The BBC, who had the rights to show F1 for the next year, gave them to Sky and instead will show only half the races going forward. If you want to watch all the 2012 races you will need to pay minimum of £383 a year to Sky according to the Telegraph. This is a pretty good comment on the whole situation and I pretty much agree with it except that I might not follow any of the races at all. But hey, the teams get an extra £1 million a year so what do they care. Hope their sponsors and the written press do.
Spamming a forum dedicated to prank phone calls a link to your SEO client isn’t the brightest thing to do. PLA is a pretty decent site so do check it out, there’s hours of funny things on there including free podcast downloads.
Boris unveils 60ft long Bendy Bike via spoof news site NewsBiscuit. The Boris comments are actually quite believable!
A little something I made using AJAX, PHP, SQL and HTML during the last week of the Tour de France.
How many Tour de France teams can you name?
The 22 teams participating in cycling’s biggest race change from year to year with the inclusion of 4 wildcard teams, changes to the ProTour teams and ever-changing sponsorship deals which dictate team names.
I had to build in a degree of flexibility to the names people entered as getting a 100% match to an official team name is really rather hard – especially with all the European sponsors. Think I got the balance about right between accepting near-matches whilst not letting gibberish or plainly wrong team names through.
Over the past three weeks I have been watching the Tour de France which finishes on the Champs-Élysées in Paris tomorrow. Hopefully Manxman Mark Cavendish can repeat his feat of the last two tours and claim victory in the final sprint stage before winning the green jersey sprints competition.
A few interesting Tour de France facts I have come across during this year’s tour.
- The total wage bill for all 489 riders in the 18 UCI professional cycling teams is lower than the wage bill of the Olympique Lyonnais soccer team [inrng]
- The average rider earns €218,000
- An estimate of team budgets from RideMedia’s Tour de France guide shows some big discrepancies. The top team budgets are €15 million a year whilst one team has just €5 million to spend. My greatest surprise was not the difference in budgets, that is to be expected, but the amounts of money spent by particular teams. For example Garmin-Cervélo are one of the lowest spending teams but have received a lot of exposure for their sponsors. They have won 4 stages of this year’s tour and will probably take the overall team competition as well.
- The teams don’t get any of the television money
- Sponsoring a team appears to be rather good value if you are big European company. For starters the team is named after you, then there is broadcast and press exposure across Europe and a few other areas of the world. Some details on sponsorship over at HTC-Highroad.
Photo credit: Tour de Suisse 2011 by Flickr user ponte1112 (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)