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Pardon My Rant: A Stopwatch on Versus’ Paris-Roubaix Coverage

No Comments | April 18th, 2007 | Trackback

stopwatch So, the other day I got a comment on this blog about my rant on the scant coverage of the Tour of Flanders on Versus. The gist was that even if it’s only 40 minutes of coverage (for a six-plus-hour race), that’s better than nothing, which is what cycling fans in the US had for many, many years. I remember quite clearly the first Tour de France I saw on TV, when the husband and I were dating in 1996. To him, an avid cycling fan for years already, the half-hour of coverage that the network (I can’t even remember which one it was) devoted to the race was manna from heaven.

Following that, I remember when CyclingNews started doing what amounted to live blogs of events around the globe, meaning we could sit at our desks at work and hit the “refresh” button every five seconds to find out what was going on in the race. That felt like Christmas and your birthday all rolled into one.

So when OLN began showing Tour de France stages live, the feeling of excitement and anticipation was beyond words. We here on the West Coast would get up at ungodly early hours, even on weekends, just to watch live feeds of the legendary event. In the years of Lance, cycling coverage on OLN grew - and we grew to love and rely on it more and more.

And that’s why the new trend with Versus (the new OLN) cutting its cycling coverage left and right is so depressing. Sure, if we’d never had what we all consider to be “the good times” for the past few years, we probably wouldn’t be grumbling. But we’re grumbling, all right.

The husband and I did an experiment while watching the Versus coverage of Paris-Roubaix, which we’d recorded. He got out a stopwatch, and we actually clocked precisely how much time of the hour-long broadcast was devoted to race coverage. (Is it just me, or did Phil & Paul proudly proclaim the week before that Paris-Roubaix coverage would be two hours long? But I digress.) I’d been overly generous, apparently, in my 40-minute quip earlier. The coverage of the actual race, even including what the husband called “a good 2-3 minutes of award ceremony, interviews and wife-kissing,” came to a whopping 27 minutes. Twenty-seven fucking minutes. Not even a half of the damned hour was spent on the Queen of the Classics.

Where did the rest of that hour go? Obviously, there are ads. I get that. I’m fine with that. But in addition to the normal advertisements outside the coverage, within the program itself there were rider profiles, technical reports on the bike, ads for the Tour de Georgia and Amstel Gold, and any number of promos (which poor once-dignified Phil Liggett is reduced to reading) for hockey or bull riding or some such nonsense.

So, what do I want? It’s simple.

I want it to be heard loud and clear by the folks at Versus that this is not okay. I want cycling fans all over the US to stand up and be counted as a viable market. Many of us are paying for cycling coverage twice now - once for crap coverage on Versus, and second for excellent coverage on Cycling.tv - and I’m not surprised whenever I hear people say they’re going to get rid of their cable package because the coverage on Versus is all but worthless now. I want cycling fans to issue an ultimatum to Versus - get your act together, or we’ll all be content to give all of our money to Cycling.tv. Because this is effing ridiculous.

(By the way, I’m not the only one who’s been thinking things like this. Podium Cafe has had a couple posts about this very topic, including this one and this one. And yes, I think they’re very wise indeed to agree with me.)

To contact Versus, here are the necessary tidbits:
email: feedback@versus.com
phone: (203) 406-2500 and toll-free: 1-877-VERSUS-ON
mail: VERSUS
Two Stamford Plaza
281 Tresser Boulevard
Stamford, CT 06901