posts tagged with 'tour de france'
watching sports
A long time ago (so long I can't be bothered to track it down in the blog archives) I declared that I was done with watching sports on television. Which before long meant I was done with following them altogether, because after we got rid of our tv 11 years ago now we discovered that without a cable subscription you can't stream sports without paying for them. Which of course I would never do. It mostly improves my life: paying attention to sports takes a lot of time and emotional energy. I'm much healthier now that I don't have any idea what the Red Sox are doing (really! Until I wrote this sentence it hadn't even occurred to me that baseball might be being played this summer!). But over the past few months sports awareness has been creeping back in.
The first thing I payed attention to a little bit was the America's Cup. Fortunately, they wanted hundreds of dollars to stream it, so I was saved from watching live and only took in the action via highlights on YouTube. SailGP, on the other hand, is live on Youtube, so that's taken up a couple weekends lately. Most recently my attention has been drawn to cycling. Downhill is the most fun; I got the Red Bull TV ap for my phone to watch it, but an even better way to get absorbed in the excitement of World Cup downhill events is all the different folks putting out content on Youtube. From newsy outfits like Pinkbike and Vital MTB, to teams like The Syndicate, to individuals like Wyn Masters and—my favorite—Bernard Kerr. With all those different ways to watch I really feel like I get a complete view of the event... super fun!
Then of course there's also this road race going on in France. I wouldn't have been aware of it but for Youtube's recommendation engine, but now I am. NBC won't let me watch livestreams or even full race replays, but that's probably good because I don't have five hours a day to devote to following the action (I haven't since that time when Harvey was a baby). Even the half-hour extended recaps are more time that I should be devoting to broadcast entertainment, given everthing else that I should be working on. But it's nice to be able to talk about a sports thing with friends, as I did on Tuesday evening. Plus an MTB boy is in the Yellow Jersey now!
au revoir le tour
The Tour de France ended today, and what a good one it was. I have complained before about previous tours and the "doping scandals" they involved; I don't care at all about doping, I just want to watch some racing. This year no one pretended moral outrage, and there was a fair amount of drama both in the individual stages and overall. Also I wasn't doing anything but watching the baby, and we have the DVR, so I was able to watch almost every minute of the US coverage (much of it, admittedly, in fast forward). Also Bradley Wiggens, who I picked as a favorite in the first third or so (mostly because of his name and nationality and because I wanted to support Garmin as the non-Columbia US team and Christian Vande Velde seems something of a tool) did quite well indeed. So it was all good, and now I never have to watch television ever again.
Also, I mentioned back in 2007 that I was going to become an Astana supporter; from what I can recall that was in response to them getting kicked out of the tour that year for doping. Needless to say, I was not supporting them this year.