Well the Tour de France has ended, and for the seventh straight time,
Lance Armstrong won it. He's retiring while on top, so make all the "that took a pair of brass balls" jokes you want, and loathe him if you must for starting the goddamned plastic bracelet fad, but winning a 2300 mile three week bike race seven years in a row is still an amazing achievement. Not that he cares about your jokes or loathing, not with his millions, his international fame, and his non-fugly rock star girlfriend.
I do wonder though, who actually watches the Tour on TV?
It looks like fun in person, sitting out and picnicking in the countryside and yelling when a bunch of sweaty guys go coursing past on bikes, but on TV? What's the point? It's on the Outdoor Life Network in the US, displacing their usual "killing God's creatures" programming fare. OLN is only on cable, and if you get it it's usually like channel 91, squeezed in between Telemundo and QVC. When they show the Tour live it's on at like 3am, due to the 6-9 hour time difference between the US and France. They replay it during the day, of course, but it's not exactly an event made for television: Each leg is like four hours long, there are only three or four guys out of hundreds of racers who are actually in competition for the overall title, and since it's a road race you don't get to see them passing each other as they do laps around a defined course. The main fun is waiting for a racer to run into one of the buzzing cameramen motorcycles, or for some costumed lunatic to leap out onto the course and sprint along beside the racers (this happens quite often), or actually knock into one or stab him (this happens less often).
My dad had it on in the morning several times while I was in San Diego earlier this month, and while it's sort of peaceful to watch them pedal along in their brightly-colored outfits, that keeps you going for like five minutes. After that you're ready to see if ESPN 2 has K1 on.
