July brings the “grand départ” of the Tour de France. Tim Grady brings a filmmaker’s eye to the race, and with London-based broadcaster ITV, produces some of the most-viewed race footage available on cable TV and DVD in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia–New Zealand markets. It’s not what he set out to do.
From a modest University Avenue storefront in St. Paul, and from a Web site at worldcycling.com, Grady’s World Cycling Productions does $7 million to $10 million in sales annually. About half of that now comes from his Cycle Sport magazine, and from cycling apparel, equipment, and products like sports drinks. But half still comes from his original business in producing and distributing video of major cycling races.
After film studies at New York University and the University of Minnesota (Grady helped launch and still is a major funder of the Minneapolis–St. Paul International Film Festival that originated with the U Film Society 30-some years ago), Grady was a film distributor in 1980, in Europe to buy rights to foreign films that he’d get shown at chains like the California-based Landmark Theaters. A chance dinner-seating assignment put him next to Danish director Jørgen Leth. Grady wasn’t a cycling fan at the time, but says he’d been “mesmerized” by Leth’s documentary of the Paris-Roubaix race, A Sunday in Hell, “a beautifully poetic look at the sport.”
He bought rights to three of Leth’s documentaries, and by pairing A Sunday in Hell with the 1979 U.S. feature film Breaking Away, he created a double feature that sold out in theaters around the country. With few media outlets where fans could watch the sport then, “there was a whole cult around cycling that was underexposed,” Grady says.
He catered to it by starting to produce race videos in the early ’80s, and then rode the sport’s peaks of popularity in the United States—around Greg LeMond’s late ’80s Tour de France wins, and Lance Armstrong’s seven-year hold on the title from 1999 through 2005.
Now, with no big American stars on the scene, drug scandals plaguing the sport, and video streams on the Internet competing with his business, Grady is still sanguine. He’s talking with iTunes and Amazon about selling them race downloads, and because he works with an overseas broadcaster, he says his coverage of major races is unlike anything available in U.S. media: “We go after the riders that really count, rather than American broadcasters who mainly interview English-speaking riders.”
For really hard-core fans, Grady will keep tapping his library of historical Tour de France footage—the largest outside of France, with race coverage going as far back as the 1920s—to produce specialized 8- to 12-hour DVD sets with titles like Great Climbs of the Tour de France. He could put his own company’s story on that one.
