Why doesn’t a triumphant British sportsman make it into the top 95 stories on Sky?

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Mark Cavendish has achieved more in four years than English football team in last forty 

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Mark Cavendish needs to learn to cycle naked

to this:

Sports Personality of the Year 2011: Mark Cavendish wins BBC award

At least this time he made it to the Sky News front page (one better than that day in 2009), even if buried two-thirds of the way down and not even the most prominent sports story. That goes to the news that Sebastian Vetttel hasn’t yet won the world championship. Yes, nobody yet winning that comes ahead of Mark Cavendish actually winning something.

So as I said before, there’s only one conclusion for Mark Cavendish: he needs to learn to cycle naked. For someone who have achieved more in the last four years than the English team in the last forty, Cavendish is still a remarkably under-reported sporting genius.

In the last four Tour De Frances he has won 20 stages, putting him well up the all-time list for record number of stage wins, despite still being a comparative youngster.

He has won the most prestigious cycling stage – the final stage in Paris of the Tour De France – for three years in a row.

He has become the first British cyclist to win the Green jersey and only the second ever to win any sort of Tour De France jersey.

His dominance in the flat bunch sprints is so great that each time it is all about “Can anyone beat Cavendish”?

The reduction in the number of such stage finishes in this year’s Tour De France has been put down to, yes, the organisers wanting to ensure people don’t get bored with the same result happening too many times.

His former rival Thor Hushovd publicly admits he changed his cycling specialism from trying to win bunch sprints because he knew he couldn’t beat Cavendish.

When he started dominating, Cavendish’s achievements were not even worth a mention in the top 95 stories on the Sky News website. He gets more coverage now, but it is still only a fraction of what a mediocre, not quite medal winning or final reaching, British sportsmen in many other sports gets.

To put it into the context of another sport: the rate at which he has notched up stage wins in the Tour De France and made the talk be all about who can beat him is reminiscent of Tiger Woods in his Major-winning pomp.

As with many of the very best sporstmen, Cavendish doesn’t always come over as a lovely person in an interview. I was struck by the comparison between one soft interview in which he still didn’t shine, however, with one I watched shortly after about a young athlete talking of their hopes for the 2012 London Olympics. She was hoping to simply make it to the finals. In other words, her ambition was to turn up and lose. Cavendish is in a very different class, and his ambition and the petulance and complaints that sometimes comes with that shows. Hugely to his credit, he does frequently praise his team though – he may at times say the wrong thing, but he is not a prima donna who forgets others. And he wins. Again and again.

Cavendish should be one of our country’s sporting heroes.

So having watched British cyclist Mark Cavendish storm to victory in the final stage in Paris, one of the most prestigious stages for anyone to win, I’ve been wanting to watch it again. Just how come slightly before the final corner his main rivals were right on his heels and then suddenly round the corner and – bingo – they were nowhere to be seen?

It looked like his lead-out man picked a very clever route, cutting across a rival team and getting to the final corner first, so forcing them to slow down and triggering a tailback in which other cyclists were even more delayed.

I want to watch it again, hit stop, rewind, slow forward – and if there was an expert commentary available from a retired sprinter? Heck, I’d even happily pay something for it.

But what can I find? The ITV Player was never very good for watching again, what with its low quality pictures and sound frequently several minutes out of synch (until the advert breaks when as if by magic they always got back in to synch). I can’t fast forward past the ad breaks of the 1 hour final show in order to get to the bit I want. It’s coverage is only around for another three weeks anyway and the commentary doesn’t help shed much light on what happened and why.

So I want more. The official website? Looks nice, lots of still photographs, but doesn’t do the job. YouTube? Ah, lots of search results. Low quality. Hit and miss. Many, if not all, illegal uploads.

But they’re there now and in to the future. They give me varying coverage. They don’t require me to stop and start around adverts to watch the bit I want.

In other words – due to the lack of availability of high quality content that does what I want, I’ve most likely ended up watching illegal uploads. (I’m not actually 100% sure given the different TV channels they were from, but certainly if the ones I watched weren’t illegal, there are plenty of similar clips there being watched which are.)

I’d have been happy to consume adverts – just not ones that stop me getting to the bit of the show I want. I’d even have been willing to pay something for a valuable extra, such as a commentary from a previous Tour sprinting star. Not to mention the benefit of being able to go straight to high quality content without having to play lucky dip to see which YouTube clip has a decent quality picture. And push at me a plug for “Order your highlights DVD now from Amazon” and there’s a fair chance I’d have spent even more money.

This isn’t just a personal story though. It’s emblematic of a wider phenomenon. Making legal content easily available, even at a price, reduces online piracy. Not just by a bit, but dramatically. That’s why, as I blogged previously, illegal music downloading amongst 14-18 year olds has declined sharply.

Cut piracy, bring in more money and make the public happier? Industries threatened by online piracy need not panic themselves into demanding draconian legal remedies which catch the innocent and the naïve whilst also wrecking the industry’s public reputation. There is a better way.

Mark Cavendish equals cycling record

It’s a fantastic achievement, notable for several reasons. It’s a rare cyclist who wins four stages in in one year, and he has now done this two years in a row. Moreover, with eight stage wins he is now tied for the British record total number of career stage wins in the Tour – and that’s despite this being only the second year he’s raced. With many years of racing ahead of him (he’s only 24), he’s set to do not just beat that record, but thoroughly demolish it.

As if all of that wasn’t good enough, he’s in such dominant form in the sprint stages at the moment that many of the other racing teams have clearly given up on trying to beat him in straight forward sprints. To have opponents concede defeat before they’ve even started a day’s racing – that’s a sign of a dominant sportsman. And he’s British. And he keeps on winning.

Now, it’s true that cycling isn’t in the top tier of high profile sports in Britain. But at the time of writing, there are 95 different news stories listed on the front page of the Sky News website, several of them sporting including two of the five featured video stories, and not one of them mentions Mark Cavendish.

Would cycling naked get Sky’s attention?

Quite what does Mark Cavendish have to do to make it even to number 95 on the Sky list of news stories? Perhaps if he rides tomorrow’s stage naked, tweeting messages from his bike to Demi Moore whilst singing his favourite Michael Jackson song?