ITV4 will not be covering this year’s Giro d’Italia. In fact the grim news is that they won’t be covering cycling at all after this year – not even the Tour! TNT Sports has the rights to everything these days, you see – although they are at least making highlights available free-to-air.
Live TV coverage
Say what you like about Eurosport’s coverage, but they were always committed to covering road cycling. Eurosport’s gone now though, which means that rather than paying not-very-much to watch cycling for a few months a year, you now get to pay £30.99 a month for TNT Sports because TNT Sports also broadcasts lots of high profile sports you aren’t interested in. Hurray! What a result!
This situation is so rubbish, I’m not even going to bother linking to the TNT Sports sign-up page.
Highlights
After a year or two of trying to track down a channel called DMAX in the listings, the free-to-air version of the Giro d’Italia highlights has returned to the marginally-more-recognisable Quest, which is available on Freeview. It seems to be quite reliably scheduled for 7pm each day.
It’s pretty much the same team that used to do the Eurosport coverage, but hopefully we’ll see an uptick in quality. The Eurosport/TNT programme has always been perfectly acceptable, in its own way, but not a patch on ITV4’s dry, acerbic, expansive Tour de France equivalent. This really matters now though. With ITV having lost Tour rights for 2026 onwards, they really need to narrow the gap or everyone’s lives will be immeasurably worse.
Here
As you may have deduced, I’m increasingly pressed for time of late. It’s the nature of freelance writing that the things that don’t pay their way tend to get squished out a little and this website is always the most vulnerable to squishing.
I’m going to have a stab at covering the Giro though. Let’s see how I go. If you haven’t done so already, here’s why you should sign up for email updates.
This is an updated version of last year’s article about UK TV coverage of the Giro d’Italia.
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