Media & PR

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

Earlier today Mark Cavendish notched up his fourth stage win in this year’s Tour de France cycle race.

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?

One response to “Why doesn’t a triumphant British sportsman make it into the top 95 stories on Sky?”

  1. Try being a woman. Where have Nicole Cooke (certainly pre Olympics) or Claire Taylor been in news coverage.

    Both are by some way the world leaders in their sport and both struggle to get any sort of billing on the sports pages

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