The event becomes bigger than the sport

Hats off to Lance Armstrong for his well deserved seventh Tour De France victory. Following this record-breaking triumph there have been the usual sports page pieces about whether this makes him the greatest ever cyclist. The consensus is that Eddy Merckx was greater because he not only won le Tour five times, he also won virtually every other major race in cycling, he won sprints, he won the 'king of the mountains' jersey, all at the same time or in the same season.
Armstrong by contrast has devoted all his energies to winning the one race, the rest of the cycling season effectively being no more than an extended training session for the one true prize. This is understandable given the way that the Tour de France now totally dominates the cycling calendar in terms of international exposure. While the tours of Italy and Spain and the spring one-day classics in Belgium, northern France and the Netherlands still attract lots of local coverage, only 'le Tour' interests everyone, even those who pay no attention to cycling for 49 weeks of the year.
This is similar to the way in which Premiership football in England has sucked up so much media attention that it dominates the sporting landscape at all times, becoming an event in itself. For instance, the back pages of the newspapers should be full to the brim with news of the Ashes cricket series (England vs. Australia). Instead, the cricket is regularly relegated to second place in the headlines by news of player transfers during the Premiership off-season.
One positive aspect of London hosting the 2012 Olympics should be to help effect a rebalancing of the media's sporting focus, so that the whole gamut of Olympic events get more coverage over the next seven years. The irony is that it takes another all-consuming event to do this.