Okay, steel yourself to make the most of what’s left. 2025 will be the last year of ITV Tour de France highlights. A very great TV programme is about to go away for good and unfortunately there ain’t a damn thing you can do about it.
In October it was announced that both live coverage and highlights of the Tour de France would be exclusive to Warner Brothers Discovery channels from 2026 to 2030 (and most likely beyond).
That brings to an end a 40-year run for the team that produced free-to-air highlights, first for Channel 4 and since 2001 for ITV and ITV4.
It is a big loss. In multiple ways.
The impact
We probably will still get free-to-air highlights. Warner Brothers (via TNT Sports and related Freeview channels, like Quest) already offer this for the Giro d’Italia and Vuelta a Espana, so there’s a template there.
However, speaking as someone who has written about cricket since 2006 – the year live coverage of that sport moved to Sky Sports – let us tell you that free-to-air highlights can only really staunch the bleeding.
Cricket isn’t what it was and, after this year (for UK viewers at least), the Tour de France will no longer be what it was either. Unavailability of live coverage unavoidably makes the event far less visible. You can’t negate that.
Maybe it’s not quite so bad for the Tour where each stage serves as a race in its own right. Grand tour highlights can be packaged in a more comprehensible and easy-to-digest way than a Test match, so they can actually be a preferred way of consuming the race for even die-hard fans.
It’s just that the Warner Brothers programme won’t be anywhere near as watchable as the ITV one, will it?
Spot the difference
ITV’s Tour de France higlights show has become, over the years, one of the all-time great sports programmes, conveying the scale, majesty and madness of the Tour de France in an unparalleled way.
One of the strengths of ITV’s coverage, and Channel 4’s before that, has been just how far from cycling they dared to turn their attention. The show as a whole has been tight and coherent, but it has always retained broader horizons, engineering room for interesting digression.
Returning after an ad break, the show routinely postpones the action in favour of a feature about something related to the race. They might tell you about some of the gear or the art of the time trial. They might give you some cycling history or tell you a bit about the day’s start or finish town. Perhaps they’ll cover the publicity caravan or the climate emergency or how vegan riders eat during the race. Maybe they’ll revisit an old doping scandal or tell you a bit about Panini stickers. In the last couple of years, they’ve run a regular segment fronted by a geologist.
When the sport basically boils down to three weeks of pedalling, this kind of breadth is welcome.
In contrast, one post-ad-break segment during TNT Sports coverage of this year’s Giro d’Italia saw the reporter standing on a hill attempting to describe how its gradients changed from start to finish – something that could be far more quickly and easily conveyed via some kind of graphic.
Their highlights show isn’t bad, but there’s a narrower focus and less ambition. It’s a pretty generic sports show really.
Conclusion
I don’t expect to lose my love of cycling when the ITV era draws to a close, but I do imagine that love will take on a different shape in the years to come. I think for many of us, our whole perception of the sport has been shaped by the way it has been covered, in this broad, discursive, open-minded way.
RIP ITV Tour de France highlights. You will be greatly missed.
This site isn’t going away though, so why not sign up for our email to get weekly recaps of all three Grand Tours?
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