"You want it to be one way. But it's the other way."
“It was like silent murder. The pain was there, but there was no screaming, no cheering, so it was very bizarre.”
—Stuart O’Grady on the nearly absolute absence of fans on the closing portions of the Olympic road race course near Beijing. (By way of Bobke Strut.)
Technorati Tags: olympics
Media Life Magazine: “One nasty spill for the Tour de France.” The article’s gist: The “cume” — the number of people who watched at least once, was up. But average viewership for the broadcasts was down as much as 20 percent. The reasons: Number One–no Yank stars (sorry, Christian Vande Velde). Number Two–le dopage. Quote from the article:
“Versus says that a larger number of people than last year tuned into at least some portion of Tour coverage, but average viewership took a hit, meaning many of them did not return after sampling.
“Doping deserves some of the blame.
“ ‘Obviously it’s the elephant in the room,’ says Marc Fein, Versus executive vice president of programming, production and business operations at Versus. ‘Some people might be turned off a bit by the bad things that have happened, the doping in the sport.’ ”
Technorati Tags: cycling, doping, tour de france, tv, versus
Highlighting the lovely, due-process-free side of the Doping Prohibition Era: “Schleck unruffled after dad’s customs search.” The story: Johnny Schleck, father of CSC Tour de France stars Frank and Andy Schleck, was waylaid by French customs police while driving along the stage route Thursday. The cops spent at least a half-four searching his car, apparently looking for the magic juice that makes his sons ride so fast. They didn’t find anything, and sent Dad Schleck on his way. At the end of the stage, Andy, the younger son, opined (at least for public consumption) that it was no big deal that pop was pulled over and had his vehicle turned inside out by the gendarmes.
Well, Andy, might be right if he and Frank were notorious dope merchants and his father was returning from a trip to, say, Tijuana. It wouldn’t seem extraordinary for narcs or border agents to stop him and give him the once over, though even in the case of a family of crack dealers some legal niceties would be observed (in a prosecution, the cops would at some point have to show they had some cause for stopping their suspect; the issue of stopping someone just because a cop thinks they’re up to no good–well, that’s the issue at the heart of profiling). But we’re not talking about an arm of the Medellin cartel now. We’re talking about a bike race. And when it comes to doping enforcement, apparently anything goes.
At least that’s how it looks: Not even the little squib offered by L’Équipe, the unofficial news organ of cycling’s dope narcs, offers anything (English “translation“) about why Papa Schleck was pulled over, and there’s no hint in any of the coverage I’ve found that the police have had to explain their behavior.
Technorati Tags: doping, tour de france
By way of Frank Steele’s Tour de France blog, an item from The Oregonian: “Tour de France ratings down so far on Versus.” The article reports the following Nielsen numbers for this year’s Tour broadcasts:
Live broadcasts (starting at oh-dark-hundred on the West Coast): 230,000 average viewership. 2007 average: 343,000.
Average viewership per broadcast (both live and taped): 143,000 (for 35 broadcast between July 5 and 10). Last year’s average: 171,000 (135 telecasts including both pre- and post-Tour shows; I’ve found some stats (in an article on Tour advertising, here) that suggest that this number was flat from 2006, the Landis year, but down from 315,000 in 2005, the year of Armstrong VII).
That seems clear enough, right? Viewership is down, and thus the item’s headline.
Well, then, check this out: On July 17, three days after The Oregonian was peddling its apples, MediaPost’s Media Daily News offered these oranges under the headline “Tour de France Cycles Ratings for Versus”: “The channel has seen a 16% gain in its cume number of viewers–those who have seen some part of the race over the first 10 days. Versus says that number is 20.8 million versus 17.9 million of a year ago.”
OK, even though I’ve worked in broadcast media, I’m not fluent in Nielsen. I’m not sure how that cume number is derived–whether it represents distinct individuals (as it allegedly does in radio) or whether one person who tunes in to three Tour shows a day for 10 days counts as 30 viewers. I suspect it’s the latter, because if it’s 20.8 million individual American TV viewers, I wouldn’t get so many blank stares when I mention the Tour to non-cyclists. Moving on:
The Media Daily News report also notes the following: that the average viewership of the Versus live a.m. broadcasts is 270,359 this year, which Versus acknowledges is down 13 percent from 2007. At the same time, Versus says the Nielsen rating for the live broadcast–the percentage of the 112 million TV homes in the United States tuned in during the show–is flat from last year at 0.3. Those numbers don’t square with The Oregonian report, which is apparently based on a different span of broadcast days, but never mind. Versus says most of its other Tour broadcasts throughout the day are showing gains.
And the MDN story also gets down to business: Versus says that in the gold-mine demographic, 18 to 34 year old males, the Tour broadcasts are way up over last year: 91 percent higher for the morning show, 108 percent for one of the afternoon (EDT) rebroadcasts, 99 percent for the late-night rebroadcast.
There’s a lot of spin here, all for the benefit of advertisers. Versus is busy trying to show how fewer viewers are really more.
I want to do some historical comparisons with pre-2007 Tours, both on Versus/OLN and the broadcast networks who have offered a Tour summary show on weekends since the ’80s. But due to the late hour and the apples and oranges problems I have with the stats, I’ll put off that project till later.
Technorati Tags: tour de france, versus
It’s the Tour’s last rest day, and we’re only six stages, a couple of huge days in the Alps, and two or three more positive doping tests away from the big climax on the Champs-Élysées.
Who/what has looked good so far on this year’s Tour:
Cadel Evans. I’m not a big fan; something about him seems unpleasant and cold. But you have to admire a guy who picked himself up from a serious crash and finished one stage in serious pain (he barely made it into the team van unassisted after the racing was done for the day) and comes back the next day to take the yellow jersey. Also admirable: the way he stood up to the repeated attacks of CSC and other riders during the first Alps stage on Sunday. [This just in: Bobke Strut reports on another reason to admire Evans.]
Mark Cavendish. Established himself as The Man of the 2008 Tour with four stage wins. His speed is incredible and you wonder what it would be like to ride with such crazy ferocious abandon–even in the rain!–just once. But the racing is just part of it. The few glimpses of Cavendish we caught during last year’s Tour, when he rode for Team Columbia predecessor T-Mobile, made him look like something of a pouting, prickly jerk. This year, he came across as quiet, affable, thoughtful, and honest about how tiring the Tour was becoming as it progressed. He dropped out after Stage 14 win to prepare for the Olympics. In his post-race interview, he looked exhausted and profoundly sad about having gotten dropped on the last climb of the day and missing the chance for another win.
Jens Voigt. The German attack and pace-making machine for CSC. His efforts are impressive as always and the Versus interviews have shown him to be a funny but fearless competitor.
Robby Ventura and Frankie Andreu. Both have been excellent in their analyst/interviewer roles for Versus. For my money, it’s time to put Team Liggett/Sherwen out to pasture and put this pair in the traces.
Christian Vande Velde. A Chicago native has to love a Chicago native who’s doing great in the Tour. I’d be crazier about him, but there’s something a little flat in his interviews. And face it: Though he has managed to hang in with some of the hardest men in the sport for two-thirds of the Tour, he hasn’t once shown the ability to take the race away from any of them.
The doping bloggers: You can’t tell the dopers without a scorecard, and you can’t make sense out of what’s happening with all this EPO and CERA and A samples and B samples and the rest of the dopage shiz-nit without reading Trust But Verify and Rant Your Head Off. You really can’t.
Who/what hasn’t looked so good on this year’s Tour:
The Tour anti-doping crusade: Three riders have been strung up so far this year. Hey, maybe they did take the stuff. But we yearn for a world in which purity of essence and ideals of athletic perfection might skip the lynching party and exist side-by-side with plain ol’ American due process.
The Versus anti-doping crusade. You know, the last people I need to tell me about the evils of doping in sports are the people who have spent the last umpteen years celebrating absolutely anyone who’s a winner. The network’s new anti-doping religion is just another way to a buck. (And note, another one of the Versus attractions, thugs in cages (or mixed martial arts to those who want to legitimize the “sport”), is gaining widespread attention now because of the widespread use of steroids and controlled substances by its practitioners.) Screw the dopers. Screw Versus.
The Roll/Liggett/Sherwen anti-doping crusade. The finger-wagging and tongue-clucking and high-pitched moralizing is unbecoming, guys. Especially when you’re berating so many riders who in past years you anointed as heroes or near-saints.
The Liggett/Sherwen play-by-play team. In a way, it’s unfair to lump Paul Sherwen in with Phil Liggett. Paul actually has some insights into the race and occasionally manages to deliver them. Phil is merely a fount of verbiage and misinformation. (OK, yes–we live for the moments when he delivers himself of a colorful malapropism.) We loved the way that between the two of them they couldn’t manage to figure out who had assumed the yellow jersey after Stage 15 — even after a good 20 minutes.
Technorati Tags: phil liggett, tour de france, versus
Due to an actual standard work-day schedule on Monday, we missed our Tour TV-watching appointment. In watching the replay, the one featuring Bob Roll and the Craig Hummer, we weren’t taken with very much of what we heard; and of course we were separated, for one race day, from our muse, Phil. That’s all by way of saying we have an honorary Phil quote today from Christian Vande Velde, who for a moment anyway captured the true spirit of Phil:
Hand in hand: “First of all, I’ve looked after myself from day one, from December on. And that’s been more a psychological change for me than anything else. I’ve changed my preparation, what I’m thinking I can do, what I possibly can do, and also physically. I think it goes kind of hand in hand with myself.”
Technorati Tags: phil liggett, tour de france, versus
Lovely lumps: “There’s the mountains now. There’s no way out, only over the top, and the riders know it. It’s an awful long detour if you want to go around these big lumps of … of granite down here in the south of France.”
The divine cyclomedy: “The tempo is spreading the sprinters at the moment down the hills. Very shortly the middle-distance climbers will find themselves in trouble because the pace at the front of the pure climbers, the men who are now in their playground. This is their garden, and they’re going to take revenge over the week of purgatory.”
Technorati Tags: phil liggett, tour de france, versus
We found the bad apple: “(Team) Liquigas in disgrace after the disqualification of Manuel Beltran found positive after taking EPO. He is out of the Tour de France, but the rest of the riders go on, with their heads held high.”
(I’m extra-special curious to hear what Phil has to say when the next positive test comes in. EPO, for the uninitiated, is erythropoieitin, a substance that can enhance the blood’s ability carry oxygen.)
Technorati Tags: phil liggett, tour de france, versus
Gerolsteiner’s Stefan Schumacher tells Versus’s Frankie Andreu the fall he took near the end of yesterday’s stage, taking him out of the yellow jersey:
Andreu: Can you tell me a little bit about what happened? It seemed like some riders kind of got pinched on the right hand side. Do you remember how the touch of the wheels might have happened?
Schumacher: I saw it that the guys of Caisse d’Epargne went to the other side, and what I wanted to do, I was on the wheel of (Columbia’s Kim) Kirchen, for sure I had to watch him, and at this moment I wanted to go left to sprint, to start to sprint, and at this moment he had to brake, and in this moment my body weight was on the left and I couldn’t do anything. I was in the wrong moment, I was in the wrong place, and I’m sure he didn’t make it because he wanted to do that, but for me it was shit.
At least it sure sounded like he said “shit.” The difference between this utterance and Jonathan Vaughters’ f-bomb the other day is that Vaughters was live and Schumacher was on tape. So, who wants to bet that the FCC hears some complaints about the Tour’s raw, raw language?
Technorati Tags: tour de france, versus
Today’s quote is a nonquote. As the racers neared the steep climb leading to the stage finish in a place called Super-Besse, two riders were about 15 seconds off the front. One was Christian Vande Velde, an American from Team Garmin-Chipotle, the other a rider from the French team Saunier Duval, Leonardo Piepoli. The last climb began with about 1.5 kilometers to go, and Liggett sung the praises of the American. “This could be a brilliant move by Christian Vande Velde, and it could have hit them at the right time.” Phil explained how the spectators had to walk to the upper reaches of the hill. “And they’re seeing one of only four Americans in the Tour de France turn on the style in the race for the next yellow jersey,” he said.
Meantime, what’s the camera showing the folks at home?
The front of the peloton was surging forward as several of the stage favorites, including the perpetually mispronounced Alejandro Valverde, made their bid for victory. The front of the group swirled past Vande Velde and instantly dropped him.
What did Phil have to say about that?
Well, nothing, actually. He opined that the wearer of the yellow jersey, Germany’s Stefan Schumacher, wasn’t reacting. The TV picture almost instantaneously contradicted him, as you could see the yellow jersey in the bunch surging past the spent Vande Velde. In fact, Phil never mentioned Vande Velde’s name again until a couple minutes after the finish, when he thought he might have recognized him crossing the line. (And in fact, he missed that call, too: Vande Velde had finished just 23 seconds after the stage winner, Riccardo Ricco of Saunier Duval.)
That’s it? That’s all that brilliant move came to?
[Later: Versus’s Paul Sherwen observed after the end of the stage that Piepoli’s attack, made along with Vande Velde, was probably meant to put pressure on the lead group and help Ricco. It wasn’t until Versus’s Robbie Ventura tracked down Vande Velde in the finishing area that Vande Velde explained that his surge, too, was meant to help a teammate: David Millar. But Millar never made a move–a fact that Liggett and Sherwen never remarked–and wound up finishing half a minute behind Vande Velde and 51 seconds behind the winner.
We should give Phil a break here. He’s an entertainer, not a reporter. He’s a fan, not an expert. He manages to convey the excitement of the moment even when he’s not quite sure what’s happening or why. There–we said something nice about him.]
Technorati Tags: phil liggett, tour de france, versus