“Perhaps the way to support cycling is by not putting it behind a big paywall?” TNT Sports’ grassroots campaign slammed as “sportswashing” amid price hike – but others say encouraging cycling is “British Cycling’s job” + more on the live blog

Finally, after a month of complaints, cancelled subscriptions, and social media debates, the day is almost upon us.

On Friday – the day before Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, the start of the ‘real’ cycling season for many fans – cycling coverage in the UK will move to TNT Sports, as Eurosport shuts its doors after three decades of broadcasting in Britain and Ireland.

And on Tuesday afternoon, TNT’s owners Warners Bros. Discovery unveiled its cycling calendar for the remainder of 2025, which will feature over 1,000 live cycling events and 2,500 hours of racing, including every men’s and women’s WorldTour race for the first time ever.

> How to watch cycling for less now it's moving to £30.99-a-month TNT Sports

This “unprecedented” coverage will, of course, now cost you £30.99 a month (though you can get cheaper deals if you know where to look), a price hike of 343 per cent compared to the old Eurosport sub.

And with ITV set to broadcast its final Tour de France this summer (for the foreseeable future anyway) after losing the rights to the sport’s biggest race, TNT’s impending status as, in Discovery’s words, the “new ultimate home of cycling for fans in the UK and Ireland” has led these very fans to mourn the demise of free-to-air cycling coverage, and with it the accessibility of the sport to new viewers.

However, as we reported back in January when the news first broke of cycling’s move to TNT Sports, Discovery have attempted to assuage some of these fears by sticking daily free-to-air highlights packages of the men’s Giro d’Italia and the Vuelta a España, as well as the men’s Paris-Roubaix, on Quest.

A new weekly magazine programme, ‘The Ultimate Cycling Show’, fronted by Orla Chennaoui and Adam Blythe, will also air on Quest, starting tomorrow night at 10pm, with 15 episodes to follow throughout the season (so not that weekly then).

(ASO/Billy Ceusters)

In a statement published yesterday, Scott Young, Warner Bros. Discovery’s senior vice-president of content, production and business operations said: “Our commitment to cycling has no boundaries, and we will continue to deliver further investment to elevate the fan experience across linear, streaming and digital.

“Our approach to the 2025 season continues our mission to shine a light on every aspect of this epic sport – from the world’s greatest male and female riders to the stories from the passionate people at grassroots level keeping this industry spinning.

“Our live race coverage is unprecedented, broadcasting 100 per cent of the men’s and women’s UCI World Tours for the first time ever. The Ultimate Cycling Show will serve as the perfect story-telling platform across the season with engaging analysis, discussion and content formats. Its free-to-air access will ensure a broader audience reach, whilst satisfying the seasoned viewer and attracting new fans. We will have an enriched digital operation with upscaled presence at key races, providing added depth and insight to the experience."

> Warner Bros. Discovery tries to tempt disgruntled cycling fans back with half price for seven months offer sent to viewers who cancelled subscriptions

Meanwhile, in another bid to calm everybody down (good luck with that), Discovery also expanded on TNT Sports’ new “grassroots cycling initiative”, Just Ride, which it says aims to “inspire the next generation of riders” and encourage families and communities to “embrace cycling by getting out on their bikes”.

The initiative will offer kits and cash prizes up to £10,000 for “cycling tribes who can demonstrate their passion for the sport” by submitting videos as part of a nationwide competition, with the winner set to be announced during the worlds in September.

And with the price hike debated to death over the last four weeks, it’s this grassroots scheme – largely ignored when it was first announced last month – that has attracted the attention of fans online, who noted a certain irony in the notion of a broadcaster aiming to promote a sport while increasing the cost of watching it by 343 per cent.

(ASO/Charly Lopez)

“I don’t know. Perhaps the way to support grassroots is to put more cycling (such as the Tour) on free-to-air, rather than a big paywall?” asked Scott Bryan, the TV critic behind those brilliant end-of-year news blooper compilations (if you haven’t seen them, go check them out).

“Free to air television has a huge impact in getting viewers behind a whole range of sport. TNT are doing a free weekly cycling show on Quest, but the best way is to just to show viewers more races.”

“The grassroots must have a lot of roots to pay the sub,” agreed Ultratorque on Threads.

David, meanwhile, described the Just Ride initiative as “a meaningless fig leaf that doesn’t obscure the fact they’ve decimated access to the sport for most viewers. Terrible news for cycling and its fans in the UK.”

“Is this sportswashing? Looks up definition…” added Joel.

> “Sad we can’t afford to watch you anymore”: Tom Pidcock unveils classics schedule... prompting fan complaints about TNT’s cycling price hike

Meanwhile, others also weren’t convinced that shoving a few highlights and panel shows on Quest is the answer to the big ITV-shaped hole facing the sport in 2026.

“Quest. I mean, come on,” wrote Gareth. “They’d get more viewers just by sticking it on YouTube. Quest, my arse.”

“Good idea Scott,” added Paul. “Maybe they could set up a free to air channel showing lots of different sports from all round Europe. They could call it something like SportsEuro...”

“Imagine sport broadcasting to increase participation and not for shareholders, a novel idea,” another BlueSky user said.

(Zac Williams/SWpix.com)

However, not everyone agreed with the concept that free equals good.

“I really do think people should stop moaning about this. Discovery/Max spend huge amounts of money covering cycling across the world,” argued Pepepig on Threads.

“It’s a quality product and many races are now covered from start to finish without adverts. The commentators are pretty good, with the odd exception.

“Why do British people think that a European broadcaster should have any sense of responsibility for encouraging cycling in the UK? Surely that’s the job of British Cycling.”

And Lorien wrote: “They said the same about BSkyB and the Premier League breakaway. OK, it’s a bit different as football was the nation’s darling, but Sky made football in the UK and the Premier League the biggest and best league in the world by viewers and commercials.

“Not everything that sounds good as a common-sense argument is actually correct. Mountain bike was free for decades, and the UCI Downhill World Cup was on Freecaster then Red Bull, but downhill bikes sales slowed to enduro bikes.

“Enduro was free for nearly a decade and yet enduro bikes sales slowed to e-bikes. The growth of enduro, participation, and viewing figures stagnated. And yet it was all free.”

> “Can you imagine any retailer of any other product getting away with that?” Ex-UCI president Brian Cookson uses baked beans analogy to hit out at “outrageous and incompetent” Warner Bros. Discovery for “trying to kill cycling for British customers”

Meanwhile, Leo noted that encouraging people to get on their bikes in the UK boils down to more than just showing them Tadej Pogačar sprinting against Jonas Vingegaard on a Pyrenean climb.

“I would argue that while taking content such as the TdF away from free-to-air is a problem, there’s also a far wider hostility towards cycling in the UK that needs to be addressed,” he said.

“But couldn’t agree more about the paywalling. The loss of the ITV coverage is such a shame, the entire production there has been top class.”

And finally, Mike said: “Only way they’ll get me back on my bike is if they somehow lobby the government to abolish cars.”

Now that’s something I imagine quite a few of our readers would happily pay £30.99 a month for…

The art of team time trialling may have fallen out of favour with grand tour organisers in recent years, but the discipline – and the sight of a featherweight climber desperately struggling to hang on to his big rouleur mate’s back wheel – could be back with a bang in 2026.

That’s because the Tour de France’s organisers announced yesterday evening that next year’s edition of the race will get underway on the streets of Barcelona with a 19.7km team timed effort – the first TTT-based Grand Départ in the race’s history.

According to ASO, the 2026 Tour’s opening stage – which will finish outside the city’s Olympic Stadium, perched atop Montjuïc, meaning an 800m climb to the line at seven per cent – will also feature the new-fangled timing rules first seen at the 2023 Paris-Nice, with riders given their own individual finishing times.

Traditionally, all riders in a team who finished together were given the time of the fourth (or previously fifth) rider in their squad to cross the line. But in the last two editions of Paris-Nice, the individual timings have enabled the likes of Tadej Pogačar to solo clear of his teammates in the closing stages to either expand or limit gaps to their rivals.

The Barcelona Grand Départ will be the third time the Tour has started in Spain, after San Sebastian in 1992 and Bilbao in 2023.

> More safety concerns as Vuelta a España pros left to ride through Barcelona in dark after "ridiculous" opening stage

The Catalan capital has, of course, played host to a grand tour-opening team time trial very recently, the Vuelta a España’s controversial dark, wet, and slick 14.8km first stage in 2023, which sparked furious safety complaints from the likes of Remco Evenepoel, who branded the evening start time as “ridiculous” and like driving “at 200km/h on the highway in full darkness without any lights”.

(ASO/Charly Lopez)

Meanwhile, other riders also criticised the organisers after they were forced to ride through the city’s heavy traffic in the dark to make it back to their buses. I imagine ASO will be planning an earlier stage time just in case this time around.

The following day, the Tour will make history once again, reaching its southernmost point ever by starting in Tarragona, before weaving its way back up to Barcelona again for a Volta a Catalunya-inspired circuit featuring three ascents of the 1.6km, 9.3 per cent climb to Montjuïc Castle, before finishing on the drag to the Olympic Stadium.

“There are many roads in this district and as a result plenty of possibilities for drawing up a circuit. I think we have managed to find the most difficult combination possible,” race director Thierry Gouvenou said yesterday about the 2026 Tour’s second stage – and he’s not wrong.

2026 will also mark the fourth time the Tour has visited Barcelona in its history, after stages in 1957, 1965, and 2009, when Thor Hushovd won on a rainy Montjuïc, on his way to eventually winning the green jersey following an epic battle with Mark Cavendish.

The third stage, meanwhile, will start in Granollers (the capital of Spanish handball, in case you were unaware) before crossing the Pyrenees back to France – by which point, if the routes of the opening two stages are anything to go by, the fight for yellow could be well underway.

Plans to install Copenhagen-style crossings – where the cycle lane continues across sideroads, giving people on bikes priority – have been branded an “accident waiting to happen” by a councillor in Cambridge, during a meeting discussing the creation of a new cycling and walking route in the city.

The plans for improved active travel infrastructure on Madingley Road, a major arterial road linking the west of Cambridge to the city centre, originally featured a two-way protected cycle lane, which had been agreed by the Greater Cambridge Partnership’s (GCP) executive board.

However, objections to the felling of 27 trees to make way for the two-way path, along with difficulties surrounding land acquisition, which would have made the project more expensive and time consuming than initially expected, have led to substantial changes to the scheme.

> “Safe, efficient, and easy to use”: Cycling junctions “keep everyone protected with no impact on drivers” says Active Travel England, amid hysteria over “chaotic” new layout with 36 traffic lights

Peter Blake, interim director of the GCP, told members of its joint assembly this week that a “semi-segregated” one-way cycleway has now been proposed, which will include (the much-maligned) floating bus stops and Copenhagen crossings.

Speaking at the meeting, councillor Heather Williams voiced her concerns that the Copenhagen-style crossings would be unfamiliar to many drivers and pose a threat to cyclists’ safety.

“We are introducing new things that people are not going to be familiar with,” she said. “Also, it does make it dangerous for cyclists by the fact that they will be having to judge when they can just go straight ahead and not stop and pause, and when not.

“It just feels like an absolute accident waiting to happen, it creates me a lot of anxiety just looking at the diagram as a driver or as a pedestrian. We have zebra crossings, everybody knows what they are, they are highly visual, and they give the people on the zebra crossing right of way, so it is not as if we are not used to that system.”

Williams also highlighted that the Copenhagen crossings relied on line markings on the road, which despite being “great and visible straight away”, could fade over time, arguing that if they are not maintained they could be “potentially putting people into a dangerous situation”.

> ‘Cycling rat-run’ proposals divide residents amid claims cut-throughs in new development could “worsen already dangerous cycling patterns”

Responding to Williams’ concerns, fellow councillor Paul Bearpark pointed out that Copenhagen crossings were “just reinforcing the Highway Code, which says drivers are to give way to pedestrians crossing side roads”, and that road designs need to evolve to increase safety.

Meanwhile, Tim Bick added that some of these features had already been installed in the city and noted that it has been proven that “people do and have adapted”, to which Williams responded that she was not claiming there should never be any change, but said she did not think there needed to be “change for change’s sake”.

She also raised concerns about the proposed installation of floating bus stops along the route, which she argued are a “complete and utter nightmare for anybody with sight impairments and disabilities”, and argued that local authorities need to “stop pursuing” such infrastructure.

 

 

 

 

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A post shared by Jimmy Graham (@thejimmygraham)

What is it about disgraced doper Lance Armstrong that these celebrities and old sportsmen admire so much?

(Come for the TNT subscription debates and active travel furores, stay for the references to press conferences from the 2009 Tour of California.)

Joining Valtteri Bottas, Brad Wiggins, and (maybe) Jake Paul on Big Tex’s Blackberry contacts list (damn, another 20-year-old reference) this week is retired American footballer Jimmy Graham.

A former tight end – yeah, I don’t know what that is either – for the New Orleans Saints, Seattle Seahawks, and Green Bay Packers, 38-year-old Graham joined the hitherto seven-time Tour de France winner for a group ride at the weekend… and made George Hincapie look like Roberto Heras in the process.

 

 

 

 

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A post shared by Lance Armstrong (@lancearmstrong)

“Hard to believe a guy who’s 6’7”, played at 265, can get into cycling and have a pedal stroke like Mathieu van der Poel,” Armstrong posted on Instagram last night.

“Having seen it with my own two eyes, I’m now a believer.”

If any team needs an extra lead-out man, they know who to call. Though I highly doubt he’d be using any of those 150mm or 160mm cranks that are all the rage these days in the peloton.

Graham, for his part, described the ride as “an absolute life moment with the man, the myth, the legend” Armstrong.

Well, he got the myth part right, anyway.

> Ekoi’s radical road cycling pedal system that “has Look and Shimano scared” is now available to buy, priced at £592 with compatible shoes