So I have been thinking about this a lot recently, especially having just partaken in 12.5 days of one of the world’s biggest races… TV coverage of cycling, live-feeds, everything involving WATCHING a bike race from afar… It is all kind of, well, bland. Sure some races are thoroughly captivating, and I am the first one to sit down for hours and watch a Tour de France stage.
I’m just saying. I usually fall asleep with about 60km to go and wake up with 20km to go.
I absolutely love this sport, don’t get me wrong. I just feel that there is so much going on that no one knows about.
IN a bike race, I am lucky if I am bored. There is a constant fight to get to the front, to group together with teammates. There is action 100% of the time, but on TV you don’t see any of that. You have to be IN the race to really know what it is we are doing, and what makes bike racing so exciting.
Take the start for example. Especially in the latter stages of a grand tour, everyone who is capable of going in a breakaway WILL try to go in a breakaway because those late race breakaways usually end up staying to the finish–key word: CAPABLE. The most attacking that happens in a race happens at the beginning. The hardest hour of a bike race is usually the first hour, or the last hour. Why don’t we show that on TV? Let me tell you, it would be pretty exciting. When you have riders and teams with strict orders to get into a breakaway and they miss it? Well then they have to chase it down. If they manage to chase it down, the chaos starts again. No matter what the road surface is like, if the profile is flat, hilly or mountainous, there will be a solid chunk fo time where riders are attacking left and right to try and get away. Even when I watch a race on TV and see a breakaway of 20 guys I forget how difficult it must have been just for them to get INTO that break. We talk about breakaways like they are these easy-to-enter, optional things–as if some riders wake up in the morning and say ‘I think I am going to go in the break today.’
It takes serious timing skills, some luck, and a big engine to get into a breakaway.
I think one thing that would be cool is if we had on-bike cameras like MotoGP, as well as microphones on some riders. How else could the public be able to appreciate the risks we take every day…like on descents? From the helicopter or the moto it is pretty hard to tell. How cool would it have been to show the 4-up Liquigas attack on the DESCENT in stage 6 that Peter Sagan won from THEIR perspective. Or from the perspective of the riders behind them?? What about sprint stages? What if you could be onboard Mark Cavendish’s bike as he weaved through the pack with his HTC train en route to winning on the Champs-Elysees in the Tour de France?
What if you could hear a team director giving orders, and watch that team respond to those orders directly in front of you on your TV? If you could hear a team leader yelling orders in desperate times–if you could hear the deafening roar of fans on, say, the Mur de Huy in Fleche Wallone–if you could hear riders yelling at each other, SEE riders bumping and pushing each other, jockeying for position–it happens ALL DAY!
Yeah…some ideas. This sport has so much potential and already an amazing fan base for its content on TV. I was fortunate as a kid to go to the Tour with my family and follow for a couple days–which ended up being one of the reasons I got into this sport. That energy that surrounds a bike race is incredible. If only we could harness it and make it more publicly available!!!
Meh, some musings. Back to Italy today…
-tp
PS, listen to these songs:
I can disagree. I can watch all Tour stages, every single minute of it and I never get bored (expect the moment when an adversitement block starts).
But well, this maybe goes hand in hand with the commentator who must keep the spectators awake. I mean, there were (unfortunatelly were. I almost cried when I heard the news) a really great one here in the Czech republic, Robert Bakalář. He had been commenting Tour (and the rest of broadcasted cycling races) for over ten years but he could always find something new to say or was not ashamed to invent something breath-taking for people to hear. I remember last years third stage – pavé. Bakalář was talking about how the socks cyclists use are made and I was laughing like crazy because he did not pay any attention to the race.
He could always focus on something like fields or sunflowers and there were only advertisements to stop him. Like seriously.
I wonder if I will be able to watch the Tour next year.
Completely agree. Before I took up cycling myself I didn’t get the point of watching cycle races on TV, they just looked boring to me. After starting myself, I can kind of imagine what is going on inside the pack and the some of the hair-raising decents literally have my pulse racing like I was doing it myself. Not to mention the near physical pain I felt when seeing the scrape with the car and subsequent somersaulting into barbed wire fence at this years TDF. Uurggh. Stuff for nightmares that was! But you are right – helmet cams, bike cams – the works – it would be awesome to be able to have more of an inside view to what happens in the peloton that could only make the races more interesting and appealing even to non-cyclists out there.
It really depends on the stage as to how interesting it is but I agree that usually the first and last hours are the most interesting. ASO did a trial with on board cameras at the Tour of California and the results gave a fantastic in-sight into the centre of peleton. However, when you get the scandalously poor broadcasting standards seen at the recent US Pro Cycling Challenge could the TV producers cope with the additional feeds?
Add to the mix telemetry data for individual riders so you can see how they are suffering/performing (a few years ago several races used to broadcast HR/rider speed data but this seems to have stopped)
I think the whole radio debate would also be silenced (pardon the pun) if radio feeds were broadcast (delayed as in F1 so the issue of tactics secrecy is maintained).
However, all of these enhancements in broadcasting need to be accompanied with a more joined up media rights plan between the UCI/race organisers/bike teams because if the money doesnt start flowing a bit more to the team, more and more will go the way of HTC. Without the high quality teams, the advertisers and media will lose interest in smaller races and it would be a great pity if all we had left was the TdF, Giro and a couple of spring classics.
I loved the cameras in the team cars during the Tour of Flanders. I wished they did that for every race. I rather like your idea of cameras on the riders too.
The Belgian TV station Sporza has been trying some of these ideas out. In some of the Belgian spring classics there were on-board cameras in the team cars.
Unfortunately not in all the team cars, so the conversations between the team leaders and the riders were delayed a couple of minutes so the other teams couldn’t take advantage of this.
It was fun to same some eyes into the team cars, you could see and feel the stress and excitement of the team leaders, and especially the incredible attention of the team mechanic sitting in the back.
Hope they expand this project even further next year. And maybe you can persuade your team to also participate
I totally agree. Why not broadcast the first hour and the last hour or 2 hours and leave out the middle part?
Swiss TV has experimented with small camera’s in the front brakes. I have to admit it was not quit HD, but at least it shows what we all want to see. We even saw a LIVE crash from the bike. And I think it was Leigh Howard in the Tour of California who had a camera mounted in his rear brake and posted a video on YouTube of a race winning lead out he did this year. That’s what bike racing is all about. I see it when I’m in the race, but I also want to see it when I’m not racing myself. And I want the fans who never raced to see what we really do. If you do this, you can also add radio communication to the TV broadcast to contribute to fans understanding what’s going on.
Good songs!
I think what I would be most interested in are the SOUNDS of the race. From afar [aka on TV], races like the Tour appear, at least for the majority of the time, as serene. Quiet. Yes, cycling is a hard sport, but for a long time I characterised it as a ‘quiet’ sort-of sport. There’s no grunts and moans that punctuate a rally in tennis. There’s no referees blowing whistles. There’s no screeching of tires and roar of engines like in F1. Sure, there’s the omnipresent hum of the helicopter and the cheer of the crowds, but it wasn’t until I started watching cycling documentaries that I realised how vibrant the soundscape of the race actually was. What does the peloton sound like when you are in it? I used to imagine it as silent, with the bunch moving along in harmony, but it’s probably more like a battlefield.
I always enjoy the perspective of the team cars following the riders – it’s as exciting as it is terrifying – and I like hearing the words exchanged between riders and DS’s, I would love for some of the team cars to have cameras in them, and for the cameras on the motorcars to pick up sound as well as picture.
I wouldn’t for a minute want to lose any of the beauty and mystique associated with cycling, and I’d never want to see vision from helmet-cams replace beautiful sweeping aerial shots of the scenery, but I would love to feel more a part of the action; privy to the battle occurring at ground level that is often lost in coverage.
Love this post… I forwarded it onto my high school cycling team! Back when the Tour of Missouri was in town it was so wonderfully palpable to see everyone fighting for position from 10 feet away. As a team we’ll have to settle for admiring Cat 1 Crits since the TofM was discontinued. It was a true loss to my students!
I love the YouTube videos that BMC racing have from inside the car! Such great insight, just like what you’re talking about. More stuff like that is what fans would love!
This new era of telematics is here. I’ve worked on it in NASCAR with all the cameras, data aquisition and transfer, and real time feeds. The technology is there so you could virtually compete in real time with the pros during the races while sitting on your trainer half a world away. Real time camera feeds (not GoPro after the fact videos) are possible too. I’d be in favor of real time audio too. If everyone has it, there is no advantage. You can listen in real time to every NASCAR team during the event. It adds a great element to the competition. Whether you are a NASCAR fan or not, they do a lot of things right on the media side. T, give me a ring if you want to really do something in this space!
Yes! Yes! Yes! Did a little racing, not stages, eons ago, and firmly believe TP’s ideas and those added by alert readers of the blog, above, would wonderfully improve the coverage of this marvelous sport. Even riding in a big bunch on training ride at speed is thrilling and some helmet and bike – cam shots of that, with microphones, could be used to pioneer the tech and give viewers a much-improved idea of the reality.
Authorities likely resist such changes, but steady pressure from passionate but polite stubborn people can work miracles. That would be us.
To answer a Q, above, main sound in the peloton is the moderately-loud odd hollow whirring of all those tires on the road, something like a thousand locusts flying past. Mostly quiet otherwise, usually, because people saving energy. Oddly hypnotic, knowing you’re riding along at speed in very close proximity with this big group of people, with just this whirring sound. A word or two here and there now and then from someone just emphasizes the presence of all those other people. The continual fighting for position during a race adds adrenaline and sharpens every sense, until you start hurting so bad you don’t notice much of anything else. Can’t show that on TV, though rider telemetry would definitely give a clue. Oh, and then there are the breaks, and crashes.
TP and others here, closer to it than I am, ought to take a shot at describing the sound. Just thinking about it makes me want to go find a good hard group ride.
Thanks for posting Taylor! I hope you recover quickly and feel strong again soon! Your music is great – I listen to every post!! I agree…cycling on tv can be a bit dragged on, but if you love the sport like I do and so many of your followers…it’s exciting to watch and learn!! Thanks so much for sharing your insight – and humor!! Love your tweets and blog!!
Sharon, NJ
it is funny, everyone bitches at the tv people that we want to see the race from beginning to end, but then we fast-forward through 75% of it on our DVRs. it’s pretty much a miracle that any bike race other than le Tour gets hours of TV time in the US.
some way of getting into the middle of the peloton would be incredible. to watch from a rider’s POV as he comes back from the team car and works his way up to the front to join a leadout? to be on Taylor’s or Cancellara’s bike as he’s torturing his chain up the koppenberg?
a few years ago they did show the speed and heart rate of whoever they had the camera pointed at, but i think the teams quashed that as it was tactical info. can’t let on that the guy with the hospitalize-me grimace is only doing 70% of MHR waiting to hit the jets when everyone else tries to relax. or whoever was sponsoring the data decided not to pay. it’s gone, anyway.
cycling is definitely getting bigger here. both the #vuelty and @USAProChallenge were on at the same time, and the crowds in Colorado were a surprise to everyone. so tv directors will improve their game as they start to compete with each other for eyeballs.
A stabilized broadcast quality HD video camera with the transmitter to feed the signal to a helo/plane along with batteries to operate it for 5+ hours is more weight than any of you guys would be willing to carry in a race. I’d venture a guess that with all the required mounts and wires it would weigh a kilo or so. Given how much money teams spend to shave a couple grams off the weight of your gear why would you sign up to carry an extra thousand?
Loosen (+/-) the UCI min weight rule on the bikes to take into consideration the change.
Watch some of the HD video taken by DataDrivenAthlete on youtube for what’s possible too. With the inserted comments it makes watching a simple bike race so much more fun.
Your TV blog note hit a huge cord with me. I have been a staunch advocate of a complete rewrite to the way we present cycling. It’s like such a huge assumption that people get us. they don’t. friends deep into the characters and sport still ask me fundamental questions about it. we leave SO MUCH on the table with 4-5 hours of letting the public into long piano flat stages, showing it just because I guess we can.
So you watched the Coors stuff. You were on your trainer and saw the DVD’s, the CBS John Tesh stuff that was packaged for a wide TV audience. The gear heads moan they want to watch daily full crank-by-crank coverage but there is no way to widen the circle of our sport, draw more fringe and curious in if we do not draw the worthy moments together, just expect people to have endless patience in between the good parts. Any sport, anything you do or watch that attracts you Taylor has a story to it. The Soundcloud tracks, build and sweeten and conclude, TV shows, movies and sports do that — they tell stories. instead our stories are protracted over HOURS and DAYS and even a MONTH. Cycling flies in the face of serving a storyline to a mass audience.
DVR’s allow us to watch in 10X now. I asked a room of team people, racers, devout fans how many watch cycling in high speed…all hands went up with notes of a few stages here and there in the mnts that warrant start to finish. So I add you to the list, falling asleep or 10X viewing of a sport you DEARLY love…yet even for you it doesn’t keep you. Imagine the guy in Iowa we are asking to sample us, become a fan, get who we are… imagine that, while even you and I fast-forward our coverage. I want that TV sports drama approach BACK! I want it for prime time. Not the story of you not finishing as a note in a long telecast, but the REAL story of cycling that your blog portrayed. Where is that? It’s intense and compelling and worthy of sports viewer’s time. Triumphs, pain, suffering, strategy, tactic, team biz, all this sets our sport aside from the others, yet we leave SO MUCH ON THE TABLE with all the hours we air.
Did you love that Tesh-voiced drama, Grewal dying from no water, the Russians and LeMond vengeance matches, your dad and mom in their respective dramas, it was star-making TV, not just coverage. Leave the crank-by-crank on the www. Put cycling on prime time with extracted story-lines and the intense unveiling of the real dramas no one ever sees, exactly like you said. It’s ok to do as we do if our intention is to play our game for our own eyes, but if we want to grow cycling as a real TV event, it needs to be accessible, we need to hand-feed stories and get under the hood. Note NASCAR.
So, voila and bowing in your direction for España.
cheers,
mda
Thanks for that I knew their had to be more going on them what we see. I would love to hear what’s going. The frist time I went to the tour of californa you really have no idea how fast riders go until you are their if I was younger I would love to bike race but as a child I never heard of TDF if I did I would have done that instead of fencing. I love going fast on a bike.
U are a genious !! seriously it would be so good to be more included in the race
and I have to tell u that u have a so big talent for writing.. i am captiated by ur texts and i undersand all even if im french and im not too good in english
in fact i don’t know in what u are bad..
thank u and go on !!!
Thanks for your posts Taylor.
As bad and sometimes boring as some of the TV coverage is, we’ve come a long way. As a teenager I used to follow your dad in the 80′s, often having to wait at least 24 hours for the morning paper to maybe have a tiny blurb about what happened the day before in the Tour. That’s only if an American did anything of note…
Versus did a series of shows during the USA Pro Cycling Challenge, narrated by Phil Liggett, called “Rematch in the Rockies”. Silly title, but I love these things:
http://vimeo.com/olliestokes/videos
I can watch these types of shows all day.
Others have also mentioned this exact point on how to better race coverage. It’s one of the reasons I enjoy reading rider blogs like your and Chris Horner to get insights into the real tactics of the race. Mic’ing up the riders and DSs, like in golf or F1 would be fabulous for the fans, rather than to try and lip read in a dozen languages.
I’ve always been fascinated with tactics of the race and understanding them make a race way more interesting.
I wonder what the reaction of the riders would be.
Yo, Taylor: http://youtu.be/FA9AeYQTivQ
courtesy GoPro camera at the ’11 Tour of CA, if you haven’t seen it yet. Too bad they didn’t release more of these videos for that race or any others.
You’ve hit the nail on the head Taylor, one of the reasons this years Tour of Flanders was so popular was down to the cameras in some of the team cars, in years to come people might remember Bjarn Riis in car celebration more than Nick Nuyens win…
Awesome article. It does appear that people miraculously form a breakaway – I never knew that. As the above comments have already said, I think that’s why it is so interesting to follow riders’ blogs and on twitter to see their perspective – so thank you for sharing your perspective & opinions. An example of this was a finish we watched where all the commentators and the public were confused at a riders behaviour for being beaten on the line and later on after reading / watching interviews – other riders’ tweets – I realised the rider was just so exhausted he didn’t even know what was happening at the time.
Vs. and NBC Universal Sports should take note, TP!
I would LOVE to hear what is going on in the car, in the peloton, in the breakaways. And to see helmet or bike-mounted camera would be awesome. Especially for someone who descends at 12 mph with breaks smokin’. I can’t imagine how it must look! And if sponsors are becoming a problem, and HUGE teams, then building a fan base by bringing us closer to the action makes sense for everyone.
Here in Australia we got to see footage of John Lelangue in the team car following the TTT in the Tour de France (it aired the following day). It was fantastic! How does he drive the car whilst doing everything else? I agree with Dan about the BMC YouTube videos, too – I’ve thoroughly enjoyed watching those. So, yes – in-race cameras would bring a whole new dimension to the TV coverage of cycling.
Hi Taylor,
I totally agree with you!
What do you think of what I realized during the Tour Poitou-Charentes this year? 3 stages filmed entirely from the jury president / radio Tour car and published on Kinomap so you can see the stage and the location on the map at the same time (with the possibility to move the bike on the map to see the video at that location)? Check it out at http://www.tour-poitou-charentes.com/actualites-6,revivez-les-3-dernieres-etapes-du-tour-poitou-charentes-en-integralite-en-video-101.html
Your TV idea is great. They’ve done it for track racing a lot and it’s always fun to watch. I also agree that they should show the first hours of racing. I know we miss a lot by the time it gets on TV.
just came across this…for sure i dont disagree and i have explored all of the ideas brought up…most of the time its a financial issue as its expensive to broadcast cycling and since it doesnt bring the ratings that football does its hard to add to budgets…for every hour a helicopter is in the air or an airplane (to bring the signal to the tv truck) it costs a ton of money. and as such its hard to justify covering the start of a race. in general, with the exception of the tdf and a couple other big races, the coverage starts with 2 or 3 hours to go because thats when it makes sense financially. if the cameras were working from the start the costs would be double…some other issues are teams not allowing certain things. some teams allow in car cameras and some will not. i have asked about micing riders but teams didnt go for the idea…teams are also not so keen to putting cameras on bikes as the extra weight is an issue. tour de suisse did manage to do it but it was an sd signal and honestly didnt look that good…i am hoping to do an hd on bike camera soon as technology is much better these days…as far as the stories being told i feel this was done exceptionally well on a daily basis in the primetime tdf show last year. as well as the daily rematch in the rockies series
jwf