After a careful analysis, I would like to respectfully submit this sports commentary:
Fuck the Tour de France.
I’m sure riding a bicycle up the Alps is an impressive feat, as well as riding thousands of miles in a matter of days. And I think Lance Armstrong overcoming potentially fatal cancer to win the thing last year (which he probably will this year as well) is rather inspiring.
But this should have interest to only the cyclists themselves. They should get together when it’s done and talk trash to one another, praise the winner, etc.
Why should the rest of us care? Why does TV and the media treat this like an actual sport, that even possibly has fan interest?
How many times do I have to hear on SportsCenter, "Iman Italiano won the 99th stage of the Tour de France today, which places him 1,844th in the standings. Lance Armstrong finished 709th, which increased his lead by a minute and 20 seconds.
*What???{i]
I know; it’s all about your overall time. So how is the general populace supposed to get into this in any way?
And then they’ve found a way to make this even less fan-friendly. I hear different riding teams and teammates within teams will cut deals during the race as to who will win or place higher in certain stages. In some sports, that results in a lifetime ban.
Bottom line: If you can’t explain to me who’s ahead and how the action in front of me bears upon that , keep your filthy sport away from me.
Seriously: I love cycling, and I love Le Tour. It’s the only good thing that the French provide us with. Well, Le Tour, and Peugeots.
It is a sporting event of great accomplishments, sheer determination, the aforementioned deals and undeoubtedly lots of steroids. But is IS a real sport in all respects.
Milo: why watch it if you don’t like it? Or, in case of just a 10 second news item about it (just 3 weeks out of the year), why get annoyed?
Gosh, I don’t know Milo…maybe because it is a sport and does have fan interest? I can’t see why you would be so crisp because SportsCenter mentions that the race is going on. Hell, the sport gets so little coverage here in the U.S. that I’m happy for any mention of it, not matter how small.
The Tour is possibly the single most difficult event in the whole world of sport, an event in which Americans are routinely creamed by Europeans. We finally get an American rider who can compete at that level (yeah, yeah, Greg Lemond too, but it’s been years) and you want to see less coverage? Hey, I love football, baseball, hockey, etc. but those sports get 95% of the coverage as it is. That leaves the other 5% for soccer, cycling, and other less popular (on American TV) sports. If you want to complain about coverage, pick on something that shows up on the radar more than once a year for 30 seconds a night. Just my two cents.
Whoops, I forgot this is the Pit. Ummm…go felch a roadkill possum, you pencil-dicked monkey fucker.
Guy 1: Nah. I think he has a deal to let some other guy win.
Maybe you have noticed they have ‘teams’ riding in the tour? They work together, sort of like this strange game called American Football, they give one guy the ball and everyone on his team “blocks” for him and help him reach the “endzone.”
How bizarre, eh?
As far as the overall leader, times, etc., God forbid you should have to think while watching a sporting event.
I respect your right to hate cycling, as it cuts into those other highly stimulating “real” sports like bowling, bass fishing, and NASCAR.
I can understand that the placing of riders within a race seems odd, but it really makes sense. You have to think of the Tour as 21 seperate races, each with its own winner, and one overall winner–the guy with the best time (lookin’ like it will be Lance. Woohoo!). It works kinda like auto racing, where the points winner accumulates points over the course of a season, while each individual race has a winner. There are riders in the tour who will never be overall winners but who train their whole careers for a single stage win. So yeah, it’s strange to watch a race and see the guy with the yellow jersey in 50th place in a stage while a bunch of guys at the bottom of the overall ranking are duking it out to win the stage. But it makes perfect sense to me.
As for the teams allowing certain riders to win stages, are you talking about riders within a team, or riders from two seperate teams? The role of riders on a team (like Lance’s US Postal team) is to do everything they can to support their lead rider. This means drafting for the leader, catching breakaways, contolling the pace of the pack, etc. So it isn’t in the interest of their team to win a stage in many cases, unless that somehow helps their team leader. But nobody throws away the chance at victory based on some negotiation with another team. Sure, you’ll sometimes see the race leader not try real hard to win a stage if he won’t lose his overall lead (Armstrong did it a few stages ago when he “let” Pantani take the stage win. It wasn’t in Lance’s best interest to kill himself trying to win a stage when his goal is the overall Tour victory).
I’m already rambling here, so I should get back to work. But I will say that I don’t think the strategies in cycling are any more bizarre than in any other sport. Try explaining to a Euro sports fan the intricacies of the infield fly rule, the onside kick, or the two-minute drill and their eyes will glaze over as surely as yours are now. I love cycling, and dammit, I’ll defend coverage of it till the bitter end. Hell, it’s the only sport I really get into before Packer season starts.
A guy I graduated from high school with just fell in the Tour de Felch. Of course, you can get back up and try to recover your place, but this guy got a concussion and had to drop out.
So now I can say I know the looser who has fallen and can’t get up!
Dang, I write a great reply and then it takes three hours to get a connection again. In the meantime, Coldy, denbo, i1055 all covered my points, so I’ll just add this:
Heh, a variation of my first thought too, along the lines of channeling.
Milo says:
Oh those kuh-wazy Europeans! On Stage 12 there were reportedly 300,000 people lining the roads of Mont Ventoux alone. And, gasp, there were Americans among them! I, on the other hand, am happy we get a measly 23 minutes of coverage on ESPN (cheaper than flying over, for sure), and will be quite happy when OLN starts broadcasting the last two hours of each stage live, next year.
You can say the exact same thing about ANY sport. That being said, we are now about to be hyped to death over the most useless of sporting events, the Olympics. When was the last time you gave a flying felch about waterpolo?
You have all defended your little bicycle race nobly.
As I mentioned in my OP; the athletic prowess it takes to compete in this event is unquestioned.
The question I feel none of you have answered, however, is how a spectator is supposed to watch and follow this sport, understand the implications of the action in front of them, and thus derive any enjoyment from it?
And, if there is no good answer to that question, why is it on ESPN2 nightly and ABC every weekend?
why don’t you take that time during sportscenter and go pee.
Tour de France is like the superbowl of cycling, or maybe I should say, the Wrestlemania.
Why is it on TV, because people care. In some parts outside of West Virginia, it’s kinda considered a matter of national pride, kinda like the America’s Cup.
It’s not hard to follow on TV, you got all these neato graphics and commentaries to help you out. If you go see it in person, it becomes a very social event, lots of money throw around, parties, etc…
but anyway, yes, there are a lot of people who care, and it does generate interest.
My question, is this…the strongest man competition on ESPN? I dig watching them, especially the ones from the 70’s, but it’s tv exposure is somehting I don’t get.
One hesitates when one sees the name Milo at the head of a thread like this.Oh lordy what is a teeming one to do?
Cycling is way more popular in France and much of Europe than any other spectator sport, we are talking literally millions of people actually attending the events.
That is not a justification in itself but if those millions can get what they want from the sport then who the hell are you to question it?
The dream of many a European is to have competed at top levels of the sport and many have tried, thus there is a huge expert following.
If I was an ignorant Briton, and maybe I am, I could say things like why is it that so many Americans have the media induced attention span of one baseball/football play and then relax for about three minutes till they are told by the pundits what happened and why ?
Could it be that sports that do not fall easily into five minute segments such as soccer/rugby/cycling which are hugely popular in the rest of the world are too demanding for the perpetually teenage male American mind?
No that of course is stereotyping bollocks ,
Sorry Milo I had a try but my heart isn’t in it .
Seriously though, if you cannot see the point then fair enough, a better spectator aspect of cycling especially for the newcomer is track racing.
You can see all the moves and work out what each rider is trying to do, there are differant types of track race with their own strategies and if you sit near to the trackside the atmosphere is brilliant.
My favorite is the devil take the hindmost where the last man over the line on each lap is withdrawn from the event,the way some riders deliberately play it to look like they are out and con some sucker into being a tiny bit slow as they suddenly overtake them, the bluff and counter bluff - its chess at 35mph with a sprint finish on every lap.
Gee, Milo, I don’t know. The concept of time differences is too confusing for my poor little American-educated brain. I have no idea how to figure out why Lance got the yellow jersey after climbing a big-ass mountain several minutes faster than anyone else, leaving quivering piles of German and Italian muscle in his wake.
Maybe the 60 billion flag waving fans in every country on the fuckin’ planet yelling for their favorite rider could explain how to follow it, understand the implications and derive enjoyment from it.
Now baseball, that I can understand. You throw the ball, you hit the ball, you catch the ball. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes it rains. Plus, usually the scores stay in the single digits so I can follow the action. I don’t have to think too hard about that, no sirree. The good thing about baseball is if you fall behind in one game, you get to come back the next day and the score is 0-0.
This whole yellow jersey thing is so confusing - it’d be almost like watching, say, 162 baseball games, but get this - each day counts equally towards the final championship, perhaps some bizarre trophy like the Yellow Jersey of cycling, oh, let’s say ‘the Pennant’. So if your team loses lots of games early in the 162 game series they have to struggle to come back if they want to win. Boy, am I glad they don’t have anything that complicated in american sports. Anything that involved percentages or averages would surely confuse me. I just look at the scores on my.yahoo.com and I know what team was better that day.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go ride my bike home so I don’t get caught in my car in traffic behind 350 pound lard-ass commute-yuppies in their BMWs shouting at my spandex-clad butt to ‘get out of my way!’ as they sit spewing CO[sub]2[/sub] and hydrocarbons into my face waiting for the light to turn green so they can get stuck in the next micro-jam 50 feet down the road. God I love the Silicon Valley.
