Two races at the same time is just too much

Our tiny pea-brains cannot cope

Every year we hear it. Every year.

Paris-Nice and Tirreno-Adriatico cannot be allowed to overlap. It’s too complicated. It’s too confusing. Cycling cannot expect to attract new fans when the current ones cannot even fathom how the calendar works.

Christ lads, honestly. There are two top-level races on at the same time. Two. It’s not that complicated. I explained it to my six year old and she understood.

Have you ever looked at the football fixtures on a Saturday? It is literally impossible to watch every game live. Impossible. Even if you planned on watching them all back on-demand, there isn’t enough time in the day. There is more football than time. So if you like football, you pick a game or two that most piques your interest and you allocate your time accordingly. And that’s if you’re only considering English football. There are ‘top-level’ games all across Europe on the same day too. So forget it. If you want to keep up with everything that’s going on, you just check all the other results the next time you’re on the toilet.

Comparatively, cycling is incredibly simple.

Within cycling media there is an accepted truism that the calendar is too complicated and is a barrier to entry. I just do not agree.

You don’t have to understand all of it in order to understand some or most of it.

If any of you are football fans, have you ever tried explaining to someone who knows nothing about football how the league structure works? Who qualifies for the Europa League and how? How the playoffs in the various tiers work? Why is the European Cup more important than the Club World Cup? Why is the actual World Cup the most important but isn’t contested by the clubs, who pay all the wages? How does the UEFA co-efficient work? Why are most of the teams in the Champions League not league champions?

Kids who begin watching football at a young age don’t know the answers to these questions. They don’t have to. The answers to these questions are not a barrier to watching two teams play a football match.

There are equivalent questions in cycling, and similarly, you don’t need to know the answers to them to enjoy a bike race.

Cycling, on the face of it, is one of the most simple sports in the world. First rider over the line wins. You don’t need to know anything about UCI points or the WorldTour or even what general classification is to understand that the first rider over the line wins.

If you’re watching Paris-Nice, you don’t need to watch Tirreno-Adriatico and vice versa. It is absolutely fine to pick one and watch it live while ignoring the other one. It is also perfectly fine to watch both, knowing that there are two concurrent races happening.

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This ‘problem’ of having two concurrent races is not a barrier to entry for cycling fans. Potential fans are not going to have a problem with Paris-Nice and Tirreno-Adriatico because this is not where the barrier is raised and new fans pour in.

I don’t have visibility on the viewing figures in cycling right now. But from 2020-2023, I did. It will come as no surprise that the viewership spikes at the Grand Tours and the monuments (and in fact, it spiked more for GCN+ at the Giro than the Tour because we had the Giro worldwide but couldn’t show the Tour in plenty of countries including USA. The Tour is also on terrestrial TV in a lot of countries which would dilute the audience). Other than these races, there are very few spikes throughout the rest of the year. Nobody (relatively speaking), even the paying cycling fan, is watching Tirreno-Adriatico anyway.

This ‘problem’ I’m told is compounded by the fact that teams take part in both races - a fact which does not apply to football. Liverpool aren’t ever going to face Arsenal and Real Madrid on the same day. This is an aspect which is, as far as I’m aware, unique to cycling.

It must be stopped. Fans won’t understand.

Something I always struggle to understand is the push for cycling to become more generic and more ‘understandable’. It should be more like Formula One, we’re told. One race at a time, only one race, in a nice simple homogeneous format.

Bollocks, I say.

Teams competing at overlapping races is a feature, not a bug. It’s fascinating seeing teams spread their talent across two races. It’s a joy. The more generic and more like other sports that cycling becomes, the LESS likely it will be that new fans will turn to it, not more likely. Cycling is interesting precisely because it is weird and different, not in spite of it being weird and different.

But setting aside the issue of trying to draw new fans in, there still pervades a feeling that current cycling fans don’t want to see two races occur concurrently. Perhaps because two top-level races divides the quality of the field and allows riders to avoid each other. But maybe it’s just because, unlike football fans who have accepted their fate as utter by-standers for almost all matches, cycling fans expect to be able to watch everything.

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(I’m sorry. I can’t stop comparing cycling to football, because football is my ‘other’ sport. Nevertheless…) football has Match of the Day on a Saturday. It’s OK if you don’t watch any live games because Gary Lineker and the lads have you covered. The entire audience probably take Match of the Day for granted these days because it is such an institution but its place at the heart of English football is vitally important. It disallows any feelings that viewers might be missing out an anything.

We knew this at GCN. We tried to replicate it.

We actually had two shows, which in hindsight should have been rolled into one. There was the Racing News Show on YouTube on a Monday evening which was usually Dan Lloyd talking to camera running through brief highlights of the week’s racing, along with some news snippets. Then behind the GCN+ paywall there was World of Cycling (where I was allowed to indulge myself with the Stat Attack segment).

The World of Cycling Show was supposed to be the Match of the Day for cycling. We were supposed to be solving any problems caused by having two races like Paris-Nice and Tirreno-Adriatico happening at the same time by wrapping it all up in a neat little package. But there were several problems.

The first I’ve already touched on. The Racing News Show came out first, so we had already produced a highlights show of sorts for the GCN audience. The World of Cycling Show was released on Tuesdays, and a lot of the time as late as Wednesdays so we had gazzumped ourselves. It was a more in-depth look at what had happened with studio guests. There was less highlights and more chat.

The problems with both shows was that neither of them were released on a Sunday evening, which would have been the equivalent of Match of the Day. And the simple reason for that was staffing. None of us really worked on a weekend. The people who would edit those shows together were Monday to Friday nine to fivers, so that was that. We couldn’t get either show out quick enough.

It gives me a really giant appreciation of what must be involved in producing Match of the Day every Saturday, on time, every time.

World of Cycling on a Wednesday meant that most people had already moved on, the races from last week or even last weekend were already old news. And it became more of a preview show, which did serve a purpose, but it wasn’t Match of the Day anymore.

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Even if we had produced a beautiful show and released it at 10pm on Sunday evening (let’s not forget most big classics and final days of big stage races happen on a Sunday), containing all of the highlights from that day and of all relevant races over the weekend and throughout the previous week. Even if we had done that, we still weren’t solving one of cycling’s biggest problems of the modern day - it is very very difficult to distill down into acceptable chunks for highlights or for social media clips. If you’re not experiencing the race live, then you’re simply not experiencing it properly.

I believe this is central to people getting so grumpy about Paris-Nice and Tirreno-Adriatico. Cycling fans want to, need to experience the racing live. It is, by design, a slow burn. If you tune-in to watch the last 15km of Milan Sanremo this weekend then you are doing it wrong. You don’t deserve the final adrenaline rush of the Poggio if you haven’t sat through hours of monotony beforehand. And indeed, you won’t experience the same adrenaline rush because the monotony is required for the payoff to land. The anticipation is accumulative. If you watch Tirreno live, you cannot watch Paris-Nice live, so us junkies are left with merely half our potential hit.

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Cycling is simple and complicated at the same time and the complexity is endlessly fascinating.

But really, I firmly believe that as bad as attention spans have become, as stupid and lobotomised as these doom-scrolling devices have made us, that we can overcome and accept the reality that the Bretagne Classic and Stage Nine of the Vuelta will take place on the same day - and that I can watch one of them on catch-up if I really want to.