Ned rues the demise of GCN+ and lost afternoons glued to minor pro races in Portugal
MUSINGS ON THE WORLD OF PRO CYCLING
I want to talk to you about the sudden absence in my life of a dear, albeit short-lived friend. While they were part of my life, we shared huge tranches of time together, idling away the hours in a contented haze of contentment, letting time slip past like a strung-out peloton on an alpine descent, threading its way through an afternoon, or scything with zen-like grace through the rolling fields of Limousin. And all this, ad-free and on demand.
In my two decades-and-more association with road racing, I have lost track of the numbers of shinily trumpeted false dawns; those new initiatives with catchy names that have been announced with great social media fanfare, only to fall apart with sudden, surprising, and occasionally brutal rapidity. One of the latest in this sad series is the demise of GCN+, to which I was a very happy subscriber for the last two years. It was tremendous value for money, for a start. The fact that I can’t actually remember how much my annual subscription cost (whereas I know very well how much Netflix and Spotify are taking me for each month) is suggestive that maybe they weren’t charging enough. But who am I to try and unpick the machinations in the boardrooms of the global corporations that bought the platform. The only seemingly irrefutable conclusion is that they got their pricing strategy wrong, and that ultimately there weren’t quite enough of us prepared to spend random Tuesday afternoons in February glued to the individual time trial at the Volta ao Algarve. In fact, I have a shrewd suspicion that GCN+ could have saved the money on broadcasting it by putting us all in a minibus and driving us to Portugal.
The cycling community on these shores does consistently overestimate its own significance. This is born not of arrogance, but of a genuine desire not to feel so alone, and I am as guilty as anyone on this front. I’ve long been labouring under the misguided supposition that simply because I am devoted to the world of road racing, with its strange unwritten rules (the rider on the front is the only one you know for sure won’t win, for example), then everyone else on the planet must share my obsession. It’s not true, sadly. I once met with a former executive of a major cycling brand, one of the many going through a very difficult time just now. I re
