25// Golden Trail Goes Live on Eurosport

On GTWS’s media rights deal with Eurosport

Hey pals,

Phwoar. Another media rights deal for trail running!

I won’t pitter-patter - It’s a good deal for GTWS and the sport. Plenty to look forward to.

Hope you’re all doing well :)

Matt

As you could tell from my last post, to me UTMB’s deal felt incremental to trail running. A nice addition, but hard to see the value for the fan. Golden Trail Series’ deal with Eurosport announced last week felt substantial.

That’s partly because it is. According to the press release, GTWS will air four races for two hours each live on Eurosport 1 and 2 with their entirety streamed in full, alongside highlights from the rest of the series, on the Eurosport Player/Discovery+ platform. That’s 53 countries, 20 different languages, 74 million viewers on average per month of which 47% claim they are active runners. A pretty decent potential audience size.

Greg Vollet, Director of GTWS, was his usual enigmatic self in his quotes, proclaiming this as a first for trail running, ‘breaking new ground for our sport and series’ and that the deal ‘sends a message to brands and athletes’. I would add it also sets a prominent line in the sand in the battle for advertisers and audiences between UTMB and GTWS. They are both waging war using similar tactics, but it appears Greg has got one up on the Polleti’s here.  

For those that don’t know Eurosport, they’re a Pan-European broadcaster of live sports with rights to many events - tennis and cycling being their meat and potatoes, with a whole array of other sports being their accompanying vegetables (to stretch that metaphor beyond where it needed to go).

Ultimately these deals are about attracting high value advertisers and audiences – the more of each, the higher the value your media rights are, the more future potential revenue. Both deals seek to grow their audience through increasing their distribution surface area with different broadcasting and streaming partners in lucrative markets. They have both sought out platforms that attract audiences from adjacent sports, e.g endurance and action sports, who have a higher potential to watch another endurance/action sport. The differences come when you consider the breadth and value of the audiences attached to each distributor.

Sure, the scale of Eurosport’s audience is impressive, likely with a higher reach than all of UTMB’s deals combined, but what’s more beneficial to GTWS is that they are also more likely to be affluent, late 20s to middle age, pay-tv subscribers, a gold mine for advertisers and for GTWS value. Additionally, if this study is anything to go by (more on this research in the near future), the trail running audience skews older and more affluent than the average population anyway – a perfect match! Through combining Eurosports linear and streaming distribution, with GTWS’ YouTube stream, Vollet gets to increase distribution without cannablising the value of other deals.

(A small caveat to the cannabalisation – the production will still be done by GTWS, so the presentation will be the exact same regardless of what platform you use. Unlike UTMB who have LiveTrail, GTWS don’t have their own data platform to enhance engagement and Eurosport won’t want to invest in a sport they’re unsure of the value of yet, hence the production will be the same. At some point the presentation (who is commentating, the visuals, etc) will become enough of a differentiator for rights holders to want to invest in, but not yet.)

UTMB will likely be watching how GTWS do closely. Eurosport has worked with UTMB before, creating and showing the odd highlight package of UTMB 100M– but not live. That was at a time when highlight packages didn’t have as much value as they do today after younger audiences learned to love shorter videos. Ironman’s owners, Advance Publications, are also likely a little peeved off that two companies they have a significant stake in (Ironman and Warner Bros Discovery, owners of Eurosport) couldn’t work together to create a deal before their competitor did. Awkward.

The details of the deal were not released in the press release, but I heard a rumour that GTWS paid Eurosport for the air-time, what is called a ‘time-buy’, rather than the more traditional other way round. When I asked their press department, GTWS just parroted a party line that both parties are happy (which wasn’t the question, but their first response to my question was ‘I don’t know about that deal’, so maybe internal comms isn’t that strong right now). Time-buys are quite unusual, they’re usually used by sports who want to get airtime to build a case study of their value, in hopes of receiving higher media rights deals in the future ( a recent example was when LIV golf was rumoured to be pursuing a time-buy with Fox Sports). Whilst it’s a detail that’s inconsequential to viewers, who paid who is an important marker of the value of trail running to media holders and especially as we begin to see more media rights deals with traditional broadcasters.

As someone whose holiday highlights when growing up included watching obscure sports on Eurosport in various hotels across Europe, I’m elated that soon trail running might be one of those sports. For trail running, it’s a testament to the rising tide of popularity of the sport. Who would have guessed we’d have two media deals in two weeks.