Ned Boulting can’t remember the last birthday he celebrated at home. For the past two decades, he has spent the day – 11 July – working for ITV on the Tour de France. On his first few birthdays away from home, the production crew would hurriedly expense him a piece of Tour merch as a gift. “On the third or fourth occasion, I said, ‘If you ever give me another mug, I’m going to smash it in front of you’,” Boulting now laughs. “So that got nipped in the bud.” These days, the date passes “routinely and roundly ignored” – but this year, as his 56th birthday slips by, Boulting’s 23-year streak could finally come to an end.
Last autumn, it was announced that ITV had dropped the rights to broadcast the Tour from 2026. The package was instead sold exclusively to Warner Bros Discovery, the parent company of TNT Sports, in a deal that ended 40 years of free-to-air coverage of the race in the UK. British fans had enjoyed free Tour coverage since it first aired on Channel 4 in the 1980s. The news triggered uproar, and left Boulting and his colleagues feeling both nostalgic and mournful as they set out on their final lap of France.
