Caliban – Opinion and Righteous Anger

Speaking of the Tour de France, how nice it is to be able to enjoy decent coverage again. The days of Mart Smeets and Jean Nelissen are behind us, but Herbert Dijkstra and Maarten Ducrot are worthy replacements with their interesting insights, dry humour and undisguised irritation. Each stage’s commentary is good for a handful of hilarious quotes.

Back in the US, Sarah and I would be forced to watch OLN’s coverage via DirecTV satellite. It was really quite bad, but it was all we could get and bad coverage is vastly preferable to no coverage. I remember days when OLN provided no live coverage at all, just highlights at the end of the day. Other major irritations with the coverage were:

• The seriously inopportune ad breaks. Sometimes the coverage would be interrupted in the middle of the final climb of a mountain stage. Upon resumption, you would discover that someone had broken away in the climb to make a break for the finish. What the hell is advertising doing in the middle of a continuous sporting event?

• Commentary that failed to captivate. The permanent commentators, Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwin clearly aimed their commentary at people who knew very little about the sport. In fairness, this was probably their brief from the station, as cycling wasn’t really covered in the US before Lance Armstrong started winning. Paul Sherwin, in particular, was a dull commentator, resorting constantly to the same well-worn clichés (some of which still resonate in my ears).

• Amateur coverage. Often, the French camera would zoom in on some noteworthy aspect of the rider or the bicycle, and neither Phil nor Paul would pass even the slightest comment to enlighten the viewer as to what they were looking at. I think they, themselves, were oblivious to whatever was being pointed out by the cameraman. Similarly, they made virtually no comments about the equipment the riders were using, such as which gears they had mounted for that stage and why, or why someone might be using a closed as opposed to an open wheel. The background detail was conspicuous by its absence, too. For example, when the French director would focus on a particular rider, we’d get no mention from the commentators of how that rider was performing this season, what his victories and other accomplishments had been this year and in previous years, anything about the rider’s history or any amusing anecdotes about the region being cycled through, how many times a particular town or mountain had been visited by the Tour, or which other riders had made history here in previous years.

• Partisanship. Dear, oh dear. You would have thought only English-speakers were competing in the race. The intense favouritism for the American riders, particularly Lance Armstrong, was very frustrating to me. It’s American television, so one naturally expects daily interviews with the national riders and copious background information on them and their teams, but with OLN it was to the virtual exclusion of all else. If you were lucky, you’d get a snippet of information about Robbie McEwan or Cadell Evans, presumably by dint of their also being English-speakers and therefore more identifiably similar to Americans. An interview with an Italian, a Spaniard, a Frenchman, a Dutchman, a Kazach or a Swiss? Forget it, unless said person also happened to be a member of Armstrong’s team.

• Kirsten Gumm, Frankie Andreu and Bob Roll. Oh, Oh, oh! Kirsten didn’t know a thing about cycling and was presumably there for an assumed glamour factor. Frankie, a former Motorola rider, was just not a good interviewer. And Bob Roll, another former rider, who’s probably a nice guy to share a drink with, but his coverage was like fingernails on a blackboard. He couldn’t even pronounce the name of the race, for crying out loud.

• The direction. As with the ad breaks, sometimes the viewer would be whisked away from the live coverage to witness a prerecorded superficial interview with some third-rate no-hoper, just because he was an American. In the meantime, God knows what would be going on in the actual race. Why not split the screen down the middle and continue to show us coverage of the race on one half of the screen? Better yet, show us the interview before or after the race, not at a crucial moment during the live coverage.

• No evening coverage in a separate programme. Consequently, there was no post-stage race analysis from either the commentators or knowledgeable guests (such as ex-riders), no mention of the day’s intrigues, no interviews with riders at the finish, no background on the organisation of the Tour de France itself, no analysis of the next day’s stage, etc.

Yes, I know I’m very demanding. I should probably relax in my old age. I’ll probably die complaining about something. On the other hand, if we all settled for mediocrity, where would that get the human race? 🙂

Anno 2007, I have to wonder what the US TV coverage is like now. Armstrong has retired and neither Hincapie nor Leipheimer can make good on the potential they showed in previous years. OK, Leipheimer’s currently fourth in the general classification and that’s great, but he’s not in contention to win. After seven years of Armstrong victories, Americans are used to watching grand spectacle, crowned with a victory.

All of which leads me to expect that viewing figures must be falling over there, aided by the disrepute into which the sport is constantly being brought by doping scandals. I witnessed in my first couple of years in the US how Olympic events were scarcely covered if no Americans were taking part in the event. And if Americans __were__taking part, you’d see pretty much only the Americans performing, plus maybe a couple of Russians just for old time’s sake, to show that they’re still being beaten. And cycling isn’t even broadcast across the national networks; you have to subscribe to a cable or satellite package to get OLN or whatever it’s called these days.

Anyway, enough about the Tour coverage and back to watching it.

While the Tour de France is tailor-made for watching on MythTV with a time-stretch of 110%, making it 10% faster to watch (and thereby reducing 66 minutes of footage to an hour) without any change in audio pitch, it’s hard to take on board the intrigues unfolding in front of my eyes.

The other day, I reported that the German public broadcasters, ARD and ZDF had abandoned the Tour. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that void has already been filled by the German commercial station, SAT1. Nothing bizarre there.

But today, an attempt was made to have to have Michael Rasmussen removed from the race! As we Dutch might say, Het moet niet veel gekker worden.

So, what happened?

The UCI, the Union Cycliste Internationale, is the governing body of all national cycling federations, including the Danish one. It also organises all ProTour races and therefore strives to maintain a closed set of races involving a fixed roster of teams.

The national federations are responsible for carrying out out-of-competition doping tests on all riders that they have licenced to race. In the case of the Danish federation, this includes Michael Rasmussen.

Now, to carry out these tests, the cycling federations need to know where all licenced riders are at all times, so that they can swing by to tap blood and urine at any time.

Here’s where it gets interesting. The current yellow jersey, Michael Rasmussen, is married to a Mexican woman, and therefore spends extended periods of the year in Mexico, training. He’s also a man who likes his privacy, so he’s been pretty lax about announcing his whereabouts whilst overseas.

Now, whether or not the Danish cycling union would, in any case, have bothered to send a man with a test tube to the other side of the world to tap Rasmussen’s pee is a pragmatic question that has no place in the world of cycling bureaucracy. Rasmussen wasn’t available for testing and that’s that.

This happened on several occasions and Rasmussen was issued several warnings. At that point, he should have been penalised, possibly with a one month racing ban or something similar. Instead, however, the Danish union did nothing. In fact, worse than that, they let him take part in the Danish national championship a month ago. In other words, they let the issue slide.

None of this would have mattererd one iota, if the coordinating body of the UCI hadn’t today got wind of this and demanded from the Tour management that Rasmussen be removed from the race for failing to have made himself available for out-of-competition testing.

Rasmussen admits that he hasn’t always treated the Danish union’s demands to be kept abreast of his movements seriously, because they are difficult to comply with. A form has to be filled out before the start of every quarter, detailing the rider’s movements over the next three months. Rasmussen failed to complete one such form on time, resulting in an official warning.

However, to demand his removal from the Tour de France after the cycling union, themselves, let Rasmussen race a month earlier is ludicrous. Not only did they let him race, but they performed doping checks on him numerous times when he was available for testing and found him to be completely clean.

The obvious questions are:

• Why did they let Rasmussen race in the Danish national championship?

• Why was he not penalised at the time according to the union’s own rules?

• Why did the UCI not approach the management of the Tour de France before the race started?

• Why did the UCI make their demand only today, now that Rasmussen is firmly established in the yellow jersey?

It stinks. Bureaucratic incompetence, political malice or some unholy concoction of the two?

Political malice, if you ask me. The UCI and the ASO (the organising body of the Tour de France) have been involved in a power struggle for some time now, with the UCI trying to enforce a closed circuit of races and cajole independent race organisers, such as the ASO, into allowing only UCI-approved ProTour teams into their events.

As usual, it’s not just political power at stake, but money, too. There are huge sponsorship contracts and television broadcasting rights in the pool, so the bald-headed and grey-haired vultures in suits are circling.

None of this has anything to do with cycling whatsoever. The riders, the teams, the fans and the sport as a whole are all victims of this posturing and greed, thinly veiled behind the pretense of seeking to cleanse the sport of drugs. In reality, everyone is looking after his own interests.

Business as usual.

With all of the doping scandals of the last few months, my interest in the noble sport of cycling had reached an all-time low this year. I didn’t bother to watch any classics this year and even the nearing of the Tour de France couldn’t excite me.

But the Tour’s the Tour and so I forced myself to watch the prologue. Of course, once I beheld the spectacle that is the greatest cycling race on earth, I was hooked again, as I am every year. I soon found myself regretting not having travelled to London for the prologue and opening stage, or at least Ghent a few days later. Lame.

The first week of the Tour was pretty dull, really. The prologue is always exciting, but after that, it was the usual array of flat stages ending in mass sprints. This year, however, they seemed even less eventful than usual, perhaps because the strategy is now so well directed from the team leader’s car that the riders themselves scarcely seem incapable of making a decision. It all seems so directed and choreographed.

Happily, that changed somewhat in the Alps, when men like Rasmussen dared to go out on a limb and go for yellow. And then there was Juan Mauricio Soler’s epic and totally surprising victory. This is the stuff great tours are made of.

Before you know it, though, the D-word is back. Patrik Sinkewitz of T-Mobile is found to have tested positive for an abnormally high level of testosterone during an out-of-competition check back in June. ‘Abnormal’ is putting it mildly, too, as his testosterone level made Floyd Landis’s positive test from last year look like a glass of mineral water. In fact, the level was so high that you have to wonder whether this test was reliable, especially since testosterone doesn’t do a cyclist that much good. It’s pretty much only useful for recovering from heavy exertion, but this was a rider in training, not in competition. If he was using testosterone, what on earth was he thinking?

That’s not the strangest thing, though. German cycling has had a particularly hard time of it over the last few months. Ullrich, Aldag, Zabel, etc. The press conferences had the air of a catholic confessional.

The yellow jersey of Linus Gerdeman a few days ago was therefore a timely blessing for the Germans. At 24 years old, he represents the much-vaunted and already tired concept of new cycling, a man with a clean slate, a man who could wash the German Radsport whiter than white.

And then Sinkewitz happens, another German and, as if that weren’t bad enough, a T-Mobile teammate of Gerdeman. You have to feel sorry for Gerdeman, who suddenly finds himself having to justify the entire sport to hordes of sanctimonious German journalists.

But the strangest thing is the response of ARD and ZDF, the German public broadcasters.

As a surprised Sinkewitz was issuing denials from his hospital bed, where he’s been since a bad fall a few days ago after finishing the day’s stage, yesterday afternoon’s Tageschau was announcing that ARD and ZDF have decided to immediately cease their coverage of the Tour de France.

The reason given is that cycling is currently not a credible sport. Therefore, the companies feel they are functioning purely as an advertising vehicle for the various teams. They further claim that to continue the coverage would be to further damage the credibility of the sport, presumably by further exposing the underbelly of the sport in the form of new scandals.

I find this reasoning absolutely bizarre. Yes, there are bad apples in the sport, but it’s not the fault of the Tour de France, any more than it is the fault of the thousands of German fans or up-and-coming riders like Gerdeman. Don’t these broadcasters have a responsibility to behave like journalists and to refrain from this kind of moral judgement? This doesn’t seem like an impartial, unemotional decision to me.

On a related note, what will T-Mobile do? With so many disgraced riders having ridden for that team and having just received the benefit of the doubt for having purged the ranks of old cycling, how will they now react to the discovery that, no sooner is the ink dry on the new cycling charter, than one of the riders who signed it tests positive?

I wouldn’t be surprised if T-Mobile now withdraws from the sport entirely. Who could blame them, especially in view of the fact that they now can’t even get their shirt logo onto TV screens in their own country?

I don’t approve of the decision made by ARD and ZDF. Cycling is a noble sport that is currently struggling to self-cleanse. It needs support and constant publicity to achieve that, not the summary rhetorical judgments of public broadcasters who do the riders and their fans a serious disservice.

If anything, the latest revelation proves that cycling is a credible sport, for it proves that the drug controls work. The irony is that, without controls, no-one would get caught and the German broadcasters would contentedly cover every stage of every race, ignorant to what was going on behind the scenes. And that, of course, is what happened throughout the nineties and in more recent years.

I’m happy that the NOS aren’t debating whether or not to abandon the Tour. They have expressed their continued commitment to cover the world’s most important bike race, in all of its glory and all of its, hopefully ever decreasing, seediness. After all, that’s what journalists are paid to do and to cover a story, you need to be on the spot, reporting the news as it happens. That’s not something you can do from a studio somewhere in Germany.