WHAT A DAY WHAT A GAME MON THE QUEENS🕷

£370 a year now to watch cycling in the UK & Ireland. It used to be £40 a year (and was actually £20 with an early bird offer). I can understand WBD continuing to simplify the trail of logos they've been dragging around (Eurosport, D+, WBD, HBO, Max, TNT, GCN) but for the average cycling fan, they're just going to see the bottom line which is that this is a ten-fold increase to watch their favourite sport. I can also understand some of the comments that young people don't really watch 'telly' anymore and that they'll find the sport now through YouTube and TikTok. I have my doubts about this. I found the sport, as I;m sure a lot of people in the UK & Ireland did, because my Dad watched it on Channel 4 and back then, watching telly was a social thing, you watched what everyone else in the room was watching. Ironically now, social media, is not socialised, it's personalised. Feeds and the algorithm are personal. My kids are not going to see what I see. Are they going to watch over my shoulder while I scroll through my cycling-filled feed and wonder what it is I'm getting excited about? Are they fuck. I don't think anyone has figured out properly yet how to present the sport to potential young fans on social media. By miles, the highest engagement racing clips we used to get at GCN were crashes and silly stuff like when a dog ran across or someone celebrated too early. I fear that the algorithm will lead to a fetishisation of crashes over the actual interesting things in the sport which is more grown up than the bollocks and nonsense that ends up on social media feeds. The actual interesting things are the history, geography, politics, geology, culture, gastronomy, rivalries, tactics, heartbreak... how do you convert those into soundbites for TikTok? I'm not saying it's impossible. But if this is the actual future of broadcast cycling media, I don't think that lock has been picked successfully at all yet. I will be very interested to see how it all unfolds this year.