Paul Jakma's Blog

If you’re into bicycle racing, you might enjoy the “De Tour van Bauke” (“Bauke’s Tour”), a behind the scenes look at Team Belkin’s 2013 Tour de France campaign, by Kees Jongkind of the dutch NOS public service broadcaster.

It has a few fascinating insights, such as into the echelon stage where Saxo, OPQS and Belkin managed to split the field; managing egos within a team with several top riders; and generally some of the dynamics within a top WorldTour team. The film doesn’t spend much time on explaining the background, and does sort of assume you’re fairly familiar with how the TdF ’13 played out, and perhaps how the team had had to scramble over the winter before to find a new sponsor after Rabobank pulled out, succeeding in finding Belkin as title sponsor. If those assumptions are met, the documentary is very enjoyable.

I obviously can’t remove the original dutch sub-titles that are embedded in the video. So I’ve had to position the sub titles above, which means I’ve had to use the “Alpha Sub-Station” format, rather than the more common SRT format, as SRT does not support positioning. Ideally, NOS would prepare an English subtitle version, with the subtitles professionally rendered. I did contact someone at NOS to see if they’d be interested – they apparently have their own plans for further releases to non-Netherlands markets, but I didn’t get any specifics. I’d be more than glad to licence the subs back to NOS for web use for free, to say thanks for making “De Tour van Bauke” available on the web.

As some of the Belkin DSes have strong regional accents, I’ve sometimes used regional english words. E.g. in my mind, the english subtitles for Nico should be read with a strong Irish accent – think Sean Kelly 🙂 crossed with Mrs Doyle from Father Ted (“Go on, go on..”). I’ve also snuck in one or two Liggettisms for the TV commentary subtitles!

In order to use these subtitles you need a video player that supports “Alpha Sub-Station” format subtitles, such as VLC 

To watch it with VLC:

1. Download the documentary from NOS. You have to save one of the following links to your computer, so you can watch it in VLC – watching in your browser probably wont work:
   • High-quality (4 GB)
   • Lower-quality (779MB)
2. Rename the downloaded video file to, e.g., tour_van_bauke.mp4
3. Download the subtitles file from OpenSubtitles, and save it as, e.g., tour_van_bauke.ass to the same folder as the video.
4. Open the video in VLC.

VLC should then automatically play the sub-titles. If it doesn’t go to the “Video” menu, then “Subtitles track”, then choose “Open file…” and manually locate and open the sub-titles file.

Feedback/corrections would be appreciated!

Enjoy.