The Roar
The Roar

Advertisement

Aussies deserve balanced coverage of the Tour de France

Roar Rookie
3rd July, 2016
Advertisement
Stage 1 of the 2016 Vuelta a Espana is a team time trial, where Australia's Orica-Bike Exchange are in with a shot at victory. (AP Photo/Gian Mattia D'Alberto)
Roar Rookie
3rd July, 2016
12
1236 Reads

The Tour de France has begun and, as usual, Australian broadcaster SBS will be beaming footage into loungerooms and bars across Australia with their fabulous coverage.

SBS’s coverage of cycling has increased over the years, from just the Tour de France to all Grand Tours and major WorldTour events.

And if the event is not picked up by SBS, a quick switch to channel 511 on Foxtel will see expanded coverage on the home of cycling – Eurosport.

While we are lucky to have expanded access to cycling events on TV, the opposite is true with print media, as local newspapers are seemingly relying more on syndicates or news agencies for their stories.

Even Australia’s longstanding cycling journalist, Rupert Guinness, has left Fairfax.

This has left a huge hole in coverage, leaving difficult questions unanswered and weak analysis, with Australians needing to scour international publications and the web for news stories and analysis.

Australian supporters now rely largely on the SBS coverage for news, discussion and analysis.

Unfortunately, SBS’s TV coverage sometimes falls down in providing this type of analysis. They seem to get caught in the performance of local riders and the Australian team, Orica-BikeExchange.

Advertisement

For example, during SBS’s telecast of the Giro d’Italia, I was left with the impression that the station was an extension of Orica-BikeExchange, with the experts failing to probe and question the direction of Orica machine.

While we all want to see Australian teams and Aussie cyclists do well, we also want our media agencies to be balanced and critical. With Esteban Chaves finally in pink, SBS presenters spent the next stage talking up Chaves’ performance as if he was a certainty of winning the Giro.

There was very limited questioning of Orica’s race tactics, or whether it had the riders capable of protecting Chaves in his quest to win.

From where I was sitting the SBS team never asked the hard questions or pressed for more detail. This was highlighted with the reporting of Orica dropping its sponsorship from Orica-GreenEDGE. There was no Australian exclusive, rather I first saw the story on the British website Cycling Weekly.

SBS had team owner Gerry Ryan on the telephone during the last stage of the Giro. Ryan indicated that the team was looking for more sponsors, but he was not pressed as to what that statement meant, or if Orica were pulling their sponsorship.

Rather the discussion continued to be a lovefest of how good the team had performed over the three weeks.

Ryan may not have disclosed the loss of the main sponsor, but it should not have dissuaded SBS commentators from investigating the comments further.

Advertisement

In contrast, the SBS presenters challenged the Italian media’s tactics of putting Vincenzo Nibali’s performance under the microscope. Italian journalists spent days analysing the reason behind his drop in form.

Surely, this is what we expect from Australian journalists. Anyone scanning the papers over the last six to eight weeks has seen Richmond’s performance dissected in the press from all angles. But not cycling. We don’t seem to get that level of analysis or assessment of Orica-BikeExchange or Australian cyclists.

Over the next three weeks, Australians will be glued to the TV set, crossing their fingers for an overall Australian win or at least a stage win or two.

I am also hoping that the coverage of the Tour de France remains balanced and the reporting of the performance of Australian riders and Orica-BikeExchange is analysed in-depth without any favouritism.

close