Ugh. Anyone watching the Tour this year? If you are, you know it is a combination of a) the most interesting competition in a few years, and b) the biggest ripoff for viewers – perhaps ever.

What is happening is the broadcast is being regularly interrupted with ad hoc commercial breaks which completely pre-empt portions of the event. The cable network Versus is providing a fantastic, entertaining program, and half-hour segments are even touted as “commercial free” – most of these hosted by Nature’s Valley. Periodically, as any television broadcast does, the Versus program officially breaks for commercials. All fine and good.

The problem is that – at least on Comcast cable, which is what I have – there are many, many additional commercial breaks which are not integrated into the program and are, in fact, just dropped onto the broadcast. So you have the excellent announcers reporting the event and then suddenly it goes into one and a half minutes of commercials … and then the Tour comes back on with us having completely missed whatever occurred during the break. The program does not pause and then pick up where it left off. YOU JUST END UP MISSING WHATEVER YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO HAVE SEEN WHEN THE BREAK FOR COMMERCIALS OCCURRED.

To reiterate: There are the normal commercial breaks, when the announcers say “And when we return we will see thus-and-so.” But there are extra commercial breaks which overwrite the program. It is like if a football game showed the team breaking the huddle, and then going to commercial, and then coming back on two plays later with absolutely no mention of what happened in the meantime.

I have to think either Versus is run by idiots, or Comcast cable is dropping commercials into the Versus broadcast. If the former, god help us that as a species we could put together such a great program and then ruin it. If the latter, Comcast should be sued – by every bike race fan on the planet, but especially by Nature’s Valley, who are paying to have their name attached to “commercial free” 30-minute segments which turn out to be anything but and make both Nature’s Valley and Versus look like grifters.

It is a shame that such an interesting year for the Tour – with Lance Armstrong returning and a major conflict brewing on arguably the best team in years, Astana – should be marred by a broadcast which randomly deletes significant segments of the action, like some bush league 1950s-era television broadcast.

Oddly enough, our household had already been scheduled to switch from Comcast to Verizon tomorrow, so I should be able to check if the same BS is happening on other cable providers, and thus determine if the morons are at the Versus television network or Comcast cable television. Somebody is ruining the broadcast of this year’s Tour de France, and it will be worthwhile to see exactly who is at fault.