Congratulations to American Team CSC rider Dave Zabriskie for winning the Stage 8 Individual Time Trial in the Giro d’Italia. He was one of the earliest starters on Sunday, so the television producers from RAI didn’t cover his ride. What a mistake.
I guess no one from the production team thought to read the start order in advance, otherwise they might have realized that Zabriskie had the ability to record a competitive time. They probably didn’t know that Dave is the current U.S. time trial champion, which would have been another reason to send out a motorcycle camera and run a tape in the production truck. Just in case.
Oh well. It might have made future U.S. television rights contract negotiations a little more lucrative if RAI could have said, “You know, we sent a camera with your National Time Trial Champion because we knew you might want to show some of that footage on the air in the USA. We were thinking of you and the future value of this relationship when we did this.” Instead we were treated to a couple of seconds of slow motion video of Zabriskie riding by a camera.
Why didn’t they show an interview with Zabriskie conducted in English after the stage was over? English-language interviews get aired on European TV all the time, with local language over-dubbing. This is not OLN’s fault folks. The Italian TV producers really dropped the ball on this one.