Is Tadej Pogačar making cycling boring? The Vuelta a España online figures reveal the bizarre reality

Tadej Pogačar has been out of the Vuelta a España for a while now, and the most avid cycling fans on social media have certainly noticed. The Slovenian rider from UAE Emirates-XRG crashed during Stage 8, sustaining multiple fractures and a concussion. While fans might've celebrated that the Tour of Spain was 'exciting again', the reality is that the second and third weeks of the Vuelta attracted far fewer viewers.

Since Pogacar rarely crashes, we, too, hadn’t anticipated the scenario in which the world champion would suddenly exit the race. He already had three stage wins under his belt and was proudly leading the general classification. However, a rock on the road put an end to his goal of winning the Vuelta for the first time in his career. It also brought his rest of the season to a close.

The big question was: what now? Enric Mas took the red leader’s jersey for Movistar, but with Pogacar out of the picture, there were suddenly six others who could dream of the overall victory. The tension rose significantly, especially when, during the first mountain stage, the new dynamics revealed that a whole host of climbers were evenly matched.

Here’s the strange thing: even as the excitement of the race built, cycling fans were tuning out of their TVs or laptops. As a cycling website, we noticed this to some extent, as evidenced by a slight drop in daily page views. That said, the performances of Visma | Lease a Bike, the upcoming World Championships, and the Mountain Bike World Championships still drew visitors. Online cycling fans felt the impact of Pogacar’s withdrawal much more acutely.

In a cycling world that has been dominated for years by Pogačar and UAE Emirates-XRG—and in a world where people talk about the sport being “boring,” “monotonous,” and “unexciting”—the Slovenian’s withdrawal provided a very enlightening insight. For although Pogacar had the Vuelta firmly in his grasp, far more people were watching when he was in the race versus after his departure.

The statistics website Procyclingstats shared a rather bizarre graph showing the sharp drop in visitor numbers since Pogacar was forced to withdraw. In recent years, there had always been an increase in unique visitors during the first and second weeks of the Vuelta. However, Pogacar’s withdrawal resulted in a 15 percent drop.

Cycling fan Lukáš Ronald Lukács, a respected member of the cycling community with nearly 50,000 followers on X, shared the statistics from Procyclingstats and added cynically: “People actually want to see greatness—who would have thought…” The Slovakian also noticed in his own traffic that interest in cycling had temporarily waned.

"People underestimate how many casual fans follow the races just because of the big stars. It is not just Pogačar, I noticed big numbers around the Deutschland Tour just because Isaac Del Toro was there," said the online analyst.

"People always talk about how a race will get more fans because it will get more interesting, but the number of casual fans of stars is bigger than the number of hardcore fans,” he concluded.

Mihai Simion, a Romanian cycling fan with 86,000 followers on X, came to the same conclusion. A few days after Pogacar withdrew, he wrote alongside a graph showing the bars getting shorter: "My daily views on X. No one cares about the Vuelta a España anymore after his withdrawal.’