Tag: oln

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Ready for Your Closeup?

If you’re watching the Tour de France every day on OLN — a bad habit in our household driven by the fact it’s the only place to see the race here in America — you’re well acquainted with the astounding caravan that moves along with the race. Motorcycles carrying TV, video and still photographers and course marshalls and timekeepers. Cars carrying race officials. Team cars — at least one for every starting squad of nine riders — carrying the team directors (the overall race strategists) and sundry VIPs and journalists. Neutral cars to support riders up and down the course regardless of which team they’re on. Overhead, at least one helicopter shadowing the progress of the daily race leaders. One of the more demanding and stressful factors for Tour riders must be the constant din of honking cars, revving engines and churning helicopter rotors.

For fans, though, the presence of cameras rolling along with the riders means that you’re right in the middle of the action. For riders, it means there’s no place to hide when something goes wrong. That’s what happened today for Floyd Landis, the former Lance Armstrong lieutenant who had managed to take the race leader’s yellow jersey this year. After a strong finish yesterday on one of the Tour’s classic tough mountain stages, lots of people had started to feel Landis would go on to win the race. But today — today was another brutally hard day, and on the stage’s last climb, Landis blew up. When one of his rivals accelerated sharply and the group around him chased, Landis simply couldn’t make his legs go any faster or harder. It was stunning to see — at least for Tour geeks who are used to seeing a single rider impose his will on the race.

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Of course, Landis had one faithful companion as he found himself wallowing up the climb, his closest rivals vanishing up the road ahead of him: as usual, a Tour cameraman was there to capture every moment of suffering. All Landis could do was keep turning over the pedals until he got to the top, no matter how long it took.

[Later: Landis avoided the media at the finish, but later gave what Velonews termed an “impromptu press conference” during which he showed a lot of class. One exchange:

Q: Did you know when you were dropped that the yellow jersey was gone?

FL: I knew I felt very, very bad. I didn’t expect to stay close to the leaders. I did what I could. I kept fighting, but I didn’t have much left. I did everything in my power to stay close, but you saw what happened. ]

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Today’s Tour Mystery

Phil Liggett just looked at a picture of a T-Mobile rider struggling off the back of the peloton on today’s (the 10th stage’s) final climb. “That’s Ullrich!” he gasped, meaning Jan Ullrich, the great racer known more as a perennial Tour also-ran. But it wasn’t Ullrich — it was one of the T-Mobile domestiques who was done with his turn in the peloton for the day.

But that’s just a small botched detail in today’s race. The truly impenetrable mystery for Liggett and OLN announcing partner Paul Sherwen is why Lance Armstrong’s team has been riding so hard at the front during the latter parts of the stage. The guys have been utterly mystified about it, guessing that perhaps it has to do with Lance’s fear of one of the riders in a breakaway that, coming off the second-to-last climb of the day was 4 or 5 minutes ahead of the main field.

But as the charge up the long last climb has developed, it’s apparent that Discovery has something else in mind: They’re applying as much pressure as possible to the rest of Lance’s rivals — all riding behind Discovery in the same group — to prevent any of them from making an attack. It’s like sucking the air right out of their lungs — they just don’t have much left to launch their own moves. And right now, inside 12 kilometers to the finish, it looks like the tactic has worked — most of the front group has blown up and dropped back.

Long way to go to the finish, though ….

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OLN and the Tour: The Little Things

It’s a small thing I want to complain about — a very small thing in a world where dozens of people are killed in terror attacks every week, where our nation is sending young people into an ill-defined and badly executed war, where so many of us struggle with personal challenges large and small just to get by from day to with our sanity intact. With that preamble spoken, the further piece I want to say is: It’s a damned shame, and very strange, that the race announcers on the Outdoor Life Networks Tour de France coverage are so bad at their jobs.

I’m hooked on the race, and I’ll watch every day, the daily cascade of meaningless froth from the two play-by-play guys (Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen) notwithstanding. Granted, they have a tough job. They’re sitting in a booth at the finish line every day and trying to cobble together some meaning from the live TV pictures they’re seeing and radio reports they’re hearing. But having conceded the task is difficult, it’s still sort of shocking how shallow, careless and sometimes flat-out wrong the duo is.

Just one case in point that won’t mean anything to anyone but a dedicated watcher/follower of the Tour: During Saturday’s stage, Lance Armstrong’s team collapsed. Everyone knows that now, because both Lance and smart commentators have been talking about it ever since the stage was over (Lance’s take in a post-race interview: “It was a bad day for the team.”).

But while the saga was unfolding — when the OLN guys had this amazing drama right in front of them — they apparently had no idea what was going on. What a viewer saw was Armstrong alone in a large group of riders from other teams who freely took turns attacking him (trying to get away from Armstrong by making sudden rapid accelerations ahead of his group); he was left to respond himself to every challenge, which involved “covering” the attack, or matching the quick accelerations of his rivals to make sure they didn’t get away. The disappearance of all of Armstrong’s teammates, who ordinarily would play a role in covering the moves from other teams, was stunning and recalled his very tough 2003 Tour, when he was repeatedly left by himself to deal with a rather large and very hostile group of competitors.

Sherwen and Liggett picked up on the attacks, because that’s what the pictures showed. But about the more important development that wasn’t on camera, they said nothing. The equivalent in baseball announcing terms would be if the announcer decided to tell you only what he saw happening at home plate. A lot of what’s important in a game happens right there. But you only see the game if you take in the rest of the field.

That’s all. That’s the end of this OLN complaint and this broadcasting day.