Legend punctures feelgood moment
LAST Wednesday afternoon, as Sam Bennett was on the verge of claiming the Tour de France’s green jersey, Eurosport’s excitable Rob Hatch was trying to stir some emotion in his co-commentator. To seemingly no avail.
‘Cast your mind back to July 24th, 1989, Sean,’ Hatch said to Sean Kelly as Bennett was about to follow in his footsteps. Legend Kelly didn’t rise to the bait, just remembering it as the last day of that Tour, coming into Paris. ‘A time trial, wasn’t it?’
Of course, it just happened to be the most famous finish in the history of the Tour de France as Greg LeMond took the race by a mere eight seconds from Laurent Fignon, but that wasn’t what Hatch was hinting at.
It was also the last time that an Irishman, in this case Kelly, wore the green jersey.
Kelly’s dour delivery in the commentary booth does belie an unparalleled knowledge of cycling, but his lack of emotion can seem comical at times, especially when a fellow Carrick-onSuir native is so close to slotting into the famous jersey he won on four occasions.
‘It is a huge day and there is big pressure on him. I do not like this idea of being virtual leader on the road. He has to concentrate on the sprint, if he keeps thinking of the green jersey, he might get tangled up in a crash,’ Kelly warned to dampen the mood of those of us getting rather excited watching at home.
To make matters worse, Hatch then pointed out ‘this is the most accidented, as the French say, finish we will see on the Tour.’ Visions of Bennett getting ‘tangled up in a crash’ flitted through the mind, but he safely came home in third – and became the first Irishman since Eurosport’s co-commentator to wear the green jersey.
Kelly’s refusal to channel his inner George Hamilton and put on the metaphorical green jersey may have something to do with the station he’s working for.
Eurosport does what it says on the tin. It is a channel for the whole, vast continent. Perhaps he was mindful that his role was that of an EU Commissioner and he couldn’t put his national interests ahead of the rest of Europe.
All of which probably means we should have watched Wednesday’s events unfold on TG4.
However, with Bennett closing in on his big moment, it was important to know what was going on during the stage and my unfortunate lack of fluency in our national tongue mitigated against that – as I am sure it did for many viewers.
Granted, we did turn over near the end to hear them hollering about ‘geansaí glas’. That bit we did get.
To cut Kelly some slack, cycling is a an odd sport to commentate on, after all long stretches of each stage pass without anything of note happening. There’s a lot of idle waffle while airtime is often filled with anything from a description of a village in the south-east of France to where the county boundary lies in Carrickon-Suir, as happened on Thursday.
And then, there are a whole section of viewers who know next to nothing about the sport but enjoy watching the Tour because they want to spend the afternoon, staring at postcard images of rural France, perhaps imagining themselves in a Gite with a glass of Beaujolais.
These viewers care nothing of category two climbs or any such things. They just want to watch the French countryside roll before their eyes. As has been observed before, the race is as much about France and all its beauty as the sport itself.
And this year, there is even greater scope for enjoying the scenery as there are no lunatics trying to get up close and personal with the riders as they scale a particularly tough summit. Just as with almost every other sport we have watched post-lockdown, the lack of fans hasn’t really bothered us during the Tour. If anything, it has nearly added to the experience seeing the odd lone fan on the road waving his French flag.
There is still plenty of airtime to fill between now and Paris, so there will be opportunity yet for Kelly to get emotional about a Carrick-on-Suir man following in his footsteps.