His plan was to kick in the door of cycling – and ASO, organisers of the Tour de France, in particular. He was then going to take over the big pot of money and share it out among the teams and cut down the share controlled by the race organisers. But, after inviting himself to the party, he discovered that in fact there was no money. What he found out was that organisations like ASO in France and RCS Sport in Italy operate to modest profit levels. They see themselves as historic institutions and the guardians of cycling’s heritage. There is not as much money in cycling as many people think.
The Tour de France is what Général de Gaulle called Un Grand Projet. He once said that if France was not engaged in a project of major global significance, the nation would retire to the cafés in a state of malaise while questioning the ranking of the first republic in the world order.
So merci beaucoup, Général, for at least defining the idea of a truly global event, but also ensuring that what Le Tour actually gets, more than any other race, is a whole lot of government support.
While some races are limited or even crippled by the cost of security, the Tour de France has none to pay. The cost of policing and road closures is covered by national and regional government. It’s accounted for in local taxes as a cultural event. Want Paris closed in the centre with grandstands laid on by the Mairie? Pas de problème. Need a subsidised helicopter or five? Pourquoi pas? Paid for by the Ministry of Tourism. And do you need a dedicated motorcycle police fleet? Avec plaisir. All of these are not low cost items on a Grand Tour shopping list. In fact, without the subsidy, the Tour would resemble . . . well . . . the Giro. The Grand Tours in Italy and Spain do indeed get support, but this is modest in comparison.
What the Tour de France gets is unequivocal national support. Everyone in France is into it. OK, the odd nutter isn’t, but everyone is certainly aware it’s going on. This is not the sense one gets with either the Giro or Vuelta. A perfect example is that residents of Rome regard the Giro as a Milanese event, which is why the city only occasionally closes its streets for the ‘nuisance’ that is supposedly the national tour. Rome and other cities have far more important things to be getting on with than some other city’s event, grazie mille. Italy, as you can tell, remains a bit divided. As for Spain and La Vuelta? Well, Spain is just plain skint. End of.
So what Tinkov thought of as a monster organisation in the form of the ASO was in fact the conduit for the French government to put on a national show. This wasn’t some financial leviathan that could be leveraged into paying teams more of the TV rights. There was, and remains, no big money chest in the Paris HQ. Cycling is not a rich sport.
Tinkoff wasn’t the first cycling team to close shop – as it did in November 2016 – and it certainly won’t be the last. IAM went the same year and more recently Garmin had to appeal to crowdfunding to stay afloat, until Education First stepped in as a sponsor. It’s tough out there. Even Team Sky declared 2019 its final season before a sponsor change. Partially a sense of ‘job done’, I suspect, but the huge cost of maintaining the super team must have been a consideration. Team Ineos is the new incarnation.
So how come the most watched sporting event of the year – namely, the Tour de France – makes so little money? Well, there are no stadiums. Our Maracanã or Camp Nou is a mountain roadside: the Tourmalet, Alpe d’Huez or Mont Ventoux. These are public places free to anyone who cares to turn up in a campervan with a stale baguette and bottle of plonk. No one pays to watch road cycling, least of all the Grand Tours.
It only takes one sponsor to pull out, and the team’s budget is suddenly a few million short. Sponsors only put money into a team to get media exposure and their advertising budgets may change from year to year, meaning that cycling teams lead a precarious existence.
Star riders like Chris Froome and Peter Sagan make millions, but you don’t have to go very far down the professional peloton before the salaries tail off dramatically.
A domestique in the Grand Tours will earn a decent enough salary to live off and have a bit left over at the end of his career to set him up in a new profession after retirement, but you only have to go down one level to pro-continental to find that isn’t the case at all.
In 2018 the P&P World Cycling Revival Festival put on three days of racing at the Herne Hill Velodrome, an iconic venue that hosted the 1948 Olympic Games. One of the races was an invitational Brompton race featuring stars like ex-Grand Tour rider David Millar, and a selection of UK-based professional riders from teams like JLT Condor and Specialized-Rocket Espresso. They were racing for a Winner Takes All prize fund of £10,048.
What should have been a light-hearted affair, of decent riders chasing each other around a velodrome on fold-up bikes, turned into one of the most hard fought and competitive races of the season. The riding was fierce with the inevitable crashes,
