Sam Bennett had to win the Tour de France green jersey and two stages before he got his dues in the Irish media, writes Jack Joy. Our pro riders get minimal coverage and our domestic cyclists get almost none, yet minor developments in some other sports - especially GAA - regularly feature in the headlines
By Jack Joy
Irish cyclist Sam Bennett begins his
2021 season at the UAE Tour on Sunday. The Carrick-On-Suir fast-man will hope
to get off to a winning start in the Middle East following a stunning season in
2020.
The Deceuninck-Quickstep rider finished
last season with seven wins to his name, including two stage wins at the Tour
de France where he also captured the prestigious green jersey.
With four sprint stages along the UAE
Tour route, the first on the opening day, Bennett’s chances of a victory look
likely, but his prospect of receiving meaningful media coverage in Ireland, less
so.
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A break in Six Nations action and the
absence of the usually present GAA National Leagues this weekend offers the
sports media a timely opportunity to turn its attention to one of the country’s
leading sports stars.
That this opportunity will be taken, however, is not guaranteed, when so often cycling appears to fly over the head of sports reporting in Ireland. Where road racing is concerned, a clear lack of knowledge is prevalent.
There are some exceptions, of course, in the shape of a small and dedicated group of sports writers who focus on cycling. But they are sadly in the minority.
Those writers, through no fault of their own, often struggle to have their voices heard and space allotted to their work in the pages of their newspapers.
Their stories have often been accompanied by old photos of our pro riders racing for teams they have long since left. Meanwhile, a photograph of a domestic rider in an Irish event is an unthinkable thing for our media.
The Tour de France is often seen as the
pinnacle of road racing and three Irish riders competed in the race last year:
Sam Bennett, Dan Martin, and Nicolas Roche.
In the last three years Bennett has won stages at all of cycling’s Grand Tours; his wins at the Tour de France last year a culmination of countless victories on the Continent and beyond.
Dan Martin is among the best riders of the last decade. He has won two of the sport’s historic monuments, multiple Grand Tour stages and placed in the top ten at the Tour de France several times, finishing fourth at last year’s Vuelta.
Roche too has carved out a stellar
career in the sport spanning over 16 years in the professional ranks. He has
recorded 12 career wins and completed a mammoth 23 Grand Tours, leading the
Vuelta twice and taking stage wins there twice.
Yet until January’s RTE Sports Person of
the Year Awards, when Bennett’s performances could no longer be ignored, none
of the aforementioned trio had ever made the 10-person shortlist for RTE’s
annual prize.
It begs the question as to whether the panel of journalists from across the Irish sporting media who select nominees and award winners each year have much awareness of cycling at all.
Cycling’s issues with doping, of course, cannot be ignored and must always be considered. However, these demons are used too often as a get out-of-jail card by traditional media outlets who appear to have very little knowledge of the sport.
An air of dismissiveness radiates from
discussions, allowing for cycling to simply be disregarded and conveyed as not
worthwhile, with little attempt at serious analysis.
Following Dan Martin’s monumental win on Mur de Bretagne at the 2018 Tour de France, Off the Ball dedicated a grand total of 2½ minutes coverage to his victory.
The presenters engaged in the tried and
tested ‘reluctant-coverage’ model to allow them dedicate more time to important
matters like the English football team’s World Cup woes.
The absence of any cycling discussion
from the media when an Irish cyclist is not winning at the Tour de France is
perhaps the most significant example of the importance, or lack thereof, placed
on cycling.
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It is, after all, easy for media outlets to cover the biggest race of the year and point to that coverage as cycling getting its fair share, even if the rest of the cycling season gets very little attention.
RTE’s Six-One news coverage of last October’s
Tour of Flanders reduced the sport to a freak show; its brief item featuring
footage of crashes, of which only Julian Alaphilippe’s was relevant to the race,
while viewers were not informed who won the race (Mathieu Van Der Poel).
Ireland’s Ryan Mullen was the country’s
sole representative in the race and there was no mention of him in the report.
That the Tour of Flanders received any
coverage on RTE could have been viewed as a positive, though there was no
mention off Alice Sharpe and Imogen Cotter riding the women’s event.
Similarly, the exploits of a rider like Lara Gillespie – a repeated winner at the junior Worlds and Europeans on the track – barely got a mention across most media outlets.
At the same time, when GAA footballers, some of them not exactly star names, decide to travel to Australia to try Aussie rules or sustain injuries that may keep them out of club-level games, those developments are often covered in the main sports headlines on RTE Radio One and discussed at length on radio panel shows.
A highlights package of the National Road Championships was broadcast on RTE last year while TG4 covered the National Cyclocross Championships – both very positive developments that can hopefully be sustained. Cycling Ireland has, over the last 12 to 18 months, made clear efforts to ensure such an outcome.
TG4 also broadcasts the Tour de France, though that coverage is the main feed of the race rather than any daily items specifically relating to the Irish riders.
The channel did, however, put together a fantastic post-Tour show with Sam Bennett and it many ways that proved what could be done if the media chose to care about cycling a little more.
The TG4 documentary was precisely the kind of package other media outlets could easily produce and publish, and for races other than the Tour de France.
The biggest race of the year is not the only one that matters. Domestic cycling, for example, run every weekend from March to September gets close to no coverage.
However, the day to day reality is that even club football and hurling is relentlessly covered in forensic detail across the media while major international cycling achievements often merit, at best, only a few newspaper or website paragraphs or snatched words in a broadcast headline.
The decision to broadcast the Irish road championships by RTE was swiftly undone when the image of Sam Bennett’s teammate Rémi Cavagna was wrongly substituted for that of Bennett’s at its televised sports awards ceremony in January.
Ireland's junior downhill world champion Oisin O'Callaghan won the young sports person of the year award on the night. But, like Sam Bennett's Tour de France performance, it took a huge achievement - a world title - for a cyclist to be nominated; the sport only making the cut when an achievement was so big it just couldn't be ignored.
When Ireland has two pro cycling teams –
An Post-Chainreaction and Aqua Blue Sport – the coverage of those teams in the
national media was minimal; again with the exception of three or four
journalists.
The sporting success of a small nation like Ireland is often repeated ad nauseam. It is a wonder then that some of the nation’s most successful athletes have so often struggled to get a fair look in.
Cycling coverage in Ireland would be better served by informed and thorough analysis, no matter what it reveals, than the assertion of illegitimacy so frequently engaged in during those rare discussions about the sport.
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