It was more a feeling than the presence of hard facts: For me, Red Bull did a very good job with the broadcasting of the Mountain Bike World Cup. It was embedded in other cool formats like Crankworx or Rampage, the commentators (Rob Warner!) were a blast. But the UCI has redistributed the rights and transferred them to the media company Discovery along with its cycling platform GCN. This means that mountain bike races will now be shown on Eurosport on linear TV. This could push the sport and help mountain biking to (even) more popularity (aka sponsorship money).

Subscription release: There was an error...

If you want to see all the content, you have no choice but to buy a subscription to GCN+. That's exactly what I wanted to do on the Friday of the short track race. But I hadn't reckoned with Discovery's geoblocking functionality. I was in Alsace and my credit card was from a Swiss cantonal bank. In this situation, it's impossible to make a payment on GCN+ and buy a subscription to watch the World Cup races. Payment was only possible once I was back in Switzerland, as was the credit card. Discovery doesn't do this without good reason, because the Swiss tariffs are significantly more expensive than in the EU, so there is a nice purchasing power penalty (annual subscription GCN+ Switzerland: CHF 49.90, EU: Euro 39.90)

Ahem....

OK, paying is twice as tedious, and I missed the short track race live. At least I'll be looking forward to the races on Sunday, I thought to myself somewhat naively. As I like to watch the races with my mountain bike-crazy kids, the commentary on GCN+ is in German. But Sabine Spitz garnishes her commentary with so many "Uhhm" and "und Äaaahhmn" that it's not much fun. And the fact that Mathias Flückiger was constantly referred to as Mathias Flückinger and Vital Albin as Vitali Albin didn't make it much better. So it was nice that Swiss television also had the races on offer...

But where there is shadow, there is also light: the races were really exciting. The women's race delivered a big surprise with the winner Puck Pieterse, an elite newcomer. The men also showed the best possible sport with a few surprises. The camera coverage on the course was also good, with the drones providing exciting images. There was already little to see behind the top ranks at Red Bull, and it's a similar story at GCN+.

After a very rocky start from my perspective, Discovery still has a lot of room for improvement. At least I don't have to watch the races in Lenzerheide on TV, because we'll be there.