Versus Who?

I've been meaning to write this for days ...
The 2007 Tour de France will NOT be televised on OLN. It will be televised on Versus.

Now don't get alarmed.

OLN will become Versus in September. So much for the Outdoor Life Network.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact the OLN-ne-Versus televises the NHL, which is played indoors (OK, so they played a game outdoors in Edmonton a couple years ago!). OLN has a $135 million two-season deal with the NHL for telecast rights, so the NHL probably had something to do with this. When will we see the new logo? Sometime during the Stanley Cup playoffs, which will linger into June, when attention turns (at least on OLN) to the Tour de France.

In addition to a lot of fishing (outdoors), some bull riding (outdoors) and running (outdoors in Spain), and some other redneck stuff (did I really write that?!), the network also televises the America's Cup (outdoors), the Iditarod (outdoors) and the Davis Cup (outdoors), except for the NHL, the network remains more outdoors than Versus, eh?

One of the names the network considered -- and I'm not making this up -- was STVE (pronounced "Steve"), short for Sports TV for Everyone, and AVA (Action Victory Adventure). There are probably more Steves versus Avas watching, though.

"In a world where differentiation is so critical and so difficult," said sports-television consultant Neal Pilson, "I suspect they may have come up with something."