Ned Boulting is standing in the rain at Stockport train station when I call, having just missed his connection. He jokes that it feels rather apt given the gloomy news which broke in cycling last week when it was announced that ITV had lost the rights to the Tour de France from 2026.

Boulting, who has become a mainstay of the channel’s coverage over the last 23 years, first as a reporter, then for the last nine years as commentator, is phlegmatic about the loss. He admits he “saw it coming”.

With ITV needing to generate enough advertising revenue to fund the production, as well as pay for broadcast rights which have been pushed ever higher by increasing pressure from subscription services, it was, he conceded in a recent column on BikeRadar, “only a matter of time before the tipping point would be reached”.

That point has now been reached.

From 2026, cycling’s biggest race will be broadcast exclusively on Eurosport/Discovery+ in the UK. It feels like a big moment for the sport in this country. Similar to when cricket was lost to pay TV after the 2005 Ashes. It never returned.

Boulting does not attach any blame to ASO, the Tour’s owners, for this. They have the right to sell to the highest bidder. Nor does he have any truck with Eurosport. In the immediate aftermath of the announcement, Orla Chennaoui, Eurosport’s cycling presenter, copped some flak on social media for tweeting about the exclusive deal. Boulting says that was completely misguided.

“They do it slightly differently [to ITV],” he says. “They’re broadcasting to a much more initiated audience than us. But they do it extremely well. Eurosport obviously see potential in taking a lot of the residual viewers [who watch ITV’s coverage] and turning them into subscribers. And actually, for the good of the sport, I hope they succeed. The worst possible thing is if this experiment doesn’t work. That would be the worst possible outcome.”

None of which makes Boulting, 55, any less gloomy about the impending loss of a job he adores, or a programme of which he was extremely proud.

“On a petty, personal level, yes, I am very down about it,” he admits. “Effectively I’ve lost a job I never imagined I would end up doing, but which means more to me than anything I’ve ever done. It’s absolutely become a part of my identity. I fell deeply in love with cycling.”

The reason Boulting is standing in the rain at Stockport station at all, in fact, is because he is on his way to Buxton, for the latest leg of his one-man stage tour about cycling.

He has been doing these shows for years during the off-season. This one is based loosely on the 1923 Tour, about which Boulting has recently written a book. But it is all interwoven with stories about today’s riders and features plentiful nods to ITV’s coverage of the race, which is, he concedes, what his audience are largely there for.

“I’ve done five different shows and they’ve told five different stories, but at the core of it is this kind of affection for the institution of the ITV Highlights Show. So there are jokes about terrible adverts, about Gary Imlach’s shirt collection, about Chris Boardman’s boring personality. It’s a kind of an ironic celebration of that whole thing.”

Boulting sees the irony in the fact that ITV is losing its Tour coverage because the numbers did not add up, and yet there are more than enough punters to sustain a 23-date tour about cycling in towns and cities across the country, from Swindon to Salford. “Honestly, the well of residual affection for this particular show is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. It’s a very strange phenomenon but yeah, it kind of works.”

Ultimately, though, he is realistic about the sport’s popularity in the UK. Cycling has always been a niche sport here, as opposed to in continental Europe, where it has been part of the culture for over a century. Even two decades of unprecedented success for British riders on the world stage has not proved enough to change that.

“I mean, let’s face it, of the television deals that have just been announced, the UK is pretty much the only major territory in Europe that doesn’t have a free-to-air offering,” Boulting says. “So yeah, I think this is a UK story.

“I’ve often said one of the things I noticed when I first was introduced to road cycling 20-odd years ago, and that I found so extraordinary about it, was that almost every other sport that you can think of, that punches a certain weight, got its roots and was either invented or codified in Britain. Even those extremely international ones, like Formula One, have got a really deep British heritage. Whereas road racing absolutely hasn’t. It stands alone almost in that regard. It’s kind of up there with sumo and kabaddi. It’s deeply alien to British culture.

“And I think if this is the beginning of the big decline again, if it is going to recede back into the shadows where it came from, I think that’s the reason; that cycling never actually took root here. So the boom of 2012 was actually very superficial.”

‘Not enough Brits watch the sport’

But what about all those people who bought bikes and opened Strava accounts and entered sportives? Who followed Team Sky through the glory years? Were they not converted into fans?

“Some were,” Boulting says. “Not enough, clearly. I think there was a maybe fatuous, maybe infantile connection that we made within cycling, that we hoped would happen, that success at the Tour by [Bradley] Wiggins and [Mark] Cavendish and Geraint [Thomas], would translate into people buying bikes and people getting into the sport.

“Actually I’ve always been amazed by the number of people who bought bikes and got Strava accounts and rode sportives and yet could not give a damn about the sport itself. They just don’t follow it. That’s always struck me as very odd. Again, quite a British phenomenon.

“People who, in inverted commas, ‘love cycling’, who do a lot of it, spend a lot of money on it. But don’t watch a single race other than maybe the Tour de France.

“I’ve ridden at some of these events with people who have no idea about cycling. You try to start a conversation about Peter Sagan and they just stare at you blankly. You wouldn’t get that in football. If you went to Hackney Marshes and spoke to amateur footballers just kicking a ball around, they’d all have a view on Arsenal and Liverpool and Manchester United. They probably watch the football.”

The bottom line, Boulting concluded in his column, was that “not enough of us cared, not really”. Now that Ineos Grenadiers [formerly Team Sky] are no longer dominant, now that Wiggins and Cavendish and Thomas are no longer winning yellow jerseys, now that the transient fan who was only ever interested in British success has migrated away, the number of “once-a-year” Tour viewers – a label Boulting concedes probably applies to most of his show audience – is simply not enough to sustain free-to-air coverage in the face of rising costs.

Boulting clearly fears for what this might mean. There is no comparison to sports like cricket, golf or tennis, which have also gone behind the paywall, let alone football. “Don’t forget, golf and tennis have been on our TV screens, part of the mainstream of our sporting culture, for as long as I’ve been alive, and way, way, way before that. For most people, the Tour de France didn’t exist before 2012. It just wasn’t even a thing. I mean, in the run-up to 2014 [the hugely successful grand depart in Britain] Welcome to Yorkshire got emails from people saying ‘I’d quite like to take part in the Tour de France. Is there an application form I can fill in?’ So there’s no comparison.”

Boulting sighs. His train is about to arrive and he needs to go. He does not want to appear too downcast. He still loves the sport and plans to continue working in it.

“I hope that some of my pessimism is proven wrong,” he says. “Things are cyclical, and maybe it will come back but I don’t know. There are reasons to be hopeful. Yes, the audience has shrunk since 2012 but it is still significantly higher than it was in 2003 when I first covered the race.”

Boulting takes great pride in the fact that ITV has been key to that growth. He points to Jake Stewart, the Israel-Premier Tech rider. “Jake’s dad is coming to the show tonight,” he says. “He’s often told me, as has Tom Pidcock, that as children it was the ITV4 highlights that got him into cycling, because they sat down with their dads at seven o’clock and watched together.

“In fact, a lot of the feedback I got after the news was announced last Friday was from people saying ‘It was watching it with my dad or watching it with my parents that got me into it in the first place’. That ITV audience acted a bit as gatekeepers for the next generation. You do wonder whether that pipeline is being choked off a little bit.”

Only time will tell what happens to audience figures, and what the knock-on effect might be on participation and future British success. But one thing is clear. “It is going to feel very strange at the end of next year’s race,” Boulting reflects. “Usually when we go off air after Stage 21, for 48 hours our timelines fill with people saying, ‘What are we going to do now?’ and feeling slightly bereft. That reaction has now been amplified 10 times by this sense of, ‘well, when it goes off air next summer… yeah, it ain’t coming back.’”

Ned Boulting’s Marginal Mystery Tour: 1923 And All That continues until 20 November. Dates and tickets are available here.

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