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The Tour de France at Versus

More precisely, the Tour de France starts about 6 hours from now (12:30am). For several years now, we try to watch just about all the coverage. Versus, which used to be the Outdoor Life Network, carries it and does a pretty good job. According to them, they have 14 hours of coverage per day, but there's a lot of repetition built in. Assuming this year follows the same schedule as previous years, there will be live coverage in the morning, which is repeated in the afternoon, and then "enhanced" coverage at night.

It's sometimes difficult to pick out exactly what they've done to enhance he coverage. There are usually a couple of short interviews and maybe an on the scene report about the bikes the riders are using, or showcasing one of the athletes. It's just enough extra content to prefer watching it at night unless it's really important to you that you watch it live.

For the most part, and especially now that Lance Armstrong has been out of the race for a couple of years, it's not a problem to avoid hearing about the outcome of the day's race if you skip the live coverage in the morning. It must be working out pretty well for Versus because they just re-upped through the 2013 season. Of course, their other programming is bass fishing so... the bar is pretty low. No offense, Versus.

To their credit they have Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwin handling the commentary. Bob Roll injects a lot of American-style personality, which actually plays well with the very British Liggett and the slightly James Bond villain-ish Paul Sherwin, who is actually South African.

Roll is the sort of "everyman" that they should have covering sporting events. He's very personable but he's a smart guy and he has real experience with cycling. The other option seems to be somebody like Al Trautwig, who proxies for the dumb American. After 5 or 6 years of doing it, he still acts like he has no idea what's going on and it's just frustrating to watch and listen to. If I could use only one word to describe his style it would be "awkward". Unfortunately, Al is part of the broadcast team every year.

Apparently Versus is broadcasting the live start of stages 1 and 2 online. Typically, coverage picks up toward the middle of a day's stage, skipping everything that went on before, except for maybe a highlight (which is usually a lowlight - like a crash or someone getting ejected from the race for a doping violation). I think it has more to do with the French controlling broadcast rights than Versus' commitment to showing the whole race each day. Hopefully it goes well and there is more of this sort of thing in the future.

Otherwise there are some bizarre facts about the race this year. For example, it's the first time that the previous year's winner is eligible but hasn't been invited to participate in the race. The Discovery Channel team has disbanded, with some of the guys, including Bruyneel going to Astana, the team started by Vinokourov in 2007 after he couldn't ride in the tour in 2006 because so many of his teammates were disqualified due to blood doping that there weren't enough people to race with him.

What happens the following year? Well, this is bike racing and the tour de France so it's Vinokourov this time who's caught blood doping and the entire team is asked to withdraw from the race. Of course, this casts doubt on whether he was clean the year before, when apparently just about everybody else on his team wasn't.

It gives the impression that there are two types of athletes in the Tour de France... those who are doping and get caught and those who are doping and haven't yet been caught. It's a little bit surreal actually. Speaking of which, Floyd Landis, who I believe is the only person to have won and then had the title stripped from him because of doping allegations was in court recently pursuing his final appeal after both Europe and the US found him guilty in separate investigations and let's see how that went...

apparently not well for Landis.

Of course we can't forget Tyler Hamilton, wherever he is, or Michael Rasmussen. And all of the rest of them before and after and in between.

I won't say that it's not depressing. I believe that eventually we'll find out how widespread these issues are and they certainly extend beyond cycling. When you're talking about baseball and basketball in the US I'm sure football in Europe, there's just too much money involved at this point. In addition to all of the performance-enhancing drug issues, there's issues of cheating on the part of players and referees. I'm sure that's just the beginning of the list of evils.

Legitimate sports are beginning to look a lot like professional wrestling. In fact, maybe history will judge pro wrestling as something of a pioneer; ahead of its time. After all, why leave the outcome up to chance when that outcome may not turn out to be satisfying. If you script the thing you can write it any way you want to. And why settle for selling tickets and merchandise for only 3 games of a 7 game series, and leave the rest of the money on the table?

As a sports fan, you'd have to e niave not to acknowledge the possibility that cheating is the rule, not the exception to the rule in professional sports.

So enjoy the Tour de France, everybody. It's 21 stages just to have the whole thing turn out to be absolutely meaningless in the end. Hey, at least there are still the crashes and the scandal. I'm pretty sure that's real.