Thread: Le Tour de Frog

Starts tomorrow on SBS.
SBS: Tour de France 2010: Home

Sunday, 4 July
Tour de France Prologue airs at 1.00am

Stage 1 10.00pm ? Live ? Rotterdam to Bruxelles. Flat and 223.5 km.

11 aussies will be lining up.
Cadel in a new team BMC.
Armstrong announced this will be his last tour.

Just as the world cup finishes too.. I love the SBS coverage every night.

Watched part of the opener. Will keep an eye on it, but watching bike riding isn't really what I call sports entertainment.

Then you don't understand it. To enjoy any sport (should one want to) you will need to understand the ins and outs obviously.

Bike tours like this are all about tactics more so team tactics. The exciting stages are the ones where a breakaway stays away especially so if there is a top 10 guy in it.

Time Trials can ruin tours, like it did for Cadel last year where the team TT took the race away from him (one of his team fell and the whole team had to slow down to let him join back up). I understand the points this year are a bit different so the same thing hopefully won't have the same impact.

That's what I'm saying - I don't care to understand it. There needs to be an interest prior to understanding, which I don't have a great deal of right now.

So, for now at least, it's not what I call sports entertainment.

Watch it for the stunning scenery is good enuf reason.. just sit back and chill with fav drink

Yah, that's my stance on it right now. And I'm happy with that.

Great article which articulates my feelings more-or-less to a tee:

Le Tour isn’t sport, it’s a great lifestyle show

Lying in front of the first stage of the Tour De France in a semi-catatonic state on Saturday night I found myself wondering why I was watching this thing. I love Le Tour de France more every year, but why?

Having just come from watching Germany’s spectacular destruction of Argentina in the World Cup, it was clear I wasn’t watching these guys in lycra and creepy sperm shaped helmets like I had been watching the soccer. It was sport but didn’t feel like sport. In fact it wasn’t even called the first stage, like a book or an opera, Le Tour has a prologue.

When Gabriel Gate appeared on the screen in his tour cooking segment with some Dutch dessert it dawned on me how this telecast was actually being consumed: it was in fact a really good lifestyle show.

The sensation of watching Le Tour on SBS is like cycling themed compound of cooking, history, travel, architecture and design. Watching the Tour coverage is comforting lifestyle tv in action - like going for a relaxing bike ride with Antique Roadshow.

Before I get hundreds of angry comments from cycling fans let me just say I realise that road racing, and especially the tour, isn’t for wimps. In fact it is very hardcore.

I know that pound for pound they’re the fittest athletes in the world and that they wake up in the middle of the night and have to do 5 kilometres on their exercise bikes so their hearts don’t stop beating (all the weird drugs they take probably don’t help this cause).

But here’s the thing: the cycling itself is pretty dull. It’s utterly mesmerising, but except for the odd sprint to the line it’s rarely exciting.

The way Le Tour is presented to us is means that cycling is not the point, and that’s the genius of the SBS coverage.

It’s about the crazy baron who built the Norman castle over the next hill, it’s about the cheese from this village that and is sold with maggots in it, it’s about the fact that in 1917 the Tour came through this valley was mistaken for a French cycling corps and wiped out by the retreating Germans (made that last one up).

There is a cooking show in the middle of the coverage. Just to put this into context I’d like to see Channel Seven try and interrupt Geelong v St. Kilda for Dipper’s tips on how to prepare the ultimate stuffed eggplants.

At other points the programming will take us on a charming tour of the Medieval architecture of the local Cathedral which the race is going past today. I don’t recall ever having my telecast of Wests Tigers v Parramatta interrupted for an architectural retrospective of Campbelltown Stadium.

For all the talk of how big the cycling is in Europe, I tend to think a lot of the fans that turn up to watch this thing have a similar attitude to the audience SBS appears to be catering to.

Have a look at these “fans”, the majority of which could only be defined as such very the loosely. They have turned up and are cheering, but seem decidedly more focused on their roadside piss-up. Yesterday somebody’s dog ran out and caused a pile-up and an old woman in a wheel chair was left on the road.

Before anyone points out that in Belgium these guys are treated like movie stars, I say to them: have you ever seen a Belgian movie? Firstly they do exist, and secondly, they’re crap (that’s saying a lot coming from an Australian). Given the other national past times of this part of Europe appear to be banning the burqa and expanding European governance, a genuine love of road cycling doesn’t surprise me.

No doubt the success of Australian Cadel Evans in recent years has helped grow the popularity of the actual leader board part of the tour in this country. Something for which I also blame for the proliferation of overweight middle aged men in lycra and stupid shoes clogging up roads and coffee shops on a Saturday morning.
But really the overall success of the Tour is its ability pull at you visually in a way that no other sport really can.

Watching the hypnotic snake of the peloton curve through a valley drenched in the light of a French summer, you can’t help but think from the late night of the Australian winter “it would be great to be there right now.” That may not be sport, but it’s worth watching.

I just watch it for the crashes

There are more exciting crashes on couches in the back of clubs on Sunday mornings.