The 298km spring Classicissima takes place on Saturday 21st Mar 2009.
Coverage on free-to-air satellite includes Eurosport.de (at 19e), 1550-1715 CET and RAI Tre (13e), 1450-1550 CET (RAI listings – thanks to Dave Fisher). I think that last year it also appeared on itv4 on a Monday evening, but I can’t see it there yet!
If you see it on another channel, leave a comment, please.
Challenge Majorca from Sunday 8 February to Thursday 12 February is on Direct 8 (13e and 19e) and IB Sat (30w).
Thanks to BernieS for the pointers – Direct8 popped up on my usual French cycling coverage monitor but I don’t have a good one for Spain.
Just as a side note, both channels have internet video streams that actually play on my GNU/Linux-based TV viewer. Several others never have. I’ll probably watch over satellite still, but will 2009 be the year that online video channels get their heads in gear and stop messing it up with Internet-Explorer-only Javascript+Flash rubbish?
This year’s Tour of Germany is overlapping with the Tour of Ireland and the Vuelta a Espana, which I don’t remember it doing before, so the main place to watch it is ARD Das Erste on 19e and 13e.
ARD show times are listed on the official site but settle down to 1605-1725 CET for next Monday-Friday. Some stages are also shown on TW1/ORF Sport Plus at 19e. (Thanks to Bernie S for the links.)
It looks like all other international satellite broadcasts are pay-TV. Please leave a comment if you know better.
Bad BBC! Their olympic schedules are useless, so I’d missed the Men’s road race by the time I found the right page on their website.
The Women’s road race is 0700-1030 BST tomorrow (Sun 10 August), with the time trials on Wednesday 13 August 0430-1010 BST.
BMX fans (any reading this? I’ve yet to find any) can see the finals up to 0418 BST on Thursday 21 August, while mountain bikes run 0800-1030 BST on Friday 22 (Women) and Saturday 23 (Men).
Events are shown on Eurosport (19e), ARD/ZDF (19e), RTBF-Sat (19e), La 2 (5w), SLO-2 (13e), RAI Due and RAI Sport (13e) and maybe others, but most broadcasters don’t make it easy to find which events are on which channels when (see above flame of the BBC), so good luck!
Update: highlights of Men’s Road Race at 2300 CET tonight (Saturday) on Eurosport (19e).
The Tour of Britain organisers emailed me to announce their launch. The race this year will be 7th – 14th September (starting stage 2 in my old stomping grounds of MK and finishing stage 3 in Burnham on Sea, the next town south from my home) and they announce daily coverage on itv4
on their front page.
Well done ToB and itv! That should be a vast improvement on the 2 hours on the last day that BBC were giving it, although I expect it’s highlights rather than live.
Bernie S wrote in: “Bit concerned RTBF not showing Flanders on Sunday (4 hrs last year). Only Eurosport (19 east) and RAI Tre (13 east) I can find so far. I just checked ARD/ZDF no deal there. Also France 3 said on Sunday at CI that Flanders is not live there. So, coverage is a bit sparse, although NOS will probably show but are encrypted.”
Thanks Bernie. Eurosport is schedules show it as 13:00-17:00 CET and RAI Tre has it 15:10-18:00 CET (which probably means Eurosport will overrun and not show the presentations, as sadly usual). Unusually, it’s also on SFinfo (13 east) at 13:00 CET. Highlights 15:15 CET Monday and 13:30 CET Wednesday on Eurosport.
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
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