Abstract
TV coverage of road cycling started shortly after World War II with the first live broadcast of the conclusion of the Tour de France at the Parc des Princes in Paris in 1948. During the 1950s, the popularity of the Tour de France news programmes grew resulting in the first live coverage from within the race in 1958 on the legendary col d’Aubisque. French television began to pay for the right to cover the race in 1960. In the following decades, television coverage of cycling races expanded in duration and scope. In this chapter, we analyse TV broadcasting of cycling in detail. We discuss the reasons behind the successful marriage of cycling and television and explain in detail how TV audiences are measured. We also present some relevant data of TV audiences for major cycling races and summarize the findings of two empirical studies that have been published on TV audience data for cycling. We then conclude with a discussion on the future of televised cycling.
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Notes
- 1.
The first reports on TV viewing for the 2015 Tour de France indeed show a reversal of this trend with TV audiences that seem to match the level of 2011.
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Van Reeth, D. (2016). TV Viewing of Road Cycling Races. In: Van Reeth, D., Larson, D. (eds) The Economics of Professional Road Cycling. Sports Economics, Management and Policy, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22312-4_6
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