Just three years ago on the eve of the 90th Giro d’Italia, race director Angelo Zomegnan could be found lamenting the fall-out from the doping confessions of the then reigning Giro champion Ivan Basso. Speaking in an interview with l’Equipe at the time, Zomegnan likened the Italian cycling star’s admission of attempted doping at the 2007 Tour de France to nothing short of a “decapitation” of the Giro’s credibility.
Fast forward to 2010 and Zomegnan’s view of both the errant Italian and the Giro’s credibility has changed dramatically. In June, Basso won his second Giro d’Italia title, the first leg of cycling’s tripe crown, which includes the Tour de France and Spain’s Vuelta. And according to Zomegnan it was the ‘cleanest’ event in history.
“This year the Giro was the most controlled race in the world,” he tells SportBusiness International. “There were more than 520 doping control tests, more than the Tour de France. “If anything is not clean, you lose credibility, and we can’t sell our product. But we know that the UCI and Wada controls were all okay, and they are generally very satisfied about the riders and the attitudes of the riders to reduce the presence of doping. The UCI president himself said that, in his opinion, Basso was 100 per cent clean.”
And the Giro’s success in countering the doping threat is, of course, key to its commercial and sporting success. The event is run by the Milan-based RCS Sport, part of the RCS MediaGroup which owns the Gazzetta dello Sport and Corriere della Sera newspapers. Zomegnan was a sports journalist on the Gazzetta before he took up the role of race director - and has a journalist’s eye for how far the sport has come in the fight against doping.
“There is no doubt that cycling is much cleaner than four or five years ago," he says. “I know that in the past, a lot of teams had problems, but now they are coming back and it’s clean. I can tell you that I spoke to the President of Mapei [major sponsors of cycling from 1993 to 2002] and he said that the team could come back in two years.”
Along with proof of a “really clean contest” Zomegnan’s three-pronged aims are to make the race more international and improve the quality of the riders in order to drive the event forward. “I am very satisfied by the growth over the past five years which has surpassed our objectives," he says.
“The [revenue] gap between the Tour de France and the Giro, for example, is less than it was four years ago. Our revenues are about 30-40 per cent of the Tour de France, and we are working to reduce that gap further “
Zomenagna admits that the Tour de France is “older, stronger and better placed in the cycling calendar” than the Giro. “July is a month of holidays with a lot of people on roads and watching on TV," he explains.
But the commercial indicators for the Giro are better than ever. With 160 countries taking the event in 2010, more than double the figure from five years ago, the Giro’s annual TV rights value, including domestic and international markets, is €17 million.
“Last year, we signed with Universal in the USA and for the first time this year with broadcasters in South America and Africa - so we are in the five continents,” says Zomenagna And while the total audience on the roads was an impressive 5.2 million people this year, the total live television audience was 350 million.
Moreover, Eurosport, the Giro’s main TV partner, broadcast 90 hours of Giro action this year, compared to 63 hours last year. The event’s website at www.gazzetta.it also produced and streamed daily live afternoon coverage to 50,000 daily users – a 126 per cent increase on 2007 - with full commentary and flash interviews with the riders after each stage.
For the full rights focus, please see the latest issue of SportBusiness International out July 1.
