The chopper was doing a reverse heads-up shot of the peloton as they came down what would be the home straight in a few laps. He was low and the pictures were amazing. The sea was as sparkly as a cocktail dress, the palms waving and the crowd bellowing.
As the helicopter flew overhead, the downdraft blew the unsecured satellite dish a degree or two off line. The uplink was broken. All the outbound pictures went pop. Two seconds later, the backup shots went to air: Dan Lloyd, Valentina, Sophie – and Dad. You could almost hear a backing track: Summer Madness.
The producers in the broadcast truck were in a panic.
‘Quick, what other pictures do we have while we get this shit sorted out?’
‘Nothing else boss, sorry.’
‘Testicoli!’
Back in London, Declan Quigley was commentating for Eurosport and, in his finest warm Irish lilt, began to describe the pictures he was seeing: ‘Well, ladies and gentlemen, we apologise for the lack of footage of the race. Please bear with us while we sort this out. Ho, ho, ho. Goodness me, take a look at what’s going on down at the finish line . . . Ah, it’s alright for some! That’d be Carlton Kirby and Daniel Lloyd on your screens right there, that’s Carlton on the left. The, ahem, larger of the two.’
Declan naturally fully described the scene, thinking this was just a brief shot. But three minutes later, the technical problems hadn’t been sorted out, so this same footage of Dan and I popping pieces of calamari in the company of our minders cropped up again . . . and again . . . and again . . .
Declan was now struggling to repaint the image for viewers: ‘I wonder what they’re eating? Have you any idea, Brian? Pasta, perhaps?’
Brian Smith, in his Hey mate, this is your problem, don’t get me involved in such flimflam kind of way, simply said: ‘Yeah, could be,’ and it was back to Declan. You can’t usually hear a man sweating. You could on this day.
Simple as the fault was, it could not be found. All client broadcasters, including Eurosport, finally took mercy on their viewers and commentators and duly pulled the plug.
The dislodged dish was used to relay pictures away from on-site. For Dan and me, there was no picture loss, so we continued our commentary, all of which was used in the highlights show later. Naturally, out came the internet trolls slagging off Eurosport for pulling a live stage. It was too complicated to explain. We moved on.
‘Say what you like about the Swiss, but the flag’s a big plus.’
Matera in southern Italy is an amazing place. It was settled in ancient times by troglodytes; that’s ‘cave dwellers’ to you and me. It’s been around for thousands of years and some of the caves higher up the hill above the town are just as they were in the time of Christ. Mel Gibson filmed The Passion of the Christ in this very place. No set required.
These days, many of the caves are fronted by chi-chi restaurant facades and, once shown to your table, you stare about in wonder at the solid rock from which the place was originally carved. The night before the stage, we were installed in one such establishment. A mix of the modern and ancient. ‘Imagine how tough life must’ve been,’ I exclaimed, tucking into a plate of lobster claw pasta and an impeccable Pinot Grigio. Irked, Dan flicked a bit of my flying food off his phone, ordered another large beer, and carried on Tweeting.
A place for the Trogs, then. And on this day at Giro 2013 it wasn’t just John Degenkolb who was a wild thing. The weather was too.
It all started off nicely enough. The finish line was on a steep uphill ramp into the new town area of Matera, over the hill and out of sight of Mel Gibson’s camera angles. We sat at the top of the incline, our commentary position having been levelled with jacks and wooden blocks. It jutted out at an angle to the slope, making the climbing finish feel very real indeed.
We began our commentary in full sunshine, but the pictures from out on course were very different. Bradley Wiggins, riding the Giro after coming out of the winter in poor shape for a Tour defence, crashed in the wet. He wasn’t alone.
Slowly the sky darkened, the clouds looking as black as in the tropics. And then the sky burst. The rain fell like a sky ocean had simply flipped over. It was solid. You couldn’t see a metre in front. Our position was at the top of a slope with a gradient of perhaps 20%, there was no ground higher than us to funnel the rain. Even so, we were surrounded by sheets of water, rushing away downhill and replenished from the sky. It was mayhem.
The crowds’ screams disappeared as they took cover and our screens flickered. We carried on.
No pictures of the finish area could be shown at that moment because the cameras had not been protected from the rain and had to be switched off. We still had race pictures of the riders who, bizarrely, were still in sunshine. They were about to face something that until now only Noah had witnessed. We gamely soldiered on, until – cruuunk! The commentary position lurched over at an angle. One of the jacks had been washed away, along with its wooden foot. We were balancing at an angle.
‘Tirati fuori da lì!’ bellowed the director, and then in English: ‘Everybody out!’
First away were the French from beIN SPORTS. Gone in a flash. Poufff! Amazing!
Frankie and Davide from Rai Uno were a little more relaxed, packing up their stuff and ambling out grumbling.
But Dan and I went into captain of the Titanic mode and stayed planted. The Brits were going to keep the world feed going, even if we
