Crikey on TdF broadcast commentary
Posted July 27th, 2007 in The Desk
Chris Tunnock and Thomas Hunter wrote in todays Crikey (for non Australians Crikey is a highly influential political publication - the piece is behind a paywall but I’m ripping it anyway) about the Tour and in particular the way the sport is commented on by the television personalities fronting the nightly broadcasts . Here is an excerpt.
If you don’t know that every corner of the sport is infected, you won’t learn it from watching the mainstream coverage. Commentary on the same performance oscillates from approbation when winning to opprobrium when the tests come back positive. The SBS feed from the host broadcasters reflects such a dynamic, with Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen waving their pom-poms until a rider fails a test. Then they become the disapproving school master. For the average viewer, the illusion is that the tests work, the cheats are caught, and then commentary resumes in full hagiography mode. Mike Tomalaris is not well served by these poor mentors.
I think Tunnock and Hunter have made their point. Given all that’s happened over the past decade, you would think a healthy cynicism would infuse all cycling commentary; something that I think would improve on the well worn patter of many broadcasters - but they continue to present as entertainers first and journalists second. Then again, maybe that’s exactly what the viewers want.
Read the piece below the fold and come back to answer these questions? Is this fair criticism? Are you enjoying the broadcasts as they are presented?
Drugs, cycling, and SBS: the final word Chris Tunnock and Thomas Hunter write:
Cycling has become a blood sport, 21st century style, and the effect is dire: those who love the sport enough to withstand its tortures for a fleeting shot at its glories are those killing it from within, virus-like. But last year’s disgraced winner Floyd Landis and this year’s shamed leader Michael Rasmussen are only the public faces of a system that implicitly condones it. The doctors, the team management, and race controllers are all complicit to varying degrees, either by omission or commission.
If they’re not the ones with the fridges filled with blood bags, they’re the ones who fail to implement a rigorous enough testing regime. When the red blood cell booster EPO hit the peloton in the early nineties, riders could not keep up without using it. Swiss chemists sold EPO over the counter with astronomical markups, while doctors in all the cycling countries ignored their Hippocratic oath to enhance the performance of their cyclists. It’s a neat illustration of the cross-jurisdictional culpability: the sport’s regulators abnegated their responsibility for it, the teams used it, and the commentators became authors in Lance Armstrong’s unreal apotheosis.
If you don’t know that every corner of the sport is infected, you won’t learn it from watching the mainstream coverage. Commentary on the same performance oscillates from approbation when winning to opprobrium when the tests come back positive. The SBS feed from the host broadcasters reflects such a dynamic, with Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen waving their pom-poms until a rider fails a test. Then they become the disapproving school master. For the average viewer, the illusion is that the tests work, the cheats are caught, and then commentary resumes in full hagiography mode. Mike Tomalaris is not well served by these poor mentors.
After 12 years covering the Tour de France, he still fails to report the raw, unfiltered truth, but he’s not alone. Like others covering the sport, he’s in a bind. It’s a great story, but it will be the last one he reports. The teams and riders who make his job possible will close him down in less time than it takes to bin a syringe. Nor do his employers want him fixating on blood science. Talk of “drugs” and “doping” is incompatible with Gabriel Gate dressed as a gendarme cooking a cassoulet, regardless of how they spin the “sensation” of it. Nobody expects wall-to-wall coverage of the issue, but what is so difficult about presenting the sport in its full context?
Is that asking too much of our cycling journalists? Or is a three week French travelogue still the best we can hope for?
What others have to say…
But unfortunately Greg Baum doesn’t. Ahhh, what a brilliant idea - get a footy journo to write about the TdF!
Enjoyed this quote from the Guardian TdF live feed at 3:42pm their time.
On Eurosport, assorted commenters and experts are patting themselves on the back for making efforts to rid the sport of cycling of drugs. They’re wittering on about how great it is that the omerta that prevented the lid being blown off the wholesale use of drugs in cycling has finally been lifted, as if to suggest that they and their journalist buddies weren’t as complicit as anyone else in maintaining it for the last 20 years. Where were these great men when Paul Kimmage blew the lid off it with his excellent book Rough Ride way back in the day? Busy buttoning their lips and keeping schtum - that’s where. Right, rant over.
Interesting. Maybe it’s time to turn things around and start asking some of the longtime cycling journalists a few hard questions.
We’re asking the media to report completely, fair enough.
However, one must remember this is driven by money directly or indirectly coming from you and me. We have continually looked the other way for the sake of entertainment. We should be asking ourselves the same hard questions.
Mike Tomalaris annoys me a lot. Does he ever have an original thought? He’s always mouthing the standard lines - the tests are clearly working, the cheats are getting caught, cycling’s problem is that it’s too transparent.
But he doesn’t want to criticise his network’s programme, especially when viewer numbers are well up on previous years (thanks to Evans).
The criticism is Fair. Phil and Paul seem to me to be Pollyannas. I’m sure they have other views unstated, they know as much as anyone. Regarding the coverage I’m ambivalent. I would like the commentators to at least put these amazing performances into context eg compare to the past so I can listen between the lines.
I imagine it’s a tough job finding the line between entertainment and insight, but I was taken aback when Phil Liggett said to Mike Tomalaris that he was surprised and shocked at Vino’s positive, that he’d never heard even an inkling of doubt about him in the past… either Phil lives under a rock or he is in some real denial here. The night before last he vouched for one rider not being a drug taker because he’s thoroughly nice and they’ve had dinner together. Hmmmm. Now that’s very convincing.
Heh, even I’ve noticed the way Phil and Paul change their tune. They’re a bit like Laurel and Hardy, but that’s why they’re employed. Currently we’re watching the race till the wee small hours because we want to see the racing. The politics will come later. But it would be nice if they can get it sorted and not drag on into overlapping next year’s race like the Landis case. Either he’s caught or not. How hard can it be?
I second David’s comment on Mike Tomalaris. He never has anything to say other than regurgitating the same old guff every night. Just go straight to Matthew Keenan (sp?) and the live action, please!
To be frank, they’re journalists of their time. Long gone is the era where newspapers break stories, it’s all press releases regurgitated.
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good article, those guys know their stuff