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Tuesday, July 09, 2002
By MARK TAYLOR
No, I'm not talking about Jerry Springer's latest episode. For the second year in a row, the Outdoor Life Network is televising the Tour de France live nearly every day from now until the race ends in Paris in just less than three weeks. CBS will air tape-delayed coverage the next three Sunday afternoons. If you're a recreational bike racer or a serious cyclist, you have probably already started tuning in to watch Lance Armstrong chase his fourth consecutive Tour win. If you're not, but you enjoy watching exciting sports action, I urge you to give the Tour de France a look. True, bike racing doesn't offer the nearly nonstop action of basketball or football. If those are your only spectator sports of choice, you may not be willing to follow the developing strategies and subplots common to the three-week Tour de France. However, if you like to watch auto racing - and, according to the TV ratings, a lot of you do - bike racing is a natural fit. Car racing and bike racing share many elements, from the importance of drafting, to the critical role played by support crews, to the intriguing rivalries and alliances between individuals and teams. This year's Tour de France may seem a bit of a downer because two of Armstrong's chief rivals aren't racing. German Jan Ullrich, second to Armstrong the past two years, is out because of an injury. Marco Pantani, a feisty Italian with whom Armstrong had a public spat during the 2000 race, is out because of performance-enhancing drug issues. Each year's Tour offers surprises, however, and several riders could challenge Armstrong. Better yet, a couple of them are Americans riding for rival teams. Levi Leipheimer, who rides for the Dutch Rabobank team, finished third last summer in the Vuelta a Espana stage race in Spain, becoming the first American to make that race's podium. Tyler Hamilton, who until this year was one of Armstrong's support riders on the U.S. Postal Service team, is now on the CSC-Tiscali team. Hamilton recently finished second in the grueling Giro d'Italia stage race. It should be fun watching this thing play out between now and July28. I won't go quite as crazy as I did last year, when I taped and eventually watched every minute of every live telecast. That was a bit much. Most days during this year's race, OLN will join the stage about two-thirds in, roughly two hours from the expected finish. Typically, the final hour of each day's race will hold most of the action. Because just a handful of stages each year determine the top overall finishers, a casual fan can get a good taste of the race in just a few carefully chosen hours. Here are some of this year's key stages and why you should try to watch them. Stage 12: There are a couple of important time trials during the race's first 10 days, but for the most part the first half of the race is a warm-up. Top contenders will be happy to finish in the main pack while muscular sprinters earn stage wins. That changes when the race heads to the mountains. Armstrong and his primary rivals will get a good feel for each other in stage 11 on July18, but the real decisive race may come a day later. Stage 12 is more than 120 miles, with one massive climb after another, and ends at a mountaintop finish line. OLN's live coverage starts an hour earlier than normal, at 8:30 a.m. Stage 16: Their legs weary from the previous day's nearly 140-mile mountain stage, the riders will face the race's toughest day in the mountains on July24. The stage features only three climbs, but they are all brutal, with more than 15,000 vertical feet of climbing. With the race ending just a few days later, this stage will have a huge bearing on the final standings. OLN's four-hour block of live coverage starts at 7:30 a.m. Stage 19: The race's penultimate stage will give riders their final chance to move up - or down - in the standings. The July27 stage is a 30-mile individual time trial, just the rider against the clock. Because the next day's final stage is more ceremonial than anything else, the standings after this stage will hold when the tour ends. The leaders will start last, so the best action will be during the last hour or so of OLN's live coverage, which runs 9:30-11:30 a.m. For more on the 2002 Tour de France, see velonews.com/tour2002/ or olntv.com/tdf02/index.html
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