Just this minute received some pictures from the long-lost Cris Moore, filling me in on what happened last year.  Apparently he got married in October.

 



 

Now if only he would divulge his address or what he's doing with his life or what's with the ponytail.  But I guess you have to save something for next year.  Apparently the Stonehills were in on this information, also, but I guess they were saving it too.

 

So congratulations to Cris and Tracy!  By now they probably have three kids and a summer house on the Vineyard.  If I hear anything more I'll pass it along...

 

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.

So did you see me on tv? I don't know if I personally made it on or not, but we drove to New York on the 4th for the Macy's fireworks with Karen, who had scored us tickets to the private viewing area through her sister, who works for Macy's (Karen's own family stayed home, in anticipation of making the trip for the thanksgiving day parade later on). There was a live show from where we were sitting hosted by Carson Daly, which was broadcast on NBC.



We got to NYC about noon and checked into the Courtyard on 3rd ave, but the room wasn't ready yet, so we walked around for a few hours, as is our habit when in New York. Being the fourth, not everything was open, but we got some lunch at a deli called Azure down the block, then hiked over towards Times Square to check out the Toys R Us (have to give the kids something to look forward to, after all). On the way we stopped in at the new American Girl store, with which Justin and I were bored silly. I was hoping to make it up to him by going to Midtown Comics after we were done with Times Square but they ended up being one of the places that were closed. But the kids had fun at TRU and we rode the ferris wheel and checked out all the cool stuff. We hiked back to the hotel (by way of the Museum of TV and Radio, which was also closed), the swanky room they wanted to give us still wasn't ready yet, but since its main attraction was that it would overlook the fireworks, I opted for a less swanky room that was ready to be occupied. Took it easy for an hour, then took a cab down to the festivities at 34th and 1st. The bell captain wasn't there to hail a cab for us, so Chloe walked up to the curb and said, "Is this how you do it?" and held her arm up into the street, and within a microsecond a cab had appeared. We congratulated Chloe in her adaptability to New York living.



Once near the East River we found Karen's sister, Marie, then had dinner at an Italian place on 2nd called Christina's, which was pretty good and reasonable too. Had to walk through a long conga line of police barricades to get to the bleachers on the far side of the FDR where we were supposed to sit. Although we were at the far end, we were only about 20 feet from the river, with some tv monitors and lights in front of us, and a stage way over to one side, also facing the river. For the pre-show entertainment some USO singers did a few renditions of patriotic favorites, and fire boats spewed red white and blue water out in the river. It wasn't hot and there was a stiff breeze most of the afternoon.



Before the real show got underway, Karen's sister got us to move down closer to the stage (which was still over our shoulders to the left) and in the front row of bleachers. There were three or four rows behind us that were empty the whole time, which I thought was odd considering how many people were there, until about two minutes before the show was about to start, when in walked a phalanx of big guys in dark suits, escorting Mayor Bloomberg and his retinue, who promptly sat in those unoccupied bleacher seats behind us.



The tv show began, we were encouraged to be as noisy as possible when going into or out of commercials (even though much of the show was on tape and from other parts of Manhattan). Aretha Franklin sang from Times Square, Cheryl Crow was somewhere else, Fantasia was somewhere, all recorded weeks ago. But we were live with Carson on the riverfront. After one commercial they cued everyone to simultaneously deploy a tube of confetti that was included in a bag of swag they'd handed out as we entered (also included: a mini American flag and a can of cocktail peanuts). Two roving cameras, one handheld and one steadycam, went up and down in front of the bleachers during the show, and we were encouraged that if they pointed at us while the fireworks were going on, to look at the fireworks and not the camera.



The fireworks started by 9:30 or so and lasted about half an hour, shot off in symmetry from three barges out in the river while some horrible patriotic medley written just for the occasion blared over the speakers. One of the Mayor's thugs situated himself right in front of us, with his back to the fireworks, so we had to kind of look over him, but the barges were spread out enough that the fireworks covered more than your entire range of vision anyway. I wouldn't say they were as spectacular as Boston's (from what I've seen of them on tv), but still a good show. There were more fireworks going on further down the river at the South Street Seaport, and an additional barge-full in front of Liberty Island, making it supposedly the largest fireworks show in the country, but since no one could see the entire thing unless they were at the top of the Empire State Building, I think that's a dubious distinction.



Once the fireworks ended, the Mayor swooped out with his entourage, and for us it was a 20-block hike back to the hotel (since all the cabs were taken and stuck in post-fireworks traffic on 3rd avenue anyway). I carried Justin much of the way, and the kids fell asleep in record time for a hotel room. Karen got in on a limo ride with her sister back to her apartment for the evening.



The next morning no one was in a hurry to get going, but we managed to check out, get the car and drive over to the west side and parked on Columbus ave near the American Museum of Natural History. As museums go, this is quite a place, with enough separately ticketed exhibits and shows going on through the day that you could spend the day there and not really see anything of the regular museum. We caught the planetarium shows, which were more movies than anything but still pretty spiffy, and an exhibit featuring 200 live frogs, walked through the dinosaur area, and by then it was 1:30 and we were meeting up with not only Karen but Adam Wolsky, who had agreed in a weak moment to come into the city and meet up with us.



Karen had scouted out lunch locations ahead of time and we ended up at another Italian place called Isabella's or Isabelle's, just a block or two away. Even though it was mid-afternoon the place was hopping and service was kind of slow, but it worked out well because while we were inside a squall blew through and drenched everyone who'd decided to eat outside. Adam filled us in on life at the radio station, his upcoming cruise in Alaska, and how he's been disowned by Nate for not going to the Motor City Bowl. After lunch the kids were still hungry (well, Chloe was anyway), so Adam steered us towards a place called Popcorn, Indiana where we got both chocolate and peanut butter popcorn, then another couple of blocks south to a hot dog place (the Grey something), where we waited in line with a number of locals, including a guy wearing a bathrobe and no shoes. We walked back to a playground so the kids could work off some energy for a while, then hit the road about 5 pm.



Although it was end of a holiday weekend, there was no significant traffic heading out of New York. We stopped in Connecticut for dinner at Friendly's and were back in Massachusetts to drop off Karen by 10 or so and we were home by 10:30. Karen had spoken to her parents in Colorado who assured her that they'd seen us on tv (her Mom knows Beth and the kids from previous visits out here), and they certainly had the cameras pointed at us enough, what with the kids in their tie-died red white and blue t-shirts and Justin with his construction paper and pipe-cleaner hat that he'd made at summer school and Chloe with a red white and blue scrunchy thing in her hair, they would've definitely been a good photo op. If anyone taped it, take a look. I would've taped it myself, but I though, "Oh, what are the odds," having no idea just how visible we'd end up being. We thanked Karen and her sister for spoiling the fourth of July from now on, since nothing else could possibly measure up to this, but it was worth it and a great time, makes me want to leave town next year and go somewhere else fun for the Fourth. Beats sitting out on the Esplanade in the heat for 15 hours, I'd say.