Latest news analysis from pro cycling and global sports in the latest edition of the AIRmail Weekly Newsletter from The Outer Line. This week, look into pivotal developments shaping the future of the sport—from the landmark 2025 Tour de France Femmes and its powerful impact on women’s racing, to concerning trends in men’s Tour viewership and structural cracks in global cycling. Also unpack significant legal shifts from the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), plus implications of the U.S. President’s executive action on college athletics. With expert insight, data-driven analysis, and bold reflections, AIRmail delivers the essential stories every passionate fan and stakeholder needs to follow right now.
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Key Takeaways:
● Tour de France Femmes 2025: A Turning Point
● A Detailed Take on the Status of the Women’s Pro Racing
● Men’s TdF Viewership Declines, Wider Implications
● Ground-shaking Developments at CAS
● Bid to “Save College Sports” Falls Short
Pauline Ferrand-Prévot’s popular victory confirmed the Tour de France Femmes’ ascension as the sport’s premier women’s event and provided a pivot point from which to fully develop the sport to its full global potential. The race embodied the creativity, strength, cunning, resiliency, and killer instinct demonstrated by many of pro cycling’s best women riders. The narrative of the first half of the race was as much about top challengers who fell out as it was the crashes and drama which affected challengers who remained, with Giro winner Elisa Longo-Borghini (UAE) and Suisse winner Marlen Reusser (Movistar) both exiting. Lorena Wiebes (SDWorx-Protime) rocketed to two sprint wins coming into the weekend’s climbing finale, and Kim Le Court (AG Insurance-Soudal) enjoyed two days in yellow after winning stage 5, while Maëva Squiban (UAE) picked up the challenge for her team with two consecutive – and unexpected – climbing stage wins leading into the alpine weekend. There, Ferrand-Prévot (Visma-LAB) rallied her team to her challenge and “PFP” was simply superlative in stage 8, patiently patrolling the lead group and then countering a strong Sarah Gigante (AG Insurance-Soudal) to take the stage win, the yellow jersey, and establish an insurmountable lead over top challengers like Demi Vollering (FDJ).
Ferrand-Prévot’s race-sealing victory on stage 9 was measured and decisive, and it also provided French cycling fans with their greatest moment of celebration since Julian Alaphilippe’s ill-fated run in yellow during the 2019 men’s event. Looking back on the buildup to this edition … the expected challenge by Vollering and her vastly improved FDJ team fell just short after her untimely early crashes, while Anna van der Breggen (SDWorx) showed few flashes of her previous dominant form – other than a scintillating final stage “hail Mary” attack to get back into the top ten of the GC. Yet there was still much to celebrate as we look down the final top ten of the race: expected challengers like last year’s victor Kasia Niewiadoma-Phinney fighting for the podium, and a mix of new and establishing GC riders like Dominika Włodarczyk (UAE), Gigante, and Pauliena Rooijakkers (Fenix-Deceuninck) confirming their considerable talents. Each stage was a microcosm of everything the sport’s current fans wish for in a world-class race: attacks, counters, new faces taking risks, and stars showing their best poker-face before playing what they hoped would be a winning hand.
The event has now taken on a life of its own, for fans, riders, media and sponsors – and has broken through as a globally recognized sports event. There was a sense of excitement and potential around the entire event, reminiscent of the early days of gravel racing a decade ago. Also noticeable at this year’s race was the number of American content creators and influencers who were in attendance – most of whom made the trip specifically for the women’s race. As they do for the men’s race, event owner ASO put on a L’Étape mass start event – utilizing the challenging Stage 8 route that finished up the brutal Col de la Madeleine. Of the 6,000 participants, about 2,500 were women. That massive women’s attendance underscored both the growing level of mass participation as well as the exciting racing by the pros on the same course.
But with race fans delighted and a winner in the books, what can we expect next for women’s pro road cycling?
The race can either grow from here, or conversely, wither on the vine. Its future is dependent on how the UCI moves forward to encourage development of women’s cycling and how the race’s organizers, ASO, position the event within a spectrum of rising women’s sports. Regarding development of women’s cycling, the sport is still struggling to diversify and expand its talent development pipelines; beyond a handful of well-capitalized women’s teams and the sport’s top-tier riders, there are deep rifts emerging. The WWT is virtually dominated by its top six teams, and while there are some outlier stars rising in the periphery, most of the current “fuoriclasse” stars are approaching 30 years of age and many are closing in towards the edge of 40 – apologies to the evergreen Marianne Vos and Mavi Garcia, both of whom won superlative stages in this year’s race. The sport’s under-21 talent pipeline hasn’t kept pace with the rapid expansion of the WWT, with ramifications that could impact the sport’s sustainability or delay its growth. According to NXTG Racing founder and women’s racing expert Natascha Knaven-den Ouden, who relayed in a recent post what a 17 year-old rider told her, “… ‘If I don’t get picked up this season, I think it’s over.’ Not because she isn’t good enough. But because we’ve built a system where you have to be visible, signed, and successful by 19, or disappear.”
Ellen Van Rooijen at the Baloise Tour
The UCI calendar presents a similar challenge, as the race quickly forces a tipping point where the entire sport orbits a mid-season climax and lands in the same hot water as the men’s Tour de France: flagging viewership numbers, zero growth, and a contracting fan base. Men’s pro cycling is burdened by a calendar that can’t thrive with the Tour de France or without it, because a sport with a mid-season climax and an end-of-season whimper hasn’t been able to connect to modern audiences in the sport’s sponsorship target demographics. We have commented many times on the tabula rasa available to women’s cycling – the opportunity to create a new and differently structured sport – rather than simply copying the men’s often dysfunctional systems and tired old model. Yet the UCI seems content to let ASO dictate a model for the Women’s WorldTour that simply recreates the myriad problems it faces with the men’s sport. This predicament will eventually recapitulate the sponsorship bottleneck of the men’s WT in which teams and races scrap for the same sponsors, a handful of over-capitalized teams privatizing talent development and creating “verticals” in which talent is siloed, a small number of races of any consequence in the calendar other than those which curry favor with ASO for a TdF wildcard, and fractured media rights that dilute the broadcast value and reach of the sport. There is a huge opportunity here which the UCI is watching slip through its fingers.
The ASO paints a rosy picture of media viewing, but other sources differ.
To understand this problem further, let’s contrast the exciting women’s finale with the finish of this year’s men’s Tour. The men’s race’s revamped stage on the Champs Elysees was not enough to reverse the race’s long-ebbing viewership tide. Metrics observed for the first two weeks of the event were in line with prior year-over-year declines in the race’s broadcast audience in its European and external markets, and week three numbers were an exclamation point. Moreover, the drop in fan interest confirmed the UCI’s own observations, as its recent report highlighted (or rather, bemoaned) the lack of competition beyond the sport’s top four or five teams. The dominance of these squads, lack of diversity among the major race winners, and an over-bloated calendar continues to dampen the enthusiasm of fans to tune in part due to the expectation that only one of just a small handful of five or six riders be the winner in the races which actually matter. The brief Tadej Pogačar-Wout Van Aert duel injected octane into the new Paris circuit finale and supercharged what is usually a low-key and routine stage. But this was fleeting, like a Major League Baseball broadcast in which a pitcher is carrying a perfect game into the 8th inning and fans rush to the channel to potentially witness history. By most measures, the Tour hasn’t had such an exciting final day of racing since Greg LeMond’s heroic 1989 time trial into Paris to win by eight seconds, yet this late boost could not correct the overall viewership trajectory of a race in which the outcome was all but decided two and a half weeks prior.
Forthcoming viewership metrics of the women’s race will provide an important bellwether of the sport but Tour organizer ASO has been guarded in revealing its internal findings in recent years.
Hence, measurements provided by experts like our contributing colleague, professor Daam Van Reeth, provide invaluable keys to unlock the race’s actual broadcast value. A recent analysis of the U.S.’s Major League Soccer bears important examination and offers strong clues as to why ASO’s numbers haven’t added up. AppleTV, which owns exclusive MLS rights, claims that games streamed over its service are averaging 120,000 confirmed sessions (full game streams). Previously, when the MLS was exclusive to ESPN, that number was 343,000; the difference is due to Nielsen Rating methodologies in linear broadcasting to measure average-minute audience size, whereas streaming focuses on unique views with a confirmed duration – not just impressions and auto-played panels in sports and news websites. The Tour de France (and much of pro cycling) has migrated behind expensive paywalls – and will continue to do so as juggernauts like the NFL and FIFA eat up licensing budgets and bundled subscription space – and true streaming metrics trend far lower than linear and free-to-air TV delivery. Therefore, it will be interesting to compare what ASO shares publicly in the coming weeks and compare these figures to expert, third party observations – the results of which could indicate the overall health of the sport. Most importantly – it could help to define a new path to success for women’s racing.
In a potentially earthshaking decision last week, the European Court of Justice ruled that decisions made by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) can now be reviewed by national courts to ensure that they comply with European Union (EU) laws.
The CAS, based in a stately mansion in Lausanne, Switzerland has previously been essentially a power unto itself, with respect to legal disputes in Olympic and international sports. The highly secretive organization, often accused on being a blatant tool for the wishes of the International Olympic Committee, is best known for handling significant sports cases involving doping controversies or contract disputes, and previously has had essentially no oversight or further appeal process. But the EU ruling stated that the national courts of member countries “must be empowered to carry out …. an in-depth judicial review as to whether arbitral awards made by CAS are consistent with EU public policy.” Thus, the ruling would effectively end the power and absolute finality of CAS decisions. Although perhaps best known for its rulings on various disputes regarding FIFA and world football, the decision could potentially have major impacts on cycling as well. The Court has previously ruled on a number of cycling doping controversies, including Alberto Contador’s clenbuterol case, and the doping cases of Floyd Landis, Nairo Quintana and Miguel Ángel López, upholding the findings of the UCI in each of those cases – while mysteriously ruling against others in higher-profile tennis cases, for example. Subjecting the Court to the oversight and protocols of individual state laws would seem to be a positive step for athlete rights and greater transparency.
The U.S. President recently issued his 176th Executive Order since taking office – this one grandiosely entitled “President Donald J. Trump Saves College Sports.”
But, as “The Athletic” noted, “if only it was that simple.” The NCAA, and its legacy policies around strict amateurism has been under attack for years, particularly around the issue of paying college athletes. Several legal decisions over the past few years have chipped away at that policy, and the recent House vs. NCAA case – just signed a couple months ago – essentially allows the direct remuneration of college athletes, up to a level of $20.5 million a year for certain universities. The agreement also dictates “back pay” for earlier college athletes from a certain time period who did not have the opportunity to receive such payments. College sports today is akin to the days of the wild west – “beneath the surface of packed stadiums and thrilling games lies a chaotic, poorly regulated, and rapidly evolving landscape … (highlighting) deep issues around governance, money, power, and freedom that define the current state of college sports.” Furthermore, the College Sports Commission subsequently loosened restrictions on NIL collectives directly paying athletes, which de facto undermined the recent Executive Order, anyhow. This on-going lack of well-understood or enforceable rules is creating huge and often under-the-table competition between schools, agents, and sponsors, all angling for an advantage – for the same sort of “gold” that drove the American wild west 150 years ago.
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