Ben Obese-Jecty

I beg to move, That this House has considered the potential merits of free-to-air coverage of professional cycling. It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Allin-Khan, and I am grateful for the opportunity to open the debate. Growing up, many of us had a sporting hero: a star striker, a gold medal winner or a record-breaking athlete. My sporting hero was Jason McRoy. Most will almost certainly have never heard of him. He was arguably Britain’s first mountain bike superstar. In the early 1990s, when the sport was in its infancy, Jason was a trailblazer. I followed his progress as closely as I could through the media available at the time. It being the 1990s, that was mostly dog-eared copies of Mountain Biking UK which I lugged back and forth to school, reading each month’s copy to destruction, and occasionally via coverage on Eurosport. Jason finally got his break in 1993, as big companies started throwing money at the fledgling sport. The biggest race in the calendar, aside from the world championships, was the Reebok Eliminator, a one-off head-to-head race on the famous Kamikaze course at Mammoth Mountain in California. Having secured entry after his mum persuaded the organisers, Jason—in his iconic black and white Hardisty Cycles kit, from a local bike shop in Newcastle—took on the top US factory race teams. Jason gave it his all, making it to the final against US favourite Myles Rockwell and narrowly losing. However, he had put his name on the sport’s international map. A professional contract with Specialised USA followed the next season and Britain had its first fully fledged superstar rider. We will sadly never know how Jason’s career would have panned out. On 24 August 1995, his Harley-Davidson collided with a lorry at Woodhead Pass on the A628 in Derbyshire. Jason’s father Jim took the call announcing his death at 1.50 am. Without Jason, there might never have been the double Olympic gold medal and world championship-winning Tom Pidcock, and no world championship wins for Gee Atherton, Steve Peat, Danny Hart, Reece Wilson or Charlie Hatton—no Rachel Atherton, Tracy Moseley or Manon Carpenter. Those are not household names, however. Their sporting successes are often difficult to witness as it is. Often the only place to watch those races was on Eurosport but last Friday it was consigned to the history books. Eurosport’s demise is a hammer blow for coverage of cycling in the UK. Owned by Warner Bros Discovery, the inevitable demise of Eurosport was hidden in plain sight. First their cycling-specific GCN+ app was closed, citing a desire to offer more content on fewer platforms. GCN+ provided almost unlimited access to the global cycling calendar. No race was too obscure. Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, check; Scheldeprijs, check; Kuurne-Brussel-Kuurne, check. Cycling bores like me had never had it so good. Parallel to the slow demise of Eurosport, and almost unnoticed to many outside of the cycling media bubble, Warner Bros Discovery had hoovered up the exclusive British broadcast rights to the Tour de France from 2026. That is comfortably the blue-ribbon event of the global cycling calendar and possibly the only race that everybody has heard of.