The revolution will not be televised. Just two weeks after it was announced that Eurosport would be closed down, Netflix revealed on Thursday that Tour de France: Unchained will end after its third season is aired later this year. This might not be quite as seismic as the Warner Bros. Discovery/TNT bombshell, but it is very much more bad news for cycling, cycling fans, and those who don't even know they like the sport yet.
Tour de France: Unchained was not perfect, and for diehard pro cycling fans probably seemed quite surface level, but I know more than a few people who got into the sport this way. In just two years of existence, the programme became a gateway drug for many non-cycling obsessives and non-sports fans to get into the world we all love.
I have a friend who knew nothing about the sport until she watched Unchained, and as a result only knew about people who had appeared in the show. Ben O'Connor, Jasper Philipsen and Tom Pidcock were all familiar names, but Remco Evenepoel and Mads Pedersen, for example, were unknowns. Now, she's not an obsessive, but is more into the sport than ever before, and that's pretty much thanks to the Netflix show. She's not alone.
Tour de France: Unchained was entertaining, and I'll miss it, but there's more to its demise than a TV show ending.
Netflix doesn't owe cycling anything, and I understand that this is a business decision; viewing figures are reported to have been weak, and there has not been as much take up in France as the company hoped, but the whole thing is still disappointing. The discovery that pro cycling is going behind the biggest paywall it has ever been behind in the UK is still raw, and now, another avenue into fandom has been disposed of.
How will those non-cycling fans, people just browsing their televisions for something interesting to watch, find the sport now? Eurosport will be gone at the end of the month, and the 2025 Tour de France won't be documented by Netflix. From the high of 2023, two years ago, to the crashing low of 2025. It all seems bleak.
There were whole parts of cycling that had not even been touched by the documentary cameras: the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift for a start, but also the Classics, the other Grand Tours. The men's Tour de France being on Netflix was supposed to be the start of something, not the end.
I warmed to the series, having been sceptical in its first year, but I found last year's really entertaining, even for someone very much inside the world of cycling; it was gripping, and brought me stories form the 2023 Tour that had passed me by despite being on the ground every day. The best bits were the behind-the-scenes insights, that you would only ever really come across if you watched everything each team pumped out on social media; and, their reels were unfiltered which is of course unlikely.
This is yet another thing that the yet-to-exist One Cycling could ameliorate, with the rather ambiguous concept potentially promising one platform showing all the team content you could want. Although, One Cycling's vision is still not the same as cycling existing on Netflix or Eurosport, available to a much wider audience. It really feels like the sport is shrinking in on itself, and that's a worry for everyone involved. Cycling is already a niche, and it seems like drawbridges are being pulled up. Something needs to be done to expand our favourite thing. I'll certainly keep trying, but it was much easier when Tour de France: Unchained was around.
