Welcome to #couchpeloton, one of cycling’s loudest digital fan communities

Connecting online is essential for fans of a global sport like cycling. #Couchpeloton brings one of the largest cycling fan communities together.

Every year, a bunch of incredibly determined athletes follow the spring and summer sun across the world, participating in grueling six-hour-long stages in races that can span several weeks.

And across the world, many who can’t line the streets to watch them compete in person, watch the races online or on TV. And unlike a football or baseball game where mingling with fellow fans is the norm, social media seems to be the mode of choice for finding your people.

The sport is road cycling and this is Twitter’s #couchpeloton.

Cycling is a tough sport to build and engage an audience for. The riders whizz past anyone standing by the side of a road to see them and TV and radio commentary is required to follow the rest of the race. If you don’t live where the races are being held, it can cost you to attend and follow the race in person.

It’s also not immediately obvious what is going on when you first watch a cycling race. You need to find someone else to ask.

But who do you ask when you are watching it on TV in your house at one in the morning — a regular occurrence for a sport with an audience across dozens of time zones? #couchpeloton gives you an option at least for finding who else is awake at an ungodly hour of the morning.

And that’s if you can even get to watch it on TV in your country in the first place.

The UCI (Union Cycliste Internationale) is the governing body for road cycling races and the ASO (Amaury Sports Organisation) is the media organization that runs the big cycling events like the Tour de France.

Broadcasting networks in different countries, both public and private, make deals to buy the exclusive rights to broadcast the races in their countries or regions from the UCI and ASO often using the ASO’s English language World Feed video and images with their own choice of commentators. This is what Australia’s network SBS (Special Broadcasting Service) does for Australian viewers, sometimes with their commentary provided to other countries as well.

But this often means that not all fans across the world can watch races equally. Some may have to pay while others can watch for free. Others may not have certain races broadcast at all.
This was the case for Deb Taylor from Texas who struggled to find a good source for watching races.

In the US, NBC has the broadcast rights but it chooses to only broadcast certain races. In 2019, NBC used the ASO’s world feed, with the much loved Phil Liggett’s commentary for their paying cable subscribers and #couchpeloton favorites Robbie Mcewen and Matthew McKeenan’s commentary for their streaming service viewers.

In 2020 however, NBC changed the streaming app and raised the price. Taylor was only accessing the streaming service and had to promptly switch tacks.

“Faced with the unreliability as well as limited race coverage, I set my VPN server to Australia and enjoyed the SBS coverage of the Fall races,” she told FanSided.

There are other issues with the options available for US fans as well.

“I also have FloSports but have been dissatisfied with their coverage,” Taylor explained. “Often they just broadcast Fubo Sports or voiceover camera coverage with medium quality broadcasters.”
Kat Seelig from Philadelphia opts to watch the world feed broadcast, a habit she started while working overnight at a TV station during the cycling races.

“The world feed comes in hours before the TV broadcast,” she explained. “That means I’m still aligned with the #couchpeloton for many races.”

What is #couchpeloton?

I first found #couchpeloton after watching a Tour de France stage (each race has several six-hour-long stages), having a lot of questions as I sat on a couch at midnight in Perth, Australia half a world away from the race being held in sunny Southern France in broad daylight.

This is quite a common way to find your way to the community. It’s how Taylor found them as well.

“I found the #couchpeloton while following a race on Twitter, possibly TDF [Tour de France],” she said. “They just looked like a fun group.”

Sometimes a shout-out from the live broadcast commentators is what spurs it on, as it did for Seelig.

“I actually heard about the #couchpeloton years ago during the race commentary,” she told me in an email. “There was a shoutout from Paul and Phil, and I thought, wow, those sounded like fun folks to follow a race with.”

And though SBS, as a broadcaster of all the races for those of us in Australia and in some other countries, engages with the hashtag, it was created by the community as @zahribeth on Twitter explains:

“[T]hat one was community-led,” she tweeted in reply to my question. “[T]he original idea was to filter out all of the TDF-only [Tour de France] posters but got taken up as the community-focused one as it became extremely popular.”

For the producers at SBS, #couchpeloton provides several ways for commentators to engage with the fans. As SBS’s Cycling Central puts it in a piece about #couchpeloton:

“The #couchpeloton is a community on Twitter who’ve bonded for many years over late nights watching cycling on SBS. They also talk about their food via #toursnacks and have come up with all sorts of hashtags to get through their nightly struggle.”

#toursnacks photos are picked out of the Twitter feed and posted up on the TV broadcast with shoutouts from the commentators.

This also happens with #tourcat and #tourdog when people post pictures of their pets joining them on the couch or seemingly reacting to what is onscreen.

“#TourDog and #TourCat are wonderful,” Seelig tells me when I ask her what her favorite part of the couch peloton is.

SBS producers take advantage of the community in other ways too, answering questions and responding to jokes from the fans in real-time. SBS has produced podcasts and live chats with commentators and former riders and competitions for lucky fans to watch the broadcast in the studio with the commentators themselves.

But #trolldj is the best known SBS contribution to making the #couchpeloton what it is. Many new fans stop to ask who #trolldj is; many older members say we must never know.

During the live broadcast of each stage of a major race, one unknown producer is in charge of the quick highlight reel of what has been happening in the race so far that is played after each ad break ends.

This producer known as #trolldj syncs the footage to a snippet of a song that matches what has happened perfectly or references inside jokes within the #couchpeloton community.
SBS staff themselves claim to not know who it is:

“We here at Cycling Central don’t exactly know who #trolldj is. When we rock up for our shift each night, #trolldj’s got the door locked, cutting up the music/cycling action montages we all love.”

And every year, certain songs always make it in during the Tour de France. It would feel incomplete if, to go with the constant footage of yet more cows (#lesvaches) in the background of the race, #trolldj did not also include “Cows With Guns” by Dana Lyons.

“Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” is another favorite during the mountain stages as riders face steep slopes and dangerous downhill curved roads that make couch peloton members dizzy. Even the Muppets make an appearance with “Movin’ Right Along” for the flatter sections of the stages. Even the SBS commentators aren’t safe from #trolldj, with the #couchpeloton being treated to a blooper reel on occasion with The Muppets’ “Mahna Mahna” played over the top.

The couch peloton appreciates both a good pun and a good send-up. Even the riders get in on the action. In 2019 the Kazahkstan company coalition-owned Astana Pro team made, in their words: “the first-ever pro cycling rap video.”

Fans were tickled pink to see riders like Laurens De Vreese, Jakob Fuglsang, Alexandr Vinokurov and Omar Fraile spitting out rhymes about their team colors and sponsors and how much they train.

The same riders went on to place in and win several stages and tours that year and teams classifications. When the Tour de France came around the video was resurrected to pass onto a whole new fresh set of fans and #couchpeloton members to marvel at the unapologetic fun and cheesiness.

Cheesy rap videos aside, riders also engage with the hashtag and community in impactful ways.
In 2018, Lawson Craddock, supporting rider for Education First Drapac (now EF Education-Nippo), crashed during the first stage of the Tour de France with a hairline fracture in his scapula. It was his debut at the race.

Instead of opting out of the Tour, he continued riding, keeping up with the rest during all the grueling stages of the next three weeks.

And in doing so raised over $250,000 via the Greater Houston Cycling Association to rebuild the Hurricane Harvey-damaged Alkek Velodrome in Houston, Texas. He donated $100 USD for every stage he finished and the fans matched him as they watched him persevere despite being in last place.

By the end, he had endeared himself to #couchpeloton.

In the midst of all the community created fun, such as fellow cricket and cycling fan @evilscootus’ #fratl (First Rider Across The Line) where members enter their guesses for when the stage will be done, the moments when the riders and commentators engage with the fans mean a lot.
“There was the time I made a joke to the couch peloton about Thomas DeGendt and he and his teammates found it and started joking about it,” says Seelig. “That was a blast.”

It matters because the riders and commentators don’t directly derive an income from the fans. Many of us are not the right demographic for most of the ads aired and may never see a race in person. But they care that we watch.

“Before the #couthpeloton, I didn’t have any cycling friends,” Seelig tells me.

I understand this feeling. When I talk about cycling, my mother and sister both groan: they don’t quite understand how I find this sport interesting.

I come from one cricketing nation and find myself in another, where surprisingly it seems hard to find fellow cricket fans to talk to. Even though cycling stepped in to fill the gap (cycling is free to air in Australia with SBS but the cricket matches I want to watch are often not), I still felt the need to connect with a community of fans.

Fans who could teach me about the game and were just excited as I was about it, if not more so.
It took me several races to understand that there are different goals in play during a race and that not all of them involve winning the overall race.

Each team has a contender who intends to try and win the race. The rest of the cyclists try to support them doing so by blocking other team’s attempts to take the lead. There is a lot of strategy involved and that is what I like about it.

It wasn’t until I started tweeting that I found out who else in my social circle also had an interest in cycling. Previously, we had despaired together over politics and now we had something more positive to talk about.

My interest in the couch peloton also amuses and baffles my friends. I can’t even ride a bike so why the interest in cycling? And if the race leader wins then what’s with the rest of the jerseys?

“Explain it to me,” says one friend over a Whatsapp chat. “If they win the stage, is it good? How is someone leading the race if they don’t win the stage?” (Yes, it is good to win a stage. You win the race with the shortest overall time so you don’t need to win every stage, just get ahead enough overall time-wise to maintain a lead over the others.)

During COVID-19 lockdowns in the state of Victoria in Australia, my trivia team decided to have online trivia over Zoom to keep in shape as it were. My friend hosting that particular trivia round has tailored the questions to each of us. Mine was, of course, about cycling.

If all this sounds a bit strange, well it is, but also in a way, it isn’t.

A lot of what is set up in and around the community is driven by economics: advertisers sponsor the teams so any visibility and engagement with fans is great and producers want people to watch their broadcasts and find it fun to stick with races that play out over hours and days and weeks.

In the midst of this strange ecosystem of how the sport is run and what is available to consume, sports fandoms and communities end up creating their own myths, legends and ‘you had to be there’ moments.

It would, ultimately, be boring to watch a sport by yourself. It’s always more fun in the fandom.