The Tour de France is the Franco Super Bowl. In the U.S., it’s the Super Bowl broadcast for Versus, a channel that the rest of the time makes its living showing rodeo and hockey—as if the two aren’t interchangeable. This year it’s the Super Bowl that actually has some drama; seven time champion, cancer survivor and all-American hero Lance Armstrong is back and challenging the pack.
You can almost hear the announcers at Versus drooling. For three weeks in July Versus becomes the Tour authority, opining on the drug issues that have dragged the famed race into the gutter with more gusto than a nasty headwind. Versus viewers learn how the peloton might chase a breakaway unless it finds the breakaway’s members to be harmless, and then it leaves the breakaway alone. They learn about sprinters and kings of the mountains. They know the difference between climbers and domestiques and why George Hincapie is a great rider who will never wear the yellow jersey in Paris.
And if that’s not enough, Versus viewers can go to the channel’s Web page and find out even more; participate in chatrooms; play games and contests; get the latest from the Versus race experts and just immerse themselves in the three-week French festival. This year they can even compete to win a spot in Paris for the Tour’s final day.
The Tour de France is the tour de force of the Versus schedule. And if you happen to miss it on any of the multiple times it’s on live during the day, it’s on VoD, the crew reminds you.
This year that crew is in bicycle heaven. Armstrong is back and Americans are rallying in the Alps and Pyrenees, cheering on this cancer survivor and hoping he can once again shove his bicycle up the noses of the snooty French who check out his urine more often than my neighbor’s dog examines his favorite watering holes.
This constant cloud of drug innuendo annoys Armstrong. We know this because Armstrong constantly “tweets” his fans about his disdain for the testing. He also lets them in on trade secrets about his Astana team and whether he’s really happy with the way teammate Alberto Contador is challenging his yellow jersey supremacy. And if fans don’t get enough Lance, they can always tweet over to his teammate, Levi Leipheimer. Lepheimer, himself no slouch on the saddle, has his own Twitter account.
So what’s all this got to do with interactive TV? Nothing. And everything. If you want the extra information that Versus hawks with every pedal revolution, you have to step away from the screen and log onto their Web site. If you want to know what Lance has to say about drug testing – or whether he’s really all that happy with the race as a whole – you need a cell phone or a PC and a Twitter account. The Tour, in all its glorious HD beauty – and the scenery IS stunning — is a static event when it comes to television. Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen and Bob Rolls talk at you, not WITH you – unless, of course, you happen to log onto your computer.
Lance Armstrong, a true American idol who is seemingly doing things the clean way in a dirty sports world, could turn the Tour de France and bicycling on its ears this year four years after retiring. You can see it happen one Sunday soon in glorious HD. But if you want to hear what Lance thinks about winning – or even more juicily, losing – you’re going to have to use other media because the television hasn’t caught up yet.
As Chicago Cubs fans like to say – maybe next year. Of course, to be fair, it’s a good bet than the Tour de France will be on interactive TV long before the Cubs even reach the World Series.
