TG4 should puncture the Tour de France
Not for the first time, I found myself watching the Tour de France highlights on TG4 last night. The commentator was describing it as a “soap opera”, loved by viewers. It’s a soap opera, alright. One of those cheap Mexican ones with the same predictable plotlines, recurring characters and bad actors.
Why, then, should TG4 keep showing the Tour? Why should the press continue to cover it as a sporting event, when it is only a spectacle - something now acknowledged by French newspaper Liberation, which has dropped reports from its sports pages. Instead, it will treat it as a chronicle of doping until the paper feels it has cleaned up. It is a cavalcade of suspected cheats. Covering the Tour de France is pointless. TG4 should stop doing so.
The tour de France is caught between a rock and a hard place at the moment. There is a lot of effort going into catching the cheats that have plagued the sport. With each positive drugs test, people jump back on the bandwagon “Cycling is full of Cheats”.
Why not instead applaud the fact that another cheater has been caught and thrown out of the world’s toughest sporting event. That’s a hundred times more preferable to sweeping a drugs problem under the carpet as other sports do.
As for the French Paper Liberation – not treating the Tour in its sports pages; this could be related to the failure of French riders to perform in recent years. It will be its top sports story once more once a French Rider is back in the hallowed Maillot Jaune.
Comment by Brian | July 30, 2007 at 6:11 amBrain, It’s true that they’re catching them, but given that we were promised a clean Tour, and that it proved anything but, how can a broadcaster trust that they’re showing a sporting event of any real integrity?
Comment by Shane | July 30, 2007 at 10:11 amHmmmm… by your same surprisingly Liveline-esque logic, Shane, should football stop being screened because of diving? And would you similarly be in favour of RTE not screening athletics (another drug-tainted sport)from the Olympics next year?
Comment by aidan | July 31, 2007 at 8:38 pmYeah, I admit it’s a bit of a rant, but it comes with a frustration of knowing that a sport I really want to believe in is both rotten and deluded and that TG4 had an option of how to react to it and chose to carry on regardless. The athletics has suffered for its drug problems, and doesn’t get the coverage that it used to partly because it isn’t trusted by the public. A broadcaster needs to make a judgement call on whether a sport is truly doing its best to clean up, and whether it’s succeeding. There’s enough fakery on TV as it is.
Comment by Shane | July 31, 2007 at 9:07 pmI agree it’s frustrating, but it’d be unfair to say that the Tour isn’t trying to clean up - the proof is in the fact that the race leader gets kicked out by his own team for SUSPECTED drug use (he never tested positive), whole teams getting booted out. That would never have happened even five years ago - it was worse that the whole thing was covered up and accepted. Is football making an effort to stamp out drugs? And golf doesn’t even have drug tests. Do the GAA?
I live in France and I’d agree with Brian in that the Tour here really needs a French contender, never mind a winner. But it’ll always draw huge crowds and sponsorship here - overseas TV rights are just a nice extra for the Tour.
Wonder how this will all affect the new tour of Ireland this autumn…
Comment by aidan | August 1, 2007 at 2:25 pmActually, doping at the tour is small change compared to what may be a much bigger story in the states which is the allegations of doping going on behind the scenes at the NBA for major league baseball. Considering the drama that Bernard Malamud got for ‘the natural’ from Roy Hobbs throwing a baseball game, if doping in baseball became a big story as it has threatened to become with the rumours of steroid use alleged to have been used by Barry Bonds, what a gift for todays novelists
Comment by Rev Jules | August 9, 2007 at 7:14 pm