Why isn’t Lance Armstrong’s 5th consecutive win of the Tour de France news?
Usually WBUR and NPR do a good job of covering key news events, even if it’s just a brief mention of headlines. This morning, either I completely missed their mention of Lance Armstrong’s fifth consecutive victory–which only one other cyclist has been able to do–or they didn’t cover it. They also didn’t say how Tyler Hamilton performed, who comes from Marblehead, north of Boston. As if the local connection isn’t enough, Tyler raced with a broken collar bone through almost all of the tour. He finished fourth overall. An ex-boyfriend of mine always griped that cycling wasn’t covered adequately in the news. After this year’s tour victory added to Lance’s incredible record and Tyler’s excellent finish, I have to wonder about that, too.
A few years ago, I had a conversation who someone who worked at a news publication focusing on sports about why they didn’t cover cycling. His answer was basically that it isn’t what their current readers want, so they don’t do it. When I asked whether they thought that their readership might expand by expanding their offerings to include cycling, he indicated that the marketing people didn’t think it would. I always wondered how they knew for sure.
Addendum 7/29: Ask and ye shall receive: I learned about this cycling news this morning. WBUR’s Web site is featuring dispatches from a Boston University student riding his bicycle across Russia with a group raising money for polio research. Okay, well, that isn’t exactly what I had in mind, but it is cycling. (Watch out: the site doesn’t work well in Netscape 6 on a Mac, but it works better in Netscape 4.76 and Internet Explorer 5.1.)
