Tour De France Gears Up

With the ever-increasing democratization of media, it’s hard to remember what it was like to watch an international sporting event on said sporting event’s terms — and this year’s Tour de France is yet another beneficiary/victim of this brave new world of broadcasting. What’s the best method for the modern cycling fan to keep tabs on the 23-day race? It’s an exciting world of options, but democratization or not, it contains one huge obstacle — the language barrier.

Because if you want to truly follow the greatest bike race on Earth, you should probably learn a little French. Le Tour De France’s YouTube channel makes little effort to be comprehensible to non-native speakers. There are short, graphics-only videos depicting the stages of competition, which quickly provide a visual guide to the upcoming day’s competition without needing any words, but English-language support overall is spotty. And while the main Tour de France site does offer some video en Anglais, they’re difficult to track down within the actual channel.

But the appeal of the Tour isn’t in the words spoken by its competitors — it’s the excitement of the daily action, each stage its own mini-race, its own opportunity to thrill. So if you’re only interested in watching spandex-clad men on bikes, you’re not so badly off. The cable network Versus has official U.S./Canada broadcast rights, and they’re streaming portions of the day’s competition, along with summary pieces.

Plus, for those interested in more detail about what it’s like to do the Tour on the ground level, the Google mothership is surprisingly helpful. Well, maybe not so surprising when you take into consideration that product manager Dylan Casey is a retired professional cyclist who rode with Lance Armstrong and the U.S. Postal Team from 1999-2002. Not only does Google have the lowdown on how to follow the action using Google Maps Street View, but Casey also did an hour-long talk about his experiences as a professional cyclist, available as part of the Google Tech Talks series. It’s worth pointing out that the video’s title and description is misleading — while Casey was definitely a teammate of Armstrong’s and did compete throughout Europe, his own web site confirms that he never rode in the TdF. But he’s still able to talk candidly about the daily realities of tough competition (though, given how frequently he mentions massages, part of me is slightly less than sympathetic).

The TdF presence online could stand to take a few pointers from other international competitions — Eurovision takes place on a smaller scale, admittedly, but is almost effortlessly multilingual. But if Alejandro Valverde can cross 200 kilometers of terrain in four hours and thirty minutes, you should be able to cross the language gap.