Real Time Trials

Sister #1 is a little loopy. Not her fault, of course—she’s related—but she just sold her house and bought a new one in another state, and she thought in between all the home inspections and moving a family of four and setting up the financing and getting the septic taken care of, she was going to have time to join us for a week to help clear out Mom’s house.

She was wrong, of course, but we went ahead and took advantage of her, and we all got a lot done.

She got up bright and early every morning and sat on the couch with her laptop building a digital catalog of thousands of objects from Mom’s house, so we could figure out what to do with them. Brother #3 got up early every morning and made coffee. I got up and wandered out a while later.

The real dirty trick we played, though, wasn’t getting Sister #1 to do all that work. The lasting loss for her is that between Brother #3 and me we got Sister #1 hooked on the Tour de France. As she sat on the couch working, as Brother #3 got the coffee pot rumbling and joined her on the couch, as I sat back in my room scratching my head and trying to figure out what they were doing with the production schedule back at work, we had the TV on, playing low, to let Brother #3 and me keep up with men in tights clambering over hill and dale on wheels.

So now, even after she went home, even while she drives thousands of miles from state to state moving cars and boxes and clothes, everywhere Sister #1 goes she’s trying to find hotel rooms with cable TV, so she can watch. (Then she went and got her son hooked.)

So to save her a little time, I’m going to kick out a couple of links here. I could have just put them into an e-mail to her, but I thought if she found these links handy, someone else might too.

I didn’t watch the Tour de France today, because I was at work before 6 a.m., but I did know who won the time trial before I got home. That’s because I checked the final results on CyclingNews.com, which puts up live coverage as each stage progresses.

So you could, for example, as you run around packing and unpacking and trying to figure out how they built a house without an electric socket right there where the lamp should go, you could have your son track the race online and report to you if there are any crashes or exciting position changes. If you read closely, you’ll notice that CyclingNews reports the race in a plummy British accent.

There’s also Yahoo’s cycling page, which features news and video clips. Not as good as live commentary, maybe, but it goes a little deeper with analysis.

And Sister #1 already found the Versus.com Tour site. Versus (Vs.) is the cable network carrying the race. They post plenty of clips from each stage—key incidents, interviews, background segments, analysis. Frankly, it’s less time-consuming than watching an entire stage, with all those guys just riding for miles and miles, not doing much. In case anyone hasn’t seen it yet, the best clip so far from this year’s Tour broadcast is actually from 20 years ago, when the U.S. team was sponsored by 7-Eleven (known today as Kwik-E-Mart). It’s called the Bob Roll Feature, and it’s posted on the Stage 11 page of videos.