'ITV's last Tour will be a moment of great sadness'

Four decades of free-to-air Tour de France coverage in the UK coming to an end was a shocker, Ned Boulting, the voice of ITV's long-running broadcasts, tells Lawrence Ostlere

- Lawrence Ostlere

Ned Boulting was a football reporter who knew next to nothing about cycling when ITV first sent him to cover the Tour de France in 2003. “I had absolutely no idea,” he says. “I couldn’t tell you the first thing about the event, except there was some guy called Lance Armstrong who apparently was quite good. I didn’t understand what I was doing properly for years and years, but I knew straight away that whatever it was, this mad thing called the Tour de France, I absolutely loved it.”

Two decades later, Boulting has become the voice of the Tour for millions of British fans, soundtracking the famous exploits of Bradley Wiggins’s triumph in 2012, Mark Cavendish’s historic 35th stage win this summer and everything in between. Next year, Boulting and his close-knit team will celebrate 25 years of the race on ITV. And yet it will also mark their last after Warner Bros Discovery announced last week it had secured exclusive rights to broadcast the Tour from 2026 onwards.

Boulting had no idea the bombshell was coming. “I found out when everybody else found out,” he says.

It is understood ITV didn’t put up much of a fight, and the outcome is the curtain falling on four decades of the Tour de France as a free-to-air event. Discovery may show some race highlights on one of its obscure Freeview channels, but ITV’s comforting live coverage and popular highlights show, complete with iconic jingle, will be no more.