FAREWELL FREE-TO-AIR

After four decades of free Tour de France coverage on British TV, the ITV team are on their final lap. Tom Davidson drops in on the roadside studio

- TOM DAVIDSON

Med Boulting can’t remember the last birthday he celebrated at home. For the past two decades, he has spent the day - 11 July - working for ITV on the Tour de France. On his first few birthdays away from home, the production crew would hurriedly expense him a piece of Tour merch as a gift. “On the third or fourth occasion, I said, ‘If you ever give me another mug, I’m going to smash it in front of you,” Boulting laughs. “So that got nipped in the bud.” These days, the date passes “routinely and roundly ignored” - but this year, as his 56th birthday slips by, Boulting’s 23-year streak could finally come to an end.

Last autumn, it was announced that the broadcast package had been sold exclusively to Warner Bros Discovery, the parent company of TNT Sports, from 2026. The deal ended 40 years of free-to-air coverage of the race in the UK. British fans had enjoyed free Tour coverage since it first aired on Channel 4 in the 1980s.

The news triggered uproar, and left Boulting and his colleagues feeling both nostalgic and mournful as they set out on their final lap of France.

Come the evening of 27 July, the ITV broadcast truck will pull out of the car park in Paris for the last time. I put it to Boulting that at least he can look forward to celebrating his birthday at home next year.

“Absolutely not. No, no,” he snaps back. “That would be the very worst kind of birthday I could imagine.” Why’s that? “I just want to be at the Tour de France. It would feel entirely unnatural not to be here at the Tour on my birthday.”

At stage two’s finish in Boulogne-sur-Mer, ITV’s popup studio sits nestled in the