Glass half full? Phil and Paul

When I came to the U.S. twenty years ago, ABC News may have had an hour of Tour coverage every Sunday, if that. Now, we have every stage live on cable, with lots of re-runs the rest of the day. And on many days, it's well worth watching. Still, if you have European coverage to compare this too (especially Flemish television), there remains much to be desired. The commercial breaks continue to be very irritating, especially because whoever decides on their timing does not seem to be watching the race. But that's the way the bills get payed over here, and unless PBS found a way to take this on, there's probably no alternative. Speaking of watching the race, sometimes you wonder how big a priority this is for the commentators, even the vaunted "Phil and Paul." I'm sure they're being told to make it accessible and exciting for the average U.S. sports fan, who doesn't know a lot about cycling. But most viewers must be cycling fans, people who follow the sport all year long. This group is rather poorly served by the Versus team of talkers. They sure talk a lot, and half of it is peripheral, sales talk-kind of stuff. Instead, what you need from a commentator is added value. We can all see that the Alps are pretty and that the helicopter is giving us great pictures. The reason the commentators are there is to tell you stuff you don't know; talk knowledgeably about the race you as a viewer are watching with them (and otherwise just shut up). Example: unlike most home viewers, the commentators are supposed to have a list with names and start numbers in front of them so that they can quickly identify a rider (if they can't recognize him outright) as he appears on the screen. But they rarely do, and so they might as well shut up (which they don't). Other example: they talk and they talk (usually the same stuff over and over again about teams with ties to the English speaking world--that, and the eternal "big Jens Voigt"), meanwhile missing all kinds of opportunities to spot things that are actually on the screen and spot them at least as quickly as the home viewer. This morning on the ascent of the Col du Croix du Fer, to give one specific example, we saw CSC initially set a very hard pace. Numerous people were getting dropped. But then, after Arvesen had been pulling for a while, certain people started coming back. One of the first was Menchov's main lieutenant (Laurens ten Dam, whom they never identify, even though he and I were in the same Steven Rooks Classic, last year), and he was followed by a small group. The time it took the great Phil and Paul to notice this, and to shift their story from "this very select group" charging up the mountain to the new situation, was outright embarrassing. They do try, and so does the always struggling and usually irritating prime-time crew, but they don't try hard enough. I really think it's a matter of effort, because most of these guys are legitimate cycling experts, people who've earned their stripes as members of the peloton or as professional journalists. What's the reason? Part of it is that they get the balance wrong between journalism and entertainment, and Versus is probably partly to blame for that. But I think another reason is that they can get away with being lazy. They can get away with being lazy the way a Flemish commentator never could, because his audience would either desert him or demand his replacement. But these days, many American cycling fans are about as discerning as the average Flemish fan, and they deserve better. Cycling fans of America! It's time to stop being merely happy with the amount of coverage we now get! It's time to take our expectations to a new level. It's time to require that Phil and Paul (and maybe eventually also poor Bob) start working hard again to makes us admire them--not for their celebrity status, not for their ability to entertain us, but for their sharp eye, unrelenting focus on even the smallest race development on the screen (and off), and for their ability to tell us things we did not yet know!