Live Update Guy
The Live Update Guy offers the best written play-by-play in the bike racing business. If you have a need to read live bike racing, LUG is your guy.
Part of the reason is practice. LUG is the nom de plume of one Charles Pelkey, who, in a time long ago and a place far away, was staffer at VeloNews, writing the live action at major stage races for them. Times change and he was out. Now he’s getting his bike racing on by live blogging for himself. He’s good at the action. And when the race gets slow, conversation begins–in our disconnected connected world, it makes being alone together more convivial.
Visit him for the the Giro, the Tour, the Vuelta, and many of the monuments. More importantly, leave something nice in his tip jar (upper right corner). He works on the public radio model and viewer support is what pays his way. Independent journalism depends on people showering the cheddar on those doing good works.
Homemade Giro Tracker
Have you caught any American bike racing action on the internet through Tour Tracker? It’s a webpage service that combines live video with a profile of the race course, graphics of who is in the break, the field, and dropped, and written play-by-play. They’ve done the Amgen Tour of California, the Tour of Utah, US Pro Cycling Challenge, among other races.
It’s kind of addicting having all that info right in front of me. I have the illusion of control, of being the director, with all these streams served up on my screen.
Because I’ve gotten used to having the video and the play-by-play at the same time, I’ve been doing two small web browser windows. LUG for the play-by-play and then utilizing Steephill.tv’s Giro Live Dashboard to find a reliable video stream. Impressively, when it comes to this Grand Tour, the streams are pretty reliable day in and out.
Then I found out that team Sky has a live update page where you can watch the race profile and whose in the break, the field, and so on. You can find it here.
Three windows I’d have to re-size every day? This is when I went to Firefox to look for an add-on that will do this for me. The one I chose was Tile Tabs.
Now I can set the tiles I want in the dimensions and order I want, and save it. So when I turn on the Giro, I go to the recent layout, pick out the “giro 2013” layout I set, and boom. I’ve got video, I’ve got text, I’ve got infographics. No need to click from window-to-window, no work re-sizing.
For the Tour, I’m considering adding a Twitter stream. Not sure where to fit it in.