From podcast to podium: how Patrick Broe could blow Le Tour wide open
As a YouTube personality hosting the Lanterne Rouge channel, Patrick Broe turned his cycling fandom into a full-time job. Then the big boys of professional sport came knocking.
When Danish two-time Tour de France winner Jonas Vingegaard and his team Visma Lease a Bike take a tilt at a third straight victory in one of the world’s cruellest, most gruelling sporting events later this month, they will have a secret weapon up their Lycra sleeves.
It won’t be some new undetectable wonder drug to stay ahead of the testers, or a fiendishly clever bit of “mechanical doping” kit. It won’t be the latest Alien-vs-Predator time-trialling helmet, or a wind-cheating advance in the aerodynamic dark arts. It won’t even be the latest couple of watts saved by arcane marginal gains, barely legal supplements from the wilder shores of nutritional science or fat wads of euros thrown at the best team money can buy (well, perhaps a little of the latter).
No, the ace in the hole for Vingegaard competing in the Tour’s General Classification (the most high profile competition in the Tour de France, and the one with the yellow jersey), and indeed the entire Visma team including American Sepp Kuss, who won last year’s Vuelta a Espana – Spain’s grand bike race – is the uncommon mind of a former lawyer from Brisbane named Patrick Broe.
Broe, aka Lanterne Rouge (Red Lantern), is the peloton whisperer; a young man possessed of a keenly analytical brain and an uncanny knack of seeing cycling’s big picture in real time. He can spit facts and stats like a rapper on every professional rider, and appears to see sprints and moves measured in milliseconds as if they’re happening in slow motion. Better still, he can turn it into actionable intelligence.
Broe first appeared on my radar three or four years ago. To a middle-of-the-road MAMIL like me, his Lanterne Rouge podcast and YouTube channel (named after the red lantern trophy given to the last rider to finish in the Tour de France) seemed like an amusing diversion. I was impressed by how Broe pulls apart key moments in a race to anticipate the finish like a Jedi mind trick, then breaks it all down so mere mortals can follow.
On his podcast, which he hosts with Benji Naesen, an affable Belgian with a similar passion for cycling minutiae, each stage of the grand tours and the one-day classics are pulled apart with incisive analysis that land almost before the riders are back in their team buses.
Remember Paul DePodesta? Even if you don’t know the name there’s a good chance you’ve seen the film he inspired, Moneyball. DePodesta was an economics graduate hired by the Oakland baseball team (he inspired the Peter Brand character in the movie) and today is chief strategy officer for the Cleveland Browns. Broe is from the same mould.
The 31-year-old Australian is riding a wave of sports podcasts which, in lockstep with YouTube, go deep into the weeds for serious fans. The bio on his YouTube channel (261,000 subscribers) explains: “I am the Lanterne Rouge. This cycling channel dives deep into strategy, highlights and training from professional cycling”. Within the channel are edge-of-the-seat videos with hundreds of thousands of views and titles like: “Cyclists Fight for Position at Nearly 100km/h; Criterium du Dauphiné 2024 Stage 1”; “The Best British Climber You have NEVER HEARD OF”; “Mark Cavendish’s Insane Leadout Sprint before Tour de France”; and the occasional bit of outright clickbait: “Now I understand why EF Wear these Strange Helmets | La Vuelta Femenina 2024 Stage 4”.
Lanterne Rouge exists within a universe of top-flight cycling podcasts including Huberman Lab by the high priest of Zone 2 training, Dr Andrew Huberman; the plant-fuelled exploits of California’s Vegan Cyclist; Hambini, who mixes juvenile quips and casual sexism with deep insights from his day job as an aeronautical engineer; and TrainerRoad’s Ask a Cycling Coach podcast. Outside of cycling, the Coach Daniel podcast is like the Lanterne Rouge with hoops, chronicling the adventures of a basketball tragic who posted analysis videos before being picked up as a scout and video analyst for the Dallas Mavericks in the NBA. His YouTube videos have attracted more than five million views on a channel with 200,000 subscribers.
Chris Miller is an elite cyclist from Sydney’s Balmain whose weekly YouTube channel The Nero Show, with fellow top rider and coach Jesse Coyle, is compulsory listening for Australian cyclists. Miller is friends and occasional sparring partners with Broe and says he is stoked for his success. “Patrick was a guest on our show in January,” Miller says. “What he has done is unique. Previously, there was a feeling that to provide serious analysis you had to be a former pro or your opinions weren’t valid. He has changed the entire conversation and shown that your opinion counts if it’s well-informed.
“But it’s not just his knowledge. I know 20 Patricks who are deep into the details of the sport. What he is able to do is grasp the intricacies of a difficult sport and make it relatable, not only at the level of the uberfan who has a great awareness of the tactics in cycling, but also to the casual non-cycling sports fan. And he does it with his trademark dry humour.”
Indeed, it wasn’t just random MAMILs like me who were impressed by Broe’s preternatural insights, grasp of Machiavellian team tactics, and amazingly accurate predictions. Pretty soon the cycling establishment began to take notice, leading the corporate lawyer away from life as he knew it and turning his hobby into something much bigger.
Cycling insiders were stunned by a message on the Visma website at the end of the 2023 season: “Team Visma – Lease a Bike has added Patrick Broe to its coaching staff. Broe, who is also known as the creator of the podcast Lanterne Rouge, had already been working with Team Jumbo-Visma for some time, as a consultant in various sporting areas such as data analysis, leadership and strategy.”
The 2024 Tour de France – the 111th edition of the storied, if occasionally tainted event – begins in Florence on June 29 and finishes three tumultuous and pain-wracked weeks later in Nice, the surviving riders having covered 3,492km and some 52,320m of overall elevation, passing through four nations – Italy, San Marino, France and Monaco. It promises to be a race for the ages, poised on a knife-edge.
The two favourites, Vingegaard and the freakishly gifted Slovenian Tadej Pogacar of UAE Team Emirates, are set to slug it out once again. Pogacar, a former Tour de France winner, is coming off a huge win in the Giro d’Italia, and will be carrying all the accumulated fatigue that entails in his historic bid to win two grand tours in the same year. Vingegaard has the mental edge after besting Pogacar in the last two editions; however, the Dane is recovering from a punctured lung and broken collarbone and ribs after crashing on a high-speed descent in Spain’s Basque country in April. He has been keeping a low profile at a secret altitude training camp ever since, and a question mark hangs over whether he will start. The stakes couldn’t be higher or the competition more intense. Each team is endlessly searching for an edge. Enter the Lanterne Rouge.
It was a courtship two years in the making. “Patrick has been an important sparring partner for me and for the other coaches since 2022,” says Visma sports director Merijn Zeeman. “It works very well to add a smart and critical eye … I am happy that Patrick will now formally be part of our coaching staff.”
Broe’s analytical skills were doubtless a factor in Visma’s unprecedented success of 2023, when the team trumped all three grand tours with three different riders (Primoz Roglic, who has since decamped to Bora-Hansgrohe, won the Giro, Vingegaard the Tour, and Kuss the Vuelta). Broe had a direct line to the Director Sportif in the team car, with real-time intelligence and suggestions.
I meet the man who is shaking up cycling with his mind at his mother’s house in the Brisbane suburb of Seven Hills in January, just before he flies out for his home base in Andorra and the start of the 2024 cycling season. Broe got into cycling while studying law at Queensland University and got seriously fit (as early YouTube clips of him holding 300 watts up Adelaide’s famous Willunga Hill attest) after watching Australian Cadel Evans win the Tour de France in 2011.
Cycling took a back seat when Broe started work with law firm Allens in 2017. But in 2019, while watching a cycling race, he had an epiphany. “Something just clicked in my head,” he recalls. “I saw something interesting happen and I realised why it happened and how it affected who won. I realised there might be space on YouTube for someone to really go deep into analysing cycling races. I’ve always been really interested in why things happen, the real reasons for it. I’m a sports obsessive. I’ve probably watched more sports in my life than 99 per cent of people. Cricket, baseball, basketball, NFL, athletics.” While at university, he also applied his analytical abilities to horseracing, and put down the deposit on a house with the proceeds.
“The analytics is a lot more advanced in American sports – it had its big leap forward in baseball in 2011, 2012, and basketball maybe four to five years later. So I wanted to bring some of that to cycling,” he says.
“I did some finance and econometrics at uni. I’m not a data scientist. But I think I have good recall of information. I wouldn’t say I have a photographic memory but I can recall a minor situation that happened in a race from three or four years ago. And then realise that if you have these three riders on this route together, then it’s likely that two of them will behave this way, or their team will say that. I just know what’s likely to happen and how a team or rider should react.”
His Lanterne Rouge YouTube channel and podcast quickly gained a cult following. Today, the podcast has more than 200,000 unique listeners, with around 10 million total listeners per year, while the YouTube channel boasts about 35 million views per year and more than 200,000 subscribers.
“The analysis videos were doing really well, so I decided to quit my law job and go full-time with it,” he says.
“One of the biggest things I did was to sign a rights agreement with Amaury Sport Organisation, owners of the Tour de France and other cycling events, in January 2021. It took six months of negotiations. I had no connections, I literally cold emailed them.
“I have a strict limit agreement – I can use up to a minute’s footage per day from the race for analysis videos. That was a first: no one had negotiated a digital-only agreement with them before. The next step was to move overseas. The time zone is impossible from Brisbane. The races were finishing at 1.30am, then I’d be trying to edit a video and get it out by 4am, and then good luck trying to sleep.”
Andorra was the logical base. “It’s a popular home for pro cyclists on the border of Spain and France in the Pyrenees. My house is literally on a mountain and, like, 20 Australian pros live there. Jack Haig [Team Bahrain Victorious’ Gold Coast-born star] was the person who told me to go there. I live about five minutes from Jay Vine [the Townsville-born teammate of Pogacar],” he adds.
For the non cyclist it is hard to comprehend the suffering of the Tour de France, or the importance of key riders being protected by their teammates from the energy-sapping forces of the wind, and the dangers of jostling for position at speeds up to 60km/h while riding in the peloton on the flat (and much faster in sprints and mountain descents).
Positioning, strategy and team tactics are everything in a race that can be won or lost by seconds, as the overall time for each rider accumulates with each stage. This is where Broe’s insights can be invaluable.
Broe is not modest about his contributions to Visma’s success. He points to Stage 11 of the 2022 Tour, where Vingegaard took the leader’s yellow jersey from Pogacar in an epic battle on the Col du Granon. “I had identified this as a key stage,” Broe says. “I recommended Ving and [Primoz] Roglic keep attacking in a pincer movement and it worked. Pog had been dominant but he cracked and that was the key to the race.”
He admits: “I spend a large part of my time thinking about one thing – how to beat Pogacar. It’s like trying to figure out how to beat LeBron, or Michael Jordan or Roger Federer. And it’s easy to recommend strategy, but it’s something else to have the managers agree with it and for the riders to believe in it.
“The best way of playing poker is tight and aggressive. Moderate hand, just fold fold fold. Then when you have a good hand, be super aggressive. So if there are 21 stages in the tour, I look at them and say 19 of these are not that good for our leader, but these two we have to try and kill the other guy.”
Broe is not resting on his laurels, and is constantly seeking new ways to hone his skills and find an edge. “I bought the rights to some software they use to analyse biometric movements of mice in labs. I thought it might work with cyclists, so I am actually starting a company with a professor in the UK,” he says. “He’s got the technical skills and I’ve got the commercial skills. The idea is to track a rider’s movements using race footage to be able to see how fast they are moving, what watts per kg they are doing, how close they are to cracking. And the idea will be to apply that to other sports – horse racing, NRL, cricket …”
The possibilities point to a new age of “tech doping”. Broe explains: “With a high enough resolution image, you could probably track a rider’s heart rate through skin colour and pulse movements, so you could predict in real time when a rider was about to crack and tell your rider when to attack. If a human can look at a race and predict when a rider looks like breaking, a neural network could probably tell you 10 minutes earlier.”
Looking ahead to this month’s race, Broe, naturally, is playing his cards fairly tight to his chest. “Pogacar was completely dominant in the Giro d’Italia, winning six stages and the general classification by a huge margin. He will now line up as the big favourite.”
He won’t be drawn as to how Vingegaard’s recovery is progressing, and whether he thinks the Dane will be at the starting line. He rates Belgian cycling prodigy Remco Evenepoel of Soudal Quick-Step, winner of Vuelta a Espana in 2022, and Roglic as legitimate contenders.
He will say this: “If all four of Pogacar, Evenepoel, Roglic and Vingegaard line up at the Tour de France in top shape then we will have a mouth-watering showdown between the best general classification riders of their generation.”
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