On The Road
by: Bill Oetinger 10/1/2004
Things I think about while watching too much TV
Did you watch the Olympics on TV? Did you expect to see some cycling? There were little snippets of two-wheeled sport here and there, but you had to be alert and have lucky timing to catch any of it. Or else you had to go into total Olympic-junkie mode, hunkered down on the sofa for 18 hours of every day, slogging through badminton and synchronized swimming and beach volleyball to winkle out those little bike nuggets buried in the mire.
I can’t really fault NBC for their poor bike coverage. Let’s face it: they had an almost impossible task in trying to cover all the sports on the Olympic menu in a finite amount of air time. Lots of other legitimate sports got even shorter shrift than cycling. Personally, I would have liked to see some wrestling, eventing, and weightlifting--along with more cycling--but you had to search diligently on their cable affiliates in the middle of the day to see any of these apparently too esoteric pastimes, and even then, they were hard to find. I saw a total of about three minutes of track cycling: a little sliver of the team pursuit final and a couple of nanoseconds of individual pursuit. Not one minute of sprints. No Madison. No Keirin. Nada...zip. If I have any complaint about their priorities, it would be that they hogged way too much time showing too many preliminary rounds in swimming and way, way too much of the Misty May/Kerri Walsh tandem in beach volleyball.
I mean, really...beach volleyball is a swell sport, I’m sure. A poor relation compared to full team volleyball, in my humble, couch potato opinion, and only an official medal sport for what, a couple of Olympics? Hardly a towering bastion of importance to anyone outside the little world of the beach scene. But geez, we were subjected to every point of every match they played, where so many of the points look exactly alike...serve, volley, set, spike...yawn. Couldn’t some of that time have been devoted to other sports?
The marquee cycling event of the Olympics--in theory at least--would have to be the men’s road race. Because it was important, NBC chose to hold its broadcast until prime time. This, it turns out, is a curse in disguise. Prime time is crammed with other stuff--gymnastics and swimming mostly, in that first week--so the race got edited down to a skimpy little digest about ten minutes long. Totally pointless when taken out of context like that. The women’s road race, on the other hand, wasn’t considered important enough to be held over for prime time, and as a result, it got shown in its entirety early on a Sunday morning. If you were awake and paying attention, you got to see the whole development of the race...the attacks and chases, the hot, brutal climbs, the crucial crash...and so it all made sense. No such luck with the men’s race.
But if the men’s race had been shown in that morning slot on Saturday, I would have missed it anyway. I was going riding. Any hope I might have entertained of keeping any suspense about the winner until the evening’s viewing was wiped out as soon as I met up with Emilio on the road. From 100 yards away, I could hear him yelling: “Bettini! Bettini!” He had followed the race in real time on one of the internet feeds, so he knew the result hours before the race would appear on TV, and he was letting everyone know the score.
Really, I was as happy as Emilio that Paolo Bettini had won. The Olympic road race can be a bit of a crap shoot, like the World’s or some of the one-day classics. Sometimes the results can be a bit flukey. Races can play out in strange ways and strange results can pop up. Witness the virtually unknown Sergio Paulinho taking the silver medal. Sergio who? So it’s always nice when the race runs true to form: when the pre-race favorite brings home the bacon. And certainly, Bettini is the cream of the crop for the one-day races right now...especially on a course such as the one they laid out in Athens. Everyone said he should win, and win he did. It would have been nice to see one of the Yanks pull off a big result, but it wasn’t to be.
However... how about the road time trials? Tyler Hamilton and Bobby Julich with gold and bronze, and in the women’s TT, Dede Demet-Barry and Christine Thorburn with silver and fourth. Wow! Between the two events, US riders were first, second, third, and fourth. Sweet redemption for Hamilton after his disastrous Tour de France. I love him dedicating the win to his deceased pooch Tugboat, wearing the dog’s tags under his jersey...how corny is that? (Note...great name for a children’s book: Tyler, the Tough Little Tugboat.) And Julich, the original Mr. Nice Guy, resurrecting his faltering career under the care of Bjarne Riis, coming back to near the level we always expected of him. Finally, a big round of applause for Viatcheslav Ekimov taking the silver--while defending his gold from 2000--at age 38. What a classic old warrior he is! Cut from the same bolt of cloth as hard men like Sean Kelly and André Tchmil, but also always the gentleman. He never complains; never acts the prima donna; hardly ever even speaks. He just goes out and works his ass off, week after week, year after year. How many times has he said he was going to retire? What a trouper.
I can’t say I was surprised at the utterly microscopic coverage NBC gave the time trials. Admittedly, an ITT can be poor TV fare: nothing going on but these guys in funny hats chugging along an empty road, one at a time. The only possible way an ITT can be made compelling is if you watch every minute of it...every mile, with intelligent commentators filling in the blanks. When you pick up the intermediate time splits and see who’s gaining and who’s losing time, it can get pretty exciting, at least for the dedicated fans. It would have taken at least an hour, uninterrupted, to do it justice, but NBC was never going to devote that much time to this arcane event. What they did end up showing was ridiculous, like highlights on the evening news. It had originally been scheduled for an afternoon slot on one of the cable channels, where perhaps it would have been accorded more attention. I kept the TV on all afternoon, checking in from my home office every so often to see if it was on yet--amidst the archery and rowing semi-finals, et al--and either I missed it or it never aired. I’m guessing that when NBC saw the USA in gold and bronze, they made a quick deciscion to move the event to prime time, and the same thing that happened to the men’s road race happened to the time trial: too many bigger fish in the pool in prime time, so the bike boys got squeezed.
So anyway...some exciting results in the various bike disciplines, but overall, pathetic but probably inevitable coverage of the sport by NBC. I don’t know that they could have done better, but I do recall--if my memory isn’t failing me--lots more exposure to bike events at prior Olympics: the men’s race in full (in some previous years) and lots of sprints and pursuits on the track. Maybe it was just that there were no notable American results in those events this year, so NBC shunted them off into limbo. After all, if the USA isn’t winning, what do we care?
Which reminds me (on a subject utterly unrelated to cycling): what about all those flags? You saw it absolutely everywhere. Whenever someone would win an event, or even finish second or third, somehow, out of nowhere, a hand reaches in from off camera and hands the athlete a full-sized flag to wave or drape around themselves. What the heck is up with that? It wasn’t just the Americans. When Fani Halkia won the women’s 400m hurdles, for instance, she hadn’t even stopped running when some anonymous party scuttled out onto the track and draped her in a Greek flag. I suppose, because of NBC’s penchant for focusing on the homies, we did see the same scenario again and again with the good old stars and stripes. Plus, the USA did win the most medals...but who’s counting?
Who are these people with the seemingly inexhaustible supply of fresh flags to hand out? In this Olympics of ultra-tight security--where supposedly no one could even sneeze without a proper credential--how was it possible for this endless stream of flag floggers to simply waltz out onto the track unchallenged? Were they all properly accredited members of their many, respective state departments? Were they part of the TV crew, hoping to make the winners more telegenic? I have no idea, and I really would like to know who’s behind it. I know one thing for sure: it was not just a spontaneous eruption of emotion. It was fully choreographed by someone.
What bugs me about it is how it flies in the face of the essential ethos of the Olympics: that we are all competing and sharing the experience as brothers and sisters of the world community; that nationalism is supposed to take a back seat to sportsmanship and fellow feeling. It was supposed to be especially the case this time around, with all athletes from all nations on their best behavior as citizens of one world united against the barbarism of terror. In fact the US team in particular had been admonished to stay low profile. As Tyler Hamilton noted in his diary: “The Americans were under a watchful eye and were asked to refrain from hanging flags, banners or anything American looking from our balconies, windows or doorways (in the athletes’ village).” So what happens? We get endless flag waving until our eyes glaze over from the stultifying sameness of it all. I mean, if you win, they’re gonna play your national anthem and raise your flag over the stadium. What more do you need? I don’t get it.
If any of my smart readers out there knows the authentic answer to the question of who the flag pimps are and who sets them in motion, let me know, and I’ll pass it along in some future column.
So enough already about cycling at the Olympics and the lousy TV coverage it got. But not enough--not by a long chalk--about lousy TV coverage of cycling in general. By now, you will have figured out that OLN chose not to televise the Vuelta a España during September...one of the three most important stage races of the year.
They have carried the race live (in the morning, PST, and in replay in the evening) for several years. It has made for some wonderful viewing for bike nuts. But according to OLN President Gavin Harvey, it just isn’t penciling out as a money-maker. “Cycling is more than just another bit of programming; it’s a passion for us. A lot of folks at OLN spent six weeks in France, working 20 hours a day. But the Vuelta is one of the worst performing franchises that we have. That is the cold, hard reality. We can’t afford to have it perform as it has in years past. We just don’t have the resources at our network right now.” (For an extended interview with Harvey on this subject, check out http://www.velonews.com/news/fea/6795.0.html.)
Okay. There you have it, from the head cheese himself. The Vuelta is a loser, and so, he claims, is the Giro. But the Giro at least serves as a seasonal teaser leading into the Tour de France, where the Only Lance Network has all its eggs in one big basket. I can’t argue with his numbers. He says he’s a die-hard biker himself, and that they’re passionate about cycling at OLN, so I will have to trust him on this.
But I could wish it were otherwise. I would gladly trade every last one of those Lance Chronicles and Road to the Tour shows, plus all the money they spent on those asinine Cyclism promotions (with that blithering idiot in the big sweater) for just one hour a day for 20 days during the Vuelta. Sure, I want the live feed...hours of it each day, if possible. But if that won’t fly, just give me one hour of tape delay. Put it on at 11:00 pm. I don’t care. Hey, beggars can’t be choosers, and if that’s all we can get, we’ll be grateful. But please don’t send us back to the Dark Ages of American cycling coverage...back to the bad old days of John Tesh and Pierre Salinger frittering away our tiny time slots with ambience segments on wine tasting and whatnot. Don’t take the entire three-week race and condense it into a one-hour wrap-up! It can’t be done!
I tell ya: I’m very depressed about this, and I fear for the future of all cycling coverage in this country once the big guy from Texas retires. (Not W...the other one.) Will even the Tour de France be safe then? I fear we have been living in a bit of a fool’s paradise for the past few years, during the Lance era, and that it would be quite easy for the gains we have made in coverage to quietly slip away. OLN won’t be much different from NBC: if some high-profile American isn’t dominating the scene, the sport will again fade into obscurity as a very marginal niche item.
I know people who--in protest or disgust--are cancelling whatever level of cable or satellite service they have that has brought them OLN. But I wonder if that message will get back to the source or make any impression at all if it does. I understand OLN has been swamped with e-mails and letters from irate cycling fans about this decision, but apparently that cuts very little ice with the bean counters, who claim a rerun of some bass fishing show offers a better return than one of the most exciting stage races of the year. That is the sobering reality we have to face, and I don’t know exactly what we can do about it.
Maybe we’ll just have to stop watching other people riding their bikes on TV and go outside and ride our own bikes instead.
Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net