Women’s Tour race organisers pull plug on live TV coverage as they face up to ‘commercial realities’
Next week’s Women’s Tour, the premier road race for women in the UK, will not be broadcast live on television as initially planned. The absence of live television coverage threatens the race’s elite status, with the UCI, cycling’s governing body, demanding it of all WorldTour tier races. The Giro Rosa, the women’s version of the Giro d’Italia, was controversially stripped of its WorldTour status this year after it failed to produce live images in 2020.
Women’s Tour organizer SweetSpot said a daily highlights program would still be available on ITV4 and Eurosport GCN for next week’s seventh race edition. But, in a statement, it added that market conditions made it commercially impossible to produce live coverage this year, an addition announced with great fanfare in February.
“The past two years have been incredibly challenging as a race organizer, particularly since there has not been an edition of the Women’s Tour for 28 months,” the statement read. “This has been the hardest time in the race’s existence and provided challenges even greater than when we created and established the Women’s Tour in 2014. As a result of commercial realities, we will not be able to expand the coverage of the Women’s Tour in 2021 to include a live broadcast.”
The Women’s Tour swiftly became one of the most popular races on the women’s calendar after its launch in 2014, with huge crowds turning up year after year and riders praising the organization and generally high standards of elements such as accommodation. The race also famously featured prize money equal to the men’s Tour of Britain. However, that, too, has taken a hit following the departure of the previous sponsor OVO Energy.
The total prize pot for next week’s six-day race is €37,250 (£32,000) compared with €117,140 for last month’s men’s Tour of Britain. That is a reduction of about €60,000 in prize money since the latest Women’s Tour in 2019 and is around €6,000 per day prize money on average for the women compared with €14,000 per day for the men. The men’s Tour of Britain also slightly reduced the total prize pot this yealigningline with UCI’s minimum requirement. AJ Bell now sponsors both races.
However, the absence of live television will come under the most scrutiny, with the men’s race still being broadcast live. The race starts in Bicester the following Monday and ends in Felixstowe a week on Saturday. SweetSpot’s former chief executive Heath Harvey said three years ago that live coverage represented the “final frontier” for the women’s event. It was challenging to add the numbers, costing “circa £100,000 per day to create a live show”.
