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news
2024 Tour de France jersey winners Zac Williams/SWpix.comNo Tour de France on ITV from 2026 as Eurosport becomes exclusive UK broadcaster
One of the UK’s most beloved televisual sporting traditions of the summer will come to an end in 2026, following the news that the Tour de France will no longer be shown on ITV after next year, after Warner Bros. Discovery and Eurosport announced that they had agreed a new exclusive rights deal for cycling’s biggest race.
The rights deal, which will run until at least 2030 according to Warner Bros. Discovery, will mean that the Tour de France will not be shown on free-to-air television in the UK for the first time since the 1980s, when Channel 4 began broadcasting its now iconic evening highlights programmes.
On Friday morning, Warner Bros. Discovery – which last year closed the GCN+ cycling streaming app after moving its live cycling content to its Discovery+ platform – announced that a new long-term agreement with the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and Tour de France organisers Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO) has secured exclusivity rights for the Tour from 2026 to 2030.
According to the deal, the Tour de France will now be exclusively shown live on Eurosport and Discovery+ in the UK, bringing an end to ITV4’s coverage, currently fronted by Gary Imlach, Ned Boulting, and David Millar, and extending Eurosport’s own relationship with the race beyond the 40-year mark.
In 2025, ITV is set to broadcast its 25th edition of the Tour de France, after taking over the UK televisual rights from Channel 4 in 2001.
When approached for comment by road.cc, a spokesperson for the broadcaster said there was “nothing for ITV to add on this one”.
> The rise & fall of GCN+ – is the livestream party over for cycling fans?
Warners Bros. Discovery also announced that the Tour de France Femmes will now be exclusive in Ireland and Norway, alongside coverage for viewers in every market in Europe.
The “colossal” deal also means that Eurosport and Discovery+ will continue to broadcast live and on-demand linear, streaming, and digital coverage of most of the rest of the cycling calendar, including the grand tours and classics, which the broadcaster says “guarantees broad access for millions of viewers across Europe”.
(A.S.O./Charly Lopez)
Announcing the deal, Trojan Paillot, head of Sports Rights Acquisitions and Syndication at WBD Sports Europe, said: “For many years, we have been trusted to act as the custodian for cycling and have worked tirelessly to maximise the opportunities fans have to engage with their favourite sport.
“Our commitment to cycling has seen us invest in the most comprehensive live rights portfolio, which includes every men’s and women’s Grand Tour race, and we’re delighted to now extend our relationship with our partners at ASO and EBU to take us into a fifth decade of covering the world’s greatest races including the Tour de France.”
“Our role as the Home of Cycling has seen us harness the most passionate team of cycling experts to consistently elevate our coverage of the sport while telling its stories to the widest possible audience,” added WBD Sports Europe’s head of content Scott Young.
“From being the first broadcaster to offer every minute of the Grand Tours live across Europe in 2018, to developing unique innovations and studio analysis tools to better explain the action, our work in this sport continues to break new ground.
“Announcing our new rights agreements today means that we can continue to produce quality, immersive content that connects fans with their favourite races and riders for years to come.”
In November last year, Warner Bros. Discovery closed the popular GCN+ app, which had been provided live and on-demand streaming of the cycling calendar since 2021, as part of its move to consolidate its live cycling output (for which it owned the rights) on its own Discovery+ platform.
Discovery, which merged with Warner Brothers in 2022, first bought a 20 per cent stake in GCN’s parent company Play Sports Group in 2017, before taking full ownership in 2021 in a bid to “amplify” its position as the “home of cycling”.
In June, it sold GCN back to its founder and CEO Simon Wear, a move that saw the collapse of the GCN website and the loss of several jobs.
After obtaining a PhD, lecturing, and hosting a history podcast at Queen’s University Belfast, Ryan joined road.cc in December 2021 and since then has kept the site’s readers and listeners informed and enthralled (well at least occasionally) on news, the live blog, and the road.cc Podcast. After boarding a wrong bus at the world championships and ruining a good pair of jeans at the cyclocross, he now serves as road.cc’s senior news writer. Before his foray into cycling journalism, he wallowed in the equally pitiless world of academia, where he wrote a book about Victorian politics and droned on about cycling and bikes to classes of bored students (while taking every chance he could get to talk about cycling in print or on the radio). He can be found riding his bike very slowly around the narrow, scenic country lanes of Co. Down.
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Real loss. Not sure if it's just a general opinion, or an actual award, but the ITV TdF sports team were regarded as one of the best across all sports. Gary's dry humour pulling it all together, Ned going from clueless to an addicted commentator, David the flawed ex-pro, Pete is a good pundit, occasional Chris Boardman, Daniel Friebe and Matt Rendell the multi-lingual (incl published award winning sports authors) interviewers (who I bet get interviews that others don't); its got it all and they're all total TdF addicts. I reckon they'd do it for free. The commentary has the odd guest on it and the highlights 'magazine' style inserts make it more interesting; Boardmans articles on european cycle city culture show how it could be. Ned, David and Pete's bromance whilst following the race. There are people I know who aren't at all into cycling, some don't even own a bike, who are totally addicted to the ITV coverage when the Tour is on. A friend of mine had got into road cycling and I put him on to the Tour; his first remark was how good the ITV team were. Eurosport's OK but just doesn't have the X factor that ITV has.
So there might be a free to air highlights show https://www.cyclingweekly.com/racing/british-free-to-air-tour-de-france-hig...
Latest episode of Neds Never Strays Far podcast discusses the news… apparently, Ned learnt from a Eurosport colleague.......
Link missing its end, try here: https://www.cyclingweekly.com/racing/british-free-to-air-tour-de-france-...
Hope the highlights are more generous than they offer for rugby, since they grabbed the game off BT Sport and put it behind their £30.99 a month paywall they offer a somewhat parsimonious three-minutes-per-game highlights package for those who don't subscribe.
Not a great loss. With streaming so widespread I don't want to have to sit down at 8 to watch it. The on demand didn't come available until later on. Eurosport coverage is on demand and I can watch it when I like.
I've not watched the ITV coverage for years and won't miss it. For me the value is also in the wider cycling coverage, money well spent to get full seasons coverage. Now, GCN + I do miss....
Apples with apples - presumably you still have to wait a while for the Eurosport highlights to be produced.
ITV losing the rights is no loss as their coverage, especially their love of taking four minute advert breaks every 12 minutes or so, or with less than 8km to go, makes their coverage unwatchable.
Give me advert free flag to finish line coverage on Eurosport everyday.
Now.... if Eurosport would sign up for the Tour of Britian we could get rid of ITV completely: my funeral is arranged; I don't need non stop adverts for such. As to hungry donkey's...
Thank the Heavens for the Pirate Broadcaster I use for all year round race coverage when ITV aren't Live. IYKYK
Shame.
At least one more year.
ITV 4 did a vuelta highlights for a couple of years, was good too.
Quest or Dmax for highlights then of everything else and short subscription for the month of July.
Hopefully itv will continue the with the tour of Britains.
ITV gave up the NFL highlights show very last minute, though they still have the superb owl and two of the London games, Craig was developing a good sidekick role to jbell and osi, not as good as mark when it was back on the BBC, but the best since.
Aww, that's a proper shame, ITV's highlights package was incomparably better than Eurosport's.
If they haven't just put the darts on instead (like America's Cup coverage this week), then it's always just the last 50mins of the days riding. Even if all the action was earlier in the day.
Then it's just Roberto Hatchio (he studied Italian doncha know...) and his painfully slow surname pronounciation, yelling 'oh no, oh no, oh no' because someone has dropped a chain, and Sean 'Yus, wull...' ignoring him.
We only tune in now to see how Orla has courageously defied her wardrobe department guidance in footwear and accessories...
Will this affect the highlights programs ? To be honest all the C4 / ITV TDF coverage I've watched since 1983 has been the highlights programs only .... 1983 I missed the TDF as was in the Falklands ... again ... I got back 2 days before Christmas... my Christmas present was the C4 highlights on video cassettes .... that music ...that music ! ... was the best ever .....
Sports competitions go to who can afford to pay the organising body the most money, and really couldn't care if people can't afford to watch (or choose not to): look at how restricted the BBC is in showing Olympics coverage, look at how football has pretty disappeared from terrestrial broadcast TV (except the women's football - not sure what message that is giving), or read the news coverage of how the Six Nations rugby is likely to disappear behind a paywall…
This is so sad. I wouldn't mind as much if Eurosport coverage and highglights was even half as good ITVs. I wonder how much this will impact future generations love of the TdF. It's certainly what got me in to a lifetime of enjoying the sport and as a form of travel.
Watching ITV, you only have one irritating presenter (Ned B), on Eurosport you've a whole studio of them.
It gives me more time to ride my bike in July from 2026 onwards.
Ah well.. there goes the last of my interest in racing. Won't be getting Eurosport just for this. I will miss the ITV coverage though, the commentary team were brilliant and part of the summer for me since the mid 80s. Maybe I'll plan a tour out to France to see it by the roadside.
road.cc on the click bait train again. Read the official ASO announcement https://www.ebu.ch/news/2024/10/ebu-a-s-o-reach-a-new-tour-de-france-agr...
I strongly suspect that ITV have done this as a cost cut, and it's not WBD that are the baddies.
How is what they said different to what we said? Are you saying we just shouldn't have published the story and that the news itself is 'clickbait', or that our headline is a bending of the truth? Always looking to improve if you can explain further.
Perhaps you need to read the official ASO announcement and then apologise, because it doesn't say anything different to what is reported here. No indication in this report, in your linked report, or in any of the other reports that ITV have chosen not to renew their coverage, all reports are that WBD have negotiated an exclusivity deal with the EBU.
I'm confused. ITV and the BBC are both members of EBU. So how does this work then? Have they both opted out of coverage (and presumably paying) or is there another explanation about why the UK is not included in free to air coverage?
I would guess that EBU membership doesn't automatically mean you get to air it, you still have to bid. E.g. EBU also has the rights to Paris Roubaix and LBL but I don't recall ITV, BBC or S4C covering those recently.
WBD may not be 'the baddies' exactly, but surely ITV losing rights has to be in the context of a very large bid by WBD to secure exclusivity. So it's unlikely to be pure cost cutting, but that they couldn't / wouldn't throw more investment at it to compete with WBD.
I'll throw in my agreement: the ITV production is always an excellent package of interviews, punditry, racing narrative, and contextual (or geological!) asides. I'm impressed that they get it out by 7pm each day.
And someone on that team, with an eclectic taste for music, always managed to pick a track to play over the end credits that referenced the events of that day. Somehow, I don't think I recall them ever choosing the same tune twice.
Discovery+ with all the cycling content is rolled in to most Sky subs at no extra cost, however I'll miss Ned, David, Gary, etc on ITV.
For now, I somehow doubt Discovery+ pay so much for exclusive rights, without expecting to get the money back from subscribers in some way.
I agree with the other comments that the entire ITV TdF team have got it exactly in the Goldilocks zone, and will be sadly missed.
Personally I'm happy to shell out my £6.99 a month for all three GTs, all the monuments and major stage races that you get with Eurosport/Discovery but I think it's a real mistake not to have a least a highlights package available on free to air. As I suspect many on here of my vintage did, I first got into cycle racing through seeing the Channel 4 highlights from 1984 (?) onwards and it formed the basis of a lifetime of devotion. My other two favourite sports, rugby union and cricket, have been severely damaged in terms of fanbase and encouraging young people to get involved by making shortsighted decisions to grab the cash and not have any free to air coverage, even highlights; sad to see cycling going the same way. So now any kids whose parents can't afford/don't want to pay for Eurosport will get to see cycle racing on TV once every couple of years at the Commonwealth Games and the Olympics?
As long as it stays £6.99.
However, Gary Imlach and Ned Boulting 😭😭😭
Totally agree. The Channel 4 coverage was where everything that is cycling in my life now started. To the point the C4 coverage theme music is and has always been my phone ring tone. This just feels like depriving the future of not just exposure to the sport but also the hook into cycling.
If it is anything like the Giro and Vuelta, there will be a nightly highlights programme on some digital terrestial channel also owned by Warner/Discovery, I forget which one. But on Freeview those channels use a lower bandwidth than ITV, making it nausea-inducing to watch the smearing effect caused by such heavy compression of a constantly moving scene. Plus the commentators are third-rate, the editing doesn't even attempt to convey the story of the entire stage, the analysis is done from some studio in Dublin by people with usually utterly generic viewpoints, and crucially there's none of Gary Imlach's sarcasm to remind us that it is all a big (glorious) absurd circus - presumably another reason why the soulless corporate types that negotiate rights were glad to ditch ITV4.
Have been watching the tour on ch4 and ITV for what seems like forever and Gary Imlach was a whipper snapper, other than a 7 year hiatus when I watched it on SBS in Australia ( you could argue SBS is Australian ch4) . Gary's sarcastic wit was pitched perfectly and always brought a smile. When Ned and David took over the commentating reigns I thought they were and are excellent with Ned's enthusiasm and David's knowledge of the peloton is great combination.
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