Sunday, March 18, 2007

Live Coverage of Bike Racing

4:25 PM Ain't it great
that a week-long stage race comes down to the final few kilometers? This is bike racing.

- From Velonews.com's live report

Now that OLN (Versus) had pretty much given up most of their coverage of cycling, you need to turn to the net for live updates. Sometimes, you can get live feeds from Europe. Eurosport always has video highlights and some commentary and you can usually find great coverage for big races, like the Giro. For the smaller and more locally based races, your choice is mainly cyclingnews.com and velonews.com.

For years, cyclingnews has been superior (maybe more of my opinion because I've written for them) but Velonews has no only closed the gap but is now blowing them away. Velo's live coverage of Parin-Nice has been outstanding, while it appears that cyclingnews is barely scraping up their leftovers. Hopefully, CN is just having a bad P-N experience and will be back on track. For the larger races, I like to read both of the live reports because you get different feedback and perspective. When they're on, both have interviews and such and have better coverage than you get on TV with the OLN crew. Sad, but true. If we could only ditch Al Trautwig and get somebody who knows something about bike racing...

Anyway, Paris-Nice has been a fantastic race. I just hope it's an indication of how the racing season is going to go.

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