On The Road
by: Bill Oetinger 11/1/2001
Call your cable company...
Do you get the NBC SN (formerly the Versus Network and formerly Outdoor Life Network)? (This is television I'm talking about here. OLN is a network available to some cable subscribers and to many folks who use a satellite dish.) I do not get OLN. I wish I did. My cable company offers me 42 channels, of which it seems about half are shopping channels, Christian channels, or local stations showing Star Trek repeats 24 hours a day. If I could actually choose which channels I'm paying for--what a concept!--OLN would definitely be at the top of the list.
Why? If you get it, you already know the answer to that: bicycle racing, and lots of it. OLN has an extensive--one might almost say exhaustive--schedule of bike race coverage, including all of the Tour de France, Giro d'Italia, and Vuelta a España, not to mention all of the major one-day classics like Paris-Roubaix, tons of mountain bike races, and other bike related programs. And when I say they cover all of a given race, I mean ALL of it. Every minute of every mile of every stage. In fact, they show all of it about three times a day: live; then in a repeat later in the day, often with expanded commentary; and then again late at night, in case you couldn't catch it earlier in the day. One fellow I know who does have OLN will watch each stage twice. First time through, he watches the racing. Second time, he enjoys the scenery. Or at least that's how he explains the marathon viewing sessions to his wife.
As any of you who have followed bike racing in this country knows, it hasn't always been like this. For many years, coverage of major European races--indeed any bike racing at all--was completely unavailable in any visual format here...not even 30 seconds of highlights on the evening news. That changed for the better, albeit in little increments, with the successes of Greg Lemond in the Tour de France and of the American cycling squad at the '84 Olympics. We began to see an hour or so of coverage on weekends of the Tour de France. Very little else. And even then, the networks always felt the need to reach out to a broader audience than just the bike weenies by taking precious minutes away from the actual racing to wax poetic about French wines or some damn thing.
When ESPN became widely available, we started seeing daily reporting of stage races...the Tour de France and the Tour duPont anyway. These were little half-hour highlight shows, with maybe ten minutes devoted to anything close to live coverage of the day's stage. Still, it was an improvement.
Now, finally, we--or some of us anyway--have access to almost an overload of bike racing. As I said, I don't get the Outdoor Life Network, but I have friends who do. And some of these friends are avid tapers of the big races. I stay up-to-date on each day's stage of the big races by checking in with one or more of the bike racing websites--another great innovation--and then I borrow the tapes and watch the stages at my leisure. Admittedly, it's not as cool as seeing the races unfold in real time. The suspense of wondering who's going to win is gone. But I still enjoy watching the races, for a variety of reasons.
The thing I like best is being able to watch them in their entirety...not just little snippets clipped together into a highlight reel. With a whole stage, you get to see all the moves, all the tactics, all the pushes and pulls of riders and team managers. Those racers are out there for five or more hours at a stretch, sprinting, attacking, sitting in, climbing, eating, covering breaks, descending, etc. No handful of highlights can begin to convey the complexity and the subtle nuance of a whole stage, with over 100 riders interacting for over 100 miles. It's an immense chess game, played out at high speed, often with great danger, usually near the limits of stamina and skill, and frequently set against incredibly scenic backdrops. If you really love the sport, and if you want to fully understand and appreciate the development of each race, then you have to take the time to absorb the whole package.
For me, the races sort of break up into four distinct phases: climbing, descending, sprinting, and...what to call the fourth phase?...rolling? (I mean the time when the peloton is just covering ground...not doing any of the other three things.) All of these race phases are enhanced by being watched right through.
Climbing: obviously, this is going to be great seen in its entirety. Big climbs are where the big moves are made, and while a brief highlight might show some critical moment, where the winner attacked or the challenger cracked, you need the whole hill, from bottom to top, or better yet, all of the hills and all of the not-hills leading up to them, to fully appreciate why that critical move succeeded, or why the loser cracked when he did. Who had the good team support up the lower slopes before the final push? Who had no support? What alliances were made for the day? You need context.
Plus it's just so cool to watch these superb athletes climb...tapping out a tempo at a speed we can only dream about. And this is where we can really see how hard they're working, as the leading group shrinks from a few dozen riders to a handful and finally to the last two or three. When all the domestiques have done their jobs, when all the lieutentants have taken their pulls and dropped off, when all the pretenders have cracked and no one is left but the serious contenders... If we don't watch the whole race, we never see this winnowing process, this culling of the herd. And we never see the progressive deterioration of those who want to win but haven't quite got what it takes, on this day at least. When the best man launches his attack, and his chief rival just watches him ride away...maybe he tries to cover the attack: leaps out of the saddle and tries a few desperate spins on the pedals, then sits back down and hangs his head... We wonder why he can't just make a little effort and bridge back up...the attacker is right there in front of him. But then we realize he has made all the efforts that are in his body and soul today. There is nothing left or he would do it. You see the human, frail face of failure...the agony of defeat. Or not really failure or defeat: just the grim reality that your best was not good enough. And up the road, we see the other reality: the gloriously triumphant winner, utterly used up by the last effort to drop his rivals, but riding an emotional wave to the finish, surfing on the cheers of thousands of fans. No little highlight reel can capture the full measure of that experience. You have to see how it was earned, mile by agonizing mile, to really savor it.
Descending: now this is probably my most favorite bike race eye-candy of all...and it's the one aspect of bike racing that is most likely to be left out of the little highlight shows. The only highlight moments on downhills are crashes. In most cases on a long descent, you don't see one defining move that can be captured in 30 seconds of edited footage. To really appreciate a downhill, you must see the whole thing, from the stuffing of the newspapers under the jerseys at the summit to the roll out in the valley, 12 or 18 or 20 hairball kilometers later. All professional racers are good descenders by the standards of our amateur, recreational rides. But just as there are some riders who specialize in climbing or sprinting, there are also those who are the best descenders...who call on extreme levels of bravery and bike handling skills to carve down mountain passes at speeds that would be suicide for an average rider.
I'm a great fan of auto racing too, and I admire immensely the courage and skill of racing drivers, taking it right to the limit, lap after lap. But I submit that for pure racing thrills, there are no moments in auto or motorcycle racing that can compare to watching a top descender pushing the envelope at 70-mph on a dinky little alpine road, with sheer dropoffs around the corners, with no safety equipment except--sometimes--a helmet, and stuck to the road with two little contact patches from those itty bitty tires. Even when I know the results of the race, I am absolutely on the edge of my seat when I watch these extended downhill ballets. (My wife has little interest in bike racing. She will sit in the room with me, doing something else, while I watch a race. But even she will put down her book or her knitting and watch in awe during the more exciting descents.)
Sprinting: most daily highlight programs will show a sprint finish. They have to: it's the end of the stage...who won? Usually they show it from beyond the finish line, looking back down the last few hundred yards of the course, using a telephoto lens to bring the action up close. Telephoto views though, while bringing the action closer to us, have the unfortunate side effect of compressing the distance traveled, so the sense of speed is diminished. If you've ever stood right next to the railing on the finishing straight during a field sprint, the sense of speed is terrific. And not only speed: there is a sense of barely contained violence and mayhem that rivals any football game or rugby scrum. Most of that gets lost in a little highlight clip. But what you get with full coverage is not only several views of the last, frantic sprint, but the several miles of run up to the finish, and that gives the final sprint its proper perspective.
Almost all sprint finishes end in the middle of a city, so the miles leading up to the finish snake their way through the increasingly narrow streets of the old city center (not infrequently on cobblestones). Seeing over 100 closely packed riders jostling and jockeying for position in the winding, congested lanes is hair raising stuff. Teams with top sprinters work like demons to position their main man just where he needs to be for the final lunge, and of course all of those teams are working to carve out about the same chunks of prime real estate, so there is a whole lot of elbowing and shoving and riding your rivals into the rails. Sometimes riders pushed right to the curb simply hop their bikes sideways and up, onto the sidewalk, often without breaking cadence. The skills and ice-cold boldness of it all just takes the breath away. Meanwhile there are the lone attackers going off, one after another, hoping to steal the stage from the sprinters, all of whom have to be brought back, reeled in, nullified. And all of this jostling and jousting--for several miles--is going on at a rate of speed most of us couldn't sustain for a hundred yards, if at all: usually over 40-mph and sometimes over 50. Incredible!
My favorite shots during these run ups to the finish are from the helicopters, looking down on the whole mass of riders...that squirrelly, squirming mass of kinetic energy known at the peloton. From above, it looks like a school of fish, darting and diving down the canyons of the old city streets, sudden, lunatic attacks sparking off the front or surging up from mid-pack...savage riders knifing through gaps that aren't even there. It's a mesmerising spectacle. The old cliché "action-packed" barely covers it, and once again, you're up on the edge of your seat, hardly daring to blink in case you might miss something.
Rolling: or whatever you call it...the large blocks of time--miles and hours--when the riders are traversing valleys or flats between the more exciting sprints or climbs or descents. On the face of it, these miles could seem rather boring, even to confirmed bike nuts. But this is where the TV announcers really earn their money. Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwyn, who have been covering Euro racing for many years, are absolutely superb at their craft. It amazes me how they manage to fill in all those "empty" miles with meaningful chatter, and yet they do. In fact, it really enhances the entire race to watch these sections and listen to their knowledgeable commentary, as they discuss team strategy, make reference to other races this season or to past races in earlier years, dissect the strengths and weaknesses of each rider and of his team, and so on. This is where you come to understand the subtle, often unseen forces that shape and animate the race. This guy has a bad knee. That guy is coming back from a crash. This young rider has been having good results in minor races...you might not have heard of him before, but keep your eye on him now. On and on...vast quatities of trivial and crucial information, leavened with liberal dollops of humor and anecdote. I've always admired the way baseball announcers can fill the endlessly boring stretches that make up about 9/10ths of a baseball game with witty patter and little anecdotes. Well, Phil and Paul and their sidekicks do at least as good a job with those connector miles in races.
I can see why some of these flat miles could easily be edited out of the highlight clips, and I confess that, when watching the races on tape, I will sometimes hit the fast forward button through some of these sections. But when you do that, you do miss a lot of informative, entertaining stuff.
I should probably briefly mention time trials too, as a fifth distinct phase of stage races. Although they are often the most important, pivotal points in a race, they don't make good highlights. Seeing one rider alone, crossing the finish line, means absolutely nothing. On the other hand, watching the whole stage, or at least the whole time trials of the leading riders, makes for very interesting viewing. Checking the time splits, or better yet, watching your favorite rider reeling in his three-minute man, can be very exciting, especially when the time differentials are rearranging the leader board.
So anyway...all of the above, in no particular order, is why I love watching bike races...in their entirety. I applaud the Outdoor Life Network for making such a strong commitment to cycling, and I hope the market forces that drive the cable industry will eventually reward them with inclusion in most cable packages. And until that happens, I hope my friends keep taping the races for me!
You can help bring OLN into your home by calling or writing your own cable provider and urging them to find a home for OLN in their offerings. If enough of us rattle enough of their cages, we may see some results, someday.
Editors Note: 6/18/10 – OLN is now known as Versus and the link has been corrected.
Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net