This was a fun and entertaining week. Enjoyed the content and the battles.
Did see this and made me smile (title is a little tongue in cheek / click bait)
2 Likes
I watched both the TDF & TDFF, and enjoyed both. Nonetheless, the TDFF was less fun to watch, and it had nothing to do with the athletes - quite the contrary, I think they’re incredible. I think a lot of it had to do with:
-
There was really only one decisive stage for GC. As a result, the GC battle was really an afterthought on most of the stages. The TDFF organizers need to add at least one early decisive stage in addition to the later one.
-
The smaller teams/smaller peloton led to less ability/willingness to chase breakaways. More racers = more matches to burn = more in race excitement.
1 Like
100% agree here…as I noted earlier, this could have been much more interesting if the TT had come earlier in the schedule.
Ideally, I would have liked to see a mid-mountain / hilly stage on Stage 2 (with a hilltop finish), and then the TT and Summit finish at the end of the race, but back-to-back.
2 Likes
I agree with @SDen147 as well - I kept thinking that it didn’t really matter what the other stages were, that the single big-climb stage would make a huge difference in the GC that it didn’t matter who was in yellow for the preceding stages. I like your thoughts about having another stage that had more mountain/hilliness in the middle.
Overall, I have to say that I really enjoyed watching the race. I don’t watch any other sports, and I primarily only watch the TdFF because I want them to know that I care about it, so maybe that skews my thoughts, but I found the US commentary (on Peacock) to be a bit ridiculous at times. Like when they spent at least 30 min talking about the expulsion of the SDWorx DS and the 20s time penalty, only to finally say, “well, he WAS driving rather unsafely”, or when Anthony spent a ridiculous amount of time talking about Emma Norsegaard’s last name and how she specifically told him how she wanted to be called, but that it’s not her married name - and Hannah finally told him that maybe she won’t want to be called by her married name. Women keep their own names all the time. I found that whole diatribe to be a bit sexist.
But I think that the field this year is clearly much deeper than last year, and I hope that it continues to grow. It was kind of nice to see that AVV is human, TBH. I agree with the comments earlier in the thread that it seemed that maybe the peloton gave a bit more distance to breakaways than they had firepower to reel back, and maybe the DSs need to not allow quite as much space, but it definitely made for some exciting racing, and some great finishes.
6 Likes
One day later… queue the marketing machines, two Specialized emails and one SRAM email 
One very positive thing that came out of the TdF Femmes was that Santini used red shorts for the maillot pois skinsuits instead of polka dots.
Hopefully they do the same for the men’s race next year.
Who was the male commentator? I found him rather annoying… he’d interrupt his co-commentator all the time, reminded me of a lot of workplaces.
The guy was Anthony McCrossen, and the woman was Hannah Walker. I thought they were much better than Phil/Bob/Megan on Stage 1 ([Phil/Bob: “I don’t know who this rider is - Megan, please save us”] I actually didn’t end up watching much of Stage 8, but I noticed that Phil/Bob/Megan were back on Stage 8) but I agree, I thought it was annoying how much Anthony interrupted Hannah, or just turned to her for a few small things rather than letting her do more of the commentating. I kind of wish they had kept Anthony/Hannah for all 8 stages. I don’t understand why they put the other group for stages 1 and 8.
2 Likes
On GCN or Peacock?
Peacock
They used the “world feed” for everything except days 1 and 8. For the mens’, we discovered that Peacock also had the world feed with Anthony and Nico Roche, which was a game changer–better than Phil/Bob, and no commercials.
2 Likes
I’m in the other camp here. I think he does a great job in his role. Unlike the other team Peacock has, he has no studio analysts, on-road motor bike commentators, or any other support and does a great job trying to keep it entertaining. Saw all the stages of TDF Femmes and never noticed the interruptions.
1 Like
I totally agree. Stage 8 was painful to listen to. They had Megan remotely and so there was a lag between her and the other two; they’d be constantly talking over each other or leaving these uncomfortable lags. Megan seemed nervous, which was probably from the general miscoordination she was subjected to from the production. You’d think they could buy the analyst that actually knows details about the women in the race a freaking airplane ticket for a day to join the cast. Just seemed amateurish from a production standpoint. Anthony and Hannah made for better announcing in my opinion.
3 Likes
I’ll admit to not being a huge Phil Liggett fan, and I listen to Cossen and the Euro feed when available. But perhaps for Stage 8 we could be kind? The remote nature of commentary clearly put Megan on the back foot and that affected the entire team. Bob was his normal self. Phil is a 79 year old gentleman who has just spent the better part of 40 days on the road chasing bike races around France.
They aren’t getting an Emmy for the coverage of the TDFF, but it was fine. The race itself was better than fine. It was very entertaining and showcased how well the ladies can race bicycles and we watched several breakthrough performances.
Too bad you young kids (I’m joking) can’t go back to a time when there was no TDFF and to get the results of the mens TdF stages you had to call the 1-900 phone number at VeloNews and listen to a recording or hope that your local paper maybe printed the results in the sports section (USA - you guys in Europe are spoiled - LOL).
See you at the Vuelta!!
–Darth
p.s. Get off my lawn
1 Like
Or wait for the new issue of VeloNews a week or two later to find out who won a classic like Milan-San Remo.
2 Likes
Please don’t take my comments as being directed at anyone in particular. However, I don’t agree with the general sentiment implied above, Darth. Personally, I think this sort of thing should be called out. At a time when coverage of cycling events seems harder to come by for the casual viewer as it moves away from the main-stream and to niche “for-pay” sites (at least in the U.S.), poor production decisions can only hurt viewership in the future. If they already had a team in place that had done a more than adequate job over the past six stages then it’s fair to question the rationale of bringing in a team burdened by their remote nature and, if you are correct, a team member that may have been affected by his prior assignment. Less eyeballs going forward due to poor production means less reason to cover these events for a network.
2 Likes
Anyone else think Anthony McCrossen sounds like Martyn Ashton from GMBN?
*TdFH
6 Likes
Hahaha! I like it. We should definitely start referring to it that way.