• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, July 10, 2006

This summer two different European-centic sports are offering two different TV results with U.S. viewers.

The Tour de France and the World Cup soccer tournament have gone in opposite directions this summer. The early days of this year's Tour de France lost almost 50 percent of its U.S. viewers versus a year ago, while during a similar time, U.S. viewers for the World Cup soccer event climbed 65 percent versus four year ago.

Some would say this is like comparing oranges and apples--or, at best oranges and tangerines.

The retirement of Lance Armstrong is a major reason the Tour's numbers have dropped, since he was the virtual lone face of cycling to U.S. viewers. Adding to these miseries for OLN , which is airing the Tour, four of Armstrong's major competitors from last year were ejected stemming from a massive Spanish investigation into a doping scandal.

The World Cup soccer offers up perhaps a more diversified group of brand-name players-ones that are recognized around the world, such as Brazil's Ronaldo Luís Nazário de Lima, France's Zinedine Zidane and England's David Beckham, among many others. Soccer is a stronger sport in the U.S. than cycling, with now well established leagues and organizations in the U.S., especially among young athletes.

For all the talk about how cycling has become so popular in the U.S., the reality right now is that for the last seven years, the Tour was really about a single story--an incredible, athletic, heroic, and, sometimes, controversial story about Lance Armstrong.

But the good news is that at the start of the Tour, three Americans were touted as favorites to win this year--and, perhaps, for the coming Tours. Now  Floyd Landis, a former Armstrong teammate, looks to be the odds-on favorite to win this year.  It's early yet. Ratings could improve. The dramatic mountain stages are yet to come. If Landis gets closer to victory, ratings could also rise.

There are also differences of supply and demand: World Cup is played every four years, while the Tour de France comes around every year. Each day there is a winner in the Tour de France (as there is in the World Cup). But at the Tour it's an ongoing story, sometimes slow to evolve and sudden to show up with dramatic events. (Think about Lance's crash up one of the key mountains in 2005; or his sudden cross-country excursion in avoiding a competitor's crash on a downhill descent in 2003.)

Lance Armstrong says if his Lance Armstrong Foundation really helps in finding a cure for cancer, his association with the Tour de France will just be an asterisk in his career. I can't disagree. That asterisk would become more apparent for U.S. TV ratings during the Tour de France.