The announcement that SPEED and NBC will share broadcast chores for the ’09 Lucas Oils AMA National Motocross Series - with six of the events to air live - is good news for diehard fans. But I’ll be interested to see how soon the complaining begins. At issue is a conundrum as old as TV motorsports itself, the fact that broadcast channels and cable outlets have always had fundamentally different approaches to race coverage.
Things may be changing, for reasons we’ll get to, but the traditional perception has been that the cable audience, though smaller, contained a much higher percentage of hardcore fans (after all, they pay for the privilege of watching). Thus cable’s editorial approach to racing has been to assume that the viewer understands the basics, leaving more time for nuance and detail.
In contrast, the broadcast networks have long been known for reaching that vaunted “mass audience,” of which diehard fans comprised a relatively small percentage. Here the traditional assumption was that most viewers knew little if anything about racing, thus the coverage was often treated as a primer for the clueless.
That approach is not limited to TV producers, as the history of American motocross reminds us. The sport was imported from Europe in its traditional format, two 40-minute-plus-two-lap 'motos' scored the old-fashioned way. Each rider’s moto finishes were added together with low score determining the overall winner. For example, Arne Kring’s 2-2 moto finishes would top Bengt Aberg’s 4-1, though Aberg won a race and Kring did not.
By 1972, when promoter Mike Goodwin took motocross into the L.A. Coliseum and gave birth to the sport of Supercross, the old ways were already under attack. Fearing that the mainstream sports fan he aspired to attract might become bored with 45-minute races, Goodwin ran three short motos per class, thus providing more starts and finishes for those with attention span problems. Sixteen-year-old Marty Tripes won with a string of three runner-up moto finishes.
