Has Le Tour de Langkawi run its course?

LE TOUR de Langkawi was flagged off at its place of birth in Kuah on Sunday as the National Sports Council (NSC) reinvent the wheel by assuming the role of event organisers.

After 28 years, with the 2021 race the only edition cancelled due to the pandemic, I believe it is time to reevaluate the objectives and the economic impact of the cycling race, once considered the jewel in our crown.

When the race was launched on Dec 8, 1995 and flagged off on Feb 29, 1996, both by the then Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, it was presented as a private sector initiative, with small funding from the Government.

Touted to be the third biggest race after Tour de France and the Vuelta as two of the three Grand Tours, LTdL complemented the Langkawi International Maritime and Aerospace Exhibition (LIMA) in enhancing the island’s reputation as an exciting and popular holiday destination.

Almost all the big names who attended the race as participants or observers during the early years, gave the Tour the thumbs up, with former world road champion and Giro d’Italia winner Francesco Moser, Gianni Bugno and renowned writer Samuel Abt among those extolling its potential.

Television commentator and the voice of Tour de France, Phil Liggett, was also a regular feature in the race, lending the race his famous jokes, in depth-knowledge of the peloton and opinions to those who knew little of Langkawi prior to LTdL.

I was fortunate enough to be part of the LTdL juggernaut, covering the race on a few occasions, including the second edition in 1997.

Although there were transfer hiccups in Kota Kinabalu, Kuching and Johor Bahru in the second edition, most participants, seasoned foreign sportswriters and team officials were impressed with the event.

Abt, renowned writer for New York Times and International Herald Tribune who devoted much of his life chronicling the career of Lance Armstrong and Greg Lemond, was impressed with the public support.

In our meetings, the bespectacled gentleman said: “It was an excellent race once the riders got on the way. The roads were good, the weather was challenging, the riders felt secure and there was good support from the crowd.

“The actual racing was terrific but I can’t say the same for the organisation. If the weaknesses are rectified, the Tour is capable of becoming one of the world’s main cycling attractions.”

Undeniably LTdL, once broadcast live over 90 countries, had cultivated a culture for cycling in Malaysia.

But should NSC, an agency tasked to co-ordinate high performance sports, continue to organise LTdL that has long lost its lustre?

For the past decade, there have been calls to remodel the Tour to suit the times.

I was part of a small delegation that went to Paris to meet representatives of the Amaury Sports Organisation (ASO) to discuss the way forward for LTdL in 2012.

ASO, a subsidiary of the Amaury Group that owns French newspaper L’Equipe, is owner of Tour de France and the Dakar Rally.

Many in the cycling fraternity realise LTdL has gone down the pecking order, others like Tour Down Under, the first event outside Europe to join the prestigious UCI ProTour, and the UCI WorldTour like Tours of Qatar, Taiwan, UAE, China and Oman attracting the world’s best.

Between 1996 and 2006, LTdL was run by private companies and fully funded through corporate sponsorship before a major bailout package by the Government through the Ministry of Youth and Sports after the organisers ran into debts.

The race was then handled by the Malaysian National Cycling Federation (MNCF) from 2007 to 2010.

From 2019 to 2022, a private entity was tasked to run the event before deferred payments to the teams for the year 2022 almost forced the world body UCI to take LTdL off the calendar.

For this year’s edition, NSC are projecting expenditure cost of RM15 million, funding which could be disbursed to other associations in need of financial support.

There is an urgent need to reinvent the race. If it requires a bigger partnership between the Government and a private event company with massive global and commercial reach, so be it. The private sector, with strong support from the Government, should be the driving force to regain LTdL’s reputation as the biggest race in Asia, failing which we should scrap the event and channel the funding towards sending a Malaysian team to be based in Europe.

The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of The Star