Tour de France Musings

Mr Swanky — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 13:07:00 -0700

We’ve been watching the Tour de France again this year. I started watching it in 1994 or 1995, when Miguel Indurain was dominating. It was relatively difficult to follow back then because there wasn’t a lot of mainstream exposure in the U.S. I followed it a bit on the InterTubes (pneumatic back then), and at 2:30 a.m. on ESPN2 right after the World’s Strongest Table Tennis Fishing Competition, when they had a super-condensed hour long version of that day’s stage. These were the Dark Ages before TiVo, so I actually had to stay up and try to make sense of a sporting event for which I had no ready way to relate. It was a little like when I discovered Australian Rules Football (also in the wee hours of the morning during ESPN’s era of desperation programming), but with less insane violence and no white fedoras.

Somehow I convinced Robin to watch it with me at some point, and now she’s pretty enthusiastic about watching, though a little less so than myself. Since it’s been on OLN/Versus, we’ve watched it either live or TiVo’d and become real fans not just of the event, but of certain riders and commentators. We pretty much don’t watch any other bike racing (or any other racing, for that matter), and I don’t think I’ve been on a bike since I taught Robin to ride one in 2001 or something.

Of course, since we started watching the event has been dominated by Lance Armstrong and doping, and we’re not really fans of either. But it’s been pretty easy to enjoy the Tour despite those dreary things, and I never really thought about giving up watching it. It’s a 3 week spectacle, once a year, you know? Whether or not some guy with one nut is dumping his wife for a celebrity fling while shooting elephant adrenaline into his ass every 200 miles isn’t really going to diminish the enjoyment for me.

For some reason this year, Versus has figured that the people watching the Tour must be somehow in crisis over whether watching is the right thing to do, and we need to be reminded of the dilemma at every commercial break. So, they’ve crafted this 30 second spot of some of the scandalized riders with the footage reversed (so their trophies are being taken away instead of granted – high concept!) , accompanied by this godawful acoustic guitar with some country western dude whining about how it’s Never Too Late to Start Over. I presume the song was originally meant as an apology to his wife for having sex with their horse — it’s difficult to tell in the 30 second chunk — but it doesn’t seem likely that there’s a lot of doping scandal/Tour de France/line dancing crossover.

But seriously, Versus, do you think I need to be convinced that it’s morally ok to watch your programming? I’m a big boy, and can change the channels all by myself. Did the various Catholic networks have 30 second spots around the time of pedophile priest scandals, reminding the viewership that Christ was still a good guy? I think it’s safe to assume that people are going to watch the Tour de France because they actively want to, and not because the very thought of the various scandals rendered them too depressed to turn off the television after Mixed Martial Art Rodeo Bowhunter’s Journal ended.

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Tour de France Musings