This year's France Television coverage is the worst I've ever seen
there, and it even rivals the old ESPN coverage with John Tesch music.
In particular, Thevenet, who was the most knowledgeable and precise
colour commentator I've heard is totally gone and his replacement,
Laurent Jalabert, who was not too bad, has been superseded by Laurent
Fignon. It is hard for me to listen to Fignon for more than 5
seconds without thinking "loser", especially when he was criticising
Moreau's position as not being aerodynamic. To make things worse, his
memory is poor, e.g., when he referred to the extremely bad TT
position of that "Russian" and the co-commentator went through the
list of Russians, each of which was negative, until he figured out
that he meant Popovych, who is actually Ukranian. Apart from that, he
is fond of making stupid jokes which aren't funny.
The production is also amazingly poor. For example, they featured
Wiggins' ride by also showing his DS yelling into his walkie talkie,
and minizing these two images to a fraction of the screen size. For
this reason, it was impossible to see his intermediate and finish
times unless you had HDTV. They used the same function during
Cancellara's ride, as they wanted to show Millar's face during his
post race interview.
My other observations of the race are:
1. It seemed that the bike size and weight check was done literally 5
minutes before the start. I saw Millar being measured by UCI officials
5 minutes before his start. Same for Vinokourov. That doesn't seem to
give much time to rectify a problem.
2. Sylvain Chavanel actually drank from his water bottle during the
race. In fact, this seems to strange for a 9 minute race that I might
actually have to find it again to make sure I didn't imagine it.
-ilan