Quote Originally Posted by Norse View Post
In our household, we heart Phil too.

Froome is starting to make this year's Tour a bit boring.... At least the scenery is gorgeous.
Bike racing, particularly stage racing, is long periods of "at least the scenery is nice" punctuated with a few attacks and sprints to liven things up. Luckily we now have HDTV which gives us some really amazing footage from the helicopter.

One of my nephews wants to become a baseball play-by-play announcer. He practices at home by watching a game on TV with the sound off and recording his own commentary for the game. He was a bit surprised by how hard it is to find things to say for an entire game. And a typical baseball game is ~2 hours long, less than half the length of a stage in a bike race. I suggested that he watch some of the cycling coverage on NBCSN to see how hard it is to cover some other sports that he's not familiar with. One of the things I like about Phil and Paul is that they research the region the race goes through each day so they can talk about the history and the different buildings and landmarks that we see. Other announcers will just say something vague like "that's a nice castle."