Today sees the 101st Paris-Tours race, the last-but-one ProTour race. It’s showing on Eurosport (free-to-air at 19 east), France 3 (FTA at 5 west) 15:15-17:00 CET, Rai Tre (FTA 13e) 15:30-18:10 CET. If you know of other broadcasters showing the race, please leave me a comment.
RAI Sport Sat (FTA 13e) repeat Paris-Tours tomorrow at 16:00 CET and show highlghts of the Giro dell’Emilia today at 13:40-14:20, and Gran Premio Beghelli 19:30-20:00.
RAI Sport Sat (free-to-air to Europe at 13 east) have highlights of the third Memorial Cimurri today (Saturday) at 21:30 CET.
In addition to the BBC and Eurosport coverage posted before, I’ve spotted the World Championships free-to-air on ZDF (some point between 12:47 and 18:00 CET tomorrow) and SWR (highlights today, but they seem to be the host broadcaster…) and SLO2 too.
RAI3 also shows it in the programme guide, but didn’t seem to cover all of the time trial…
The UCI Road World Masters are showing on Eurosport and BBCi.
BBC have posted the BBCi schedule in a handy form. (Thanks BBC!) Most BBCi video channels are visible to most of Western Europe at 28 east (instead of the UK-centric beam that is used for BBC Two and the other national channels).
Eurosport’s site still won’t give simple listings, so here’s their schedule for the free-to-air channel at 19 east as far as I can make out:
Wed 26.09.2007 – ITT Women 16:00-17:30 CET
Thu 27.09.2007 – ITT Men Under 23 11:30-12:30 CET, highlights? 12:30-14:00 CET, ITT Men 16:00-17:00 CET
Fri 28.09.2007 – ITT Men 13:15-14:00 CET
Sat 29.09.2007 – highlights? 09:00-12:45 CET, Men U23 16:15-18:00 CET
Sun 30.09.2007 – Women 09:00-0930 CET, Men 10:30-14:00 CET, Men (highlights?) 16:00-17:30 CET
Mon 01.10.2007 – highlights? 15:15-16:15 CET
I think it will also be on RAI Tre at 13 east, but I don’t know if that will be free-to-air. Show times should appear here the day before broadcast.
Which other free-to-air satellite broadcasters are showing this?
Eurosport coverage of Vuelta a España at 19 east continues with commentary in English (analogue only) and German. Scheduled times:-
TVEi are broadcasting in Spanish at 13 and 19 east. Scheduled times:-
Enjoy the finale!
Just a quick reminder that the BBC’s only Tour of Britain highlights show is on BBC 2 at 12:30 today (Astra 2D at 28 east, the same satellite as Sky UK+IE, but no subscription required).
Official listings say this is highlights of the final stage but hopefully it will cover the other stages too.
Hopefully, live coverage will get better next year, either online as cyclingfans editor Pete predicts or on TV.
As mentioned yesterday, I went to watch the Tour of Britain for real in Taunton.
It’s taken me a while to encode these (I’ll write about the technical details on another page soon), but here are the videos. They’re in the super-cool Ogg Theora format, in case that helps you update your media player with filters like these. (I probably should do some clever tricks to embed these videos in the page, but it’s taken me long enough to get this far, so please either download the files or drag-and-drop the links to your media player. If anyone can explain how to embed videos simply, please leave me a comment…)
First of all, I went to Staplegrove Road, where I thought the peloton might slow slightly to get past a roundabout on their first pass through Taunton (Ogg, 514K) a bit after 11am, but they didn’t really.
Then I got a brilliant position in the second row just by the finish line, which meant I didn’t see the big crash of the day until I saw the TV news in the evening, but I did see both the main sprints, for the stage win (Ogg 919K) and the yellow-jersey group (Ogg 382K).
Finally, I went and watched the presentations – the yellow jersey (Ogg 1.3M) and the champagne spray (Ogg 643K) are shown here.
The BBC has the broadcast rights to the tour of Britain and seem to be doing a terrible job:
Live race news seems to be limited to a quick mention in the half-hourly sports bulletins on Radio Five (on satellite Astra 2D at 28 east to much of north-west Europe, or Medium Wave 909 and 693kHz).
Each night, there’s a short (3 minutes?) summary report in the BBC1 TV news of that stage’s region, some time after 18:30 BST (so tonight in West Midlands, tomorrow Yorkshire and North Midlands, Friday North-west and Saturday Scotland, all Astra 2D). This is not shown on BBC News 24, as far as I’ve seen, not even in the Sportsday show.
There will be one national highlights show on BBC 2 at 14:30 on Sunday (again, Astra 2D), the day after the race has finished. Official listings say this is highlights of the final stage but hopefully it will cover the other stages too.
I feel they should take the rights away from the BBC and give ITV a chance. We had better coverage of this year’s Tour of Ireland (from itv4) than we have of the Tour of Britain – this is silly.
For non-TV coverage details, including Twitter, see CyclingFans.com
With all the excitement of the Vuelta and the Tour of Britain (which I’m off to watch today), I’d missed that the Tour de Pologne also started on Sunday.
TVP Polonia has coverage and broadcasts free-to-air to Europe at 19, 13 and 7 east. I think it may also be visible in Australia in a GlobeCast package (can you see it? Please tell me by leaving a comment.)
Scheduled shows:-
I can’t actually watch this at 19 east except in perfect conditions at the moment because my dish is slightly mis-aligned. I don’t want to adjust it until after the Vuelta finishes, just in case I make a mistake and lose reception completely.
Eurosport coverage of Vuelta a España at 19 east continues with commentary in English (analogue only) and German. Scheduled times:-
TVEi are broadcasting in Spanish at 13 and 19 east. You can also see the race on TVEI America, but I don’t know the reception details. Scheduled times:-
I’ll post more times next week.
It was good to see a strong Caisse d’Epargne showing, as I predicted, even if it didn’t last long…
Eurosport are broadcasting the Vuelta a España at 19 east from today with commentary in English (analogue only) and German. Scheduled times:-
TVEi are broadcasting at 13 and 19 east. Scheduled times:-
I’ll post more times next week.
I’d bet on a strong showing from Caisse d’Epargne after a relatively quiet TdF. Who would you tip?
If you’ve not got your satellite set yet, some Lidl specials are still available and most Maplin branches have sets. Finding the broadcasts at 19 east is pretty easy in the UK. See my asteFAQ for hints and links. I’ve still not fixed my dish up properly, yet it gets most 19 east transmissions.
CyclingFans Main Site Yet-to-be-published Coverage Tips Recent Bookmarks MJ Ray’s Recent UtteringsPowered by WordPress