Aldo Grasso on the Giro

TV coverage has a changed a lot. Today we can follow the race for ourselves, there's less need to recount the race in the print media the next day.

When most people relied in the press, the poetic language and essay style account by Grasso and others like Antoine Blondin helped to romanticise the sport. It's a far cry from the matter of fact reporting that the combination of time pressures and budgets impose on the likes of cyclingnews.com or even the Gazzetta today.

But you see some nice instances still. Sam Abt's pieces can be thoughtful, Eugenio Capodacqua is a terrier and you get other examples. The Guardian's Richard Williamson did some good pieces from the Tour this summer, rather than report the number of people on Mont Ventoux, he just said it was as big an event as Bob Marley's funeral in Jamaica, which summed things up very well.

Here's Hinault on Blondin:

He never interviews anybody but just records his impressions of what he's seen and what he feels. Sometimes René Fallet was with him. They both love the Tour and, in simple language, they turn it into a modern epic, a troubador's song, a crusade, as they describe its beauty. The most banal event becomes significant to Blondin; he has only to see it and write about it. He raised the status of the Tour by giving it his own cachet; it became a myth to be renewed every year. No matter how predictable the race, he could maintain the interest in it.

There is a lot of good stuff still written. I really liked this piece about Roger Hammond and Paris-Roubaix, and have gone back to it several times:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2007/ap ... cling.news

In fact I think I was originally directed to this article by a post from NervexProf, fittingly enough!