Comment by scott_w

Comment by scott_w a day ago

All of those sports are far more niche than sports where the competitors compete directly against each other.

I can give you an example from my own sport: triathlon. It has two broad categories: short and long course. Short course is generally draft legal, and was developed specifically to get into the Olympics. Plenty of people can name the Brownlee brothers, Alex Yee (place Olympic athlete of your own home nation here). Most of my own damn triathlon club have no idea who Lucy Charles-Barclay is (the UK’s best long course triathlete and Ironman and 70.3 world champion)!

hnlmorg a day ago

> All of those sports are far more niche than sports where the competitors compete directly against each other.

They might not be your field of expertise but calling (for example) Rally as “niche” is insanely off the mark.

> I can give you an example

Except you didn’t give an example that had anything to do with our conversation.

Well done on the triathlon though. It’s a very tough sport to get any good at.

I tried a few times but hated the running part haha

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scott_w a day ago

> They might not be your field of expertise but calling (for example) Rally as “niche” is insanely off the mark.
I say this as someone who’s uncle was a rally driver: it’s niche.
> Except you didn’t give an example that had anything to do with our conversation.
Half correct: long course is, in theory, a race between people. In practice, it’s a bunch of time trials that sometimes sees a pass, but there’s not much interaction by the time you get to the run.
If we wanted to talk within a sport: cycling has time trialling and road racing. I can tell you the difference in spectator numbers is stark. Like, time trialling has 0 spectators and road racing gets plenty. I love it but it’s really not that interesting to watch compared to road racing.

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- hnlmorg 12 hours ago
  
  > I say this as someone who’s uncle was a rally driver: it’s niche.
  Funny enough, mine too. That’s a hell of a coincidence for something that’s “niche” ;)
  I don’t think you know half as much about this motorsport than you think you do. That or you have a really distorted opinion of what constitutes as “niche”
  It’s multimillion dollar industry for starters.
  Car manufacturers specifically make models for professional rally circuits.
  There’s video games sponsorships and all sorts.
  We aren’t talking about Redbull Soapbox racing here. It’s up there with other popular forms of motorsports like NASCAR.
  Granted Rally isn’t as big as F1. But F1s success doesn’t automatically make another sport niche either.
  Anything that is a multi-million dollar industry is clearly well beyond the realm of “niche”.
  Skiing is another massive industry. It’s definitely well beyond what any normal person would define as “niche”.
  You have more of an argument with bobsled but it still gets its spectators come the Winter Olympics. So even if it were niche, it’s still evidence to my point regarding spectators of timed events.
  > If we wanted to talk within a sport: cycling has time trialling and road racing. I can tell you the difference in spectator numbers is stark. Like, time trialling has 0 spectators and road racing gets plenty. I love it but it’s really not that interesting to watch compared to road racing
  I don’t know enough about cycling to comment on TT vs road racing but plenty of other sports have a mixture of TT and head to head racing and still see high numbers of spectators for the TTs. So I suspect there’s other variables at play in cycling to explain the lower turnout. Possibly because spectators are low to begin with and TT are such early stages that people would prefer to see the final stages instead, which are not TTs?
  
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