Your ability to bring in the big names for interviews is 2nd to none.
Do you have a small number of people you can trust to give you get critic and feedback ?
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But where’s the outrage for Barstool sports (Jack Mac, KFC), Antonio Brown, or more importantly the college students on yik yak who started the rumor in the first place?
Sure McAfee was wrong for chiming in on it. He admitted last night during his show that he would be making it right (I assume she’s getting paid).
To call Pat a “a piece of human excrement” is a bit of stretch. Did he make a mistake, yes. But what about the good things has he done? Did you know he gave away $2.5MM last night to a crowd of 12k people in Pittsburgh? And another $100k online? And also got Jelly Roll, Wiz Khalifa, Snoop, and Shane Gillis to each donate $50k to Pittsburgh local charities (and Pat matched each of their donations).
If you’re in to all that stuff… fringe sports coverage, X, bloggers, etc. A lot of us aren’t. I hadn’t heard about it until McAfee repeated it, and I would imagine, like myself, many hadn’t heard about it until it got out mainstream.
As you alluded to later on, he actually is a pretty decent guy, but he’s a major tool. And his tool-ness is what led him to making that rumor mainstream, because he often doesn’t take the time to think things out.
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It was a fun conversation where she opened up and gave a lot more detail/insight than maybe I would’ve expected considering (correct me if I’m wrong) I think it is the first podcast she’s done since Singapore. Massive privilege.
Yeah, I definitely do have some great people that I trust around me that I get positive & constructive feedback from!
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It’s not personal, Jack. There’s no doubt in my mind that you are a pretty cool dude. The fact that so many of the pro athletes regard you as a friend speaks to that fact.
How would you describe the evolution of the pod from HTT to last year to this/next year.
What did you like/not like that drove the change ?
BTW, you had some really cool ideas. Example, when you had 2 coaches sitting down over coffee discussing their philosophies, that was really innovative.
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I’m not saying there is or isn’t an actual current issue. By Jack’s own self admission in this thread, this *reporting on this specific subject matter, has caused him to reflect and/or change how he wants to work his journalistic side of his career. Whether right or wrong that’s his own takeaway from this moment in triathlon history that has certainly created a lot of polarized feelings on both sides of the subject matter.
So your advice would seemingly be “not to change”, my advice would be “remember who you also represent”, are both right / wrong or mix of the 2.
Barstool, is Barstool. But even then I’ve seen Portnoy sack some dudes over being sexist idiots in public and on their platforms. Antonio Brown? The well known piece of human trash? I don’t really care if McAfee donates money one place but then treats someone he doesn’t even know like that. My morality isn’t reflexive. McAfee fits at Barstool, but this ESPN gig needs to end ASAP because he has no class.
And to echo @BfloTri I literally hadn’t heard of it until McAfee talked about it live…and then my X Feed was loaded with people sharing his clip.
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The chemistry between the athlete and the comms people is odd…in almost every sport, the game/race commentator doesn’t speak to the individual athletes. A sideline reporter does.
What you want from your booth is someone who knows how to call a race, and then has some anecdotes. That is the play by play person which seems to be Jack’s current role. Play by Play is distinctly different from color analyst. Traditionally, the only sport where there isn’t a color analyst is baseball on the radio, but that has gone away for the most part and there is now a color analyst. Vin Scully famously but the D-Backs guy just retired and they slowly inserted a color analyst to apprentice and take over as the main…
But on TV? Baseball has two people. Who is the color analyst? In most cases they are either a just retired coach or former athlete. It is traditionally very difficult for a career broadcaster to become a color analyst at the professional level. More common in college but that is even going away. The color analyst is the expert, they bring all the vignettes. They bring the relationships.
So the chemistry? The chemistry needs to be on the broadcast. A great example of people moving as pairs. Troy Aikman moved to ESPN, there was NO WAY he was calling a game without Joe Buck. Joe Buck moved to ESPN, which is unfortunate because he’s incredible in the booth when calling a baseball game.
In any “national” broadcast with almost any sport, before every game (usually day or days before) there are pre-production meetings where the announcers sit down and talk with the coach/athlete. It’s essentially as that’s a good source of up to date information / background story / sound bites for the announcers to then add the “tidbits” throughout the broadcast; no sport is every not filled with commentary from just beyond what is actually happening in front of them. They’ll almost always add that prep information at the right times within the broadcast (key 3rd down play that they wanted to really key on the TE, etc). I distinguish national vs local broadcasts, because most times the local guys have better day to day access, where the national guys are literally coming into for 1 game and then maybe never coming back.
It’s why Tom Brady being hired as the lead football commentator has been so controversial because he’s banned from entering any team facilities since he’s now part owner of a team. Lots of media have speculated how that will impact his ability to do his job. So yes your right that the people in the booth need chemistry, but you also need chemistry (or respect at min) to be able to meet with athletes/coaches and get the information from them you need to make the broadcast better. That’s the whole point of pre-production meetings, to get additional information, sound bites, etc or if Lurker wants to call it “prep”.
Hell the most famous pre-production meeting in the sport of triathlon created the whole Laidlow vs Long “beef” which I wonder if that still is the biggest ratings numbers PTO has ever had.
Technically the proper attribution should go to chatgpt
Prep meetings most of the time are with coaching staffs, the sideline person is generally the one who tells stories so they’ll be doing player prep with features. Most of the prep today actually happens on zoom, unless you’re talking day of quick chats.
But the point is, the chemistry is between the broadcasters. Whether they have good relationships with the athletes is probably in some type of calculus, but minor if you even get to the stage of being considered for one of those roles.
The Olav Bu conversation was an exception from the usual excellent quality of interviews on The Triathlon Hour. I’d say it was pretty shit; in part because of the guest rambled impossibly and didn’t even address the questions for the most part, and in part because the questions throughout the first hour were nothing but an invitation to ramble ("what is zone 2 and how is it used in the training of Kristian, Gustav and other pros?).
I’m used to the questions being A LOT more focused, though not sure if that would help with Olav’s tendency to make an absolute mess of his “replies”.
Basically the whole thing seems unnecessary if he was a guest a year ago. Not much has changed. The only thing I’d want to know from him is if he agrees with Blummenfelt that the training before Paris was miscalibrated and made him fit for an Ironman and not a 2-hour draft legal event with a 10k at the end. There was a sort of a similar question towards the end which he sort of addressed, basically by saying he gets bored with doing the same shit all over again and he needed to find motivation, so instead of doing what works for Kristian he did something new that might’ve worked but didn’t. But he didn’t say it directly. Because that would’ve sounded awful…
I only listened because someone told me not to listen as Olav didn’t answer a single question, and that piqued my interest 
That fact that Olav is always so wordy in answering questions while at the same time not really answering them at all has always made me wonder if there’s something else behind the so called Norwegian method. Even getting KB or Gustav to talk about it. They seemed a little cagey and just talked a bit of gibberish. With them I excused it as language barrier. With Olav it’s like he was trying to filibuster an answer with as much boilerplate sciencey sounding stuff as possible.
It’s a shame because I want to believe these world class athletes are on the level, but equally my skeptical detector alarms are going off whenever he starts into another long winded, answer on periodization and specificity.
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Oh that’s quite simple, there is nothing magical or mystic about the “Norwegian method”. It’s just mainstream science of performance dressed up with insane amounts of marketing sauce. But Olav wants it to come across as something special, like anybody would.
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[in general, not directed at the episode with bu this time] Or that the devil is in the details, and they are physical-in language. trying to describe it with words might require a lot of them. There are few absolutes regarding physical performance science that is adequately described with very few words and few sentences.
This is also why I somewhat appreciate some of Jacks very “long” questions, because all the words used frame the question in a good way.
“but in fairness, mike reilly really liked the pay check for the first athlete out of the price money presentation , they became best buddies iam pretty sure .”
what no
Thanks for asking Joe about Triathlon Mockery @JackKelly-TTH, but apparently he doesn’t understand why everyone is calling him out for how he handled it. Oh well.
Alex actually seems like a dude I’d want to hang out with in this chat.
Very good episode. I hadn’t listened in a while. More like the old HTT format, which I liked.
Alex seems like a really smart guy.
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