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Authors: Ned Boulting
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game is going to end is quite another challenge. There is no final whistle after ninety minutes. And there can be plenty of extra time.
The Tour does its best to try and help, naturally. In the Race Manual, it prints a hugely detailed table of potential timings; the vertical columns are divided into three ‘schedules’: the fast, medium and slow timings. The horizontal lines relate to points on the map. In other words, the Race Manual helps you to predict that the head of the race will pass the level crossing between Saint-Pierre de Somewhere and St Jean de Somewhere Else at 14.58, provided they are going slow. The problem with this system is that it is well-intentioned nonsense. The race speeds up and slows down organically and often without rhyme or reason. A thirteen-kilometre climb with an average gradient of 9 per cent might take no time at all to get over. But it also might take an age if the heat is out of the race. And besides, there might be a lone leader going hell for leather, stretching out a lead over a wholly uninterested peloton. So who do the timings relate to? And when is the race ‘over’ for the day? When the leader crosses the line? When the yellow jersey group comes in? When the pre-race favourite struggles in five minutes down on him? Or when Tom Boonen finally hauls his sprinter’s frame into view?
All this we have to predict and relay back to the transmission centre in London who fit in the commercial breaks, without which there is no is ‘free-to-air’ coverage. They are nightmarishly complex calculations. Ofcom regulates commercial breaks tightly. There are maximum and minimum numbers of breaks each hour. There are minimum part durations. There are under-runs and over-runs, with all the attendant chaos in the ensuing schedules. And as the race plays out during the afternoon, it is cycling clever-clogs Matt Rendell’s onerous job to advise Steve Docherty, the director, on when to take breaks. Matt is a respected writer, a fine intellect, a phenomenally versatile linguist and a consummate Jazz Funk bass guitarist. Yet, this is the hardest of all his disciplines. He must advise on when it will be safe to come off the air, leaving Gary, Chris and myself enough time to wrap up the afternoon’s events without spreading our content too thin.
But too thin was precisely what we were reduced to that day in Luz-Ardiden. Sammy Sanchez had stuffed Matt’s best efforts at predicting the outcome, and we’d ended up with an interminable half hour of airtime at the end of the programme, which somehow we had to fill.
Gary and Chris had looked again at the key moves of the day, glanced at both the Stage Result and General Classification graphic, and talked over the daily parade of self-conscious riders on the podium clutching flowers and cuddly toys and looked forward to tomorrow’s stage. Then it was down to me to get some interviews.
The first of them was easy enough. Straight away, the increasingly shaggy-haired and elongated figure of Geraint Thomas, with his new five-year contract stuffed in his back pocket, made his benign, laid-back way over to the ITV microphone. He’d won the Combativity Prize after joining a mad rampaging breakaway move that had ended in him flying into a grassy ditch just after he’d sped past a bemused-looking lady waving a Welsh flag in his face. Snaking a wildly unstable path between a quad bike and a caravan, he’d executed a perfect comedy fall over the handlebars. Minutes later, he was at it again, this time a parked car was just averted. So, reflecting on his great adventure, peppered with misadventures, Thomas did his usual shtick. Big wide eyes, the flicker of a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth and his usual humdrum phraseology.
‘I lost it a bit in my head,’ was his frank assessment of his unusually inadequate bike-handling skills.
I thanked him, and he headed off to the podium to collect his ashtray/enamel bucket/oil painting from the sponsor. The
The Tour does its best to try and help, naturally. In the Race Manual, it prints a hugely detailed table of potential timings; the vertical columns are divided into three ‘schedules’: the fast, medium and slow timings. The horizontal lines relate to points on the map. In other words, the Race Manual helps you to predict that the head of the race will pass the level crossing between Saint-Pierre de Somewhere and St Jean de Somewhere Else at 14.58, provided they are going slow. The problem with this system is that it is well-intentioned nonsense. The race speeds up and slows down organically and often without rhyme or reason. A thirteen-kilometre climb with an average gradient of 9 per cent might take no time at all to get over. But it also might take an age if the heat is out of the race. And besides, there might be a lone leader going hell for leather, stretching out a lead over a wholly uninterested peloton. So who do the timings relate to? And when is the race ‘over’ for the day? When the leader crosses the line? When the yellow jersey group comes in? When the pre-race favourite struggles in five minutes down on him? Or when Tom Boonen finally hauls his sprinter’s frame into view?
All this we have to predict and relay back to the transmission centre in London who fit in the commercial breaks, without which there is no is ‘free-to-air’ coverage. They are nightmarishly complex calculations. Ofcom regulates commercial breaks tightly. There are maximum and minimum numbers of breaks each hour. There are minimum part durations. There are under-runs and over-runs, with all the attendant chaos in the ensuing schedules. And as the race plays out during the afternoon, it is cycling clever-clogs Matt Rendell’s onerous job to advise Steve Docherty, the director, on when to take breaks. Matt is a respected writer, a fine intellect, a phenomenally versatile linguist and a consummate Jazz Funk bass guitarist. Yet, this is the hardest of all his disciplines. He must advise on when it will be safe to come off the air, leaving Gary, Chris and myself enough time to wrap up the afternoon’s events without spreading our content too thin.
But too thin was precisely what we were reduced to that day in Luz-Ardiden. Sammy Sanchez had stuffed Matt’s best efforts at predicting the outcome, and we’d ended up with an interminable half hour of airtime at the end of the programme, which somehow we had to fill.
Gary and Chris had looked again at the key moves of the day, glanced at both the Stage Result and General Classification graphic, and talked over the daily parade of self-conscious riders on the podium clutching flowers and cuddly toys and looked forward to tomorrow’s stage. Then it was down to me to get some interviews.
The first of them was easy enough. Straight away, the increasingly shaggy-haired and elongated figure of Geraint Thomas, with his new five-year contract stuffed in his back pocket, made his benign, laid-back way over to the ITV microphone. He’d won the Combativity Prize after joining a mad rampaging breakaway move that had ended in him flying into a grassy ditch just after he’d sped past a bemused-looking lady waving a Welsh flag in his face. Snaking a wildly unstable path between a quad bike and a caravan, he’d executed a perfect comedy fall over the handlebars. Minutes later, he was at it again, this time a parked car was just averted. So, reflecting on his great adventure, peppered with misadventures, Thomas did his usual shtick. Big wide eyes, the flicker of a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth and his usual humdrum phraseology.
‘I lost it a bit in my head,’ was his frank assessment of his unusually inadequate bike-handling skills.
I thanked him, and he headed off to the podium to collect his ashtray/enamel bucket/oil painting from the sponsor. The
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