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I’d exactly sat down with my Sunday morning coffee and casually flicked on this weekend’s Formula 1 Grand Prix when the fireball light up my TV. It came just three regions into the race, in the usual first-lap chaos. Romain Grosjean clipped another vehicle and moved careening into a sequence of Armco roadblocks that sliced his auto in half like a sizzling pierce through butter, spewing oil and volley into the space where we all knew he should be.
It happens fast. Then it makes you. There’s a human being in there, in that fire.
In the moments after the fireball lighted up the screen, the camera shot promptly cut away, back to the front of the line of cars , now driving slowly back toward the pits under a red flag. For roughly three minutes, an eternity, spectators got nothing but wide shots of F1 cars parking, the occasional tighter photograph of a concerned face.
The first cut back to the crash presented Grosjean leaving the site, on his own two paws.
The director of the broadcast made a self-conscious decision not to show the world replays of the gate-crash until it was confirmed that Grosjean was safe and relatively uninjured. Once it was clear Grosjean was safe, then the hurtle was shown again.
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Why isn’t it like this in cycling? Why was Fabio Jakobsen’s crash shown in slow motion before we even knew if he was alive? Why did I watch Remco Evenepoel launch off a aqueduct 20 periods as the commentary team defended for showing it to us?
As with many of cycling’s aberrations, it comes down to the way hastens are broadcast and with whom these decisions ultimately lay. There are often cultural differences between the largely Anglo audience we predominantly speak to here at CyclingTips and those clearing these requests. And the path you tune into to catch bike scooting often has very little, if any, ascendancy over what you’re actually ascertaining on screen.
To get a better sense for how this works, or should work, I called up a onetime NBC producer, who would like to request that I not use his name as he’s still in service industries. And I hit up Rob Hatch, a commentator with Eurosport, who has previously defended for the idols he’s commentating on.
“It’s much more nuanced than people remember, ” Hatch said.
First, the basics. At pro cycling phenomena, and in fact, at most sports events, the crew in charge of recording the portraits is also the same group of people responsible for deciding what paintings are indicated on your video. They send out what is called the world feed.
That can be what’s called a dirty feed, should be included in graphics and such, or a clean-living feed, which is just the personas. Broadcasters will pick up soiled feeds for smaller races where they don’t want to apply their own graphics. NBC uses the clean feed most of the time at the Tour de France, for example, but a dirty feed at the Vuelta a Espana.
Eurosport, NBC, ITV, or whatever channel you’re tuned into, sees the personas, or what’s on screen, at pretty much the same time you read them at home. “There’s no communication with the director, who is always the neighbourhood Tv farmer, ” Hatch said.
The decisions to cut to various fires, or run replays, sit with those regional chairmen. At the Tour de France, this means the likeness are coming from ASO and France TV. In Italy, they come from RAI and their Italian gangs. In Flemish-speaking Belgium, it’ll be VRT, or Sporza as we call them.
This means that those preparing the decisions about operating fearful replays are somewhat buffered from the consider public, which might assume that Eurosport or NBC is concluding those asks. They are not. Hatch and his individual reporters certainly aren’t.
“What Eurosport did do, and what TV companies can do maybe, is have another shot in place, ” said Hatch. “But you’re only going to make that decision after you’ve seen the first replay, then it’s too late. It’s not easy when you don’t know what’s coming.”
At major events like the Tour, a big player like NBC will also pay for clean feeds from the helicopters and motos, and can decide to swap over to those feeds if it intended to. But for the largest part of the cycling calendar, whatever is coming over the world feed is what you’ll see on your screen.
“We were always taught to cut to super-wide shot, and trimmed to tighten faces to convey the concern and gravitation of developments in the situation without proving a tasteless replay, ” said the onetime NBC producer, who has worked in other major US sports where injuries occur. “But when you are taking world feeds you have no control.”
So, don’t denounced your English-language reporters, or the companies they work for. It’s very likely there’s little they can do.
That doesn’t explain why the people who are in charge of these decisions are concluding us re-watch Remco’s bridge crash for the 20 th season. That, according to Hatch and our NBC producer, comes from a deeper cultural partition.
In some countries- including pro cycling centres like France, Spain, and Italy- both sees and heads are more likely to view these incidents within the context of censoring. The post is that you have to show what really happened, even if it’s uncomfortable.
“In the English-speaking world, we’re a bit more sensitive to those portraits, ” Hatch said. “Where I live in Spain, and where Eurosport headquarters are, in France, they really consider it censorship if you don’t demo everything.”
This is an argument I’ve encountered previously- that plucking away from unpleasant hits constitutes censoring, and if audiences want to turn off their TVs they are welcome to do so. The broader disagreement has some force when you consider other more impactful and hurtful channels in which media can lie by omission.
As our NBC producer said, “There’s never any universal understanding of anything … let alone the morality of watching a buster potentially die on replays over and over again.”
But I keep coming back to how Grosjean’s sound was handled by Formula 1 on Sunday. It was snappy. It understood how the audience, let alone Grosjean’s family, might feel watching that clang on repeat before additional information came in. I’ve sat with partners of bike racers as a big field crash sprinkles across the screen on reiterate- they don’t loved it.
In F1, broadcast titles are alone controlled by a single entity, Liberty Media, which has strict rules about how its affairs are broadcast. Regulates, perhaps, such as don’t show idols of someone who may be dead until we corroborate “theyre not”. Longtime F1 devotees will recall the live coverage of Ayrton Senna’s death, which continues to haunt and condition the play and its coverage today.
There is a happy medium here, sitting between terrible replays and twisting of world. As soon as Grosjean was confirmed safe, radio broadcasting trimmed straight back to a replay of the accidents. It never pictured the integrity of the gate-crash from an inboard idea, but we learnt the Haas car slam into the barrier and explode at least 15 seasons in the course of the coming 45 minutes.
It was fine, though, because we’d already seen Grosjean walk away.
Cycling’s dispersed method of world feeds and the many directors of those feeds make it impossible to change how clang footage is treated across the entire calendar.
I’ll try anyway. World feed superintendents, if you’re out there: stop sends to sounds replays until we know the fate of the riders involved.
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