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Old 06-07-21, 02:55 PM
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surak
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Bikes: Specialized Roubaix, Canyon Inflite AL SLX, Ibis Ripley AF, Priority Continuum Onyx, Santana Vision, Kent Dual-Drive Tandem

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I watched a lot of the coverage. The moto footage was sparse, didn't see the attacks and mechanicals that occurred before the select group was split with the two who came to the line. On one descent, one of the riders (Ted King maybe?) gestured at the moto, perhaps in contempt of it being too close or kicking up dust. The video was stable but the camera panning was mechanical and at times lagged, so presumably it wasn't a human holding it.

Liked the commentators, Frankie Andreu and Janel Spilker, who filled the time between finishers. There would have been a lot of dead air had they not. Andreu was a tad too talkative when interviewing the finishers, but no biggie.

My feed would randomly show ads, and at least once it stuck to showing soccer before I quit and restarted it. So I don't know how many times the ads were glitches and if I missed much of the actual stream.

I don't think televised gravel racing is compelling enough to justify a subscription even if FloBikes added more gravel events going forward. The contender pool is too small to make the last miles as must-see as a World Tour race, there's too many moments of riders solo or in pairs spread out on the route doing nothing but holding a steady pace. The interesting moments have been better captured in written articles later (like Kiel Reijnen running in his socks for 8 miles after breaking his wheel). You can tell the live feed was searching for stuff to point out when they got super excited when one of the front riders, Stetina maybe, gave a 100-mile rider his bottle. Commentators would only get excited about something like that in a pro road race because of the new controversial littering rules.
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