As you may have guessed from the previous entry, I've been watching the Tour de France. While I've been getting bits and pieces from the start, I've been able to watch pretty much all of the last two stages on the Outdoor Life Network.

The play-by-play is provided by Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen. Odds are if you've heard any English-language TV coverage of the Tour, either of these guys was involved (most likely Liggett, who usually took the color role in over-air network coverage of the race). Both are former riders, pretty good in the booth, though the nature of cycling makes it hard sometimes to get the proper names and positioning down (you try reading the number bib on a rider from a helicopter shot).

The OLN hosts are not as strong. The guy (for the life of me, I can't find links to them from OLN's pages) kind of looks and sounds like John C. Reilly after a few drinks. The woman is there to direct traffic. Sadly for her, when she was mentioning that OLN was the official English-language broadcaster for the Tour, she couldn't pronounce "English." Three tries, none right. Ouch.

Anyway, if you get OLN, try to catch some of the race. They've been running stages pretty much all day, so you can even coast in and out as needed (though they aren't showing tomorrow's stage live - CBS gets the broadcast tomorrow, probably a highly-edited digest of the week with some extra footage from tomorrow thrown in, especially if Armstrong makes the move that folks expect).