The wheels are turning on Nine and Fox Sports’ cycling coverage, but improvement is needed

It took Cycling Australia longer than expected to announce that it had partnered with Channel Nine and Fox Sports for 2015 and 2016. So long, in fact, that the first event covered by the new contract, the Bay Crits, had already been screened for four nights on Nine and Fox Sports before Cycling Australia (CA) “announced” that it would.

So what took CA so long? CEO Nick Green told CyclingTips that it was a case of getting the finer details bedded down, but added that the delay “didn’t affect the coverage of the events and the coverage was terrific.”

In an article last week I argued that the partnership between Cycling Australia and Nine/Fox Sports is a positive step, suggesting that greater exposure via a commercial network (and, to a lesser extent, via a subscriber network) would help grow the sport. I stick by that argument, but would add that the coverage of the Bay Crits and Road Nationals has left plenty of room for improvement.

A highlights package was screened each night of the Bay Crits on Gem and Fox Sports (with a replay the following day). These packages were well produced, with commentary from Scott McGrory, Phil Liggett and Rochelle Gilmore, and they provided a great recap of what was four days of exciting racing. The only problem was that each highlights package was screened after midnight — not exactly prime-time viewing.

I asked CEO Nick Green whether the broadcast time was of concern to Cycling Australia, given the organisation’s goal of putting cycling “into the living rooms of millions more Australian homes”.

“The reality of what we deal with is a network that is very busy,” Green said. “Every event would love to have prime-time television but the reality is we’re not going to get that all of the time. But we will get that some of the time.”

Road Nationals

The Road Nationals are currently underway in and around Ballarat/Buninyong in Victoria, and Aussie cycling fans who were expecting live coverage might have been disappointed. Only the men’s road race on Sunday will be broadcast live — from 2pm to 4pm on Gem and Fox Sports 5.

Wednesday’s criterium races and Thursday’s time trials were bundled into separate one-hour highlights packages, both screened after midnight on Gem and Fox Sports as well. CyclingTips understands that the criterium highlights package on Gem attracted just 8,100 viewers on Wednesday night (technically Thursday morning) — hardly wide-reaching.

Gem and Fox Sports will screen a one-hour highlights package after midnight on Sunday morning, recapping the U23 men’s and elite women’s road races. At 1pm that afternoon, just before live coverage of the men’s road race, there will be a separate one-hour highlights package recapping the first three days of the Nationals.

Some fans will surely complain that a highlights package is being screened while live racing is underway at Buninyong (the men’s road race starts at 10.50am). And some will be even less impressed by the fact Gem is showing a 47-year-old movie and an episode of Getaway before the highlights package, both while the race is in progress.

Women’s cycling

Cycling Australia’s announcement of the broadcast deal also attracted criticism given a lack of live coverage of the women’s road race.

@CyclingAus highlights only of the women? Not good enough.

— Jono Coulter (@JonoCoulter) January 6, 2015

SBS’s veteran cycling presenter Mike Tomalaris told CyclingTips that there were discussions last year (when SBS screened the Road Nationals) to hold the women’s road race on the morning of the men’s road race, thereby reducing production costs and making it more feasible to screen the women’s race live. According to Tomalaris the proposal had the support of riders in the women’s peloton and Cycling Australia considered the proposal, but the idea never came to fruition.

CyclingTips understands that an additional $50,000 to $60,000 of funding would be necessary to screen the women’s race live.

But even though this year’s arrangement isn’t ideal for fans of women’s cycling, there are perhaps some positives to be drawn. For one, the women’s road race will feature in two different TV highlights packages within 24 hours of the race happening, something which didn’t happen during SBS’s coverage of the race in 2014. It’s not ideal, but perhaps it’s a small step in the right direction.

According to Nick Green, there are other positives when it comes to the coverage of women’s cycling in Australia as well.

“This [CA/Nine/Fox Sports deal] does actually provide significantly more coverage of women’s cycling [than] the partnerships we had previously [with SBS - ed.]

“The National Road Series is a good example where we’ve got two new events”, Green said. “Both of those are standalone women’s events, and they’re both events that are part of a significant UCI-sanctioned road races with Cadel’s [the Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race] and the Tour Down Under.

“Both of those events for the first time are on the National Road Series and we’re going to cover those events as part of this new deal.”

Online coverage

According to the broadcast deal announcement, Cycling Australia will “integrate the highlights packages across its digital platform”. That is, it will have highlights of the races covered by the Nine/Fox Sports deal on its YouTube channel such as this 44-minute-long highlights video from the Nationals criterium races. This is the same package that went to air on Gem and Fox Sports.

Nine’s Wide World of Sports website and the Fox Sports website are yet to feature any video from the Bay Crits or Nationals and indeed neither site has a dedicated cycling section.

It’s a busy time of year for Nine in particular, with the cricket season in full swing, but cycling fans might reasonably argue that a lack of online support from Nine/Fox Sports shows a lack of investment in their new acquisitions.

I asked Cycling Australia CEO Nick Green whether we would see highlights videos and other online content on the Wide World of Sports and Fox Sports websites in future:

“They are some of the things we’re still fine-tuning with the networks,” Green said.

“Wide World of Sports have already committed to doing profile pieces on cyclists and teams and events throughout the year, so that’s additional coverage into an audience that the sport can’t otherwise have.”

A step forward?

Despite concerns that Nine and Fox Sports aren’t invested in covering cycling properly — given the poor time slots and a lack of online coverage — it’s worth considering Nine/Fox Sports’ coverage alongside that of SBS in 2014.

SBS didn’t do nightly highlights of the Bay Crits last year, instead wrapping them into a one-hour highlights package a week later. And as mentioned above, Nine/Fox Sports will provide more immediate highlights of the elite women’s road race at the Road Nationals than SBS did.

Nine/Fox Sports will also show highlights of the Jayco Herald Sun Tour in 2015, which SBS didn’t in 2014. It remains to be seen what Nine/Fox Sports’ coverage of the National Road Series will look like and whether that will be more comprehensive than SBS’ (leaving aside the fact two women’s races have been added to the calendar).

What now?

Cycling Australia’s deal with Nine and Fox Sports is for two years and, despite a shaky start, it seems fair to give all parties some time to find their feet. So will Nine and Fox Sports dedicate better time slots to the likes of the Nationals, Bay Crits and other races in future? And will more races be covered live rather than in highlights?

“They’ve already expressed interest at doing more live coverage and so there’s already a starting point where they’re seeing the opportunities around the sport and what it can deliver”, Nick Green told CyclingTips.

“This is a very exciting platform to start a really good relationship with Nine and Fox and I know both of those networks are open to continue to fine-tune the partnership over the next two years … either to put the events on at a better time-slots, give them better profiling …”

“It’s not just the time-slots the networks give us, particularly in 2015. It’s also the other cross-promotional support they’re going to give us which we get as part of the deal.”

Even at this early stage it’s clear Nick Green and Cycling Australia are excited about the potential shown by the new deal with Nine and Fox Sports. In order to deliver on that partnership’s potential, though, he and Cycling Australia will need to push for much more than after-midnight highlights packages on Nine and Fox Sports’ secondary channels.

Proving to cycling fans that those networks have the sport’s best interests at heart could prove be an even greater challenge.

jules

TV is dead. the fact they are showing some old movie instead proves it. i know production costs are independent of where the footage ends up, but it seems obvious that live streaming is the way to go.
- Riggah
  
  TV is indeed dead or dying. The commercial broadcasters have zero respect for the content they put out and even less respect for their audiences. The butchering of programmes just to squeeze in another few seconds of commercials has ruined the experience of TV viewing, but the networks do this because they are now so desperate for revenue as audiences desert them.
  If I was sponsoring a bike race I would much rather have it screened either by a trusted public broadcaster or online, but with cuts to public broadcasting in Australia, that is likely to leave just one option!!!
- steel
  
  I’ve been making this point for some time on the pages. CA need to get ahead of the curve and jump to live on line streaming. TV is yesterday’s medium. Most people seem to have a smart TV or media centre now, so cycling can be right in your living room, live for the full duration of the event.
  - Alex Hinds
    
    Still requires broadcast infrastructure to provide live streaming.
Dave

2 hours live coverage of a world class road race that’s on home soil, featuring some of the greatest cyclists this country has ever seen, including Cadel chasing the elusive national title, is nothing short of pathetic. Why buy the cycling if you’re just going to abuse it and treat fans with contempt. 9 are a disgrace with the tour down under and I think this move will put cycling backwards. How can it reach a greater audience when it’s either on after midnight, or preceded by a movie from 1872? I hate channel 9. Don’t get me started on Ian Chappell!
- echidna_sg
  
  simple - to prevent others from broadcasting it or challenging the cricket. A bit like oil companies owning solar panel R&D companies… cheap to simply buy and file away… someday it might be important, but in the meantime at least nobody else can benefit from the exposure…
  - Dave
    
    Spot on. That’s where the contempt for cycling fans comes into it.
- Horses
  
  It’s not even 2 hours - the race will be done by 3.00 or 3.30.
  - http://cyclingtips.com.au Matt de Neef
    
    Presentation is scheduled for 3.40pm.
Ro

the pacakge for bay crits is fine, just put it on at a decent time, not after midnight, or during the day while people are at work
Damien

Never giving Fox money. So I guess I’m stuck with pirate streams for another year.
- Archer
  
  I’m not sure where to turn now that wiziwig has disappeared.
  - Damien
    
    You can usually find something on steephill. Maybe I’ll invest in a VPN and pay for an overseas stream.
Gavin

“A network that is very busy”? Busy with what? Re-runs of the Big Bang Theory or Friends? Seriously annoyed at the time slots Channel 9 are allocating to this.
Classics Specialist

pretty sure I saw some of last years Sun Tour on TV, can’t remember when or where though… “Nine/Fox Sports will also show highlights of the Jayco Herald Sun Tour in 2015, which SBS didn’t in 2014″
Josh Smith

The post production of the bay crits with the inclusion of the on bike camera footage mixed in with the footage from the motos and trackside cameras was great. The times that all of this was shown on the tv was disappointing. If channel 9 doesn’t want to loose prime time viewers from existing programming the. The footage needs to be available on line as soon as the post production is done not a few days later.
I watched the TT highlights today and it had been edited to look like there where only 3-4 riders on course at 1 time. Porte finishing before Dennis left the start house for example. If CA and channel 9 want to attract new viewers to the sport not portraying an accurate picture of the race is only going to confuse people.
Alex Hinds

Anything that Channel 9 is doing for Cycling Australia is done through Editrix, a production company that has also done much of the work for the National Road Series and the National Championships, in the last few years. How much Ch. 9 is doing in comparison to SBS is contingent only on what Cycling Australia is paying them to do. That Ch. 9 may/may not be doing more or less is a matter of their contractual obligation. I would actually imagine CA is spending more in 2015 for its broadcast media partnership than it ever has done, and thus is creating a professional appearance to the broadcast it’s undertaking.

It may not be worth anything now, but what SBS tried to do, with frankly very little substantial resource, was commit to a breadth of coverage that Ch. 9 never will - through online, broadcast and social media. We bit off a lot, because we were committed to the sport (we still are, but now not the sport in this country from a broadcast perspective). Will be watching this experiment with interest.
- runrider
  
  Great insight Alex. I agree that the passion shown by the SBS team, Tommo, yourself, and the entire SBS production team will be missed. Keep up the good work on Le Tour et al!
runrider

SBS get shafted yet again after helping to promote our sport & for being the cycling network here in Australia for the past 20 years. Ch9 coverage of cycling will always come second to the cricket & we are the ones that lose out. If we have to stay up after midnight to watch races they should be beamed live from Europe, not local events.
The NRS will become like the Yeti, people will know it exists but nobody will ever see it. Nice CA - good work, with all the Ch9/ Fox money in the bank you don’t need to worry about attracting new members or kids to our sport, unless they are insomniacs!
At least that stage race held in France during July had the good sense to stick with SBS, but what would they know?
JCJordan

It has been interesting to see how the Ch9 coverage has been going. They have fixed one of my concerns with the commentary. Getting Matt and Rochelle in was exactly what they needed and is a huge improvement over the muppets they had in the past.

My concern is over the broadcast timings. Really late at night with lots of events squeezed into a really small timeslot does not really show anyone the action or excitement of the racing. Add to this there has been little or no advertising of the broadcast by Ch9 (actually have not even seen a add for the TDU yet either) there seems to be no real interest in actually getting viewers.

I stand by my belief that Ch9 has picked up these events to ensure that they do not get a foothold against their broadcast schedule.
jooo

Real fans have been watching pixelated streams in Flemish at hours much later (or earlier?) for years and yet so many are still upset with any free to air coverage in their native tongue? It’s better than nothing.