Originally Posted by
gear
One of the details I wish race TV would cover is the various gear choices a rider would request from his mechanic on a particular stage. They sometimes will show a rider's bike but they never get into gearing details. Occasionally during race coverage they will show a drivetrain being lubed from a car and you can see the gear a rider is in, and sometimes they will mention a rider being in a particular chain ring but (on TV) you never hear about the number of teeth on sprockets or rings except in the most general of ways.
You're right, you'd never know how central gear choices are to the riders. Most of us non-pros don't change cassettes depending on our ride but talking gears isn't just a bike-nerd thing, any more than talking fastballs and sliders is just for baseball nerds. It's pretty important. But I'm not sure VS wants to or can go into those details. To be fair, I'm sure cycling is a very difficult sport to cover well, as opposed to tennis where the players stay put. But VS is taking the European feed and overlapping in with lots of graphics and whooshes, and bull-riding ads, and throughout the action, I think they have to rely on what the camera shows them. When they do a little technical aside, they whoosh in, talk to the expert for about 20 seconds and whoosh back out. It can start to feel a might dumbed down.