How to watch Olympic mountain biking this Sunday & Monday

Holy mother!

Classic! Love a bit of barging around in mass start races

How did he do that!

French being French

Good finish for Aldridge.

TP is gonna get hounded at the medal ceremony!

Yeeehah!

No hugs between the winners at the line like the women’s race. I can see the podium being a bit frosty.

Proper racing that.

Switching channels mid-race (and therefore missing the drama of TP’s puncture), an immediate cut back after the finish to the eventing so they’re missing the medal ceremony too… BBC did a shit job on that one.

I think the actual coverage as supplied by the broadcaster wasn’t too bad but what the BBC did with it took it down a few notches.

It be good advertising for Pinerallo 2 golds one on a  hardtail and the other on  full-suspension. Not bad for Specialized either 2 silvers.

Bet the course designer is glad they put that second line in.

French course designer put in a second line that GB rider used to beat the French race leader. Lovely stuff.

Just went back to watch the finish on Eurosport and it was 100% better. If you have Eurosport don’t bother with the BBC.  You could almost tell the BBC were desperate to cut away to the bloody horse riding. If it was any other sport a UK gold medal would be savoured a bit more.

Yeah, bad enough that there was a gap between BBC2 stopping and BBC1 starting, but unbelievable that they were still blathering on about swimming when you could clearly see Tom stopping in the pits on the coverage.

Nick Floros designed the course who did both the Tokyo and Rio courses.

Odd Discovery had no adverts for the mens race but whacked a load in for the womens.

Switching channels at the time of the puncture – not a lot they can do about that, tv schedules are fairly fixed things.

They have multiple channels, and an on demand streaming service. It’s not beyond them to show two things at once, you’d think if it was good enough for Glastonbury it would be good enough for the Olympics. Discovery+ are still showing the post-race analysis so at least someone is getting it right.

Just like Verstappen/Hamilton, this will run and run but fundamentally Tom was in front when they came together so its tough luck for Koretzky.

Was he? I’d say he was behind but was on the line without the tree in the way – K had to come back on to the left line and Piddock was there already. But if it was a photo finish 2m before the tree where it narrowed the French guy would have taken it. Maybe even 1m.

Good race though. How the French guy had enough in him to duke it out with Pidcock given how easily P had munched K’s lead up is pretty amazing.

Is there any chance that racing like that might make MTB racing a bit more acceptable for any of the mainstream broadcasters?

Switching channels mid-race (and therefore missing the drama of TP’s puncture)
Yeah, bad enough that there was a gap between BBC2 stopping and BBC1 starting, but unbelievable that they were still blathering on about swimming when you could clearly see Tom stopping in the pits on the coverage.

They switched it off completely on the iPlayer feed for a while, Don’t understand why that couldn’t have just carried on as there was no channel change.

They have multiple channels, and an on demand streaming service. It’s not beyond them to show two things at once, you’d think if it was good enough for Glastonbury it would be good enough for the Olympics. Discovery+ are still showing the post-race analysis so at least someone is getting it right.

Discovery+ (well, Disney, who own them) signed a billion dollar deal with the IOC to have rights to show everything. all the time. The Beeb have a much more restricted deal and can show two broadcast streams at any one time. So that’s going to bring issues when they have to switch those streams between channels at inopportune moments

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/articles/cjk3vkpxz1po