Covering the Tour De France

By UK Journalism

A former online journalism student and cycling enthusiast has combined work with a long time hobby by covering the Tour De France for Cycling Weekly magazine.

Simon Smythe is a sub editor for Cycling Weekly and also works on the magazineís website writing a weekly editorial and the 'what's in' page. He has recently been offered a job as a senior sub editor on Holland and Barrett magazine, Healthy, but managed to work on what he described as ìthe most important professional bike race in the worldî before his departure.

Legend

Simon said: ìThe Tour De France has an unbelievably rich century long history which is full of legend. You have to go to France to see it to really appreciate it, but the British mainstream media have done a good job of conveying some of its magic this year.î

As a sub editor most of Simonís work on the Tour De France is before and after the event. The issue of Cycling Weekly before the Tour was over twice as long as usual to include a preview.

ìLast year there was a major drug scandal which broke the day before the Tour and most of the favourites didn't start so some of our editorial pages were immediately out of date. We were keeping our fingers crossed this year that nothing like that was going to happen again and it didn'tî he commented.

Simon has competed as a cyclist himself as a time triallist racing against the clock. He won a national medal in the British Circuit TT Championships and several open events before retiring in 2006 with back problems. He started freelancing as a sub editor for Cycling Weekly whilst completing an MA Online Journalism course at UCLan in 2003.

He added: ìI work in a team made up of a Production Editor, Chief Sub Editor and two Sub Editors producing a weekly and two monthly magazines and that's quite a challenge. It's great working as an efficient team and I'm quite sorry to be leaving them.î

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