Did Lance Crash Levi? And Hummer the Bummer

Top two threads on the Versus message board:

 

Hummer is a Bummer!

 

Please make Craig Hummer go away!

 

I’ve actually listened to an in-depth interview with Hummer on Competitor radio. Until then I had no idea he was an Olympian swimmer and has contested some severe open water swimming events. He appears to be quite a waterman.

 

It’s difficult to tell if he’s actually terrible and totally lacking insight or if he has been told to act this way and report in such a manner. I would suspect it’s the latter. Listening to his Competitor interview, I gleaned that he is acutely tuned in to what the athletes are experiencing as he has experienced most of what they’re experiencing albeit in a different sport.

 

Having covered cycling for Versus for several years and hanging out with cycling legends all the time, it would stand to reason that he has a mastery of how bike racing works, tactics, the personalities, etc.

 

Yet if he does, none of it comes across. The myriad production problems have probably left Hummer with a lot of dead air to cover while he’s receiving sketchy information about what might pop up on the monitor next in his ear bud. Doing live sports broadcasting is not a simple business.

 

But can you imagine any other major sport having such shoddy commentary and footage with no B-roll to flip to when there’s an hour-long block without any live race footage?

It seems that the cycling world is pretty evenly split between those who believe pro cycling has an endemic drug problem that’s still probably out of control and a past it needs to openly confront if it will ever get over it. .. .and those who want to stay in Wonderland, believe in the Tooth Fairy, and play the role of the sophist in elevating the least scientific argument and placing it on the same level as, say, a binary doping test. The sycophant fan-boys playing scientist at Trust But Verify for the past several years would fall into the latter category.

 

So what do people expect? When you’re limited to asking Lance Armstrong questions like, ‘how did you feel today, Lance?’ rather than asking him a question like, hey, when you stood up to follow Horner’s wheel, did it send your wheel backwards when Levi wasn’t anticipating it?

Because watching the replay of the Levi crash, it sure seemed like that’s exactly what happened. Anyone who has climbed in a pack knows that at any moment the person in front of you could stand up and that the shift in their body weight will cause the bike to move backwards. Smooth, experienced riders can somewhat mitigate this effect and make the standing to seated transition without that momentary aporia of momentum that causes the deceleration/rear wheel movement in a less smooth rider.

 

When you’re dead tired and the pace cranks to hellish or when you’re going really slowly, those movements can be very exaggerated. It appeared that the pack was moving quite slowly when Levi ate it and that Lance had stood up and given a few hard stomps directly antecedent to Levi eating it. It was hard to tell, but it also looked like Levi may have gotten bumped by someone on his left, perhaps moving off of a rough shoulder or debris at the edge of the pack.

 

Who knows?

 

I don’t after watching the coverage, but I am dead certain that the Tour of California is the first major bike race in America to cross the Golden Gate Bridge.

 

That’s nice.