Does anyone give a damn about the Tour de France?

you could have written yesterday, when he dropped the hammer on the peloton and won Stage 2.

 

I'm just going to throw this out for fun and discussion.

How many of your readers are active cyclists? How many of them race? Are these the kinds of potential readers -- i.e. usually upper middle class -- worth paying attention to?

If you are at a 75-100k paper, do you run stories -- small or otherwise -- on local golf tournaments? Do you cover the local bike races?

I live in an area where, on any given Saturday or Sunday, there are 200-300 local cyclists in an actual race. Another 300-500 in a triathlon on the same day. Usually there are a few thousand dollars in cash and prizes on the line in these races. It's a number probably significantly higher than are competing in a local golf tourney down at the muni. Last week, there were 2,000 cyclists in an organized fundraiser tour. In a month, 1,000 more will be in a 170-mile one day race. A month later, 1,500 in a 206-mile one day race.

I bet all of them are interested in seeing at least a few inches each day on the Tour even if they already watched it on TV or read about it on the Internet. After all, don't most baseball, football and basketball fans already know virtually everything there is to know about those games within an hour of them being over? And we still publish those results.

Next month, a big pro stage race comes to town. Last time it was here, there were 25,000 people along the street for the downtown stage.

Are events like these ever covered by your paper? We have a staffer who thinks almost every golf tournament needs some degree of coverage -- especially during summer when 'real sports' like football and basketball take a vacation and he needs hours and bylines in order to feel like he's earning a paycheck.

Also, if your paper gives coverage to things like Euro 2008, doesn't the Tour de France also deserve semi-similar coverage?

 

I suppose it'd depend on the area, but it'd be wise to at least feel for a base of readers interested in the sport.
One fairly easy way to get into coverage is if there's a local crit series or something. There was a running series where I used to work, and they tallied points and had an awards ceremony after the last one. It was a good way to fill some space, and tapped into an enthusiastic part of the community.

Plus, it can just be something damn interesting to cover. If you treat it like something that needs to be covered and write off the results, it's going to look like shit. But if you send someone who knows what they're watching and take some good pictures (crits tend to make for good action shots), you'll get a good story.

 

And at my paper, I try to not push too hard to include this stuff. After all, I'm an admitted fanboy loser as well as a participant in the local crit series and racing scene.

But when the NRC stage race comes to town, the boss is happy to have someone on staff who know what 'the race of truth' means.

 

Sorry, Ids, but it's a niche sport. People in the US pay attention because they're supposed to. It's conditioned, just like the Indy 500 (and the last time most of you watched an IRL race, was?), a horse race besides the Breeders Cup or the Triple Crown, the Australian or French Open. We pay attention because we've heard of it, but it isn't as important as it was five years ago, or 10 or 20 or 50.

 

Early Monday, a guy calls to thank me for running a story in the paper about the weekend UFC head-bash.

I have never, ever, ever, ever, ever gotten a single solitary call about the TDF, and I'm a bit of a geek about it myself.

 

But you were so damn polite about it...

 

That's where this business can get sketchy. I can say the exact same thing about the NBA (other than the geek part because I hate that shit). Throughout the course of the entire NBA season, if we run more than half a dozen NBA stories, that's pushing it. When it gets to the playoffs we pick up coverage but it's still not daily. We'll run a game story from each game of the finals.

But I have never, never, never had a call complaining about NBA coverage. We've had more complaints about what we run on the NHL, which is in line with the NBA.

So I guess going back to the original question of the thread .... who freakin knows?

 

Isn't the NHL a niche sport in America? Especially in non-NHL cities? That gets at least a roundup every day.

A bit off topic, but I love watching the early morning coverage on Versus with Phil Liggett offering commentary. The announcers change during the replay at night.

 

The morning covering with Phil and Paul is the best. They are the English voice of cycling. Liggett gets so much stuff wrong in terms of misidentifying riders or saying things "... and there's no way he'll get caught now... " just as a guy is getting passed. That's part of his charm.

NHL/NBA get roundups if there is space, but it's rare by the time we get in all our local coverage and stories of higher priority. College basketball is much bigger outside NBA cities.

 

All I know is Vaughters dropped an f-bomb onlive TV and Robbie Ventura nearly swallowed his microphone not knowing how to react. Classic.

 

I'll keep an eye out for that when I watch the replay tonight, though I suspect that portion might be edited.