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“No one has done the Giro-Tour double since 1988.”

Cycling commentator Phil Liggett said this the other day during the broadcast of the Tour de France, which these days is beamed live on NBC’s streaming platform Peacock. He was referring to race leader chances of winning the Giro d’Italia and the Tour this year—a Herculean feat totaling some 4,000 miles of over nine weeks of racing. At any rate, Phil was wrong by a decade. Italian cyclist Marco Pantani last did the Giro-Tour double in 1998.

Hardcore cycling fans know this wasn’t the most egregious of gaffes, especially considering it was made during the heat of a live bike race. But alas, for the 80-year-old Liggett, it was par for the course. Dates, locations, statistics—Liggett often blunders these basic details during the Tour broadcast. Watch the Tour long enough and you’ll hear Liggett call a current racer the name of some guy who retired eons ago. Google Phil Liggett, and you’ll get Reddit threads and other forum rants ranging from the polite, “…” to the blunt, “.”

Yes, Phil Liggett is increasingly prone to what seems like amnesia. But I still love the guy, and will defend him and his cycling commentary against even the staunchest critics. Here’s why:

Back in the day, before Lance Armstrong took cycling mainstream in America, Liggett and his longtime co-host Paul Sherwen were our spirit guides into the wonky netherworld of European professional bike racing. Coverage was scarce at best, even as late as the mid-nineties. In those mostly pre-Internet days, I’d get my fix from monthly issues of VeloNews, mainlining the black and white broadsheet as if it were contraband. I was a cycling junkie, thanks in part to my European father, who’d passed on the bug, filling my head with stories of Eddy Merckx and Francesco Moser. Liggett took care of the rest.

For three weeks every July, he’d narrate my summers in his lyrical British accent, dropping metaphors and knowledge every few minutes. He’d chant the names of my heroes with perfect diction—Claudio Chiappucci, Gianni Bugno, Laurent Jalabert, Djamolidine Abdoujaparov (trying saying that one three times fast)—and I’d parrot them back to my parents, or to myself. When I’d head out for long, lonely rides, my only companion Liggett’s voice in my head calling play by play: “and there he is, James Jung, the young usurper from America, the angel of the mountains!” At age 12, I knew what words like “usurper” meant because Liggett used them and I’d later look them up.

Liggett taught me other things, too. History lessons about cycling legends of the past—Federico Bahamontes, nicknamed the “Eagle of Toledo” due to his climbing prowess; Raymond Poulidor, the “Eternal Second” because he never won the Tour. Through Liggett, I learned that 51 is the race number with the most Tour wins, that Napoleon was exiled on the Italian Isle of Elba, and that a palindrome is a sentence that says the same thing forwards as it does backwards. Normal American boys had John Madden; I had Phil Liggett.

My father and I ordered video cassettes of Liggett calling other races that you couldn’t catch on TV—grand tours like the Giro d’Italia, and one-day spring classics like Paris-Roubaix and Liege-Bastogne-Liege—as if we were both part of some cult. One summer, when Dad was out of work and put the family on a strict budget that meant canceling cable, we swallowed our pride and went over to the neighbors to watch the Tour, rather than go Liggett-less all July. It was there that I remember, Dad and I rapt on the old couple’s loveseat, watching our hero Miguel Indurain drop the entire peloton on the finishing climb to La Plagne, sealing his fifth consecutive overall Tour de France victory. “Enough is enough!” Liggett shouted, narrating what he believed to be going through Indurain’s mind at the moment of the vicious attack.

My father loved it, and for the rest of his life he would repeat the catch phrase in his thick Austrian accent whenever things got tough, looking at me mischievously with his bright green eyes. Between Dad and I, Liggett was our love language.

Of course, as you age, your tastes change. While I enjoyed the increased coverage that came with Armstrong’s seven-year reign, I grew tired of his bravado and that of his fans, many of whom seemed to be the type of red-blooded American dudes who used to shame me for wearing lycra and shaving my legs. Liggett and Sherwen became their guys, not mine, like when your favorite band gets too commercial. �����ԹϺ��� even profiled the announcing duo in a 2004 print feature. Liggett also, as some people criticize, graduated from objective cycling journalist to Armstrong fanboy, never once questioning the Texan’s ethics at the race. Why would he? Armstrong was good for business. Rather than gripe, I moved on from Liggett thanks to the proliferation of pirated online streaming feeds, instead watching illicit broadcasts of races called by equally eloquent Brits like Eurosport commentators Carlton Kirby, Brian Smith, and Irishmen Sean Kelly—announcers who get their facts right. During this era I acted like a snobby record store clerk out of High Fidelity. “Oh you like Phil Liggett,” I’d think when around the rubes. “Me? I listen to commentators you’ve never even heard of, maaaan.”

In recent years, however, I’ve returned to Liggett. Snobbery is something you should let go of in your forties, and besides, geo-fencing has gotten much better online. Rather than stream pirated feeds, I’m glued to NBC’s coverage. Things have changed since Liggett was the voice of the Armstrong era—tragically, Paul Sherwen died in 2018 of heart failure at age 62. These days, Liggett’s dulcet voice echoes through my home every July, his cringe-inducing metaphors filling the living room, his mistakes unfurling from the TV speakers, one after the other. My wife groans, just like my mother once did. My two boys, ages six and three, recognize his lilt as well. To me, it’s a lilt that sounds like summer.

My father is no longer alive to hear Liggett—Dad died almost five years ago. I miss him daily, but it is during the Tour de France that I feel his absence most acutely. I find myself reaching for my phone anytime something surprising happens—an attack, a dramatic finish, a white-knuckle descent—wanting to hear Dad’s voice, to laugh and marvel at whatever athleticism we’ve just witnessed.

Instead there’s Phil Liggett, talking to me from the TV, mistakes and all, just like he has nearly every summer since I was a boy. I’m glad we still have him.