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Just Another Essay



Viva le Tour de France!

Essay Posted July 9, 2007 by James E. Nelson

America may be the most lucrative place for advertisers; it may have the highest paid athletes; it may even be the most desirable market for many athletes to compete in, but in the larger scheme of things, it’s small potatoes.

The Tour de France began this weekend in London and the pelaton will make it’s way toward the Champs d'Elysée in three weeks. Since the prologue is in London this year the British press has been reporting on “Le Tour” more than usual. This little item on the BBC sports feed last Friday caught my attention: “The event is watched by as many as 15 million people on the roadside every year with an estimated two billion watching on television over the three weeks.” [Note: That was written on Saturday. Since writing that, the numbers are final from the Prologue in London (one million spectators) and the first stage from London to Canterbury (two million spectators along the route).]

Those numbers must make Madison Avenue drool. Nothing in North America even comes close. On the other hand, I suspect that it would be difficult to translate those viewers into revenue stream in the same manner that they manage with the Super Bowl, for instance, is turned into a cash bonanza for the network showing the game. But this essay isn't about who can produce the most cash or create the snazziest commercial, it's about sport and how it is appreciated here and around the world.

America is football, while the rest of the world is FUTBOL!!!!!!!! America is Nascar while the rest of the world is Formula 1. The United States is baseball while those countries in the British orbit are cricket. And now that the Chinese, Italians, Azerbaijanis, and Canadians have players in the NBA, it seems everyone—except Americans—cares about basketball.

Of course, not everyone in the world has the same tastes in sport, and American tastes certainly don't lean toward professional bicycling. But that being said, just what is the fan attraction to bicycling? Or at least, attending a race? I have thought that it would be great fun to go to Spain to attend the Vuelta d'Espania, the smallest of the three grand tours, but this year, watching the weekly wrap-up of the Giro d'Italia and other races on television, I began to notice that the crowd was many people thick. If you were lucky enough to get close enough to the road to actually see the cyclists, you'd stand there for hours just to get a glimpse of each cyclist peddling by. There would be no context, no start nor finish. Upon consideration, it seems an odd way to spend a day. And yet thousands upon thousands (I had better change that to millions) drop everything and do just that whenever one of the Tours comes by their house.

But I suppose the truth of the matter is that attending public sport in many cases is less about “sport” and more about “public.” It's an opportunity to gather with like-minded people to be a part of the action, even if you don't know precisely what the action is. In this sense it's a lot like tail-gating at a football game or the Latin Mass. I have a friend who is Indian. I suppose it goes without saying that he's a cricket fan. He tells me (with a straight face, so I assume he's telling the truth) that a single cricket match can last five days. People evidently don't merely attend a match, they camp out. To an outsider like me, it seems less like a sport and more like a vigil. But Manoj tells me that you have to experience it to understand it. And once the experience is in your blood, you're an addict for life. Again, it sounds like he's saying that it's more about “public” and less about “sport.” Some events are simply bigger than the sum of their parts and you have to experience it first hand, even if in doing so you can't experience the event in its wholeness.

Watching cycling on television is a different matter completely. Like all true sports, there's a great deal of technical skill and strategy. Although it's not obvious, it is also a team sport. But it is akin to basketball in that while the team and team strategy are absolutely vital, a talented individual can carry a team, such as a Lance or LeBron. But since the cameras travel on motorcycles right with the riders, it is possible to watch the whole event on television, in contrast to the passing glimpse one would get if you were present at the event.

So even though it's a non-event here in the States, I have to offer up a hurrah to the teams and riders and a pause with a bit of wonder that 15 million will be lining the roadsides of the race and possibly two billion at least occasionally tuning it in on their television sets. That's a remarkable “public” for this “sport.”

NOTE: The Tour de France will air daily throughout the event here in the U.S. on Versus (which used to be called the Outdoor Life Network, or OLN for short). Sadly few cable systems carry the channel, so it's not even available in a number of places. But I settled on DirecTV specifically because they carry Versus, so you're welcome to join me at 8:30 a.m., Central Daylight Time (or, since we're talking about a European event, maybe I should say, GMT -6) every day so that we can add a little bit of “public” to the “sport.”