EDWARD PICKERING

EDITOR

O ne of my favourite things about cycling is that it’s a pretty educational sport. I’m biased, but I think cycling fans are the most erudite sports fans of them all.

A televised bike race isn’t just a compelling piece of sporting action. It’s a geography lesson, too – we learn where a lot of towns and cities are and, just as importantly, what lies in between them. We also get some geology lessons: which other sports’ fans, save for rock climbing, can name mainland France’s five mountain ranges? We know a lot about meteorology, too, such as the prevailing winds in the Belgian spring and why the Basque Country is so green. And races also teach us physiology, pharmacology and linguistics. For me, this broad range of subject matter is one of the best things about cycling. It adds to the sport’s already complex and textured nature.

It’s also, from one viewpoint, a hindrance. Some sports fans don’t want to have to engage their brains too hard. For many fans the action, passion and result are enough. This makes the job of those marketing cycling difficult. How can the sport be packaged to appeal to more people, yet still remain faithful to its nature? Often, especially for a TV audience, cycling is reduced to the most exciting bits – sprint finishes, attacks and, unfortunately, crashes.

However, I think that you tinker with the mechanics or structure of a bike race at your peril. The races have to be long to maintain the endurance aspect and the sense of epic; also to ensure that a stage race can get from point to point, though there’s no reason not to have shorter, intense stages in the mix.

A bike race, even one with a sprint finish, is a slow build, and so the more of a race you show, the less ‘exciting’ it actually is. Even in the Twitter age, what draws people into a race like the Tour is the unfolding narrative and compelling stories. Cycling’s always been complex and absorbing. Long may it remain so.