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.
