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Ned Boulting was a football reporter who knew next to nothing about cycling when ITV first sent him to cover the Tour de France in 2003. “I had absolutely no idea,” he says. “I couldn’t tell you the first thing about the event, except there was some guy called Lance Armstrong who apparently was quite good. I didn’t understand what I was doing properly for years and years, but I knew straight away that whatever it was, this mad thing called the Tour de France, I absolutely loved it.”
Two decades later, Boulting has become the voice of the Tour for millions of British fans, soundtracking the famous exploits of Bradley Wiggins’ triumph in 2012, Mark Cavendish’s historic 35th stage win this summer and everything in between. Next year, Boulting and his close-knit team will celebrate 25 years of the race on ITV. And yet it will also mark their last after Warner Bros Discovery announced last week it had secured exclusive rights to broadcast the Tour from 2026 onwards.
Boulting had no idea the bombshell was coming. “I found out when everybody else found out,” he says.
It is understood ITV didn’t put up much of a fight, and the outcome is the curtain falling on four decades of the Tour de France as a free-to-air event. Discovery may show some race highlights on one of its obscure freeview channels, but ITV’s comforting live coverage and popular highlights show, complete with iconic jingle, will be no more.
Evidently, it was just not popular enough. “I’ve seen the viewing figures tail off after 2012 year on year, not always in a linear fashion, but they’ve definitely dipped,” Boulting says. “And I also know that at the same time, because of the interest from subscription TV, the price being exacted for those rights has gone up. And at some point, for a commercial organisation like ITV, you’re going to reach a tipping point.
“Perhaps we just didn’t reach out to enough viewers and make it entertaining enough, I don’t know, but for whatever reason, the bottom line is not enough people watched it and not enough people cared. And that’s the underlying truth.”
Boulting is speaking from the road, in the middle of a run of one-man shows which delve into the mysteries hidden on a roll of Pathé news film he bought from a London auction house a few years ago. The film roll contained two and half minutes of footage of the 1923 Tour de France, and Boulting’s investigation into the grainy scenes became the focus of his seventh book on cycling, titled 1923, on which his show is based – “a play that tells the story,” he explains.
It is an illustration of just how emphatically Boulting’s love of the Tour de France has seeped into every aspect of his life since first setting eyes on the race. But he believes he is an outlier in a country that does not truly hold road racing close to its heart. ITV deserves credit for its long commitment to cycling, he says, but its relinquishing of the Grand Boucle is “confirmation of what I’ve always felt about the sport, which is unlike almost any other sport you can think of – football, cricket, rugby, tennis, golf, motor racing, horse racing – were either invented or codified by the British. Not road racing.
“Road racing is fundamentally un-British. It never took root here. It’s never come from here. Up until now, it’s been a deeply continental, mysterious foreign-language event, and I think despite the successes of Cavendish, Wiggins, despite all that boom, I think it never took hold. And I think we’re moving back to where we were in this sport: peripheral.”
“There’s been a complete decimation and collapse of the domestic racing scene,” Boulting says. “When I first started there were six or seven teams that sustained a roster of eight or 10 professional riders – now effectively it’s gone. It seems to be heading in a certain direction at the moment, and it’s not upwards, sadly.”
That is despite the fact that there were more British riders on the start line of the Tour de France this year (11) than ever before. Some of those were inspired by the zenith of Team Sky and Britain’s most successful era on the road a decade or so ago. Tom Pidcock, now a double Olympic champion, was one of those children whose parents let him stay up late to watch ITV highlights at 7pm on summer evenings. That ritual will soon be a thing of the past.
Ned Boulting’s Marginal Mystery Tour: 1923 And All That continues until 20 November. Dates and tickets are available here.
