Twelve months ago, I enjoyed one of my cycling highlights of 2013, the Tour of Oman.
My first experience of this race, albeit on TV, was such a revelation, as my perception that this would just be another race in the sand and wind couldn’t have been more wrong.
If you caught any of the racing, you’d remember Chris Froome, Alberto Contador, Cadel Evans and Joaquim Rodriguez, tearing up parcours that were routed through some of the most stunning coastal and mountainous scenery you’d want to see.
The age-old buildings of Muscat, the palm fringed coasts and the arid mountains of this oil rich sultanate make for an intoxicating visual presentation.
Sandwiched between the UAE and Saudi Arabia to the west and the Arabian Sea to the east, the Tour of Oman was a major and welcome contrast to the races in Qatar and Dubai and I gratefully lapped up the live pictures on Eurosport.
Fast forward 12 months and I’m sitting here wondering just why we don’t have live TV coverage of the race in 2014?
In fact, when it comes to live coverage there’s basically nothing!
The Tour of Oman may only be four years old, but that hasn’t stopped it attracting riders from the top shelf of the sport.
As Roar expert Tim Renowden wrote yesterday about the start list:
Only a few years after it was considered something of a joke, the Tour of Oman 2014 boasts a start list that any race promoter would be proud of.
Let me reel off some names.
Chris Froome, Vincenzo Nibali, Joaquim Rodriguez, Rigoberto Uran, Tejay Van Garderen, Andy Schleck, Frank Schleck, Jurgen Van Den Broeck, Robert Gesink, Roman Kreuziger, Nicolas Roche and Thibaut Pinot.
That’s just the GC guys.
If you’re keeping a closer eye on the classics, how about Fabian Cancellara, Tom Boonen, Peter Sagan, Philippe Gilbert, Greg Van Avermaet, Moreno Moser, Michael Albasini, Heinrich Haussler, Daniel Moreno and Zdenek Stybar?
Sprinters? Andre Greipel, Nacer Bouhanni, Leigh Howard and Daryl Impey.
Maybe it’s mostly down to the power of race organiser, the legend that is Eddie Merckx, but remember this is the Middle East in mid-February.
And while the accommodation and facilities are awesome, the total prizemoney is only 111,000 Euros. So the riders are not there for the cash. It is quite simply a great race.
The UCI must be stoked to (once again) see such a quality field for a race of this status (2HC) and they’ll be hoping to see a similar finish to last year where Chris Froome gave an indication of things to come with a stomping victory over Alberto Contador and Cadel Evans.
For a race so early in the season, there was plenty left on the road when the riders finished the final stage on the simply stunning Muscat Corniche.
The thought of reliving this race in 2014 was something I was truly anticipating.
So I’m quite stunned to see that there’s no live TV coverage of the 2014 Tour of Oman.
And what’s more there’s hardly any live coverage on social media.
For the past five years I’ve been lucky enough to work at the Santos Tour Down, providing minute-by-minute text commentary for the official race website. My reports are also tweeted by the TDU’s small digital team. Over the course of a TDU stage, the number of updates can easily exceed 150.
After one stage of the Tour of Oman, the total number of tweets didn’t even reach 40. As the race heated up, we got a tweet with 10k’s to go, one with five kilometres left, then one at 3k, one at 2km,and finally a 1-2-3 over the line.
Woeful.
And while it’s terrific to see Leigh Howard finish second to Greipel, if we can’t have live pictures then at least some detail would be nice.
If the social media side of things wasn’t bad enough, the team’s pages has names but no race numbers or rider information, the news page has no news on it and the TV broadcast details haven’t been updated from last year.
What I can’t understand is that with such a quality field, is it good enough that we are forced to put up with such scant coverage?
Yes there will be a 26 minute daily highlights program and some smaller news type feeds but Eurosport viewers aren’t showing the highlights until nearly 7:30pm the next day, the best part of 21 hours since the stage ended.
I realise live TV coverage is expensive but the quality of the peloton and last year’s race make the debate around this race a no brainer.
The UCI recently live streamed the World Cup Cyclo Cross on its You Tube channel, so perhaps that’s an option if a proper TV station can’t/won’t pick up the coverage.
Cycling’s new boss has much on his plate as he gets up to speed with all that his job entails, but Brian Cookson, please do something to ensure proper coverage of races of this calibre.
Live TV pictures and a thorough coverage via the race’s website and social media platform should be a pre-requisite ahead of any contract being signed.
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