This July, as with every July for the past God-knows-how-many years, American Tour de France fans follow the race to the soundtrack we pretty much always have: the patter of long-beloved commentators Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen.

Like a lot of current Tour followers, my first real guides to bike racing were Phil and Paul. They schooled me in some of the first racing terminology I ever learned. They’re how I learned (or thought I learned) to pronounce names like sprinter Djamolidine Abdujaparov (whose nicknames—alternately the “Tashkent Express” or “Tashkent Terror” depending on whether he won the stage or crashed someone—have rarely been surpassed since).

For years, their well-tuned back-and-forth was the enjoyable duet of my July. But in recent years, those familiar tones have turned grating to my ears.

Perhaps it’s because they’re prone to misidentifying riders—magically transposing, say, Romain Bardet for Thibaut Pinot (hey, they’re both French!)—and mispronouncing even famous names. (Guys, it’s Peter SAH-gun, not SAY-gan or Sah-GAHN. He’s only the current world champion.) They've even been known to mangle the names of entire teams, like during the recent Tour of California, when somehow the developmental team Axeon-Hagens Berman became “Axeon Bergman Hayman.” Somewhere, a title sponsor hangs his head.

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When I first started watching bike racing in the 80s, the broadcast team included earnest-yet-generally-clueless swells like Sam Posey and John Tesh. So to have commentators—with exotic British accents!—display a seeming grasp of the actual racing was remarkable and refreshing. Phil and Paul became my trusted guides to the sport. I lapped up catchphrases like “the little man from Italy is dancing on the pedals in a most immodest way,” and “now Euskaltel have thrown a cat amongst the pigeons.”

Perhaps for newer ears, those still sound musical. But to me, the Phil n’ Paul softshoe variety show has become a mordant drinking game, with a social for every time Paul calls some backbencher from a wild-card team in a no-hope breakaway a “superb bike racer.” No, Paul; he’s just trying to get the damn sponsor logo on TV for a bit.

Look, I’ll be honest and say that Phil and Paul are only part of an issue that goes even beyond the problems of US rights-holder NBC Sports. It’s the coverage in general. If you magically transported a fan here from 1986, they might marvel at the bikes, but almost every other aspect of the broadcast would seem comfortably familiar.

You’ve got the same raw footage that France Télévisions provides, heavy on sweeping landscapes and castle shots, arty fades, and copious amounts of Dutch angle; minimal graphics; and strong reliance on slo-mo replay of inconsequential moments. Then NBC layers on the same two guys saying the same stuff throughout every single stage.

Efforts to change this have been, uh, fitful. The past few years in particular, we’ve been treated to breathless announcements of bold! new! technologies that will take bike race broadcasts into the future. Dimension Data—the outfit now sponsoring a team—made a deal two years ago with the ASO to provide on-screen graphics. But so far, a lot of the promises have not borne out, or do so in flawed ways that fail to impress.

But neither have Phil and Paul made good use of the material that is right in front of them and doesn’t depend on geegaws and data. The pair have shared a mic for 31 years now, a fairly legendary run. They’ve earned a license to ramble a bit. But they rarely do, much less with the kind of masterful storytelling of, say, Vin Scully, the legendary LA Dodgers broadcaster.

Here’s Scully, this past spring, simultaneously calling a game while telling a story about pitcher Madison Bumgarner:

“You know, Bumgarner tells a story which, in a sense, reminds you of what it takes to be a big-league ballplayer. Two years ago in spring training, and he and his wife were roping cattle, which is what they do. 1-1 pitch, sinker low, ball 2, 2-1. And they were startled by a large snake. And Madison thought it was a rattlesnake, so he grabbed an axe and he hacked the snake to pieces. But there’s something more to the story. 2-1 pitch, low, ball 3, 3 and 1. When his wife Ali, and an expert field dresser, examined what was left of the snake, she found two baby jackrabbits inside pieces of the snake and extracted them. 3-1 pitch to Turner, waaay inside, ball 4. And after she extracted them, a short while later the Bumgarners noticed one of the rabbits had moved slightly. It was alive! Well, his wife brought the rabbit back to their apartment. The next few days they kept it warm, bottle-nursed it and the rabbit was soon healthy enough that they released it into the wild. And Madison said, ‘Just think about how tough that rabbit was. First it gets eaten by a snake, then the snake gets chopped to pieces and then it gets picked up by people and lives. It’s all true. Meanwhile, line-drive base hit to center by Kendrick and the Dodgers are in business, first and second, nobody out.” So I guess, really, the moral to the story about the rabbit and the snake; you’ve gotta somehow survive, you’ve gotta somehow battle back. A lesson well-taught, for all of us.”

Sure, it’s a digression. And it’s not an original story; Tom Verducci first told it in Sports Illustrated in 2014. But it’s a masterful digression, woven seamlessly into the play call (listen here). Both cycling and baseball are marked by long stretches where not much is going on—stretches where storytelling would leaven the dull march of the pack, inform viewers about the riders they’re watching, or even provide some opportunities to educate about why what’s happening is happening, even if what's happening is apparently nothing at all.

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Broadcasters of Scully’s caliber are few and far between; but that said, Phil and Paul don’t tell stories, fresh or frozen. Aside from defining rudimentary terms like “echelon,” they make little effort to open up the often-inscrutable (to casual viewers) tactics, and almost never offer meaningful analysis of, say, a sprint finish. I’ve rarely heard more than the faintest criticism of a team’s tactics, even though Paul’s role is nominally the analysis guy to Phil’s play-by-play call. Maybe it’s better that way. On Stage 15, Phil said that Nairo Quintana had to attack (he didn’t; it wasn’t the right spot) or if not, he was “out of the race.” (Huh?) They dutifully follow ASO’s travelogue script for the castle shots and historical asides, and once those are exhausted they fall back on their well-worn catchphrases. Riders have “nerves of steel,” to contest a sprint. A dropped rider must dig into his “suitcase of courage,” while another on a last-kilometer flyer is “riding like a man possessed,” and so on. It’s like Statler and Waldorf—those two cantankerous Muppets in the theater balcony—but without the wisecracks and heckling.

Meanwhile, recent ex-pros like Christian Vande Velde and Jens Voigt are reduced to spot analysis, akin to the sideline reporters in football who must somehow make a meal out of the thin gruel of three questions with the head coach at halftime. “Well, Holly, I think we’re gonna have to score more points in the second half to win…”

A small secret: For several years now, I’ve mostly muted the sound on the broadcast. I turn it up when Christian or Jens are talking, as those are the moments when I might get some insight into the race. But Phil and Paul’s welcome, in my house at least, has long since worn thin. (Apparently it has at British broadcaster ITV too, which replaced them this year with Ned Boulting and ex-pro David Millar, to generally positive reviews.)

Pro cycling is in something of a pivotal moment: trying, fitfully, to become a stable business and more mainstream professional sport. There’s an animated discussion right now about how best to make that happen. One building block for American audiences: Take the sport’s marquee event and use its reach—one of the only races to be truly live-broadcast on a cable channel most Americans get—to actually build an audience. One way to do that is to freshen up the play-by-play.

There’s no Lance Armstrong waiting to supercharge American ratings, no advertising rainmaker. There’s no value in waiting for the ASO, France Télévisions or the UCI to innovate the coverage; they won’t. And there’s no reason to expect that the same old approach will somehow yield fresh audiences. As the saying goes: If all you ever do is all you ever did, all you ever get will be all you ever got. Or, as Phil might put it: “There’s the roundabout they’ve been warned about; and they’ve gone straight on into the barriers.”

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