Every July, the media covers the oft-neglected sport of cycling. American excitement about the Tour de France has risen steadily as Lance Armstrong comes closer and closer to becoming the greatest cyclist of all time. Casual fans enjoy sporadic articles about the “drive for five,” Lance and the United States Postal team’s push for five consecutive tour victories. But for a fanatic like myself, the Tour consumes my entire life.
Cycling is a subtle sport. It’s hard to sort out what happens in a one or two day race, and it takes a 22-day extravaganza to cultivate some serious fervor. For cyclists, the Tour de France is the season’s peak and the only race that truly matters. Every year, Lance spends most of his time in Europe training exclusively for the Tour.
Thanks to the Outdoor Life Network, the race could and did invade every free second from July 5 to July 27. An elusive and ill-defined sports channel, OLN broadcasts everything from RVtoday to the running of the bulls. In the weeks before the Tour starts, OLN drops everything for almost exclusive cycling coverage. Each of the 20 stages gets a three-hour block, which is then replayed four times throughout the day. If a stage was particularly crazy, my friends and I would watch all 4. OLN cameramen are omnipresent and capture everything. The greatest moment was the multi-angle replay of Lance’s harrowing cyclocross escape through a wheat field to avoid crashing into Joseba Beloki. OLN immediately had a camera on the Spanish Beloki, whose gut-wrenching yelps from a broken femur should have been edited from television.
The cycling community is pretty small, so in-depth reporting of the event is more extreme than any other sport. OLN’s website includes an online diary from every race commentator. Phil Liggett, the Lance Armstrong of bike reporting, churns out cool British phrases like “both of these men have ticking time bombs in the back pockets” or “look at them pummel their machines” or “will this Tour ever lay down?” Other journals included Lance Armstrong’s coach on his daily physical performance and a former teammate’s perspective on the current United States Posta Service team’s dynamic. All of the commentators are former cyclists and get exclusive interviews with Lance at the finish line. As larger than life as Lance is, no one can be guarded after spending grueling hours on a bike. You get a daily sense for the champion’s unabashed personality. My boring summer internship was instantly spiced up with news from France, oftentimes through a subscription I found on the OLN website to have highlights sent to my phone.
This year’s tour was more exciting than the past years because it came down to an epic Cold War duel. Jan Ullrich, the last athletic remnant of East Germany’s infamous sports program, came very close to beating Lance Armstrong. Four major competitors quit or were knocked out by injury over the course of the race. What looks like three boring hours of the same thing on television ends up building until the next day’s stage seems almost too suspenseful to comfortably watch.
I’d like to see more cycling during the year, but the Tour de France is the climax. It never disappoints and we Tour-junkies get a big enough fix to tide us over until next July.
