Introduction
Since 2003, I’ve been an occasional contributor to the Daily Peloton. A few
years ago, I discovered that most of my stories there are no longer available
due to some server problems. It’s
another slow news day at albertnet, so here is one of the lost articles, restored
and preserved for prosperity. This isn’t race coverage per se; it covers the
sport in general and subtopics that I hope you’ll agree are still relevant.
San Francisco Grand
Prix: A Spectator’s Eye View – September 14, 2003
I attended the San Francisco Grand Prix bike race today, and
was reminded how different these events are in person. Being a live spectator
is much more exciting than just watching on TV.
The SF Grand Prix covers a 10-mile circuit of downtown city streets, largely shutting down all
normal traffic flows. Attendance was impressive—as always, the sidewalks were
clogged with spectators, estimated today at over half a million. If you showed
up early enough—and this year the first-ever women's edition started at
7:30—you got a good position along the scenic waterfront Embarcadero where the
Start/Finish line is. I got a great spot, and if I’d stayed put for the next
eight hours, I'd have had a great view of the finish of both the races.
But this stretch really isn't where the race is won or
lost—that happens on the brutally steep climbs of Fillmore and Taylor streets,
roughly on the opposite end of the loop. Last year I watched Charles Dionne win
the race on Taylor Street. Of course I didn't know he was winning it at the
time; nobody really did, not even the other riders in the lead group, or at
least not all of them. That's because Dionne didn't do anything obvious, like
drop the rest of the group, on that hill. All he did was manage not to get
dropped himself. Dionne is a sprinter, and his superior sprinting ability is
like money in the bank, a simple and incontrovertible fact of nature. If he's
there to contest the flat finish line sprint among a bunch of climbers, stage
racers, or time trialists, he'll beat them. The sprint itself was a formality
for Dionne. The climbs are where the action is, so staking out a good spot on
Fillmore or Taylor makes a lot of sense.
Still, it's not totally satisfying to see the defining
action on the backside of the course only to miss the moment of victory, the
winner throwing his arms up as he crosses the line. But since you can’t see the
action on the climbs and still make it to the finish line in time, and you’re
thus doomed to miss so much of the action, what is the attraction of being
there? Any spectator, of any sport, will tell you that these things are just
better live. You're not just there to watch the athletes; you're there for the
entire spectacle of the thing, for the atmosphere. Just like the smell of
popcorn at the movies, or of suntan lotion at the beach, there’s a sensory
bonus to being at the race in person: sound. TV coverage gives you great
voice-over (if the announcers are good), but you don’t hear the tires on the
ground, the panting of the riders, or most importantly the cheering of the
spectators.
When I worked as a general purpose gofer for ESPN covering
the 1988 Coors International Bicycle Classic, my first assignment was to point
this giant phallic microphone at the pack as it went by. After one stage of
this, the recording was deemed unusable and I was off the hook. An even
stranger request I got was to run up and down a flight of stairs a few times
and then let a sound guy record my panting. This would be dubbed over footage
of a pro cyclist climbing some grade. I must not have sounded authentic enough,
because the recording was never used. But the fact that they tried to get it
says something. And yet if you are actually there at the race, the sheer noise
factor is almost overwhelming.
This year at the SF Grand Prix, sponsors such as Clif Bar
and Saturn gave out cowbells, which created a huge and pleasant din. When I sat
at a restaurant bar to have lunch, and watched the race on TV, what I got for
sound was less than nothing: the one screen showing the race was muted, and all
the other screens were showing a football game, with sound. Between the TV
sound and the cheering football fans, it was hard to enjoy the subtle pleasures
of cycling coverage. It struck me, when the 49ers scored a touchdown on fourth
down with eight to go, that the yelling and cheering in the bar was nothing
like what I’d heard outside. These guys weren’t cheering on the players, who
after all can’t hear them anyway. Their cheering had a strangely turned-in
quality, like they were cheering themselves on for living in San Francisco, the
home of the 49ers, and thus basically deserving some of the credit.
Beyond the noise factor, at any sporting event the presence
not only of your sports heroes but of the throngs of other spectators creates a
certain energy that far surpasses what you get at home, or at a sports bar. I
went to a Diamondbacks/Giants game years ago, and managed to miss every big
play—I was fighting with the relish dispenser when Barry Bonds made an amazing
catch that was on all the evening news highlights—but I still had a good time
(better than I’d have had seeing it on TV). And the thrill of actually being
there is even more pronounced in cycling than in any stadium sport, because the
athletes and the action are so accessible—nobody has to watch through
binoculars from the nose-bleeder seats. You're as close as you manage to get,
often (ideally) with nothing between you and the racers but your own
discretion.
Lance Armstrong commented some months ago on the
vulnerability of cyclists in the Tour de France (a comment that many
misconstrued as terrorist-attack paranoia). And we all watched in horror as
Lance's handlebar hooked a spectator's musette bag on the Luz-Ardiden, crashing
him. But I have to agree with Tour director Jean-Marie LeBlanc: it would be
wrong to overreact to this incident and place new constraints on the
spectators. The absence of ubiquitous crowd control is one of the things that
makes bicycle racing special. And you don't see Lance complaining to LeBlanc,
either. Doubtless he recognizes that without the spectator-friendly culture of
the Tour de France, you won't get as many fans, and if you don't get enough
fans, teams don't get the corporate sponsors, and without the sponsors, Lance
doesn't get a paycheck.
Beyond their livelihood, the peloton surely appreciates the
fans on a more human level. This is what we, as spectators, need to believe to
thoroughly enjoy the event: that we are not just watching, but participating,
having a connection with the athletes and creating the special energy that
defines a big race. But do we? How much do the spectators really matter to the
bicycle racer? Are we actually any different from sports fans in a bar
congratulating ourselves for what the athletes are doing ten, a hundred, a
thousand miles away? There's a simple answer, which would be yes, but it's not
actually a simple matter.
First, we have to differentiate between two basic spectator
scenarios: teeming masses vs. sorry handfuls. The fact is, there’s a critical
mass required before the racers could possibly be inspired. Today certainly
measured up. After the race, I talked to Tim Larkin, a professional on the San
Francisco-based Ofoto / Lombardi Sports team, who is by any account one of the
best bicycle racers in the Berkeley area. Though Tim was clearly fried from the
race and couldn’t have been operating on more than 20% of his brain power, he
immediately commented on the crowds. “The crowd was phenomenal,” he said. “You
don't expect it in cycling over here, and to see that kind of turnout . . .
from the first time up the hill they're going nuts, and they keep that
intensity up for four and a half hours, just yelling their heads off, it's
pretty amazing. Everyone’s ringing the cowbells, so you can't hear anything,
just this din. What was new to me were those balloon things, that were big last
year in the world series—the Anaheim Angels started that, got everyone in the
stadium banging those together—so to see them at a bike race, to see them cross
over from a mainstream sport, makes it feel like what you're doing gets more
respect than racing in the middle of nowhere with, you know, people's parents
there. Even if it's an important race for other reasons, if there aren't many
people there, you're like, well, how important can it be?”
I’ve known that feeling myself, and it’s more common the
further you get from Tim’s level. Let's face it, it is the reality for the
majority of local races in the U.S, and it can be demoralizing. A race can feel
an awful lot like a bunch of guys riding fast around a residential street or
office park, if there isn’t someone there besides a referee keeping track of
the results. It makes a huge difference if a critical mass of spectators
manages to assemble itself, and seems to care about the action and the
athletes, if not the outcome, regardless of how important the event is to the
racing calendar. And this is why U.S. races should be held on city streets in
places like Boulder, Colorado where cycling is in the blood of 90% of the
residents, or tiny, quiet places like Sterling, Colorado, or Casper the
friendly Wyoming, or Nevada City, California—places where the spectacle of a
bike race is honest-to-God exciting to the small-town folk who turn up in
droves with their Igloos and lawn chairs.
This enthusiasm certainly matters to any racer. Tim races
all over the country and finds that good crowds are seldom a given, even when
the race draws top talent. “Only a couple of other races in the country that
have a really good crowd; Philadelphia has the long tradition there but [the SF
Grand Prix] even takes that up a notch. To be fair to other races, criteriums
can have a very loud crowd but it's a 1 km course, and this is a 10-mile loop
with half a dozen places where it's just packed, so there’s no comparison to
road races where you may expect people at the Start/Finish line and that's it. Very
rarely do you get to have a race downtown, and this one happens because you
have Lance and Thomas Weisel behind it to get the city’s buy-in. If promoters
can keep on working to bring races to bigger cities, it can only be good for
the sport.”
Cycling in the United States simply doesn’t have the strong
tradition and national identity that it does in other countries, and as sports
like soccer increase in popularity here, it must continually fight for a place
in the national psyche. Certainly Lance’s phenomenal success has helped the
sport, but I’m disappointed it hasn’t provided an even bigger boost. The road
bike has gone from a standard to a specialty item. Junior fields in big races
like the Nevada City classic have dwindled alarmingly. To keep the sport
healthy will require that the spectators cease to be small gatherings of
already interested people. It needs to bring in curious onlookers and hook them
on the action, so they won’t change the channel from OLN once the bronco riders
have finished up.
Of course it would be unfair to put the burden solely on the
race promoters and the communities that can choose to put on races or not. I
talked today with one of the race announcers, Michael Aisner, about what it
takes to create excitement among the spectators of a bike race. Michael
announces for various top U.S. races, but formerly had a much larger role in
U.S. cycling than that. He essentially put the cycling on the map in this
country, taking over the fledgling Red Zinger Bicycle Classic (sponsored by
Celestial Seasonings, when it was a much smaller company than it is now),
landing Coors as its new main sponsor with a much bigger budget, adding many
more stages to the race, and drawing a world class international field.
I grew up watching this race, and even at a young age could
see the progression each year. There’s nothing I can see that was a
revolutionary change in the approach to the race; Michael’s formula seemed to
be fairly simple: make each stage exciting to watch, show the crowd a good
time, and next year the crowd will be bigger, the TV coverage better, and the
race will increase in prominence. This in turn brings a better field every
year. But what did this race do to achieve these ends? For one thing, there
were plenty of criteriums, always held on downtown streets where crowds can
find them. Purists criticized the format, trying to champion the more
traditional point-to-point road races popular in Europe, but (as Tim Larkin
pointed out) this format isn’t conducive to large crowds. It works in Europe because
the sport is already huge there.
But beyond the format, the success of the Coors Classic
depended on harnessing the elusive potential of the sport. “Cycling is kind of
a rock and roll sport in a way, and its energy level was built on people being
able to really exploit it in a big way,” Michael told me. “And I really credit
the announcer for having done what he needs to do in order to make a race huge.
I think you need to bridge the gap through your announcer, and through music
and energy levels … so that cycling can become comparable to other things that
people relate to that are exciting.”
This is a core difficulty with popularizing bicycle racing
in America: making people relate to it, helping them understand that it’s far
more complicated than it appears. Other sports have surpassed this obstacle, of
course; a colleague of mine took a foreign client to a baseball game and
explained the rules to him. “It’s really quite simple,” he started out, but by
the time he’d explained the sacrifice fly, the bunt, the walk, and the strike
zone, he realized that it’s really not simple at all: it just seems that way
because we take our own knowledge for granted. It should be possible with
cycling as well; after all, anybody who’s tried to ride a bike fast knows the
challenge and the thrill of this sport. But it takes a good announcer to really
amp up the crowd.
Click here for the second and final part of this
article.
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