Eurosport audience for cycling Grand Tours surges | Sticky Bottle

*Tao Geoghegan Hart winning the Giro and his Ineos Grenadiers team claiming seven stages clearly proved popular with British Eurosport views (Photo: Gian Mattia D'Alberto)*

[banners_ad id=55]

The audience for cycling’s Grand Tours on British
Eurosport increased very significantly this year as the unusual season and
delayed racing meant the events were more popular than ever.

Viewing figures - in Britain and Ireland - for the Tour de France, Vuelta a España and Giro d’Italia were all up, though the Spanish and Italian Grand Tours overlapped this year.

The pro cycling season was interrupted due to the Covid-19 pandemic, with many races cancelled; a factor that seemed to increase viewer interest in the largest events that went ahead.

The audience for the Tour de France on UK Eurosport
increased by 48 per cent while the Giro audience was up by 82 per cent and the
audience for the Vuelta almost doubled, recording an increase of 95 per cent.

Overall, the combined audience for Grand Tours on the channel – dubbed ‘the home of cycling’ – was up by 68 per cent compared to last year.

The Tour de France was a big hit for British Eurosport, with audiences increasing very significantly. This stage 2 win for Julian Alaphilippe into Nice, where he also took yellow, resulted in a spike in viewers tuning in on TV in France

Related News

Lara Gillespie attacks Dolomite stage as Giro hits high mountains

Video - Ireland's Meehan climbs with best on brutal Alpine terrain

The growth of the Bradley Wiggins Show was more modest,
though still reasonably strong as it gained 25 per cent more downloads than
last year.

However, that was perhaps surprising as the audience growth was much smaller than for the racing on the TV channel, even though the Wiggins show is still relatively new.

In France there was also very strong interest in the Tour among the domestic audience, with Julian Alaphilippe (Deceuninck-QuickStep) proving a ratings winner.

More than 40 million people tuned in to watch the Tour, over the three-week duration of the race, on France Télévisions (FTV). Reports in France suggest the audience on the FTV domestic channel was seven million higher than last year.

L’Equipe reported that FTV enjoyed two significant peaks in audience size during the Tour, with 6.3 million viewers tuning in for stage 2 when Alaphilippe won into Nice and took the yellow jersey.

And on stage 15, when eventual overall winner Tadej Pogacar (UAE Team Emirates) won on Grand Colombier and defending champion Egan Bernal (Ineos Grenadiers) was badly dropped, the audience also reached 6.3 million.