The Tour on Tape

Tour de France 2000. From Bromley Video Entertainment, 11 The Terrace, Barnes SW13 0NP. Tel 0208-876-4671. Catalogue no BVE0176. Double tape, 117 min & 110 min.

The whole thing is compiled from Channel 4's coverage, with commentary written by Liggett and Sherwen, and profiles and interviews by Gary Imlach. And there's no doubt that Phil is much better doing his own stuff than reading somebody else's badly-translated script. Paul Sherwen's very own fractured version of English sounds like translation anyway. So does his French, which is odd, because I've heard him on France Inter and he's fluent.

Tape 1 shows the Prologue and all the stages to the Ventoux, with more time proportionally allocated to the two mountain stages. After Hautacam the others were riding for second place, so the media invented the Armstrong-Pantani row. It's not difficult: you get your athlete, exhausted and incoherent, and ask him a few questions which imply that his rivals are behaving badly towards him. Chances are he'll riposte in kind, and Armstrong did, instead of ignoring Pantani's petulant, junior mafioso drivel: 'He should show some respect.' What, for a man who can't perform without drugs? A shrug would have been enough.

Tape 2 is the rest of the race. Most coverage goes to the three big Alpine stages, and especially Armstrong's brief difficulty on the Joux-Plane which reduced his overall lead by ooh … what? 90 seconds?

Some of this stuff would be very useful for anyone doing a spot of coaching on road racing strategy and tactics. Garcia Acosta's disposal of Simon and Hervé is straight out of the manual, and Commesso and Dekker are instructive too.

If you've recorded every Channel 4 Tour broadcast ever, you want to keep them, and you've got a small warehouse to keep them in, then don't let me stop you. But why bother when you can have the essence of it on two tapes, thus saving you a lot of space and freeing up all the others for recording the next series of Frasier or South Park?

Ray Minovi