesting going on, and plenty of time for commentators to fill with warm and cheerful banter. Unlike golf, it also features attractive locations full of interesting buildings and some of the finest athletes in the world. Only the pinnacle of the sport, the Tour de France, gets close to being appointment TV as opposed to filler.
Back in the late 90s and early noughties TV rights money was supposed to be a godsend for all sports, making them lucrative places to invest. The reality is grimly different. The TV money is going to a few sports, and within those sports, to a few events, promoters or teams. Pareto, the Italian land economist who specialized in the uneven distribution of wealth, would have a field day with TV rights. In extreme cases, sports or teams are paying broadcasters, not the other way round.
Is the TV cycling model from the Tour De France or the Tour of Britain a model that can be replicated at the lower levels of the sport? I’m not convinced. There’s a reason why the Tour isn’t in the same parts of Britain every year; local and regional government budgets aren’t that large, and the Tour can be a huge challenge to fund and organize. The rise of town centre races is in part a reaction to that; they’re cheaper than an out and out road race, with a better promise of return on investments in terms of spectator spend in local businesses. Joe Reilly’s criticism of the Newcastle Crit this year may be spot on in terms of the parcours dictating a race for the breakaway that disappointed many of the field, but as a business proposition, putting the riders on England’s most beautiful street in the heart of Newcastle’s entertainment district, it was perfect.
So can we shape the national race offering to attract more TV, or more local government money? The short answer is, we have to. Races aren’t self financing, and costs are always rising; measures like BC’s Accredited Marshall scheme will reduce costs in some areas, but the trend is clear. Costs will go up.
The national races that are televised are televised in a pretty traditional way; talking head presenter, commentary, and two cameras on bikes with occasional static shots. If you like cycling it’s great, but it can’t compete with the major races that have helicopter shots and the like. What would a race look like in my ideal world? It would have live tracking of all riders, presented on screen when needed, it would have up to a dozen fixed on bike cameras giving peloton shots, it would use drone footage to give a sense of place (vital for local sponsorship) and it would share data, preferably with someone in the indoor cycling market to increase the revenue streams.
There’s no new technology proposed there; what’s required is a central direction that acknowledges that TV money will go to the best products, with the average or the mundane products reduced to the role of filler, endlessly shunted round the schedules to accommodate overrunning tennis or extra time in the Scottish Cup. That means BC, or the series organizers, working with technology providers to improve the broadcast package.
The second suggestion is that the sport target different public sector budgets. At some stage the place promotion bubble will burst, and cycling will lose its allure for local authorities. Events like the Tour of Britain are competing not just with other sports events, but with an increasing trend for bespoke place making and place branding events from cutting edge design consultancies like Hemingway Design and their events team. In terms of return on investment cycling has to identify why it’s a better spend than say, a one off like Hemingway’s Festival of Making in Blackburn. (Declaration of interest here; Berwick are using Hemingway Design to produce the town’s new place brand).
Where cycling has a unique offer is in the wellness and health areas. However, that offer only works if it’s co-ordinated, supported by the centre in terms of series organizers, and adapted around each event. Peter Harrison has a good offer placing the Beaumont and the Curlew Cup at the heart of his weekend Cyclone festival (in the interests of full disclosure, I rode the Cyclone this year on the Saturday, and marshalled the road races on the Sunday) which focuses on driving up participation, but this should be the norm, not an outlier. The goal should be that every national race carries wellness related branding, and attracts public health funding to promote active lifestyles and healthy living. In the process some of the local authority antipathy to cycling events on ‘their’ highways might be tackled as well. This sort of initiative needs central direction and leadership, and top quality networking and lobbying with national politicians.
I could go on, especially about the ladder of participation and how we transform leisure cyclists into athletes and competitors, but that would involve suggesting more co-operation between BC and other organizations like CTT, and this is meant to be an essay, not a book. I’ll add one further note though; the window of opportunity is closing on public health funding; new entrants like Parkrun are hoovering up public sector cash and resources, and failing to look into the future could be disastrous for cycling. Either we improve the offer, and the outcomes we’re addressing, or we’ll lose out.
