Professional Cycling: Free-to-air Coverage

Jim Shannon Excerpts

Wednesday 5th March 2025 Westminster Hall

[Ben Obese-Jecty (Huntingdon) (Con)]

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.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

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.

[Ben Obese-Jecty]

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.