Once again the Tour De France is upon us, and amazinhgly, ITV2 are still giving it reasonable amounts of airtime (undoubtedly helped by the fact that it has a sponsor in Michelob Ultra). Live coverage seems to be limited to occassional transmissions at the weekend when Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwin manage the very clever trick of broadcasting on both ITV and America’s OLN at the same time including channel specific pieces. (I finally worked out what was going on by listening to the online audio from OLN while watching the ITV2 coverage at the weekend and realising that at times both commentators are talking – one on one channel and the other on the other – before coming back together. Usually this happens around commercial breaks that are far more frequent in the US).
So with daily highlights at 7.00pm, we’re back to good old Eurosport for the live coverage. But it’s a shame that there hasn’t been any David Duffield? I know he’s getting on a bit, and Mike Smith (no not *that* one) isn’t bad, but I miss his ramblings. Actually Eurosport do a damn good job considering the tight budgets that they tend to work to – usually seeing the commentators based in studios in Paris rather than actually at the events. As for Duffield, a posting on the Eurosport message board says that he had been due to guest on the channel’s studio coverage. But they lost their main sponsor days before the event started and obviously had to scale back what they were planning to do. It now seems that he’ll be contributing from Stage 6 onwards – quite how is not clear, although I can appreciate that there won’t have been hotel rooms booked etc, and another person is a significant additional cost.
But the real disappointment of the Tour this year has been the sorry story of David Millar. We don’t have much of a British presence in the Tour, and this year we have precisely no riders at all. Millar, of course, is a time trial specialist, and won his first ever stage of the Tour in 2000 when he won the Prologue time trial. What’s happened is that he’s admitted taking the performance enhancing drug EPO, although he says, not recently. But in a sport that’s been plagued by drug scandals, that’s plenty enough guilt and he’s been banned from the Tour, kicked out the Olympics and likely to be dropped by his team which has a zero tolerance policy. Quite how the whole thing pans out is difficult to say, but it’s going to take a gargantuan leap for him to come back from this low.
Returning to the Tour, Armstrong is of course chasing his sixth win in a row – an all time record. He’s looking good, and had a great time trial prologue on Saturday. But last year was the best race for ages, with Armstrong at times looking defeatable. The real action comes in the third week this year with the mountains unusually back-weighted towards the end of the race.