Dutch sports marketing professional Jonathan den Boon manages the website sport-watching.nl. There, he provides useful overviews of where and when you can watch sports on TV, but he also conducts surveys about how the world views sports.
In this context, he researched the latest Tour de France and made some interesting findings based on Google Trends, the measurement system of the search giant.
For instance, he wrote that the Netflix documentary about the Tour hadn’t yet sparked global interest, and that the worldwide interest in the Tour was higher on the day when Wout Poels won his mountain stage. He did this on a weekend day, and there are always more people interested in mountain stages, which explains some things.
But in which countries was the interest in the Tour de France the highest? Jonathan also created a neat graph of this. And he adds: “In this statistic, we are looking at the percentage per inhabitant. So, it’s not the case that more Danes than French people are interested in the Tour de France. In July last year, there were 5 million searches for ‘Tour de France’ on Google in France, whereas in Denmark, there were 673,000 searches.”
He also explains that interest tends to be higher when a fellow countryman performs well. This explains the Danish top position. “If we look at other editions, we also see that interest is higher when a fellow countryman succeeds. In the 2019 Tour, interest in France increased when Alaphilippe held the yellow jersey until stage 19.”
In 2018, a Tom Dumoulin effect was noticeable in the Netherlands. The Dutchman finished second in the general classification, behind Geraint Thomas.