The former president of the UCI, Brian Cookson, has strongly criticised Warner Brothers Discovery for effectively closing the Eurosport channel in Ireland and Britain and bundling it with much more expensive TV packages.
Though the channel, which dubs itself 'the home of cycling', has been available for €6.99 per month, that is expected to increase to about €30 per month when bundled with TNT Sports in coming weeks.
Cookson said no other retailer or serving provider would "get away with" a similar move and questioned if Warner Brothers Discovery was intent on "killing" cycling in Ireland and Britain.
"Outrageous and incompetent mishandling of this by Eurosport-Discovery-WBD. Are you trying to kill cycling for your British customers?" he said, noting later that cycling fans in Ireland were also impacted by the sudden move.
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Cookson then went off on a tangent, using a tin of beans, as an example of other products and services would not be subject to changes that brought about such a significant price increase.
"Here’s an alternative way to look at this," he said. "I like a particular brand of baked beans, which I can buy at a number of different supermarkets at a reasonable price. I don’t like any other beans or any other sort of canned vegetables.
"Now I find that in future I am only going to be able to buy these beans from one particular supermarket, and I will have to buy several other brands of beans and canned vegetables that I don’t like and don’t ever eat.
"Can you imagine any retailer of any other product getting away with that? Can you imagine that company and people in that industry telling the people who objected that they just didn’t understand that industry?
"I think the many people who are objecting to this move by WBD to scrap Eurosport in the UK and Ireland, to package its coverage of sports like cycling in with sports we don’t wish to watch, whilst hiking up the price for this combination by a ridiculous amount, well, I think we understand it very well indeed. And we don’t like it."
