Most World Cup fans are following the action via social media in 2025, instead of relying on more traditional channels like Discovery+, according to the latest data from WBD, which manages the racing.

World Cup competition has racked up an incredible 56 million views on HBO Max, Eurosport, discovery+ and TNT Sports, all owned by WBD and locked away behind a £30.99 a month paywall. But that pales compared with the 225 million video views on its own TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube channels across the same period.

Watching the World Cup live is only possible if you pay up, but plenty of us have been keeping in touch via social media, it seems.

Earlier this year WBD announced it would lump World Cup mountain bike racing in 2025 into its £30.99 TNT Sports or Discovery+ Premium package, alongside the likes of cricket and football. The worry was that fewer mountain bike fans would want to put up the cash for sports they weren’t interested in; but the hope was more general sports fans would stumble across cycling as a whole.

At the time I did manage to find some TV package deals that would let you watch the World Cup downhill mountain biking on TNT for just £10 a month, but those seem to have dried up in recent months.

Social media can’t do it all, only way to watch Jackson Goldstone win races live (and other people occasionally) is through a TNT Sports subscription.

So have fans voted with their wallets and abandoned the pay-per-view channels? It’s impossible to say, given most of us are now using social media more than legacy media for all aspects of our lives, not just mountain biking. Besides, you can’t watch a three hour mountain bike race via TikTok.

These are also strong figures from WBD, which says there were 15 million views of the action at Val di Sole across all the WBD channels alone – that’s 15% more than the previous most-watched round, Nové Město Na Moravě in 2023. Thibaut Daprela nearly won at Val di Sole, if you remember, despite losing his chain right up at the top, so perhaps it’s no wonder we all loved watching it back.

With four rounds still to go, including Lenzerheide here, the WBD viewing figures should climb higher / Red Bull Content Pool

And all told, there have been 15 million watch hours so far this year. Not bad, considering there are still four rounds still to go; Les Gets, August 21–31; Lenzerheide, September 18–21, Lake Placid, October 3–5; and Mont-Sainte-Anne, October 9–12.

Whether WBD’s plan to draw in more viewers is succeeding, with more people are watching the World Cups this year, is equally hard to say. That’s because WBD hasn’t released any comparative, mid-season figures from the previous two years it’s been managing the sport.

Who isn’t loving the drone footage this year?

WBD puts the successful viewing figures down to innovation and an improved content though, “making broadcasts more accessible and engaging, introducing features like heart-rate zones and strain gauges,” it says. “It has also added visual elements such as athlete headshots, race bike images, team logos and colours, national flags, and career stats for past UCI World Cup winners.”

WBD is also compiling the viewing figures for all the mountain bike events it promotes, from enduro to XC and downhill, meaning the figures are always going to be pretty high when you lump everything together. Again, we’ve got no data on how downhill fared against XC, but YouTube views of WBD’s official highlights edit seems to show a pretty even split: 31,000 views for the men’s highlights at Val di Sole to 28,000 for the XC.

Tens of thousands of us still watch the action live and in person, with 250,000 people turning up this year so far / Red Bull Content Pool

It’s not just online and TV where we’re watching the action though, WBD says over 250,000 fans have watched the racing in person, lining the courses of venues Araxá, Minas Gerais in Brazil to Pal Arinsal in Andorra. It’s impossible to compare those figures with other years, especially mid way through the season, as the data just isn’t available to us. 

What we do know is that 21,000 fans watched the racing at the Fort William World Cup round back in 2024, so with 11 rounds complete (and four still to go) in 2025 it looks on average like pretty decent attendance. It’s not a patch on the World Championships 2023 in Glasgow though, where the mountain bike events saw 365,500 fans watch the action in person, according to the BBC.

New rounds like Bielsko-Biala in Poland have been great for the action, putting riders on a level playing field / Red Bull Content Pool

Some races are undoubtedly more popular than others it seems, with that eighth round in Val di Sole accounting for over a quarter of all the views via HBO Max, Eurosport, discovery+ and TNT Sports. That’s 15 million cumulative views on WBD channels.

The sport of mountain biking is in a strong position in 2025 then, the coverage is excellent – particularly the new drone footage – and the racing has been on another level. It’s still not cricket though, where a billion viewers (that’s not just views, but individual people) have logged on to watch the IPL in 2025 – more than 840 billion minutes of leather on willow cut and thrust.