Business of Sport with Sean Farrington

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1:07That's O-D-O-O dot com. BBC 5 Live. Wake up to money. Business of sports on BBC 5 Live. Hello, welcome to the Business of Sport with Sean Farrington. This time round, it's cycling and how it fits into the worlds of elite sports competing for funding, for TV eyeballs, for participants, for spend in the shops as well. This weekend we'll mark the last Tour de France which you'll be able to watch on telly for free the way you have been for so many years. We're going to have a look at how a change to broadcasting rights might impact gateways into the sport and we'll hear from those who've been at the top of British Cycling about how it's changed, how it's changing.

1:49Get a glimpse of where things might go next. BBC Five Live. Wake up to money. Business of Sports on BBC 5 Live. So when the last rider rolls across the Tour de France finish line in Paris, it'll mark more than the end of Elite Cycling's biggest race for this year. It could well be the last time TV viewers will hear this.

2:19So for any fans of long-distance road cycling, this music will be instantly recognisable. It is, of course, ITV's Tour de France broadcast theme. And when that comes to an end, it looks set to bring an end to the four decades that we've had of terrestrial free-to-air Tour de France coverage on one of the core channels for British TV viewers. So Warner Brothers Discovery will have the exclusive rights to show the race going forward, continuing its paid-for streaming platform, as it has done. Many subscribers may be familiar already with the Discovery Plus app in the UK. TNT Sports, the channel's on there.

2:59As it stands, viewers could now have to pay potentially up to£30.99 a month subscription if they're watching through that app. So big changes for viewers on the way, potentially. It's a good time to assess, therefore, how the cycling world is doing. We've talked about it in years gone by, haven't we? once being billed as replacing golf as the new spending splurge for middle-aged men amongst others. Has it been able to build on that time? Can it continue to grow? Does it have to watch its back for fast-growing up-and-comers like paddle, that tennis-like sport we've talked about in previous episodes?

3:33To chew over this and much more, I've got Fran Miller with me, who is chief executive of the British cycling brand Rafa, also former boss of the fashion business Bell Staff, formerly one of the bosses at Team Sky as well. Fran, thank you for joining us. Not at all lovely to be here. Feels like a moment if you are somebody who has watched cycling on the telly for decades. If that tune may not be heard anymore in the years to come, all the stories of cycling that we've had and successes in recent times, it feels like terrestrial telecycling might have been the essence of much of that for us. Yeah, absolutely.

4:11And it's definitely where a lot of us of my generation discovered this for. you know I remember really clearly my brother and I watching the Channel 4 coverage as it was at the time in the 90s and then it moving over to ITV and it fit even that feeling like a big deal like oh it's going to the ITV it's not on Channel 4 anymore so yeah I think it's I do think it's a shame I think a whole generation of of young people you know sort of fell in love with the sport and got educated about the sport actually via the terrestrial coverage so yeah I think it's a real shame. A reminder that things do change though.

4:41Exactly yeah it's not always in ITV. No, and I guess businesses like yours, sports like yours, you adapt to this kind of stuff. In many ways, your audiences are pushing, whether it's big broadcasters to make big decisions, big sponsors to make decisions on where they're watching stuff and how much they're willing to pay for it. yeah I think it's a really interesting one actually because there's obviously been quite a lot of backlash around you know that TNT are going to take everything and they're putting it behind a paywall and I think you know there's a couple of elements to that one of one of them is you know we as a sport have to look at ourselves and say why hasn't it been able to justify staying on terrestrial television and why didn't terrestrial television want to bid for it and the reality of that will be that they weren't getting the viewing figures so we can all be up in arms but we equally need to take some sort of time to reflect on why that's happened equally I think you know the way that people are consuming sport viewing sport engaging in sport is is fundamentally and has been fundamentally changing for for the last sort of decade probably if not more um and i think as a sport we have to adapt to that and and change that i don't think necessarily that only being able to access it via a paywall is right but equally i think finding ways to make sure that people can engage with the content in the sport now that it's not going to be unterrestrial is really important how do you have to adapt to that at rafa you know it's a competitive sport within itself cycling gear trying to get you know the more increasing amount of money certainly over recent decades that people have been willing to spend on cycling getting that money into your direction where do you change your approach to try and get people to engage with you yeah I mean I'm not sure if necessarily it's a change of approach I think when it comes to content um consumption you know we were one of the sort of pioneers of making films and long-form content about the sport and trying to kind of educate people through sort of telling them where the sport came from, what it was all about.

6:29I think the reality of, you know, and we were very much one of the only brands that really did that. And now everyone's doing content and, you know, TikTok and Instagram. And so it's not enough now just to produce content and to think that will be the thing that gets people into your brand. I think the one thing that Rafa has and has always had is this unbelievable community of people who support the brand, ride with the brand. And we believe in the sport as quite a transformative thing for people to get involved in so we're evangelists really for getting people on bikes and riding so I think we've we've been at the sort of forefront of that community building encouraging people to get into the sport for a long time and I think that's what we'll continue to do and double down on because that's where I think we really can differentiate ourselves from the competition.

7:10And as part of the whole marketing behind it does it make a difference to you whether a sport whether it's an event as big as the Tour de France is on terrestrial TV and accessing all households potentially, even though not necessarily all households will be tuning into it, versus subscription platforms. This isn't a new debate, free-to-air versus subscription, but for a brand that you'll be popping up on cyclist gear that are in the Tour de France, and you may well have sponsorship around it if not this one the other events as well do you does it make a difference if you're on a free to air channel compared to somebody that's subscribing i think a purely commercial and we you know as a brand we we partner with ef um who are one of the teams in the in the race and we have done for seven years um and prior to that we were with team sky which obviously at the time i was one of the bosses of so um certainly from a commercial perspective yes it's great to have the eyeballs I think actually for a brand like ours it's it's more you know we love the sport we're passionate about the sport we want as many people as possible to be able to access it and engage in it and I think one of the big challenges that cycling faces is it is a little bit impenetrable understanding what 21 days of racing is and why does the guy who crosses the line one day not win the whole race overall and what's that yellow jersey and all of that kind of stuff I think you know a one-hour highlights program like Channel 4 used to do and ITV do They're so amazing at kind of opening the aperture of the sport to people who have stumbled in it as they're watching their dinner.

8:44You know, they're not necessarily tuning in to watch the bike race. They're tuning in just to be entertained. And that's the thing I think that as a brand, far more than the commerciality of it, actually, is how many people are not going to stumble across this amazing sport that we all love so much now that they can't find it on a normal TV channel. And that's the thing, actually, that concerns me far more than the commerciality, because there's always ways to get eyeballs. You can use a million and one different platforms and channels now to get people to see your brand. But actually to get them to see cycling and to see the Tour de France and to see this incredible thing we all love, that's going to be much harder.

9:16And I think that's a shame. I'm intrigued, actually. It might be a topic for another show that we do about the tourist board of France might view these kind of things disappearing. Because one thing about cycling is you do manage to see sort of phenomenal settings and the storytelling alongside that when you get to watch it. It's as much about the castles as it is about the riders, that's for sure. Yeah, it is. And I'm interested how to get a bit of insight from the trends you've seen at Rafa over the years, Fran, the highs, the lows, whatever they might be along the way. Where does it feel to you that cycling is right now?

9:53Because we had the boom times of Olympic success, Tour de France success, hosting the Olympics, and cycling was so much at the forefront of that. But where we are, you know, 13 years on from that now, does it feel like you've got to work a bit harder for people's attention? It's a really interesting question. I mean, I've only been at Rafford. I've been at Rafford for under a year and I think, you know, I was very much part of that boom of the British cycling phenomenon. And I think, you know, the thing that people forget is the sort of perfect storm that was going on from kind of 2007 through to the London Games and beyond.

10:28And I think, you know, a lot of credit needs to go at the door of Sky, actually, in terms of what they did to harness that storm. You know, we announced that London had won the Games in 2007. Obviously, the Great Britain cycling team went to Beijing and were partnered with Sky from 2008. And then there was a huge amount of investment into the sport around giving people access at all levels, from grassroots through British cycling programs, through sky rides and mass participation events. And then there was, you know, Bradley and Chris Froome winning at the highest level. And so you had this and, you know, even things like Boris bikes, you know, and bike lanes and the cycling superhighways and all of that stuff that got invested into both London and the UK more generally.

11:06I think we we were absolutely riding a wave of that. And so I think when people now look at the sport and say, oh, it's it's on a bit of a decline. It's like it's starting from a significantly higher base. You know, when I when I used to work say to people, I worked in cycling back in the early 2000s, they genuinely thought I worked in a bike shop. so you know the idea that you could make a make a living out of anything other than working in a bike shop and cycling was a complete enathema to people so we have started from a much higher base we had a bit further to fall because we were so so high up so I think I think it's easy to kind of to kind of um be be pessimistic and be a be a bit sort of morose about where cycling's at I actually think we're in a great place I think you just have to ride your bike in and around the UK to see how many people are still riding they're still out there the super highways on a sunny day are packed in central London.

11:53Does that play through into spend, though? Do you see that? Because Rafa, like many businesses, won't necessarily have had an easy time of it. If we looked at the financial figures, we'd see losses last year, a few years in a row of that. So it's not like it's just a money printing industry, is it? No, but no one. Well, if there is a money printing industry, let me know where it is. Well, no, quite. But I just wonder that enthusiasm and the passion that we can really hear when you're running a business that is at the forefront of trying to capitalise on that. Why don't the two maybe tally quite so easily?

12:33I think that's as much a question of how Rafa has approached it over the last few years. And I think the industry went through a massive boom in COVID, as many did. I was in contemporary men's fashion during COVID and coming out of COVID. And, you know, everyone overstocked, everyone ended up with too much inventory. Everyone thought that the kind of e-com phenomenon that we saw through COVID would last. It didn't. Everyone then paid the price for that and was picking up the pieces off the back of that. And I think now the market, both in cycling and probably more across apparel, is settling. And I think that settling is now where we've got the chance to go again.

13:08So, yeah, it doesn't always translate as financials, but equally, I think there's more to it than just a downturn in the market. And I think Rafa has had a tricky couple of years for a variety of reasons. And now I'm in there and having a look at what we're going to do. I have absolute confidence in our ability to optimize and commercialize what we're seeing across the sport and bring more people into it, get more people engaged in it and ultimately get the business back to profitability. Somebody else who has been a major part of the growth in British cycling over the last decade or more is Lizzie Dignan, former world cycling road race champion, four time British road race champion, won Team GB's first medal of the London 2012 Olympics.

13:51Joins us now, Lizzie, thank you for being on Business of Sport. Thank you for having me. Lizzie, I see, I mean, when we read around what you're up to at the minute, retire at the end of the season. are you are you technically retired yet or not where are you at I couldn't quite figure it out uh yeah it's kind of uh the middle ground I do still have some races to do um but uh yeah it's a bit of a wind down I would say yeah well even more grateful for you taking the time to talk to us we've been chatting there about you know the the growth in cycling and uh as Fran was describing there you know even if there are you know sort of relatively tougher times it's it's from such a much higher base have you seen that as a professional in recent years just wonder how the the finances of the sport from your perspective have changed behind the scenes oh I mean dramatically different yeah um from every stage really I mean I remember when I first started cycling I was introduced to cycling because they'd announced the London Olympics And like Fran was saying, there's been this huge investment since then.

14:59And I was one of the lucky people who was talent spotted at school, given a bike and put through a process to be a cyclist at the London Games. So when I first started and went training, I didn't see cyclists on the road, definitely didn't see women. But now I can't go on a bike ride without, you know, passing, I would say, at least, you know, 50 people on the bike on my local roads every bike ride I do. and that's unrecognisable. Financially, the sport is obviously in a very, very different place. I turned professional earning sort of 200 euros a month and now we're at a place in women's cycling where we have minimum wage and lots of financial infrastructure in all of the teams.

15:42So, yeah, it's very, very different. And just as a ballpark figure, what are we talking about as a minimum wage? If you were on one of those teams that's touring and racing all year round, And as you have been, what's the scale difference there that we're talking about? So if you're an employed rider, you earn at least€45 ,000. And if you're a self-employed rider, you earn a minimum of€65 ,000. So it's a very good wage, you know, as an 18-year-old to turn professional. And when Fran was describing people thinking she worked in the cycling industry, she must have been working in a bike shop. Do you see now, when you speak to people who are future Olympic champions potentially, if not Olympic champions, future career owners of the biking industry, do you see that they can actually make it financially work for themselves now right from the beginning?

16:40Yes, definitely. Yeah. I mean, there's never been a better time to be a young professional. there's so many amazing opportunities for them the women's cycling in particular is just growing and growing there's so many different investments you know obviously I don't see just the British side I see the European side and I see how much the sport has grown and yeah I still feel that there is momentum there. Where's the money coming from Lizzie do you see even if it's just the sponsors on your kit or the relationships the collaborations you might do is there is there a certain area where you feel like there's been a big boost of investment in the sport?

17:20Not a particular area, no, I wouldn't say so. I think that's the beauty of cycling. You have this blank canvas of the jersey that can be bought up in different sections. And yeah, I think the return on investment is huge for people because of the air time that they get. Fran, is that anything you've seen in terms of relationships that you might have with teams, with individual cyclists, who you're going up against, the cost of your sponsorship of certain teams and riders? Are you getting competitors now from different sectors that you might not have done before? I think there's definitely there are more apparel brands now than they used to be you know Rafa was pretty much the only you know sort of certainly the only modern apparel brand you know we had we had a couple that were sort of long-standing Italian brands so there's definitely more competitors entering the space I think the price generally of sponsoring a professional team has exponentially increased both in the women's side of the sport and the men's side of the sport and I think that that increase in rights fee it is something that the sport's going to have to look at in terms of the commerciality because ultimately one of the reasons you see so much churn of partners is you know you do it for three or four years you get your value from it you get your return there's no revenue being generated unless you're like like us you have a product to sell and therefore you know the big this big sort of corporate partners tend to move on um so i think the kind of the model of the sport is broken because you know they require so much investment from from partners and there's no other way to you know we're not a stadium-based sport we don't have ticket sales the teams don't get access to the rights fees that get paid to the race organizers so they're completely reliant on sponsors to fund them which means that as the you know salaries of athletes go up as the the demands of sports science etc increase the requirement to fund the team gets higher and higher and so you have to keep going back to sponsors and asking for more money and there's a natural ceiling to that.

19:13One of the ways actually one of the major partners in recent years that the Tour de France in particular has looked to engage with a bit more and potentially She raised some cash. A partner that has come and then gone is Netflix. So we had the big Tour de France Unchained series, one of those fly-on-the-wall documentaries that follow elite athletes very closely. Lots of sports are doing this stuff these days. Lizzie, I don't know if you watched any of that where you're potentially thinking, would you want some of your cycling habits and conversations being revealed on it? I wonder what you made of that kind of thing being done by the sport and the fact that Netflix in the end after three years said, actually, we're not going to make any more of this.

20:00Yeah, I mean, I thought they were very good. Yeah, I did watch them. And obviously, you know, knowing the inside stories, you know, you realise quite a lot of it is edited. It's a dramatic value and all that. But I think, you know, as a sports fan myself, I enjoy watching sports documentaries. is I enjoy learning more about athletes and what drives them and how it works. But I think maybe the issue with cycling is it's quite a complicated sport to understand. So I think Netflix was trying to appeal to potentially a new viewer, but also existing cycling viewers. So it was quite difficult to get that balance, I think, of, you know, what language was used and how things were explained and how deep they could go with the stories, maybe.

20:45Fran, I don't know if you saw much of it, but that idea of mimicking what Formula One has been very successful in where it gets a new audience into the sport because it's telling you about the personalities, the behind the scenes stresses that go on, almost leading you into then watching the races weeks and months later. Is that what cycling needs to do? Do the riders themselves need to say, look, we're going to actually sell ourselves individually a bit more than we have? I think there's lots of ways to skin a cat, right? And I think everyone saw the drive to survive model and what it did for Formula One and the commercialization in the US particularly and thought, oh, we'll have a piece of that.

21:25And I don't think it's as easy as that. I think to Lizzie's point, I think that every sport is different. It has different complexities. It has different levels of understanding. I think, you know, it's very helpful for Formula One that there's two drivers that the races are contained. They're on a track. You know, you suddenly go into 220K stages with eight riders on each team and it becomes a very different proposition. so yeah I think finding ways to make the sport more penetrable finding ways to make it more understandable finding ways to get it to bigger broader audiences are the challenges that it has faced perennially and will no doubt continue to face but I know there's lots of bigger brains than mine thinking of ways to solve that yeah no doubt and I do wonder whether there'll be other broadcasters thinking there might be a way to tap into some of those personalities if Netflix aren't going to do that in years to come.

22:13I mean, something that has been a big story for cycling over recent decades when people are asked, you know, what springs to mind is an issue that's coming to the fore a little bit. To the fore might be a bit of an exaggeration at the time we're recording this, but questions are being asked at the moment at the Tour de France of the Ineos Grenadiers team, formerly Team Sky, before the ownership change. These questions are about members of staff, potential communications with people linked to historic doping scandals. For the record, INEOS has said it's aware of recent media allegations relating to the 2012 season and a member of its staff.

22:51These allegations, it says, are not to date, been presented to the team by any appropriate authority. It said it's formally requested information from the International Testing Agency, reaffirmed its zero-tolerance policy regarding doping violations. I've laid all that out, Fran, because that is something that riders, team owners are being asked about at the Tour de France this week. From your time at Team Sky back from around that period, do you recognise any of these issues being raised at the moment? I'm incredibly proud of what we did at Team Sky and I think there's a huge amount of speculation and scrutiny that comes to the sport and came to Team Sky that period of time and rightly so.

23:31So, you know, there is a track record in our sport that is very, very poor around how doping, you know, was institutionalized for many years. And I think, you know, the sport has made huge leaps and bounds around anti-doping and around how they manage that. And I think, you know, the lesson I learned the hard way at Team Sky was the most important thing is to, you know, be honest, be open. You know, there's a lot of history in cycling. There's a lot of skeletons in the cupboard. and I think it's really important that when and if those get found or when and if people have questions about them, that the people involved and the teams involved, including Ineos Green and Glide, including Team Sky, including my time there, that people are as open and as transparent as they can be.

24:11But I do think it's probably worth also considering that 2012 is a significantly long time ago. I actually haven't seen the allegations that are being made. But no, I think scrutiny is inevitable. It's important that people continue to be as open and transparent as possible and answer questions when presented to them. Lizzie, for a period at the height of previous very high profile doping scandals, we saw big sponsors retreating. As somebody who's been in the sport for so long now and seen what's gone on sponsorship wise, does it feel like all that has bounced back or is there still work to do, do you think?

24:47uh no i mean from my perspective um you know i've i've come from a very different generation so i don't feel like i ever it was really before my time uh so no i mean uh it's very clear to us within the team uh you know no tolerance policy etc how important it is for us to have a clean image and it is um you know it's every single member of staff on the team every rider on the team's job relies on us all racing clean so um I think that has been the ethos since I started in cycling I think I came after the wave of you know of doping so I feel lucky that I didn't see any of it. Does it feel to you now that cycling is building on a on a different platform after all of that yeah very much so I think also um you know not to draw a comparison again but the difference in women's cycling is that the financial uh opportunities haven't been there but you know it's only been in the last 15 years that that people have earned any money from it so there's never been uh the incentive really uh to dope you know it's a very different sport in that way we've come from a very different place so um you know fortunate to be part of a sport that was built around passionate people and volunteers.

26:10So a very, very different place to the kind of pressures and scrutiny of the men's sport in the past. Fran, I know you have to go and get a flight shortly to the next business meeting, whatever that may be that you have to go to. Just before we go, just on that topic that Lizzie was talking about there, about women's participation. Just at RAFA, do you see women spend compared to men spend? Are there trends there that are either concerning or ones to be embraced that you're seeing at the moment? Yeah, I mean, women's, this women's side of the sport is the only part of the sport across the board that is growing in double digits.

26:51You know, we as a brand have always been very, very supportive of women's sport. I think it's one of the things I'm most excited about, about my role at RAFA. You know, I wasn't able to do some of the things I would have liked to have done at Team Sky. We were only a men's team. So, yeah, it's incredibly exciting to see the work that, you know, actually people like Lizzie really pioneered and pushed incredibly hard to get. Whilst it's not parity yet to push for the, you know, we now have a women's Tour de France. We have a women's Giro again. We have, you know, racing at the calibre that the sport deserves.

27:21And I think it's, you know, I'm actually I'm at the Tour de France day for the rest day, but I'm going to the opening of the Tour de France women at the weekend. And I think I'm almost more excited about seeing that than I am about the men's. And I think there's just this huge groundswell of both participation on the women's side and, you know, the sport is increasing all the time in terms of its professionalism and actually its sort of engagement with fans. So I think it's a really exciting moment to be involved in women's cycling. And I'm very, very excited about what it can do for our brand.

27:51Is there a bit of a message there for the broadcasters as well? It may be that the Tour de France men's race is not going to be broadcast the way it has been for so many decades. But given the growth you're talking about there in audiences that many broadcasters would like to tap into, that perhaps they should be maybe taking a little bit more of a risk, doubling down a bit more on women's cycling. A hundred percent. Yeah, a hundred percent. I think for me, it's like the whole campaign around the women's Tour de France is watch the femme. and I think it's like go watch, go see it, go see what the racing is.

28:24It's incredible the calibre of racing now. It's incredible to see how much that sport has evolved and it will only get better as time goes on. So yeah, the people who get in and start investing now, I think they'll see an exponential return over the course of the next five to 10 years. Fran Miller, Chief Executive of the British Cycling brand Rafa. Thank you for being with us on our Business of Sport programme today. Lizzie, we were talking right at the top of the programme. you might have missed us playing a little bit of the theme tune from ITV's coverage, which you don't need us necessarily to be playing for you.

28:56You will be familiar with it yourself. I just wonder what you make of the, because I know you've worked with many of those who work on this coverage on ITV, who will be wrapping up this week for the final time of the Tour de France coverage. What you make of it no longer being on there in the years to come. Yeah, I feel really sad about it. I think it's a really important show to have on the TV. Yeah, I mean, I grew up in a non-cycling family, but we watched the Tour de France. And I know that that is an experience of lots of different people. You were going to miss the casual cycling viewer. And I've had so many, so many people come up to me and say, oh, it's so sad about ITV4.

29:37So I think, yeah, the reaction has probably been stronger than maybe they were anticipating. There's a lot of disappointed people. And yet, I guess, behind the scenes or even in front of the scenes for people, riders like yourself, the other platforms like Discovery Plus, TNT, there may be a subscription platform and people might only be becoming aware of them for the Tour de France in future years if it's not going to be on ITV or Channel 4 as it was decades ago. But yet they're showing a lot of cycling all year round, men's and women's and backing the sport in a different way. Is that notable within the sport?