Routes, Racing and Ratings

Want to draw your own route for the Tour de France? You could start with a map and a pen but what you really need is a TV remote control, if not in your hand then in your mind. More than ever the Tour de France route is being designed for television viewers, to make racing rhyme with ratings and ensuring that the opening week is as worth watching as the mountain stages. Today’s feared cobbled stage is just one example.

Leblanc canvas

Jean-Marie Leblanc ran the Tour from 1989 to 2005 and the routes often had a formulaic feel: an opening week of repeat sprint stages, a couple of long time trials and a few set piece summit finishes in between. Leblanc, despite being a nordiste who loved Paris-Roubaix, was rarely inclined to use cobbles in the Tour. It wasn’t all staid, in the 1992 Tour de France visited the Pyrenees in the opening weekend and in 1999 the Passage du Gois was wild, a road submerged by the tide and littered with seaweed. But the repeat sprints of the opening week were a staple and often the overall contenders just had to worry about their reaction times in case of a surprise spill. Leblanc was an ex-pro turned journalist and perhaps his grounding in the typewriter era meant he liked a beginning, a middle and an end to the Tour de France? In a good interview with Rouleur he sings praises for the sport’s romantic past and rants about social media.

If Leblanc had a typewriter in his brain Christian Prudhomme appears sensitive to the TV remote control. Today’s routes designed to bring in audiences and keep them gripped rather than drifting off into a siesta or channel-hopping. Certainly today’s routes are made for TV and more specifically a TV audience. But it’s too much to define it as a philosophical clash between Prudhomme and Leblanc. Prudhomme’s been bossing the race since 2007 and we’ve had several boring stages along the way: the 2012 route had a prologue and then six sprint finishes in a row. Instead it’s business with the creation of a lively route bringing in more interest and greater audiences.

The Paris-Roubaix cobbles feature today after being used last year. Before this they were used sparingly in 2010, 2004 and 1989. The repeat use is indicative of the need to spice up the first week. If that’s not enough the race was run alongside the coast yesterday, climbed the Mur de Huy, Wednesday’s Stage 6 is a sailing race along the coast and Stage 8 has the punchy uphill finish in Mûr-de-Bretagne. The opening week makes for compelling viewing; years ago you could skip a lot of stages.

Repeat Customers

As exciting as the opening week may be, borrowing from the spring classics does suggest a lack of originality, a paucity of imagination, as if even the mighty Tour has to reach into cycling’s collection of greatest hits. It’s just good business. What do the finish on the Muy de Huy, an intermediate sprint in Rotterdam, a stage start in Antwerp, another in Seraing, a celebration of Paris-Roubaix all have in common? They’re all linked to other ASO races (Flèche Wallonne, World Ports Classic, Liège-Bastogne-Liège, Paris-Roubaix) so a spotlight on this terrain might make the general public more aware of these other assets and it also allows for cross-selling, towns that host smaller races can get rewarded with the Tour’s stardust although of course they pay too.

Short and Sharp



Another TV inspired trend is the increasing number of short stages. Or is there? The average race length hasn’t changed much over the years, between 1989 and 2015 the mean distance is around 3,360km. But it’s the composition that’s changed, 5km prologues and 40km time trial stages are more rare these days which means the typical road stage has to be shorter. We see short mountain stages of under 120km and these have been compelling viewing, especially when shown from start to finish. Today’s stage might be the longest of the 2015 race but it’s the shortest ever longest stage.

Record audiences

So far so good. It’s working to with very high audiences, almost as good as 2009, the high watermark where Lance Armstrong’s comeback sucked in a wider public curious to see the show.

Conclusion

They say the riders make the race not the roads, more poetically in French it’s les organisateurs proposent, les coureurs disposent. In the Tour de France it doesn’t take much to get the riders racing so if the route can harness the geography whether coastal roads, cobbles or climbs the action and ratings will follow. This is making the opening week a test for all riders.

The risk with chasing ratings is a Wacky Races element where the public end up watching a circus show rather than a sport. But the Tour is only using roads used covered elsewhere during the year and for all the risks the big crashes in recent years have happened on banal roads. Chris Froome and Alberto Contador were simply unlucky last year rather than victims of sadistic course design, ditto those exited yesterday.

A tough opening week isn’t just good for TV whether your enjoyment as a viewer or ASO’s ownership as business. Making every stage a line from Rudyard Kipling’s “If” only makes the race a greater test: if you can cope with the cobbles, if you can ride in echelons then you might not have the Earth but you’ll win the yellow jersey. The winner of the 2015 Tour will be tested on all kinds of roads and they will stand taller on the podium in Paris for it.