Commentary: does the media ignore endurance sports?

I sat down to write a piece questioning why the mainstream media ignores endurance sports. It’s not everyday that you flip on the tube and catch a running of a marathon somewhere in the world. There’s a large audience, and it’s a valuable one, so why aren’t we seeing more of these events on TV.

But as I thought about it, perhaps the mainstream media doesn’t ignore our sport at all.

If you think about it, the Ironman World Championships, the New York City Marathon, and the Tour de France are all televised. These are the crowning events in our sports: triathlon, marathon and cycling. The Olympic Games are on every four years too, although NBC seems to like gymnastics a lot more than they like running and triathlon. But even with all of these, the broadcasts are far and few between.

Perhaps we make it too hard on the media to follow our sports. For one thing, the top athletes in the marathon, Ironman and some other endurance sports only race a few times each year. Unlike baseball or football that have games daily or weekly, the major endurance sports events only come around once a year. Hardly a way to create a viewing audience.

And then there’s the fact that these sports are hard to follow on TV. If you’ve ever watched running on television, you’ll know what I mean. Imagine the commentator saying: “It looks like he’s making a move now. . . or maybe he’s just going over to the other side of the street for some water. Oh yes, here he comes back. The lead pack has regrouped again.” Hardly compelling viewing.

But there’s a difference between the audiences for mainstream sports and endurance sports. With many sports, the viewing audience doesn’t actually participate in the sport. In other words, just because you watch baseball, doesn’t mean you play baseball. This isn’t true of endurance sports. Most of the people watching a marathon on TV are likely runners. The impact to advertisers of this distinction is a great one: people watching running on TV might be very inclined to buy running products. That should make advertising to that audience more valuable that placing running oriented ads on some other show tailored to a wider audience.

And the people that participate in endurance sports tend to be the type that advertisers seek out. In a study on Ironman distance triathletes, their average income was about $100,000 per year and a high percentage had college degrees or higher. This speaks to the fact that it takes some financial and career freedom to have the time to participate in Ironman triathlon. These folks should be a key audience for all kinds of expensive consumer products.

What we see however is that the coverage on television of the key events in our sports don’t draw viewers in great numbers. TV programmers measure the success of their shows primarily by their share of available viewing audience, rather than the quality of the individual viewers to a particular advertiser. Small audiences discourage programmers from adding more events.

The audiences may be small, but they may be mighty in their purchasing power. The viewers of endurance sports events are “qualified” potential buyers, who should be valuable to anyone making products for endurance sports. If we could get broadcasters to understand that these smaller audiences could be a mighty force for their advertising customers, perhaps they would seek out more events to broadcast.

Endurance sports after all may be the ultimate reality TV experience. They feature real people torturing themselves through difficult athletic challenges. Reality TV shows have been doing well in the ratings. Maybe what we need to do is to help people see these broadcasts as another form of reality TV.

So if my original question was “why does the mainstream media ignore endurance sports?”, perhaps a better question is “how can we help advertisers see the value in us as an audience?” If they want our dollars, they’ll encourage broadcasters to put more of the stuff we do on TV. It may be a different view of the world, but it could make a difference in our advertiser-dollar driven media world.

Of course, at the end of the day, perhaps you just want to be out running and have no desire to watch running or triathlon on TV. That’s probably fine too, but as someone that really enjoys our sport, I like to see all that I can.

Coach Joe

Running Wild with Coach Joe – a blog focused on marathon, triathlon and ultra-endurance racing, training and motivation. Bookmark us at http://coachjoeenglish.wordpress.com or use your favorite RSS feed reader to get the latest news and articles. Running Wild is also available on Yahoo! 360 and My Space.