From a nerd/technical point of view, one of the great challenges of the tour de france is the live HD video feed from the helicopter camera platforms to the broadcast/editing studio. Considering the mountains and terrain often in the way, the distance of the route, and the fact that the event relocates itself every day.
It was considerably less difficult in the 480p analog days.
Here's an older example of the aerial camera work.
Also the live video feeds from the camera operators that ride pillion on motorcycles chasing the riders. That presents its own unique technical challenge.
France used 576 25i in analog days. And why would analog be any easier than digital? A WMT will give acceptable pictures for this type of shot at about 5mbit which is far less than 8MHz. You can get about 40mbit on an 8MHz channel which gives cracking pictures even at 2160 50p
Analog is easier than digital because the signal degrades gracefully, whereas with digital it is all-or-nothing. So raw bit rate is not quite as important as the degree to which you are losing packets.
Digital comes with tons of error correction - especially if you use the entire 8mhz. While analog degrades with just slight issues, digital remains rock solid past the point an analog signal would be unacceptable to put out in air.
> - Business-vs-talent returns: most riders earn minimum wage.
Where so you get this from?
There is a mandated minimum that is around the median salary of my country, so much higher than minimum wage of most countries.
New young riders in the UCI Pro Tour level reportedly get a fair bit more than the minimum, on the Tour they are not usually fielding a more experienced team and earn more. If they prove themselves the earnings go up fast.
Cycling pays little compared to basketball, football etc. but they are well paid compared to the general population at Tour level.
It's not just the salary. World tour level pro cyclists usually receive free room and board during the season. Even the domestiques get some appearance fees from sponsors. And they're given extra equipment at the end of the season which they can sell for cash. For a young guy without a lot of commitments it's a pretty good deal.
If he read the article it says the mandated minimum wage for a rider is $35,000, but most riders make more than that.
You might have a hard time living in say California on that wage but in parts of rural Europe you could get by comfortably. You definitely could in Michigan.
Salaries work a little differently for pro athletes: they're not just earning money to live off now, but they also need to save up for when their career inevitably ends and they don't have any other skill to fall back on.
There are options for pro athletes after their athletic career, as trainers, speakers, organizers of amateur events, etc.
For the major US pro sports, some or all of their draft is from colleges in order to encourage post-secondary education and leave players with more options after their career. I'm not sure how many pro cyclists do college, but I knew some folks when I went to college who were fairly high amateur and I believe looking to go pro.
That depends on how much of the work related expenses are handled by the team. If they have to pay for their own travel, that'd be several grand right there. Plus, it wouldn't be surprising if the team mandates where you live.
How can you get by comfortably in Michigan with a $35k income when health insurance deductibles are $5k+ and out of pocket maximums are $6k to $8k and premiums are ~$2.5k+ per year?
Plus federal income, FICA, state income, sales taxes, and Michigan’s famously high car insurance prices? Add on saving for retirement / emergency healthcare expenses.
Doesn’t leave much for a comfortable day to day life, especially if you have or intend to support a family.
Childbirth will get you there in no time. My under 1 year old had to go to doctor 3 times for various normal infections from daycare in February this year and it cost $850, plus $80 for a state mandated lead test that I just got a bill for.
The point is $35k per year gives you no breathing room, and certainly doesn’t quality as comfortable. Even for single young people in great health, they can’t build any wealth and they will lose whatever they do get due to various health/auto/etc issues that come up.
Sure but $35K a year is fine for a young man looking to start a career in competitive cycling. He doesn’t need to save his way to build wealth, his role is a lottery ticket itself, if he moves up he’ll make ten times as much, if he doesn’t he quits after four or five years and gets a “real job”.
These athletes are young men. They might still be living at home. The team takes care of their health insurance.
If they're 22 and married with two kids with their partner not working yes it would be tough. However the average income in Detroit is less than $30,000.
They better do. Professional cycling is a dangerous sport. This year, stage 1 saw a crash of 30-ish riders that broke a rider’s kneecap (he finished the stage, but didn’t start for stage 2), the thigh bone of another (happened so close to the finish line that he would be allowed to start stage 2, but he didn’t), broke a few ribs of and gave a pulmonary contusion to a third rider (he is still in the race, and hopes to contribute to his team’s success in the later stages), gave a fourth one an elbow injury (he hit a spectator taking a photograph. He tried staying in the race for about a week, but eventually retired)
There also already were a few broken collarbones in week 1. Add in a zillion abrasions.
What is your definition of comfortable? Because if 20 year old mostly single people earning the average income isn't it, then I'm not sure your expectation is realistic. Even if you redistribute all income equally, the average isn't going to change.
I do think income inequality is a problem, however.
I dunno, I made less than that when I was young and I was happy and had enough money to drink, go out once a week, etc. Felt pretty comfortable to me.
I lived in Africa a couple years as well, and Americans have such a distorted sense of what poverty is. Travel to other places and gain some perspective.
I don't know if you're American, but if you are, comparing America to the world average is comparing apples to oranges.
Most of the world has been occupied or has had wars fought on its territory in the past 150 years. Most of the world lives in a country that has a neighboring country of similar heft, and usually much bigger, that interferes with local politics much more than the US has ever had foreign intervention. Most of the world lives in a country which isn't basically an entire continent's worth of resources. Most of the world doesn't live in a country where per capita incomes are among the top 10% in the world and the middle + upper classes are 200+ million strong.
The first few individual finishers would do okay for themselves — but bottom-tier finishers would make more working in retail for 3 weeks than racing in one of the most prestigious cycling races in the world
> ... riders must formulate their Tour de France strategy around maximizing visibility for sponsors.
> Winning the tour is fantastic — but not necessary — for brand exposure. Often, you’ll see lesser-known riders break away from the pack to give sponsors media time, even if it isn’t technically the best thing to do.
> “The entire Tour is about getting eyes on the company on your jersey,” an ex-pro who wished to remain anonymous told us.
Riders from the wildcard teams are especially prone to go for suicide breakaways. It was a huge source of confusion when there wasn't any breakway the other day in the tour. It's literally worth hours of commercial air time.
The more you learn about the bike industry the uglier it looks. For example Trek married itself to Lance Armstrong, in the era before he was proven to be a massive dope cheat.
Trek at the time and their legal department caused millions of dollars of damages to Greg LeMond and his bike business he had licensed to trek. It turns out LeMond was speaking the honest factual truth all along about what an absolutely terrible human being Armstrong was. All later admitted by Armstrong, and by members of the former US Postal team in sworn depositions.
Yes exactly. They rode that Armstrong/livestrong/US postal/discovery team pony for as long as they could, as hard as they could, as long as it kept selling bikes and provided a huge benefit to the bottom line.
Trek also managed to take the brand name licensed to them by one of the people who can reasonably lay claim to the title of "inventor of the mountain bike", Gary Fisher, and run it into the ground.
Other major brands are almost as bad. Giant was the sponsor for the T-Mobile team of the late 1990s and early to mid 2000s in the Jan Ullrich era, which was just as rife with organized doping. They knew full well about the doping allegations (also all later proven and admitted by the team members once retired) and did nothing as long as the financial figures looked good.
Every single sponsor of the uci protour teams from 1990 to about 2015 knew how absolutely ingrained systemic doping and cheating was, and continued to funnel money into the western European Continental cycling races and team corporations.
In my experience, many (if not most) sports aren’t really great to watch as a spectator, versus on TV... if your goal is appreciation of the actual sporting event taking place.
Bike racing? As you say, it’s hours if not days of effort and travel, for about five minutes of seeing the riders zoom past. Motorsport? At least they’re on a circuit and go past lots of times, but it’s actually very hard to have a tactical appreciation of what’s going on from the side of a track. Sports within a stadium (for example soccer, cricket) are better, but it’s still very hard to have a decent appreciation of what’s going on second to second, versus a decent TV presentation. Small court sports (e.g. basketball, tennis, badminton, etc.) are probably the best but there you are very dependent on the quality of the seating position you purchase.
But... this ignores the enjoyment of the travel and being present at the event. Yes, you get a much better appreciation of the racing watching the Le Mans 24 hour race (or indeed a TdF stage) on TV. But travelling, camping, barbecuing, partying, experiencing the event, with friends? That’s a life experience that far transcends enjoyment of the sport of self.
> why do you have to wait in traffic to get to it?
Because someone's closed a bunch of roads :)
Seriously though: You can sell tickets at the starting and finishing lines, or by putting a loop in the course and sending the riders past the spectators 10 times.
But for the rest of the course, the riders will shoot past in a few seconds.
You can't sell a 'party atmosphere' or pad the entertainment out with dancers and marching bands and food trucks because the spectators are spread out over the entire course.
And even if you decided to charge for tickets despite that - the course isn't fenced off, so people without tickets can just walk in. And if you added fences and bouncers checking tickets, you'd need loads of them because the course is far too long to funnel everyone through a single entrance like a music festival does. And even if the fences and bouncers somehow made economic sense, you've gone from blocking a section of road for an hour as the race goes past to blocking it for a day or two as the fences get built.
OP might have been referring to the hours of police/officials/advertising caravan that precede the riders. You can’t just show up 10 minutes before the race passes. On a typical mountain stage the roads are closed mid-morning so anyone who wants to see it either has to drive up in advance (up to a week on the really famous climbs) or ride/walk up on the day then wait for the aforementioned traffic to pass before seeing the race. But it’s okay: it’s a big party. You hang out with new friends, you wait for the media helicopters to appear, and then you see the riders, albeit briefly, producing inhuman levels of effort. Then you go home and watch the race for real on TV, happy with your day out.
On flat terrain in the middle of a stage you might be able to just park up and wait for 30 minutes but you’d also be missing the spectacle surrounding the race itself.
It's an 'event' and the furthest thing from 'spectator sport' because there is literally almost nothing to spectate.
Its 3 hours of 'prep' because the courses are usually way out there, way far away from anything, and near the route traffic is upside down, maybe there is parking maybe there is none, nobody knows.
It doesn't happen at a 'venue' that's designed for sport, it happens out there in the French boondocks.
Many want to watch it on a steep climb, where the riders are going slowest and are spread apart most, giving you optimal viewing time.
Such climbs often are over the only decent roads up the mountain, and those roads will be closed down an hour or so before the riders arrive.
There also will be competition for the best spots (in the outside of corners, where you can overlook the road)
Because of that, for many, it’s easily 3 hours of (traffic and waiting), even ignoring traffic time. But that need not be bad. You bring food and drink, sit in nice weather (hopefully), and watch the stage on tv.
Your views of a “spectator sport” might be skewed by Nascar or other good for tv Americanized sports with plenty of scoring and announcer drama. On-TV cycling is a “hang” and on the side of the road even more.
Well, no. I went seeing some stages of the Giro d'Italia. Time trials are awful on TV but great on the street because you see every single athlete passing by you. Normal stages are great on TV (3+ hours of live feed) but awful on the street because you don't see anything and you know little of what's going on. However in both cases it's great to be at the start, maybe a couple of hours in advance, or at the arrival, especially after the end.
Ciclocross is different. They have as much as 100k paying people (on venue) in the Netherlands and in Belgium. It's also great to be able to move around the track and see the cyclists in different spots. Probably this is possible only in smaller events. I have experience of races in Italy.
MTB, no direct experience. Looks great on TV and YouTube.
And if all cycling would go on pay TV, goodbye. I'll be a little sad but I'll look at something else. I'll keep cycling tough.
"The Economics of Professional Road Cycling" which they cite about halfway through is absolutely worth the read if you're the kind of cycling fan who enjoys a good academic paper.
The cycling model is flawed because their is no distribution of screen rights amongst teams.
Basically the race and teams ownership are separate. As a result you have a few big teams and the rest scrambling for pennies
Some teams have tried to access the viewing money but the lack of solidarity amongst teams has failed. Also the owners of the tdf own a lot of the big races
> Basically the race and teams ownership are separate.
This isn't a problem per se. For example, this is how it works in football in most countries and I think most people would agree that football would be enhanced by following a US cartel system.
Didn't realize there was that big of a difference between 1st 2nd and 3rd in terms of prize money. That might partially explain why a rider in 2nd doesn't try and make a move on the last stage - they would risk blowing up and moving down to 3rd
The thing you probably need to know about cycling is that everyone crossing the line in the same group gets the same time regardless of if they were first or 100th.
The difference in energy required to ride on the front of a small break away vs in the middle of a peloton can be as high as 50% on a flat stage.
Given that, realistically what would happen if you attack on the last flat day is that the peloton would just follow you and wait for you to tire yourself out.
The domestiques on the front of the peloton can we swapped over time to give them a rest so that the peloton never slows and in fact increase its speed over time.
This is why the sprinter's teams almost always catch the breakaways and why the beakaways are allowed to go up the road in the first place.
Sometimes the peloton gets the sums wrong or doesn't factor in the affects of the wind and the break succeeds but not very often. By the last day of the Tour the leader can have minutes on second place so the chances of them making that up in a break are pretty small.
Aerodynamic inefficiencies and tradeoffs are one of the things that make cycling such an interesting spectator sport for TV.
The article discusses this at the bottom a bit but prize money at any pro bike race is treated like a team bonus and shared. The article does say it’s all about sponsor exposure - from final podium place/stage win/jersey - the riders make more money in exhibition races post TdF where the top riders (based on TdF yellow/polka dot/green) are paid appearance fees.
Exhibition "races" only in the very broad sense. The post-tour criteriums are almost as fake as pro wrestling- the riders have agreed beforehand who is going to "break away" and cross the line first, though occasionally one of the local amateur riders they have in there to make up the numbers will decide to have a go:
In terms of the economics of these races, they are much better spectator events as they take the form of laps around the centre of a small city. The audiences still doesn't pay, but it's much easier to go watch- so the city will pay the race organiser, both to put their city on the map and for the economic benefit of all the food and drinks the spectators buy, often from stalls or trucks that have paid the city for a license...
Highly unlikely. Firstly, the last flat stage is a procession and the leader is accepted as winner by convention. Secondly, it’s highly unlikely that the second place rider on the general classification could even get time on the leader. The last stage is typically flat and has nothing that could be used to force a separation (climbs, wind, etc), plus the leader has a full team at his disposal to chase such an attack down.
If the last stage was mountainous or a time trial, perhaps. But it hasn’t been in a long time (or ever?)
Also, I don’t think a guaranteed banking of the second place cheque would ever prevent a rider from going for first. These guys want to win, not make a few extra euros.
A very very small chance, but not no chance. It's very unlikely but in theory it is possible that by the start of the last stage the GC difference between place 1 and 2 is a couple of seconds. And the last 50km around Champs Elysees are so hectic that anything could happen. A flat tire 10-5km from the line could be enough to lose those precious seconds.
Another possibility could be an organized coup by the 2nd place team, then it essentially becomes a team time trial between 2nd and 1st place teams, while the rest of the peloton is battling for the sprint victory. Unlikely but not impossible.
It wouldn't be a TTT between two teams it would 2nd place team vs the field including all the sprinters' teams. No team can beat a beat a focused peloton on a flat stage.
No way. If 2nd place team tried to do that, all of them would become pariahs of cycling immediately.
Flat tire or some massive crash in the last km or so might happen, of course, but I think it never did (or at least never influenced overall podium standings).
It was considerably less difficult in the 480p analog days.
Here's an older example of the aerial camera work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSmhgOFGl_M
Also the live video feeds from the camera operators that ride pillion on motorcycles chasing the riders. That presents its own unique technical challenge.