I live in the mountains of the Northeast, and normally the last thing I want in the spacious days of summer is something to watch on TV. But this year we’ve had one flooding rain after another, and when the skies have cleared they really haven’t––the plume of smoke from Canada’s wildfires has hovered day after day, and many mornings, like this one, the roadside sign that usually offers up warnings about construction ahead has instead flashed this grim warning: “Air Quality Alert/Limit Outdoor Activity.” So I’ve been grateful for the daily distraction from climate dread provided by the Tour de France, arguably the world’s biggest annual sporting spectacle.
And in this case I come to praise not mainly the noble rivals Jonas Vingegaard and Tadej Pogačar (more on them later) but the broadcast crew assembled by Peacock, the NBC streaming service, to cover the contest’s twenty-one days of racing. Since each broadcast lasts five or six hours (the daily stages are hundreds of kilometres long, and even at the astonishing pace of these cyclists it takes a while), that’s more than a hundred hours of coverage in a month—maybe equivalent to an N.F.L. season’s worth of broadcasting time. And yet it is a steady pleasure.
The coverage begins each morning in a Connecticut studio where a trio—Paul Burmeister, Sam Bewley, and Brent Bookwalter—stand quite formally behind a lectern, wearing suits, ties, and pocket squares. (I have no idea why—perhaps a contract with some haberdasher.) Burmeister is a TV guy—his smooth patter has graced everything from Notre Dame football to ski jumping. But his two partners are bike guys—Bewley, a former Olympic bronze medallist for New Zealand, and Bookwalter, a Michigan native and a veteran of the Grand Tour, in Europe. They begin by forecasting the day ahead, which is a more complicated task than you might think.
The Tour de France is famous for the yellow jersey that its over-all leader wears—when the race finally ends up on the Champs-Élysées, on Sunday, the Danish cyclist Vingegaard will almost certainly wear the maillot jaune for having made the 3,405-kilometre trip in the shortest elapsed time. But his duel with the Slovene Pogačar has been only part of the story. The race also features the polka-dot jersey, awarded to the man who wins the most summit climbs in the mountains of the Alps and Pyrenees, and the green jersey, which goes to the fastest of the sprinters. On “flat stages,” which avoid the mountains, those sprinters usually wind up in a chaotic dash to the line; on mountainous stages, the sprinters gather far behind the main peloton, willing their bodies slowly up the hills to meet the daily time cutoff and stay in the race. Meanwhile, each day’s stage is a race of its own, with glory to whoever manages to win; each rider, in turn, is a member of an eight-man team, and they can and do work together, breaking the headwinds for their stars. All in all, there’s plenty to talk about.
And the talk, after half an hour of studio preliminaries, moves to France, and the persons of Phil Liggett and Bob Roll, as natural a TV pair as I’ve ever seen. Liggett, an Englishman who will turn eighty shortly after this Tour concludes, has covered the Tour for more than fifty years, which is very nearly half of its hundred and ten renditions. Roll is merely in his sixties, and declares his youth by pre-riding many of the hill climbs on the morning of the stage, the better to describe the pain the racers are about to endure. He is, I think, the actual heart of the coverage. Liggett talks more, chattering happily away with many useful references to the long history of the race. But sometimes he gets a name or a team or a time wrong. (He occasionally conflates young riders with their fathers or even grandfathers, who raced before them.) Roll, like the patient wife of an endearingly addled older husband, offers a gentle correction, but mostly he provides strategic insight that comes from his own long career in the saddle; he has an almost preternatural instinct for the glorious moment each day when one of the leaders will launch a superhuman uphill “attack” to open a gap on his rivals.
When that happens, the other key member of the team—another former pro cyclist, Christian Vande Velde—is often on hand to commentate. He spends each race day on the back of a motorcycle, watching the action up close and chatting through car windows with the directors of the various teams who will share bits of strategy. This sounds like an easy enough job, until you remember that, much of the time, he’s whipping downhill at sixty miles per hour or more, following the racers through the harrowing descents. (In the Tour de Suisse, a warmup race for this year’s Tour, one rider died after a high-speed crash.) Oh, and then there’s also Steve Porino, a dead ringer in look and affect for the late Fred Willard in his role as the broadcaster in “Best in Show”; Porino ranges ahead of the riders, looking for people along the road to interview, often managing to find the stars’ parents, whom he coaxes from their camper vans to offer anecdotes about the athletic precociousness of their sons as small boys.
Even with all these voices, there’s a lot of air to fill, and so Roll often serves as tour guide: the broadcast feed, provided to TV channels around the world by the Tour organizers, features many long helicopter shots, and when nothing much is happening in the race the camera tends to linger on châteaux and churches, and so there’s an ongoing impromptu lesson in medieval history. All in all, a low-key way to pass the day, a gentle frame for the eventual injections of high drama.
And, oh, that drama! This year’s two stars are so evenly matched that two weeks into the race only ten seconds separated them. (Vingegaard finally surged ahead on Tuesday’s time trial.) Many of the stages end with massive ascents into the lunar landscape of high and treeless mountains, and sooner or later one of the two tries to shake the other with a massive acceleration; the tension hinges on whether his foe will be able to match the pace or will watch his rival disappear up the mountain. The commentators are fully up to the task of capturing the nobility of these painful assaults, coming after hours of fast pedalling. (Oh, how one hopes these two are not doping.) That catharsis—it often lasts just seconds—is the centerpiece of these long broadcasts, and a daily reminder of why sports are, in some way, a serious part of our lives: there are few other venues for such public displays of courage and resolve, and the resulting joy or despair.
That’s a point, perhaps, that’s less obvious now than it once was. The Times announced earlier this month that it was disbanding its sports department. It will now send its readers to a subscription service that it recently acquired, the Athletic. I read it, and it occasionally offers long and engaging features in the lineage of Sports Illustrated. But mainly it provides acres of words about the main team sports in the U.S., often to do with contracts and statistics. It is sports as business—the comments sections are filled with disgruntled fans moaning about the general managers of their local teams. (One suspects that its most devoted readers are the ever-growing ranks of sports gamblers.) Transcendence is rare, unless you find it in a spreadsheet.
Endurance sports such as the Tour de France, which traditionally receive little coverage in the U.S., are perhaps a more reliable vehicle for that transcendence, and Peacock deserves credit for covering them—Liggett and Roll have also worked the Grand Tours of Spain and Italy, and the network also offers up coverage of swimming and track and field. Doubtless this has something to do with NBC owning the rights to the Olympics; we are always on the Road to Someplace (at the moment Paris, next summer). And my plaudits have limits: the network recently stopped covering Nordic skiing, which means that the winter TV sports scene features very little long-distance agony.
Still, the Tour de France redeems much else. There’s no escaping reality entirely—the weather has been heating up in Europe as the Tour proceeds, and this is easy to see as the racers warm up in ice-filled vests. But, when the race finishes, the commentators help viewers wind down their heart rates with another half hour of commentary—Roll is even able to translate from most of the European languages that the racers use to offer their post-race clichés. England was wise enough to award Liggett an M.B.E. (Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire), some years ago; we have no such way to honor our broadcasters save devoting a few hours each day to listening and appreciating. ♦
An earlier version of this article misstated the location of NBC Sports’ studios.
