When we think of the most popular cycling races, the Tour de France immediately springs to mind. But which races follow in terms of popularity in the Men’s World Tour? Do the other grand tours capture the imagination in the same way as the Tour de France? Or do the monuments attract more attention despite only being one-day events?
Now, that’s a lot of questions. But by analysing Google searches from the past year, we begin to gain insight into the popularity of races across the season.
Men’s World Tour races
| Race | Searches |
|---|---|
| Tour de France | 1220000 |
| Giro d’Italia | 368000 |
| Vuelta a España | 110000 |
| Paris-Nice | 74000 |
| Paris-Roubaix | 60500 |
It will come as no surprise that the three grand tours receive the greatest volume of searches throughout the year. It is important to note that while this will mainly be down to their stature and importance within the sport, these races also benefit from taking place over three weeks. This means that people are searching for day-to-day news over the course of three weeks, whereas Paris-Roubaix is limited to one day of more intense searches.
When we look at the Google Trends data from 2022, searches for Paris-Roubaix pick up two weeks before the race, before dropping off in the week after.
Meanwhile, the uptick in searches for the Tour de France takes place over the course of a month and a half, lasting from mid-June until the start of August.
Grand tours dominate Men’s World Tour searches
Another entirely expected finding is that the Tour de France dominates public interest. As the one period of the year where cycling bursts into mainstream consciousness and piques the curiosity of semi-interested sports fans, search volume is increased to such an extent that searches for the Tour are greater than those for the rest of the top ten most popular races combined.
The ranking of the other grand tours is also as expected, with the Giro receiving over three times as many searches as the Vuelta. As the first grand tour of the year, the race ushers in a new period of racing and clearly captures the attention of the general public in a way that the Vuelta is unable to, perhaps suffering from it’s late-season slot in the calendar.
La Vuelta may be concerned by the comparative lack of interest, attracting less than a tenth of the searches that the Tour de France does despite taking place just over a month later.
Another key demonstration of this is the relative similarity in the number of searches for the Vuelta and Paris-Nice. While Paris-Nice a hugely prestigious race itself, we wouldn’t expect it to garner a similar level of interest to a race that is three times the length and attracts a more star-studded peloton.
Or perhaps this is a concern for cycling as a whole. If governing bodies, event organisers and teams are unable to convert the number of eyeballs that the Tour brings to the sport into viewers of the third biggest race of the year shortly afterwards, then surely cycling has issues to address. For the sport to grow, it’s most valuable asset needs to convert one-time viewers into fans. Based on search results, this conversion isn’t happening, and the opportunity to retain audience interest is missed.
Hell of the North captures public imagination
If we look at searches per day of racing, Paris-Roubaix actually pips the Tour de France to the top spot. With 60,500 searches, it narrowly beats the 58,095 searches per race day that the Tour de France receives.
This alone shows how eagerly anticipated and highly regarded Paris-Roubaix is within the pro cycling calendar.
The race benefits not only from being one of the most captivating on the calendar, but also from its position as the climax of the cobbled classics, as interest in one-day classics has built over the preceding weeks.
One-day surprises
Paris-Roubaix clearly draws more attention than other one-day races, but the races behind it in the rankings are surprising.
Rather than being followed by another monument, Amstel Gold Race is the next most searched-for one-day race. Receiving less than half as many searches as Paris-Roubaix, which stands above all other classics, Amstel Gold manages to garner more search interest than Strade Bianche and the Ronde van Vlaanderen, which received the same number of searches.
Milano-Sanremo occupies the next spot in our rankings, but we find the remaining monuments much further down.
Despite their prestige, search volume for Il Lombardia and Liège-Bastogne-Liège is lower than much smaller than that of much smaller races like Dwars door Vlaanderen or Eschborn-Frankfurt.
Promising demand for week-long races
One of the more intriguing results from this particular keyword research was the search interest in week-long races. I was somewhat surprised to see Paris-Nice as the most searched for race outside of the grand tours. However, this search interest isn’t limited to the Race to the Sun. Rival Italian race Tirreno-Adriatico is the seventh most-searched race in the Men’s World Tour, just behind the Tour de Suisse.
With the Tour de Pologne also present, four out of the top ten most searched races are week-long stage races. While we’ve already discussed the pitfalls of comparing one day races to stage races, it is still interesting to see how the rankings compare between the different types of racing.
What is more difficult to discern from search data alone, however, is whether the interest is heightened because fans like the shorter format of stage racing, with a week potentially being a ‘Goldilocks’ length for a race, or because of their history and wider importance in the context of the cycling season. Beyond the prestige of the individual races, Paris-Nice and Tirreno-Adriatico often represent the first chance for fans to see the biggest grand tour contenders compete in the same field, while the Tour de Suisse is a key warm-up race for the Tour de France.
Whatever the reason for the interest, it is clear that one-week races capture cycling fan’s attention in an impressive way.
What about the women?
This article has focused on the Men’s World Tour, but that doesn’t mean that we’ve forgotten the Women’s World Tour. The stories and analysis into search interest in women’s racing deserved their own article, so that will be following soon. Has the Tour de France Femmes changed interest in women’s cycling?
This was a different kind of article to usual, so let us know what you thought about it. Were there any surprises?