Mid-season figures taken from January 1st to August 1st 2025.
WHOOP UCI Mountain Bike World Series press release in full:
2025 WHOOP UCI MOUNTAIN BIKE WORLD SERIES SEES RECORD-BREAKING MID-SEASON MILESTONES
The 2025 WHOOP UCI Mountain Bike World Series has so far attracted 56 million cumulative views and 15 million watch hours across WBD channels, supported by strong digital, on-site, and content engagement.
Record-breaking broadcast performances, significant digital engagement, and over 250,000 passionate fans attending in person have marked the first 11 rounds of the 2025 WHOOP UCI Mountain Bike World Series — powered by a reimagined promotional and coverage strategy from Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) Sports.
Chris Ball, Vice President of Cycling Events at WBD Sports, said: “All the successes we’ve seen so far this season have truly justified our work in partnership with the Union Cycliste Internationale, riders, teams, venues and partners. The radical changes to the racing in 2025, including the new, high drama Q1 and Q2 format in downhill, combined with an entirely new approach to mountain bike professional team structure and the creation of the new UCI Mountain Bike World Series Teams is proving successful across the board.
“When we became the first global promoters of the discipline, our ambition was clear — to harness the scale of our global broadcast, streaming, and digital platforms to engage millions and elevate mountain bike to new heights all the way from on-ground operations to live broadcast innovations. Now in our third season of taking control of the promotion and organisation of the Series, we are thrilled to see that the significant changes we’ve made are working and resonating with fans, athletes and teams around the world.”
RECORD-BREAKING VIEWERSHIP
Innovation has been central to WBD’s ambition in attracting new audiences to mountain bike. WBD has focused on making broadcasts more accessible and engaging, introducing features like heart-rate zones and strain gauges that demonstrate just how physically demanding the races are. It has also added visual elements such as athlete headshots, race bike images, team logos and colours, national flags, and career stats for past UCI World Cup winners to additionally increase awareness and enhance team and athlete exposure.
So far this season, millions of viewers across the globe have enjoyed live and on-demand coverage of the WHOOP UCI Mountain Bike World Series on linear and streaming on WBD’s channels and platforms (HBO Max, Eurosport, discovery+ and TNT Sports), with 56 million cumulative views and 15 million watch hours.
This includes WBD’s most-watched WHOOP UCI Mountain Bike World Series round to date, with Val di Sole – Trentino (Italy) amassing nearly 15 million cumulative views on WBD channels— surpassing the previous record set in Nové Město Na Moravě (Czechia) in 2023 (+15.4 per cent).
CONNECTING WITH FANS BEYOND THE LIVE
The WHOOP UCI Mountain Bike World Series social media channels have continued to bring fans closer to the action and riders, and at the same time attract new fans to the discipline. This season, there have been 225 million total video views and 11 million total engagements across TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube, with the social media teams posting more content to more fans than ever before.
The official WHOOP UCI Mountain Bike World Series website has also continued to play an integral role, providing news, updates and event information to users from across the world. It has received 1.7 million total page views since the start of the 2025 series, and the live timing feature on race weekends has continued to be one of the largest drivers of traffic throughout the season – particularly during UCI Enduro World Cup rounds.
The action continues in Haute-Savoie (France) with the UCI Enduro World Cup in Morillon (22-24 August) and Cross-country and Downhill racing in Les Gets (28-31 August).
Coincidentally, the same number of words that Ric squeezes into each broadcast.
That’ll be my fault. I’ve never watched mountain biking on the telly until I saw it on TNT this year. Been watching most of the Downhill and XC races and absolutely loving it.
Good, they’re clearly putting a lot of time and money into trying to make it work and gain viewers. I really like the coverage and XC course previews with Josh and various team riders each race weekend are a really good way to get your head around how techy a lot of the tracks are now! Having a racer on most weekends too is a good idea to get a different perspective on things, although some of them are clearly more comfortable in front of the camera than others!
The Downtime Podcast episode with Josh Carlson was really good actually, hearing how enthusiastic he is about it and how much happens in the background that you don’t see/hear.
My only annoyance is Ric pronouncing Schurter “Shurr-urrr" but I’ll live with it.
The cumulative views number set against the watched hours sounds to me like a fairly small but dedicated fan base watching all of their races whilst a huge number of people see is there but then switch away. I’d be interested to know what a ‘view’ is. My guess is that tuning in and seeing the preamble is on so going away and coming back when the racing starts is a count of two. Multiply that across a weekend of racing and one viewer can rack up a lot of stats.
I can’t decide if it’s alot of views. So across downhill including qualifying, short track and xco all doubled up for men and women that 50 things so far this year? So a million per race??
It’s really expensive per race for me. Ok when I’m doing grands tours as well but when there is only one race in a month it’s mad
Would be interesting to have comaparative stats from the Red Bull days – else those stats are meaningless.
I suspect they’ll be measured differently…
I have watched everything that’s been on the TNT TV channels and enjoyed the content. Ric needs to get better at commontary but other than that I’m impressed.