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SBS should change its name from Special Broadcasting Service to Sports Benevolent Society.

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How else would you describe a media player that prides itself in committing itself to bringing the best of world sports to Australia and gets so little reward in return.

The Artarmon-based organisation has done it with football, showing an insular country that there is more to the world game than Manchester United and Liverpool.

SBS gave us the World Cup, the European Championship and the Champions League when no other media organisation probably even knew what these competitions were all about. The FA Cup was their ‘World Cup’ not so long ago, remember.

Or whose boardrooms and newsrooms were dominated by English expatriates whose only interest was to propagate their own brand of football. The other fare provided by Brazil, Argentina, Italy and Germany was only ‘wogball’ not so long ago, remember.

SBS is now giving mainstream Australia an insight into the special appeal of international cycling, particularly the gruelling Tour de France.

Same as in the 1990s when live and uninterrupted telecasts of the World Cup and other major events at unfriendly hours gave SBS sizeable ratings returns, the multicultural station that justifiably called itself the home of football has enjoyed another ratings bonanza this year as Australians followed the fluctuating fortunes of Cadel Evans in his quest for cycling immortality.

SBS is to be commended for showing foresight and sticking with a proven event it just knew would eventually strike a cord with avid Aussie sports lovers. We’ve all become cycling aficionados, all of a sudden. It’s World Cup football all over again. Well, not quite, but you get the drift.

Yet the sad thing about all this is that the cycling phenomenon and surge in national interest in a bike race eventually will draw the serious attention of commercial stations and pay television, whose bottomless pit of financial resources could crush the valiant efforts of budget-conscious SBS into submission. SBS won't have a sporting chance.

SBS has the exclusive rights for the next two World Cups and the next four Tours de France.

It is indeed a cruel side of sport and television that the SBS organisation that works so feverishly with limited resources at bringing the best of world sport to Australia is actually laying the bed for wealthier media outlets to reap their rewards when the time is right.

With the rise in football’s popularity came the inevitable explosion in television interest which of course forced a hostile print media that would only touch soccer if there was a skirmish that could be beaten up into a riot to jump on the bandwagon and give the game more space and better treatment.

Cycling to a degree will go down the same road, no worries about that.

It is a scenario that is agonisingly similar to that of small feeder football clubs, who nurture their young promising talent with all the love and care in the world before the big clubs come along to dispense with their spare change and enjoy all the benefits.

In their mad scramble for the corporate dollar, commercial stations and pay television simply can’t be bothered educating Australians in the art of such 'foreign' sports as football and, to a lesser extent, cycling.

They’re too busy trying to outdo and outrate each other in AFL, rugby league and rugby, which is their bread and butter.

But once there was enough interest in such an ‘exotic’ pastime as football they made their move, bought the rights and used (and misused) them according to their whims and requirements. It will happen again with cycling.

This makes perfect business sense but there is something morally wrong about such a sorry state of affairs. It just does not seem fair.

But there is one positive, after all, because hundreds of thousands of football fans in this country owe their sanity to SBS for bringing a whole world of soccer to their loungerooms, even though these days they often have to pay for the privilege.

Cycling fans must be feeling the same way towards SBS at the moment.

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