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Will someone please shut Rob Hatch up......!!

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That's what happens when you get somebody who only commentates on cycling occasionally - and is more likely to be heard at a football match. Saying that, he's not bad, and could be pretty good if he did it regularly.....

its just stuff like he kept talking about the leader wearing the yellow jersey and then his commentating style is all about just picking out riders he recognises, especially if theyre British, and then describing their jersey or listing abunch of stats about them, its not actually commentating on the race and has that classic newbie sees a rider on the front theyre suddenly going for victory approach of reading a race, not just doing a stint to setup a team mate or helping a break form.

if Hatch spent his whole time going and theres Roglic riding for Jumbo Visma, theyre on the left of the screen wearing a yellow jersey with black lettering, just passing Geraint Thomas, who is an olympic gold medal cyclist and has won 25 stage races, 2 gold medals and been world champion 3 times, riding for Ineos, theyre on the right in the blue and red fade jerseys.

I think people would rightly have issues with that style. Hatch might make mistakes sometimes, noones perfect, but he does at least know how to call a bike race properly imo.
 
At least he manages to pronounce place names from his own country correctly. The man on Ride London Classique duties kept referring to Maldon (1st syllable should be as in maul, or the Mall in London) with a short a (rhyming it with pal) when talking of the main venue for stage 2.

If you don't know (which is reasonable), just ask someone rather than guess and be supremely confident in that guess.

GCN or Beeb coverage ? actually the host guy on the microphone at the stages was doing that too iirc
 
GCN. But even worse if the bloke on the spot was doing it and winding up the locals. Simply shows lack of respect.

so that was Marty MacDonald then, cant say Ive noted him getting stuff like that wrong before, I couldnt listen to the whole thing to see if it spread to Dani Rowe to in their conversations,she was telling this great story about how the Lifeplus Wahoo rider out on the solo attack should use her garmin to follow the route.

But I did watch the highlights though and they managed to avoid saying Maldon once in a nearly an hour, which is quite impressive for a stage that starts and finishes there.

as for the hired mic, they just bring people in to get the crowd hitting the boards, and Becca Charlton whose job it was to say Lizzie Deignan as often as possible so it seemed.
 
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so that was Marty MacDonald then, cant say Ive noted him getting stuff like that wrong before, I couldnt listen to the whole thing to see if it spread to Dani Rowe to in their conversations,she was telling this great story about how the Lifeplus Wahoo rider out on the solo attack should use her garmin to follow the route.

But I did watch the highlights though and they managed to avoid saying Maldon once in a nearly an hour, which is quite impressive for a stage that starts and finishes there.

as for the hired mic, they just bring people in to get the crowd hitting the boards, and Becca Charlton whose job it was to say Lizzie Deignan as often as possible so it seemed.
Speaking of the live announcers on the loudspeaker at races, anyone know why the announcer at Saturday’s Giro Stage 20 finish line was calling the race in English and not Italian? Surprised me—you would never hear a Tour de France announcer speaking in anything but French.
 
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Speaking of the live announcers on the loudspeaker at races, anyone know why the announcer at Saturday’s Giro Stage 20 finish line was calling the race in English and not Italian? Surprised me—you would never hear a Tour de France announcer speaking in anything but French.
I think I overheard both English and Italian, probably saying the same thing in each language. They hope that the Giro will have brought in visitors, and although not all of them will be native Anglophones, it is more likely to be understood by a larger proportion of non-Italian speakers than any other language.
 
Speaking of the live announcers on the loudspeaker at races, anyone know why the announcer at Saturday’s Giro Stage 20 finish line was calling the race in English and not Italian? Surprised me—you would never hear a Tour de France announcer speaking in anything but French.
If you listened to the background noise and tuned Hatch out it was both English and Italian, one after the other.

In fact Barry Ryan references it in an article, with one of the Jumbo riders calling for the announcement to be made in English.
When the speaker at the finish announced, in Italian, that Roglič had already pulled back 16 seconds on Thomas at the second intermediate check, Oomen threw his hands up in annoyance: “Say it in English too!” Confirmation from the on-screen graphic did little to defuse the prevailing tension.
As for the Tour ... English is the race's lingua franca for a decade now. And hasn't Ant McCrossan been one of ASO's English announcers at the Tour?
 
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I think I overheard both English and Italian, probably saying the same thing in each language. They hope that the Giro will have brought in visitors, and although not all of them will be native Anglophones, it is more likely to be understood by a larger proportion of non-Italian speakers than any other language.
Stage 20 certainly brought in a lot of visitors and it looked like 95% of them were Slovenians!
 
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Speaking of the live announcers on the loudspeaker at races, anyone know why the announcer at Saturday’s Giro Stage 20 finish line was calling the race in English and not Italian? Surprised me—you would never hear a Tour de France announcer speaking in anything but French.
That's Anthony McCrossan, brother of Marty McDonald.
Maybe wrong , but I believe he is employed by UCI or ASO as start and finish race announcer for all world tour races.
Keeps him away from GCN who used to work for, not my favourite.
 

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