TV commentary is one of those jobs that everyone thinks is easy… until they try it. The next you watch a race try pressing mute and replacing the audio with your own commentary and see how you get on.
David Harmon is one of Eurosport’s commentators. If you watch cycling this year you’re bound to hear him at work, hopefully via full HD and clear audio but maybe via a pirate audio feed.
Here he talks about the job, how it’s changed, what it’s like to talk for six hours non-stop and more.
Well done to the Louisville race crew who put on a great event. Cyclocross is booming in the US as a participatory sport and the crowds partied like Belgians on the day only, as the photo by cyclocosm shows, with added fancy dress. There was even a copycat Dirk Hofman sign spotted.
With all the talk of pro cycling going global cyclo-cross remains a specialist affair within Europe alone but you’d struggle to get the Louisville atmosphere if the worlds were awarded to France, Germany or even the brewery-rich Czech republic. It was made even better thanks to the UCI’s video stream on Youtube meaning it was available around the world for free without resorting to pirate feeds of dubious quality.
A 20 year old neo-pro with two stage wins in his first race? That’s quite a start for Europcar’s Bryan Coquard. For sure he’s got a long way to go as the opposition in the Etoile de Bessèges was not the best and this is only an early season race. Still, he’s the youngest rider in the race and his margin of victory was so big that when I put a photo on Twitter someone asked if he’d been in a breakaway because he was surely too far ahead of the bunch to have won the sprint.
Only he’s not a new name with Olympic, World, European and National medals across a range of disciplines to go with a long list of victories on the road and track alike.
As part of a series to explore the famous roads of cycling, here is the Passo dello Stelvio in the Italian Alps. The idea is to discover the road and its place in the world, whether as part of cycling’s history or to look at the route on a day without racing and it is open to all.
The Stelvio is Europe’s second highest paved mountain pass but superior in legend to the Col de l’Iseran thanks to history, pedigree and the sheer experience of climbing and descending this giant.
There’s little to preview in the Tour of Qatar. The race doesn’t even bother with profiles as each stage profile is a horizontal line. Every finishing straight is wide enough to land an aircraft.
But at the same time this race matters. First as a tactical training ground, a literal sandbox to test skills and technique and if it’s not compulsive viewing, it’s the equivalent of watching a theatre troop in dress rehearsal as it is a practice session for the spring classics. But the race is also notable because Qatar is very influential in world sports, it is the world’s richest country on a per capita basis and recently won the right to the 2016 Cycling World Championships, deploying sums of money that nobody else could match.