The world’s greatest sporting spectacle is upon us again and for those of us who love cycling and are not on cable or satellite, it is about feeding that race fever with only the meager pickings of Tour highlights every evening, punctuated by far too many adbreaks. At least in the UK this is a significant improvement over past years, where the tour would hardly earn a mention at all, but still far from ideal.

Earlier this year, the Giro D’ Italia presented me with the opportunity or rather, the challenge of trying to see some of the magic, being stuck in a country determined not to cover it. This was a far harder challenge as some of the usual sources, including Cycling TV and others, had entered some peculiar arrangements which meant that if you were from North America, you could see the Giro online, but if you were from the UK or elsewhere in Europe, you had to go away empty-handed.

CyclingFans were the saviours though – they devised a cunning hack of splicing Eurosport audio coverage of the stages with the live TV feed from the Norwegian state television TV2, and available to watch online via Windows Media player. TV2 seem far more advanced in their policy of using the Internet for TV broadcasting than many other European rivals, who offer recordings of their programming online AFTER the programme has been broadcast, but not the opportunity to watch it live online when it happens. 

In fact, there still seems to be an issue about trying to watch Tour de France 2008 live if you live in the UK. A google search on the topic reveals a number of options one could go for, which are all mysteriously out of bounds as the systems discover your IP address comes from the UK. This makes me wonder whether to go for a piece of software, which masks your IP address origin – simply to try to fool the system or whether there are other alternatives? And no, a live tracker of who is in front or a text feed does not count – those are meagre consolations in the 21st century when it should be possible to subscribe to your favourite sporting event directly online and whoever’s responsibility it was providing the feed to you would get the cut from your payment.

Instead we are still stuck with this ridiculous obstacle course where to see one event only, you have to go with Sky and pay nearly £40 a month for a channel package, which includes Eurosport. Forty quid is an awful lot of money to pay for watching TV and frankly, life’s too short – I’d rather do something else with that time than sit in front of the dumb box – unless of course, it is TDF time!