Remembering David Duffield
David Duffield was the butt of many jokes on Derailed. This was, largely, because he was such a big part of my teenage years. I “got” cycling, and it was hugely frustrating to endure the ramblings of a commentator who just seemed to know less about the sport than me… or anybody.
I appreciate that’s an unfair criticism. But that’s where it all came from. I even invented the Duffield Trajectory, which charted that beautiful parabola of madness that afflicts all cycling commentators as they descend into incoherence and irrelevance.
But, of course, then I worked with him at Cycling.TV and the British Premier Calendar. He was a wonderful man. I went through a long period of self-reflection over how my vitriolic perception from afar was so different from my perception of the man on a personal level. It was a lesson that stuck with me, and continues to inform how I try to behave.
He died on February 21, 2016, while I was still editor-in-chief of Striking the Sun, a haphazard mixture of cycling ebook, collaborative audiobook, and 19th century absinthe-fueled art commune. A character not-so-loosely based on Duffield made up a large part of Striking the Sun‘s plot. David’s death was a loss that hit me harder than I would’ve expected, and I paused the project briefly.
Here are the words I wrote at the time. And below them, a short chapter from the book.
Remembering David Duffield
David Duffield was an unforgettable man, and those that knew him will already have recognized the influence he’s had on Striking the Sun. Henri Giroud is not David Duffield, of course, but his storyline reflects my own autobiographical experience of David.
As a teenager obsessed with cycling, the final years of David Duffield’s race commentary were baffling to me. He couldn’t always recognize the riders, and often seemed to be more interested in telling us what he’d eaten for dinner the night before. This made him the butt of our jokes when I began editing Derailed. Derailed was always about the media more than the sport, and it was hard to ignore the absurdity of trying to watch cycling on television in Britain, begging the tennis to end so you could hear a commentator who’d speak through the duration of the ad break and shout every time he saw an animal at the side of the road. It was never the intention of Derailed to diminish his contribution to the sport, though it’s sometimes a worry that we were too brash.
Aged 22, I moved to the cycling media, where I worked with David a few times and discovered how much the reality differed from my teenage perceptions. He was a tall, friendly man, and it was easy to see his commentary in the conversations you’d have with him. Somehow even the commentary changed to me when I reflected back; he was inspiringly enthusiastic and loved his sport. His dedication to being pleasant, more than anything else, seemed to scupper him.
In Striking the Sun, Henri Giroud starts as a joke, floundering in his role as a commentator and writer as he rambles about nonsense and his own personal interests at the very end of his career. The scene in Chapter 12 where Giroud commentates on a bike race in a dilapidated office is a true story. The race was the British Premier Calendar, edited to 24 minutes, and David missed all the narrative cues we’d discussed with him before he entered the commentary booth. Nobody was as unkind as in the story—that’s a narrative deviation. After we finished recording, I rode the Underground with him to an event in central London, where he compered and I reported.
Another day, terribly hungover at a bike race far from home (as is the wont of the young journalist), I descended to my hotel’s dining room and sat willing a mug of coffee to appear in front of me. At the far side of the room, David was already eating breakfast with Phil Liggett, dressed (as always) in a blazer. He looked across to me, laid down his knife and fork, and strode over to wish me a good morning. He’d always go out of his way for pleasantries that even the best of us would shrug off as unnecessary.
Most of us have strong memories of David, and I’m glad mine had a chance to evolve away from the 14 year old boy wanting statistics instead of stories. Henri Giroud is not David Duffield, but he is the only sympathetic character in this story.
Striking the Sun: A Handshake
Henri Giroud arrived at the building around lunch time, hungering a little. It wasn’t the modernist Parisian studio in which he’d worked for twenty years, but instead the office of a small company that was new to cycling production. The offer of freelance commentary work had come directly from the race organizer. Giroud had expected friction from TV4–it was one thing to lose a production job, but another to have your lead commentator provide the voiceover for it after it had been lost. And sure enough, TV4’s head of production soon found out. Instead of anger, he had remained calm, had implied filming and producing small races was an expenditure that offered no chance of return on investment, and that event promoters could do whatever they wanted if it saved TV4 money.
This small production company was filming and editing the race much cheaper than TV4. The savings had been passed on to the building, a decrepit tower on the furthest outskirts of Paris. The studio was on the top floor, and when Giroud pressed the button to call the elevator there was a pained clunking sound from behind its doors, and then nothing more. He made his way to the staircase, which was made from riveted steel and reverberated with every laboured footstep. When he reached the top, the door was locked, and none of the doorbells appeared to work. Giroud banged his palm against the door twice, and a short, weasely man opened it.
“Hello, I’m Henri.”
“I know.”
The walls had once been white, but were now soiled grey. They had damp lines running down them, as well as dark fingerprints and scratches. An entire corner of the workspace was piled to the ceiling with empty boxes and packing materials, and the other side of the room was equipped with little more than a few laptops and PC monitors.
“Shall I give you the grand tour?” The producer said. He laughed. In Giroud’s experience at TV4, producers were expected to dress like adults. Jeans, perhaps, sometimes, but shirts too, maybe even blazers. The media wasn’t known for being sartorial, but this man was scruffy for middle-management. Old jeans, old trainers, and, well, a new-looking t-shirt with an intentionally worn design on it.
In addition to the producer and the weasely boy, there was one large man in his late twenties, also wearing ill-fitted clothing. He was looking at his own profile on a social networking site and didn’t acknowledge Giroud’s presence.
The producer handed Giroud a printed shot list, and ran through the video. They spent ten minutes watching the programme in fast forward together, the important parts slowed to real time, and the producer explaining the intended narrative of the edit. At the thirteen minute mark, there was to be an advert break and Giroud was to announce the important attack and pose the question of whether it would stay away. Find out after the break.
Giroud stepped in to the commentary booth, which was dark and warm and little larger than a wardrobe. It felt like wherever he sat, his large frame would be touching a wall.
“Do you want to take a moment to look over the shot list before we start?”
“Ah, yes, thank you.”
“Alright, just let me know when you’re ready to go.”
Outside the door, the producer gestured to one of the other men, a motion of swigging a bottle, the waft of fingers under his nose.
Time passed. The producer returned to his computer briefly, then stood in front of the monitors, stretched his legs, and looked at his watch.
Twenty minutes now, and the producer knocked on the door and pressed his talkback button.
“Henri, are you ready to go?” The swigging motion again, and a wink.
“Ah, yes.”
“Would you like a glass of water?”
“No, let’s begin.”
The tape played out on all four monitors. What looked like redundancy to human eyes in the warm hum of the studio appeared different to the computers. One, the original file, one the output, one the version with Giroud’s commentary, and the final the capture of this version.
Giroud’s commentary sounded strange and ineffective to the man who was producing it, but the event organiser had requested him specifically. Besides, nobody at the production company knew very much about cycling, so they were willing to let this rumoured legend of broadcasting speak his own words, even if the words conflicted with the narrative they’d been working so hard over the past few days to portray. Times were tough, and the team was killing itself to prove it could offer the same standard of work for less money than its established rivals.
The producer wasn’t paying a great deal of attention to the voiceover, just keeping one headphone over his left ear to ensure the audio was recording correctly. Approaching the break, though, he began to listen. It was important the ad break was announced, otherwise when it was broadcast on television it would cut to ads mid-sentence.
“The er gentlemen for the Saint Jude team see the ah what’s er ah he did ah the ah whoosh he what’s he he’s going and so-”
The screen cut to black. Thirty seconds of black, representing the ad break. Giroud filled it.
“-of course rumoured but not proven and as we er well this race has a long history with winners going back to ah in 1968 it was won by ah Claude Demorarie who was famous for aha breaking his wheels over the ah over a spectator in the Tour de France the ah following year I think-”
The producer had passed the headphones around the office by now.
“What do I do?” He mouthed. The second half of the edit started, Giroud still talking over it.
“And ah as we see who’s this yes we see the rider from Saint Jude now he’s still attacking and he’ll tire himself out riding this way surely.”
“Sorry, Henri, I’m going to have to stop you,” The producer said. He opened the door to make it final. “We just need to re-record a couple of bits.”
“I noticed you lost the picture for a minute, I wasn’t sure it was just for me.”
“Yes.” The producer ran his hands through his thinning hair and sighed. “So I’m going to play this bit back and you need to say ‘We see Marcel Since from the Saint Jude team go on the attack. Can he stay away? Find out after the break.’ Can you do that?”
“Of course. Is this so you can edit it?”
“Yes. Do you want it written down?”
“No, I’ll be fine,” Giroud said. “What a smashing race, eh?”
“I’ll write it down. Just as it says on the paper, Henri. It makes it much easier for us this way.” He said. “In ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four.”
“And as we ah see Marcel Seize from the of Saint Jude he attacks. Will he stay away? Find out after the break.”
Black screen.
“Perfect. Are you ready for the second half?”
The second half went the same way as the first, but the production team was there only for technical quality. If the event promoter wanted this commentary then the team would oblige, recorded as crisp as they could manage.
The weasley editor pretended to go through Giroud’s bag, picked up an invisible bottle. Swigged it, mouthed silent deliriums at his colleagues.
They had expected this to take 45 minutes. A run-through, then the 26 minute edit, then a handshake. Including out-takes, lunches, and protracted silences from inside the booth, it ran to two hours and 23 minutes. By the time Giroud was done, only the producer was left in the office.