Doing TV is hard. Doing anything in front of a group of people is hard, and I find that doing it in front of a group that you can't see is much harder. I'd rather have a live audience, and I really take my hat off to those who can speak into a radio microphone or a TV camera. It's a skill I don't have, and when I'm forced to do it I, like Wes Hobson, would certainly characterize a tight race as a throw up. Worse yet, I probably would throw up, right in front of all you viewers out there.

The task gets harder by an order of magnitude when your technology doesn't work. This appears to be what happened at the Life Time Fitness Triathlon over the weekend. I'm going to guess it doesn't rain in Minnesota in July very often, but it did for the race, and the cameras on the course were often useless. Therefore, you've got to find more things to say, and you've got to come up with these funny and pithy things immediately, Robin Williams style.

I can't blame Endurance Films for occasionally faltering under that kind of pressure, and I have nothing but sympathy for the predicament they found themselves in when their equipment failed at various moments of truth.

There are other things for which I don't have sympathy. There's a lot of lo-tech preparation that goes into race coverage. Learning the correct pronounciation of the athletes' names, for example. There's no excuse for not knowing how to pronounce Tobjorn Sinballe, or Rasmus Henning. As for the former, the Danish long-distance star outraced many of America's best at the Oceanside half earlier in the year. He was no secret. In fact, none of the forty or so athletes in the race were mysteries. And Henning? He's probably one of the top three or four all-around triathletes in the world right now. He and Sinballe both speak perfect English, and I suspect there were opportunities to speak with them prior to the race.

I also spent most of the ninety minutes wondering what the heck was going on. What was needed were a few good race spotters. All a spotter needs is a wristwatch, a pad of paper, a pencil, a knowledge of the competitors, and a cell phone or 2-way radio. Or forget the radio. A pair of legs will suffice if the race is at all proximate to broadcast central. Figuring out who the top five are, and how far they are from each other, just isn't that hard.

I found myself wondering, as well, how Barb Lindquist could still be on lap-one of the run when it was obvious she'd run too far and been out too long not to be on lap-two. Then when I saw her obviously starting up a finishing sprint, it seemed pretty apparent to me that she was ending her race. Yet that fact still seemed to escape the announcers. And, lo and behold, there was a fellow only 15 seconds behind her! We had no idea he was that close, and it sure would've made for a more compelling broadcast if we'd known he was making up that kind of time.

What we do have available to our sport is the same sort of hi-tech cameras, and cameras in helicopters, and computer generated graphics to show with little dots where the athletes are on the course. What we don't have in our sport are broadcasters that know the sport. Not even our "color experts" know the athletes very well. Nor do they know much about our sport's technology, or its history.

We just don't have the Phil Liggett of triathlon, and when we really need a compelling broadcaster, we hire Phil Liggett, as if his silver tongue will suffice for us. It would be awfully nice if we could generate a broadcaster for our sport with the enthusiasm and style of Liggett and the encyclopedic knowledge of, say, Inside Triathlon's Timothy Carlson. I suppose the best I've seen in that regard is Canada's Steve King, the voice of Ironman Canada, and once upon a time the voice of Kona.

Our sport is maturing rapidly, but we've got holes to fill. We need to catch up in a hurry. We can't afford to botch telecast after telecast, which is what we're now doing. Steve King isn't a highly visible commentator these days because—at times over the years during his expert commentary—he's variously upset (I am told) elements both within the ITU and WTC. Throughout their history these organizations have, it seems to me as a viewer, emphasized commentary that furthers commercial priorities, sometimes at the expense of the most relevant, interesting coverage for enthusiasts. That's been justified as being best if you want to make money. Yet when I see how OLN covers bicycle racing, it seems intuitive that good, sport-specific race coverage must be paying off for them, or else they wouldn't be covering it that way.

Our sport has done a good job of developing and standing behind top athletes. We need to develop and stand behind some sport-specific broadcast pros. Time for us to abandon the party-line toers, cleavage showers, drama queens (and kings), hired guns from other sports, and cheap labor. We need to raise the bar for our broadcasts—for those in front of the camera, and the support crew who'll at a minimum allow us to follow the race intelligently.