Taken with instagram
Would you watch this?
It’s been a great couple of weeks watching the USA Pro Cycling Challenge[1] and the Vuelta. Loved the days where we got some great guest commentating for the early part of the stages. Joe Silva killed it. The Velonews boys killed it[2]. I loved following along on Twitter and seeing what everyone had to say about the happenings. It’s no Tour Chats, but it was still fun. To the point though, it got me thinking about my cycling viewing experiences. I hate Versus. There, I said it. Their half-assed coverage of cycling is borderline infuriating. It’s such an after thought compared to the rest of their programming. Aside from three weeks in July, most of what we get is tape-delayed coverage of a handful of events, with commentators who are doing voice-overs after the fact[3]. So what are our alternatives? We get to scour the web for video feeds of the races, and it’s pretty damn hard to find most of the smaller events[4]. Cycling.tv has tried to fill the void, admirably so. It’s still not enough though. What we need, nay the world needs, is a truly dedicated cycling TV channel. Before you laugh, read what I have to say. It can be done…
The Blue Print
· We have to start from somewhere. This is how we do it. We start with Pay-per-view. I know, it sucks, but this is where we need to begin. Creating an entire station is expensive, and find enough capital to do so would be extremely difficult to do. This is why we have to begin with PPV events. Think about it, what would you say if I told you I could offer you Ghent Wevelgem for say 5 bucks, in HD, with lets say a Frankie Andreu and Neal Rogers commentating tandem, live or on demand for a month[5]?
· We sell advertising for cyclists specifically to the people who make/offer services for cyclists. I know, I know, brilliant right? But seriously, we get to walk into Trek, Cervelo, Sram, etc, etc, and say “Here you go. Everyone watching this is a cyclist, or loves cycling at the least. You’ll never have the opportunity to reach a more focused market then this.”
· We create original content for the web and TV. Tour Chats on TV. Vaughters has a weekly spot to tryout new Ascots. You’re telling me Dave Z wouldn’t love a platform to act a fool? The UCI Overlord gets his weekly show. I love football. You guys watch Hard Knocks? Yea, well next years reality show on our network is Team Leopard. You’re telling me you’re not going to watch the Schlecks? You’re not going to watch the interactions between Spartacus and Jensie?! Yea, sure you’re not. We’re going to take all the things that everyone else is doing on the web, and put it in one spot. We’re not going to pirate their ideas either. We’re going to bring them into the fold. How? Profit sharing. We’re not trying to be the next collective Rupert Murdoch. We want our Channel to at first survive, and then thrive. We’re all in this together.
· We are also going to diversify. This is not the UCI network. This is the United We Pedal network[6]. That means continental teams and races. Women’s only races. Grand Fondo’s. RAGBRAI. You get the idea.
In short, while we can’t be everything for everyone, we can try and meet as many people’s needs as we can. We are a tight knit community. We are fiercely loyal. We are passionate about our sport, and we all want a way to enjoy it together. Who’s with me?
Next time…
Sniff. You smell that? It smells like Cross season….
As always, this is the section where I acknowledge the people who inspire me, motivate, or entertain me. Please check them out.
Neil Browne- My unofficial mentor and spiritual advisor. You can find him at neilbrowne.com on Twitter @neilroad
Dan Wouri- THE master of 140 characters or less… You can find him at http://velonews.competitor.com/tag/the-livestream-diaries or on Twitter @dwouri
Hbstache- My wardrobe provider, friend, and fellow lip sweater patron. Find him at hbstache.com on Twitter @hbstache
Ciclirati- My other wardrobe provider. He is also about to start providing my coffee as well. Find him at cilirati.com on Twitter @Ciclirati and his awesome coffee @HighCadenceCoffee highcadencecoffee.com
[1] I hate typing that. Everybody I know, which are the only people that matter really ;), either called it the US Pro, or Tour of Colorado. Both are far better, more manageable names.
[2] I have to listen to Skeletor and Sherwan for 3 straight weeks in July. I honestly don’t dislike their commentating as much as a lot of people do, but damn. Overkill to listen to them during the US Pro too.
[3] This probably pisses me off even more then anything else. Seriously Versus? Don’t your British lap dogs live in ENGLAND?! How hard is it to get them to Belgium? Come on now…
[4] I have a passion for any cycling event that takes place somewhere where people speak Flemish or Dutch. I dream in Vlaamse…
[5] I just tried to give myself a finski!
[6] Hbstache.com My man!
Conversations from the back of the team bus….
Tour de France Thoughts and Reflections
(Editors Note: I know talking about the Tour isn’t exactly timely now, but I just got on tumblr, so I wanted to import this post from my old blog. Frankly, these ramblings took a bit of time, and I think I had some entertaining material for you all. Also, I hope you’ll take the time to check out the footnotes.)
This is my first blog post, so excuse me if I burp during dinner. The last time I checked, it’s July, which means everything is, and should, be revolving around Le Tour. I’m going to assume that beyond my wife and parents the only people who bother to read this, don’t need an explanation of the Tour, so we’ll stick with my opinion, and that of the people I respect in the cycling community. It’s a little after midnight est. on July 23, 2011. The demi-gods, I mean cyclists, who are attempting their 20th straight day of the running equivalent of a daily marathon, are approximately a little over 7 hours away from starting the penultimate stage of the Tour. This seemed like an incredibly opportune time to start my blog/rant/lovefest, depending on the day….
Let’s start with addressing the White Buffalo[1] in the room. The cycling we are watching now, isn’t your weird 30 plus hipster (shit, just outted myself) uncle’s Tour. This is what we all threw rotten tomatoes at- the UCI, WADA, ASO, and the likes of Flyod[2], Basso, and Vino, for the better part of a decade now. Well, we all got what we wished for this year. This is a (fingers crossed so tight that Cadel’s voice[3] just went up another octave) clean Tour. Here’s what we get, incredibly athletic guys, in incredible shape, still suffering. Because that’s what normal human beings do, they suffer when they ride a bike over 100 miles a day avg over mountains that stress people out just to drive over. They have their great days[4], and their days where the legs and the lungs quit[5]. We may see another Eddy Merckx, Lance Armstrong, Bernard Hinault, etc… (and let me say for the record now, none of these men have ever been shown to have used PED’s, and they are all inspiring cyclists to me, I only bring them up for the point that they dominated the Tour[6].) Maybe we’ll see another dominate cyclist, maybe not… I think if people my age (lets just say 25-35 and beyond) are honest with themselves, they’d have to admit that, at minimum, not seeing someone own the Tour basically from whenever the first or second big mountain stage happens, to the end, is a little weird/unfamiliar, to (even if they wouldn’t publicly admit it) a little disappointed/reminiscent. Well, I’m here to tell you, get used to it! We may see another 5 plus timer again, but it’s not likely in my opinion. I don’t think this is a bad thing. Here is my list of reasons why this might have been the greatest Tour ever…
A) The Crashes- (if doping is the White Buffalo, The ridiculous number of horrific crashes is the Drunk Aunt at Thanksgiving dinner) Nobody really wants to see it, but we all can’t stop watching without the mix of horror and weird excitement that we’ll have to work out with our therapist, in the future. It’s like the ASO went, “Shit! No Lance, everyone hates Contador, and the Schlecks couldn’t command a room if their collective lives depended on it[7]!” Wait, I’ve got it! What if we set up a course where the riders will be on the ragged edge for like 20 of the stages? Oh wait, that’s exactly what the ASO did, and this years’ Tour became Nascar at Martensville[8], whichever GC contender makes it to the end wins. I’ve been watching wrecks in the Tour for years, but this year is redonkulous! The Hoogerland wreck (we’ll get to him), the Vinokourov/Dave Z wreck, the Boonen wreck, the Chris Horner wreck, etc, etc, etc, my keyboard doesn’t have an infinity symbol etc.
B) Thomas Voeckler deserves a statue in his honor. That was downright heroic watching him hold onto the Maillot Jaune each day. Especially once they hit the Pyrenees, where he basically found himself isolated with the top GC contenders on just about every mountain stage finish[9]. He matched the best of the best and more then made his country proud. Every Frenchman/woman should be proud of him, and if there not, we’ll take him.
C) Johnny HOOGERLAND! Hoogs gets all caps from me. There is no way for me to express how much respect I now have for him. This ties in to the crashes I talked about before, but Hoogs’ crash was different. It was inexplicable how it even happened. Tour crashes are supposed to be caused by rider error, or the conditions, or mechanical failures by the bikes themselves. They are NOT supposed to be caused by idiots in cars. By now everyone has heard about the crash. ESPN even deemed it worthy of getting two seconds of coverage on Sportscenter[10]. Since we all know what it looked like, lets try and put it into some kind of perspective. Each day of riding in the Tour is approximately the physical equivalent of running a marathon (as far as its toll on the body). Lets combine that fact, with the fact that Hoogs was in the break the day it happened. This means he was going through a far greater physical exertion then those riders in the peloton who were having a relatively relaxed stage. So what we have is a rider who is pushing his body to its limit, who wrecks at 30 mph[11] while flipping into a barbed wire fence, absolutely shredding his body. I’m sorry, but 90% of all cyclists would have given up and abandoned the Tour right then and there. Instead, Hoogs gets back on his bike after minimal aid from the Med team, and wills himself to finish the stage before the time cutoff for the day. Balls of granite on that man. @hbstache, a respected fellow cycling blogger/cycling business owner even came up with a new slogan that he now has available on a great t-shirt (check my friends list for a link). HoogerlandTFU! That sums it up perfectly.
D) Thor Hushovd. I’ll keep Thor’s review brief, not because he didn’t have a stellar tour[12], but because he will also be included later in my GarminCervelo point. Thor reestablished himself in the Tour after what, in his own words, has been a bit of a lackluster year. He did us all proud when he attacked for a beautiful stage win while wearing the World Champion’s rainbow jersey. I would argue that while it is said that the Maillot Jaune gives riders wings, the rainbow jersey is an anchor that weighs riders down. The pressure of having that jersey on your shoulders, particularly because whoever has it for the year ends up riding far more races then most ever would choose to do.
E) The Good Schleck. Oh Andy and Frank. Shaking my head. Full disclosure, I am a big fan of both Schlecks, and Andy was my pick to win the Tour, so I’m more then a little disappointed. I’m a bit of a cranky bastard, so I choose to get the good out of the way first, before focusing on why Andy lost the Tour. Fortunately for you naïve optimists, the good is pretty damn good. Andy unleashed an epic attack on stage 18. That was the kind of attack that our fathers and grandfathers told us about Eddy “The Cannibal” Merckx doing. The kind we haven’t seen in a couple decades[13] it was my favorite stage of the whole Tour. I can’t remember being that excited while watching a stage in years. I can’t speak for everyone, but I personally loved the risk. Most of us live fairly boring lives, where we rarely put anything real on the line, and we’re used to watching a Tour that is often controlled and calculated by the best teams with one of the top GC guys. They rarely take risks themselves. They stay close to their rivals, they mark each other’s attacks, and they either widdle down leads, or go for it on a stage, but usually only on the final climb of one targeted stage. That’s the way you win a Tour. You put together a strong team with one, and only one, GC guy who can climb, and Time Trial fairly well. You pick one stage, have your team blow up the peloton with their pace setting leading up to the last climb, and then your guy goes for it. The rest of the Tour you mark your rivals, protect your GC guy, and have him just put a decent TT. Before anyone kills me for the last few sentences, I’m speaking in generalities to emphasize a point. This is what Lance did for 7 years, and he did it to absolute perfection. It’s essentially what Cadel Evans did as well. And in my opinion it is incredibly impressive, but also incredibly boring and uninspiring to watch. This is what sets Andy’s ride apart. He went all in. His attack could have failed miserably. He could have been caught and dropped by the other GC contender’s if he had gone any earlier[14]. That’s what made it so intriguing and entertaining to watch. We were all sitting there, eyes glued to the TV, thinking the same thing. Is this going to work?! I can’t believe he even tried it! He is going to win the Tour right here, right now! Admit it. We all thought he had won it until those last two kilometers, where the time gap’s started to drop. I know quite a few cycling fans, whom knew right away, that he didn’t have enough time, and Cadel could easily get it back in the TT. I was not one of those forward thinking individuals. Had I really thought about it, I would have known right away too. Cadel is one of the best time trialists in the world, and Andy looks like he would rather be wrapped in Hoogerlands’ fence then on his TT bike. But the fact is I was so damned excited about what I had just seen to even give it a thought. I hope we see more of this in years to come. You could easily argue that Tommy Voeckler did the same thing for a week and a half. Throwing it all in to keep the jersey and not knowing if he was going to be able to recover the next day to do it again. It’s the kind of bike racing that inspires people[15]. It’s also the kind of racing that people want to watch, and that can be sold to advertisers[16] and television networks.
F) The Bad Schleck. Forget the TT! The TT is not where Andy lost the Tour. If you think it is, you’re wrong. I’m sorry, but you are. We all knew Andy was going to lose time once he put on a skinsuit. The TT may have technically been the stage where Andy handed over the Maillot Jaune, but he lost it, before he ever even put it on to begin with. In fact, Andy lost this year’s Tour 5 years before he was even born. He lost it the day his older brother Frank was born, because flash forward to Stage 14 of this year’s Tour. Andy was clearly the best GC rider on that day. Multiple times Andy attacked, and no one was able to immediately respond, but to the dismay of me, and I’m sure the majority of his fans, every time he got a gap, he inexplicably would turn to see where Frank[17] was and slow back to the GC-leton. This didn’t happen once or twice either. There were a solid half-dozen times Andy could have staked claim to the time he would have needed, to win the Tour. But his relationship with his brother appeared to almost mentally cripple him from dispassionately attacking his rivals. It was like Andy decided that if Frank couldn’t come with him, it wasn’t worth winning alone. Now this is all revisionist history. And there is a major flaw in my argument, namely, had Andy made the attack I was screaming at my TV for him to make[18], then what are the odds that he throws in that all or nothing attack on 18? Answer, zero. He would have been wearing yellow, and the Maillot Jaune doesn’t get to make those attacks. I would argue however, that Andy was the best man on 18 regardless, and he would have been able to attack on the final climb and gain some time, which coupled with what he should have gotten on Stage 14. I believe that those gains would have amounted to more then the minute thirty that Andy lost the Tour by. As much as this might raise more then a few people’s ire, I think Andy lost the Tour every bit as much as Cadel won it.
G) Garmin Cervelo. What an incredible showing by the American based team. Despite the fact they didn’t win any of the individual classifications, they won the team classification, got multiple wins (the team’s first ever at the Tour), and were generally the talk of the Tour, almost from beginning to end. It began with an amazing TTT, that saw Dave Zabriskie rocking the Captain America US TT Champ skinsuit taking huge turns on the front, and Thor Hushovd grabbing the Maillot Jaune, and not relinquishing it for the whole of the first week.
H) Cadel “Cuddles” Evans. Congrats man. You’ve never been my favorite rider, but there is no doubting that you have spent a creer working your ass off for this[19]. On many a mountain stage you found yourself in a Schleck sandwich with Alberto “where’s the beef?” Contador there too. You handeled it perfectly, picking your spots, marking all the big moves, and biding your time for what was an epic individual TT.
All in all, this was the best Tour I’ve watched in years. I could write a book about this one (obviously). If you’re a fan of cycling, and you weren’t at least a little bit inspired or awed at what you saw, then you have no soul, and I cast a hex on you that will force you to only ride Huffy’s for the rest of your life (insert evil laugh). Anyhow, thank you for reading, even if it was only part. I’d appreciate any feedback, sarcastic or otherwise. And if anyone knows a guy, who knows a guy in the industry, wink, wink, send them my way.
You can reach me here, or on twitter where I’m @rutgers79
As always, this is a list of the guys and gals that either, inspire me, entertain me, or put out such great stuff that they can’t be ignored.
Neil Browne (my cycling journalism, and spiritual mentor)
Twitter @neilroad, website neilbrowne.com
Brett from Handlebar Mustache (my wardrobe provider)
Twitter @hbstache, website hbstache.com
Dan Wouri (I only wish I was his level funny)
Twitter @dwouri
[1] Hot Tub Time Machine, hated it the first time I saw it, but it has grown on me more and more.
[2] Floyd was a product of his environment. Sorry, but that’s a fact. He didn’t do anything that 60 or 70 percent of the Tour was doing at that time. FYI, Floyd, if by some miracle you read this, what the eff is the nascar thing? Dude, I’m trying, but you’re starting to drift into Gary Busey territory…
[3] No really, it sounds like Cadel uses helium as a PED… I’ll bet during the off season he’s a bass in his barber shop quartet.
[4] See Thor Hushovd, Stage 13. Thor is a beast. http://velonews.competitor.com/2011/07/news/hushovd-wins-stage-13-of-the-2011-tour-de-france_184085
[5] This makes me quezy every time I watch it.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgStAPQhA3M
[6] I treat all doping, PED’s, Steroids, accusations the same. Like a Judge would. If there is even an ounce of doubt, they are innocent in my court. Decisions based on speculation, or he said, he said, permanently damage an athlete’s reputation. None of us would want speculation to trump evidence, so I’m not doing it to athletes.
[7] Seriously! I said this as a joke at first, but is the road champion of Luxembourg determined by whichever rider can make it from one end of the country to the other first?
[8] I love sports. Let’s talk about anything. But nascar? I only did my research for that reference because I’m a pro, and don’t want to short-change you… ;)
[9] Every day Tommy would get interviewed following the stage and say, “I think today was my last day in yellow.” And everyday, he would gut it out.
[10] I’m not even going to begin to spell out my take on why cycling doesn’t get the coverage we think it deserves. I’ll tackle that in a future post, probably early in the morning when I’m cursing trying to find a vid stream of one of the minor “Classics” while suffering from a hangover of epic proportions.
[11] One of my fellow enthusiasts told me that he tried to describe what it feels like to wreck on a bike to a non cyclists, by describing it as “getting your car up to about 30 mph, opening the door, and jumping out.” I think that is about as accurate a description as I’ve ever heard.
[12] Two stage wins, one while in the world champ jersey, plus part of GarminCervelo’s TTT win. If you argued that he was the best non-GC guy at this year’s Tour, I’d have a hard time disagreeing with you.
[13] I have permanently removed the Landis ride from my memory. It never happened, and you can’t convince me it did.
[14] Don’t believe me? Google, watt output stage 18. Andy was crashing hard, and the GCleton was catching up quick. You don’t even need the numbers. Just look at the way Andy was riding in the last 5k.
[15] All those people who discovered cycling because of Lance, got pulled in by the cancer story, but got hooked because of the awesome attacking displays like the one he put on Lars Ullrich on Alpe d’Huez.
[16] For karma purposes I have to balance out my Lance compliment with a criticism. If I have to watch one more Michelob Ultra commercial, I’m going to kill someone.
[17] We came up with a, dare I say, plethora of entertaining nicknames and observations. From the Schlooks, to our suggestion, that the Schlecks should just start riding a tandem to avoid their separation anxiety.
[18] I have a checklist that I always run through before watching my New York Knicks play. Gallinari Jersey? Check. Scotch? Check. Something soft to throw at the TV? Check. Ok, I’m ready for the Knicks game. I’m thinking of adding that to my Tour check list as well, even if it is 8 am, and even by my standards, too early for scotch.
[19] Couldn’t we the cycling fans, decide to just make Cadel the 2006 winner? If we did that, we could just erase all those bad memories…..on second thought, I think Tommy Voeckler should be the 2006 TdF champ. Who’s with me?
