Tom Pidcock Commentary Fail: Who Should Commentate?

Unsure if the CBC (Canadian commentators) were the same as the British coverage but it wasn’t too bad. Some knowledge but of course they missed many of the intracies from presumably not keeping up though the UCI xco seasons.

My personal favourite was when the commentator called him Tim Podcock

To be fair, he caught it immediately and made a joke of himself about it.

I think the initial issue stemmed from thinking it was a BBC commentary.

You watch the first few minutes of racing wondering how they haven’t possibly noticed Tom straight into top ten and Evie in the top five. So you conclude they are clueless and then every other mistake and random statement starts to grate.

However the reality was they were just bland bipartisan background noise so the general public knew the name of whoever was at the front. Wonder what they would find to say about horse dancing? 🙂

I guessed Bart would have been doing NL TV. But yes, BB and Rob Warner make an unlikely but effective XCO commentary duo and would have been perfect.

Rochelle Gilmore, just did a Google images search, not many of her actually riding a bike.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rochelle_Gilmore

Maybe look at something other than just pictures? Very well known in women’s road racing, founded and owned the Wiggle-Honda team, Commonwealth Games gold in the road event.

Having said that, I’ve never liked her as a co-commentator, she’s done a lot of work for the BBC on women’s road (e.g. World Championships).

I think Rob and Bart in the men’s event – in an ideal world an ex-rider with similar palmares for the women’s – Gunn-Rita Dahle Flesja? In a perfect world get Jolanda Neff on board when she retires she comes across as a cheery person with plenty of personality, and is encouraging and knowledgeable.

I always feel that I have to defend sports commentators because, quite frankly, cycling itself is pretty dull. Especially the more pedally variants.

Yep, imagine covering the Tour de France and having to waffle away for 5 hours a day (nice church, was built in 1671 and use for……. etc,.)

The best move ITV4 made was getting in Alexei Sayle (a keen cyclist) to have an informal chat for an hour while the race was running.

The first 2 minutes that he was on I was like “WTF?!”
Then I realised it was hilarious. Agreed, perfect move.

That’s been depressingly standard in a lot of journalism. Cycling Weekly used to routinely do 2 pages of coverage of the Men’s race detailing the timeline, the breakaway and the result. Then there’d be a paragraph at the end going “In the Women’s race, Vos won in a sprint finish”.

It’s a minority sport that in the grand scheme of things no one gives a toss about.

But Pidcock is a bit of a superstar in more than one cycle sport and rides for one of the biggest cycling teams ever, so to comment that he’s a bit jammy for winning the race would suggest that the person making the comment is a bit jammy for getting any sort of ‘expert opinion’ gig.

Was just flipping through red button to see what sports were on, ended up watching a few minutes of gymnastics. Girl nails a routine (to my uneducated eye it looks pretty spot on).

Commentator: “Oh she won’t be happy with that at all, that was terrible. The extra spin she had to do to recover from coming up short there will have cost her dearly, the judges will penalise her heavily for that. Such a disappointment.”

I’m assuming the commentators know what they’re talking about… 😉

I couldn’t for the life of me spot what the disastrous and shaming mistake was that one pair had made

Diving: Small splash is good, big splash is bad – that’s basically all you need to know. 🙂

Commentary for the BMX – oh dear God. The bloke might actually have been Rob Warner, couldn’t really tell. However having Shanaze Reade simply yelling “come on Kye/Beth, all the way, all the way, YES!” wasn’t commentary in the slightest…

Cringey.

(much as I admire Shanaze for her achievements in both BMX and track, commentary is clearly not one of her strengths).

Anyway, track cycling starts next week – wonder how that’ll be? Assume it’ll be Simon Brotherton, Chris Boardman and maybe Chris Hoy / Jo Rowsell-Shand.

However having Shanaze Reade simply yelling “come on Kye/Beth, all the way, all the way, YES!” wasn’t commentary in the slightest…

I absolutely understand what you mean, but I quite enjoyed the energy of basically just having someone who’s a massive fan* yelling COME ON. I doubt it would be so fun if the did that in all sports though.

*I know Shanaze Reade is more qualified than ‘massive fan’ but that’s how she came across.

I thought not having UK commentary for the MTB but having it for the road race was an interesting choice. In this day and age fewer and fewer people watch tele live and instead stream it after the 1st broadcast. I thought the BBC would have looked at the minority sports like MTB, Road Cycling, etc and taken into consideration the chances of the UK picking up a gold in an event and therefore more people watching the event after it has happened. They obviously didn’t do that as we had a near zero chance of a road race gold but a really strong chance of a mtb gold.

As I said earlier, road & track are traditional (old school) cycling sports. I still get the sense the MTB is viewed as not ‘proper cycling’ – so they can use any coverage provided. For both road & track, BBC/Eurosport will use their own dedicated experts. Imagine using a football commentator and a MTB-er for the road races & track – it would be ridiculous…..That’s basically what happened with the MTB races.

Imagine using a football commentator and a MTB-er for the road races & track – it would be ridiculous…..That’s basically what happened with the MTB races.

Commentary is its own thing – if Mike Costello (boxing, athletics) did the mountain biking it would be excellent because he is excellent. Ideally paired with a discipline expert but having someone skilled in the art of commentary makes the biggest difference.

Incredible – The BBC have hired the man who usually commentates on his dogs to commentate on the actual RUNNING 😂

The commentary was terrible. If they’d just watched this year’s worls cups it would have helped. I wonder if at the planning stage they expected no male uk mtb athlete and no female medal contender.

Europsport sailing commentary is excellent

The commentators on the BMX (both disciplines) were good though, particularly the freestyle.

Did a great job of spotting the tricks and explaining the proceedings in an accessible but not dumbed-down way. Excited but not as inanely jingoistic as much of the BBC coverage.