We're one week into this year's edition of the Tour de France, and the usual questions are uppermost on everyone's mind: Will Lance be able to hang on for the win? Will Ullrich or Hamilton or Leipheimer or whoever give him a run for his money? Will the green jersey come down to the final day again? Will OLN ever find the right combination of announcers and format?



When I first tuned into the tour in '99 it was purely by coincidence that it was the first stage, and that Lance was going to make his big comeback. At that time, and for a few years before that, you got half an hour of highlights every day on ESPN2 around dinner time, and if you missed it you had to tape the rebroadcast late at night and watch it the next day. But compared to nothing at all, it was ok to put up with Adrian Karsten to here those choice moments of Phil Liggett calling the race.



Then in 2001, OLN took over, with not just the Tour but all the major European cyling events. Even the Giro was broadcast in prime time. Now we had a steady dose of Phil and Paul, with Bob Roll thrown in to keep things interesting. OLN has stuck with this combination ever since (except they snubbed Bob in 2002 for some reason), but every year they bring in a newbie to be the lead announcer guy, since somebody has to be in charge and apparently they've already got the only three people in the world who know anything about cycling. So that first year there was Bob Varsha, he of the pompadour that defied gravity. He was replaced the next year by Bill Patrick, who was equally colorless and forgettable. Last year we got the perky Kirsten Gum, who at least meant well and didn't really pretend to know anything about bike racing, and who is still around although relegated to the human interest stories and forced to travel around France this year with a group of bike messengers who at least have been relegated to their own show so I don't have to watch.



And this year we have Al Trautwig, who comes across with a degree of professionalism missing from the others (much like Brett Haber, who anchored the short-lived Summer Sports Zone last year with Bobke, a neophyte but one who'd obviously done his homework and added an ESPN-like pizzazz to the proceedings. He's now disappeared too). Al wants to like cycling, but he doesn't have much to say about the specifics of the proceedings other than talking about Lance or about crashes (which is kind of how the rest of tv deals with the TdF already). OLN has had the dubious idea this year of having Al and Bob call the race in prime time so that we Americans don't have to listen to those British accents for too long, although they defer to Phil and Paul for the finishes because, after all, no one can call a finish like Phil Liggett. But since Al doesn't know very much, Bob does most of the talking, and I don't care how much you know about cycling after a while you run out of things to say, especially on these flat stages of the first week where not a whole lot is going on. Even the classics and other races I've seen on OLN that are just called by Phil alone cry out for someone for him to talk to.



So if you read the letters column on velonews.com you see a lot of whining about Al and about OLN, and occasionally about the other guys too, but these people either have short memories or are new to cycling because this still beats by a huge margin what you had just four short years ago. And as I think Kevin Livingston wrote a while back when he was getting into cycling during the LeMond era, you had to buy the tapes if you wanted to watch a race in the U.S.



What's been interesting is a seeming surge of interest in cycling in the U.S. in the last couple of years, with the expansion of the Tour of Connecticut and Tour de Georgia in trying to establish a significant stage race on American soil that actually attracts European teams. This happened during the '80's too with the Tour de Trump and Tour Dupont, presumably after Greg LeMond and Andy Hampsten brought European cycling to people's attention here for the first time. But as soon as they retired, the big American stage races retired with them, and it's taken this long into Lance's reign to see anything similar being put together. Lance, Tyler and Bobby Julich are all about the same age, and Levi's only a few years behind, and it remains to be seen what Tom Danielson or Dave Zabriskie or some of those guys can do in the big stage races. So once the old guard retires in a couple of years, who's coming along in the American ranks of cycling to keep that interest going? OLN promotes the Tour heavily because it's how they make like 40% of their revenue (I didn't realize until this week that they're also a sponsor of the USPS team, which would seem to be a conflict of interest, but maybe not). Once Lance is no longer in the headlines, somebody else will need to come along to keep the Americans tuning in, or cycling will go back to being in the same category as rugby, cricket, soccer and all the other European sports which are just as good as their American rivals, but suffer here from not having any American teams. Then the days of Al Trautwig will be looked upon fondly even by his current detractors.