The breakdown after every stage takes only a few hours, it’s amazing to watch and these guys almost waste no movement making it happen. Seriously, by the time you have all the reports written up on the days stage, the semi’s are already in place loading all the commentary boxes, fencing, displays, banners, everything. I walked out after writing a Road Diaries update, maybe 60 minutes after the stage was over to take these pics. One worker in broken French told me they were nearly halfway through the breakdown of the start/finish, which is massive. What’s impressive is all the commentary boxes stacked up high, some upwards of three stories. It’s like boxes at a baseball or basketball game, with good vantage points for all the various premium commentary boxes.

Hate to tell you this but the American Versus channel, while bringing exceptional coverage, gets placed way at the back, they can’t even see most days finish lines. Again, like almost all the editors, they don’t battle the huge crowds and watch the finish on tv live, like all of us do. But the feed in from Versus is also delayed, it is never actually truly live, semi-live if you will. If you ever wanted to bet on a stage in the final moments, have someone in France to call who is at the finish or watching it on TV there, and ask them who wins. They will have it a few minutes before America’s greatest cycling network. The closest to live we get here is the web updates that many of the best cycling sites feature, although even those have a bit of delay because they have to watch the monitor, interpret the info (which is in French), write the update, and send, and the web speeds at the finish can be really slow.

 share