It was an ugly day at the Tour de France — foggy and cold, with plenty of rain.

But it was the perfect day for Alex Carmedelle. An opportunity to record a video of cyclists struggling up a hill, battling the elements.

So he got up at 6 a.m. and began driving to the top of Col du Tourmalet, a 6,939-foot climb. The rain fell in buckets, the wind picked up and Carmedelle couldn’t push himself to nap, so he waited. And waited. And waited. He waited for 11 hours in the rain, hours the sophomore television, radio and film major would call, ‘the most miserable of my life.’

But in the end, he said, it was worth it. After all, it was just another day at the office.

Carmedelle spent his summer filming behind-the-scenes videos for team HTC-Columbia, a highly competitive cycling team that placed 15th in this summer’s most prestigious — and most grueling — bicycle race, the Tour de France.

Every July, cyclists from around the world gather to traverse mountains and countryside in a 2,262-mile campaign — roughly the distance from Syracuse to Flagstaff, Ariz.

Carmedelle was with them every pedal of the way, and said it was every bit as grueling for him as it was for the riders.

‘Working for the Tour de France is a grind because, logistically, it’s a nightmare,’ Carmedelle said. ‘You have 200 riders that come with a support staff and the media and race staff. The Tour de France probably moves 2,500 people a day: Moving from one city to a start city, then doing the race, then a finish city, then a sleep city, then you do it again the next day.’

Carmedelle’s job was to create short, one-to-two minute videos every day of the race, documenting the team and what had happened in the race that day. Carmedelle was constantly in motion, shooting new footage, interviewing athletes and team members, and then piecing together two videos in the same day.

Kristy Scrymgeour, in charge of marketing and communications for team HTC, said

Carmedelle was constantly working. She said he would collect footage first thing in the morning, and then, as the race was going on, produce the film while on the bus traveling to the next town and upload when the right Internet connection became available.

‘And then he’d basically start again as soon as we got off the bus when the race was finishing,’ Scrymgeour said. ‘He’d start again with his filming and work into the evening.’

Carmedelle grew up with the sport of cycling. His father, Bruce, began riding recreationally 25 years ago and said Alex has been watching the Tour de France since he was seven or eight years old.

Though Alex said he only participated in one cycling race, he’s always been around the sport. This summer was his third trip across the Atlantic to see the sport’s biggest event, and he regularly attends the Tour of California. He’s even met cycling stars Lance Armstrong and Mark Cavendish.

At the end of 2006, when a family friend bought Team T-Mobile and changed the name to HTC-Columbia, both father and son were thrilled, especially when Bruce was named its chief financial officer.

‘This was an extremely unusual opportunity for an American to basically go in and operate one of the top teams in the sport,’ Bruce said. ‘I tell people who don’t know anything about cycling, ‘Imagine that your best friend buys the New York Yankees and asks you to come help run it with him and sit on the bench next to the manager.’ That’s kind of what the equivalent was for me.’

Alex was asked to shoot videos for the Tour of California because it would have been expensive to fly the company’s regular videographer to the United States, Bruce said. From there, the company was so impressed with Alex’s work they asked him to do the same job for the Tour de France.

Alex already had plans to go to Italy with friends during the Tour de France, but he jumped at the opportunity and changed destinations.

‘I had to take it,’ he said. ‘It was nothing short of a once-in-a-lifetime experience.’

Alex spent time with the team, interviewing team members before and after races, and filmed all aspects of the race. He felt like a VIP, he said. He was part of a circle that he said everyone — fans, journalists, autograph seekers — was trying to get in.

But the job was difficult. The cyclists didn’t always want to be interviewed, especially after a less-than-desirable stage or a session with the media. Some of the riders always refused to speak to Alex, others only spoke on rare occasions. Ultimately, it was up to him to find a story one way or another, and in a limited amount of time, he said.

‘It was pretty much a COM 200 project every day of my life for 23 days,’ Alex said. ‘It was like a multimedia storytelling project, except instead of having three weeks and time to edit, I’d have, like, five hours. The longer it took, the worse it was because people would start to go to sleep on certain sides of the country, so information became less and less pertinent.’

Seth Gitner, a newspaper and online journalism professor, taught Alex in a multimedia storytelling class in the spring. He said he was proud of his former pupil’s application of storytelling skills.

‘I know he has the capability of doing high quality work,’ Gitner said. ‘It’s always nice to be able to see students take what you’ve done in class and apply it to the real world.’

The experience reinforced Alex’s idea that broadcasting and news production were not for him. He’d rather go into television writing, he said. He occasionally got frustrated with a stressful job that was never ideal, and the hard work caught up with him, leaving almost no time for personal enjoyment.

‘Before I did Tour of California, I thought this would be really fun,’ Alex said. ‘After Tour of California, I knew it wouldn’t be that. It was a job. It was not a vacation. Everyone’s like, ‘Oh, you’re complaining about going to Europe.’ No. I didn’t see Europe. I saw the inside of a bus, I saw the side of a road and I saw the inside of, like, 24 horrible hotel rooms.’

Alex’s videos received more than 54,000 hits on YouTube, and the team plans to invite him back next year to do the same job. And although Alex’s European travels were hardly a vacation, he said he still walked away with a valuable experience and plenty of stories to tell.

After 23 days of moving hotels, sleeping short hours and working all day, a fatigued Alex and his HTC-Columbia team made it to the final stage in Paris and began to unwind. He walked off the bus, spied the Eiffel Tower and walked to a roped-off section of the Champs Elysses.

‘Me and my boss have a glass of champagne, and I take my champagne and go sit on the curb with this journalist I’d been talking to throughout the tour,’ Alex said. ‘And I’m sitting on the Champs Elysses with a glass of champagne, knowing that I had just done all this, and I just smiled and said, ‘I guess that was worth it.”

lefulton@syr.edu

Published on September 8, 2010 at 12:00 pm

Contact Lorne: lefulton@syr.edu