Originally Posted by DogBoy
Al got me when he was talking about how "nothing was happening in the first week of the TDF." Nothing? How about Boonen drawing a blank...Thor winning the prolouge, CSC and T-Mobile getting decimated 24 hours prior to the tour and all the shake-up that goes along with it, not to mention field sprints galore! The guy is clueless. Now that I'm back home and have the tivo recording for me, I will be following Koffee's suggestion. Also, only watch the "non-enhanced" version. That has Phil and Paul doing most of the commentary.
And of course this is the same Al who in stage 8 said Sylvain Calzati was bucking the 99.9% odds of winning with a solo break. So I guess beating 99.9% odds isn't of note either. Of course the odds are not nearly that bad. After all that is 1000 to 1. Meaning it would work only 1 time out of a 1000. If you figured 20 stages per tour (there are actually less after subtracting out the TTs) and that there were 5 breaks per stage that would mean we see it work once every 10 years. But haven't we seen it work twice already this tour? But of course nothing has happened.
But I'm pretty sure Al was not the source of their Friday misinformation. More to come on that.
EDIT:
I forgot to point out that it really seems strange to me that they would make this kind of comment, because it really says 'nothing is going to happen, no need to watch our coverage'. If you are going to slant things slant them to say 'something special is going to happen'. If they left in Al's inaccurate assesment but followed up Bob or Phil saying something to the effect that this time seems different then you would be saying something special might happen. (Actually eventually they did, but it was 15 minutes or more later, far to late if someone has already decided nothing is going to happen and started doing other stuff planning to come back in time for the sprint finish).