Masters & Obut Trophy

Some more about two of France's major annual events for top players:

Masters: a "tour" with 8 stops in 8 cities during the summer
- over 5,000 spectators on average per stop
- a total of 35 hrs of television coverage like Sport+
- 6 cameras (one overhead for bird views and one macro for slow motion)
At each location there's a juniors event (Masters 'Jeunes') the preceding evening.

Trophée Obut des Villes: a 3-day competition in the fall. The last one was in Béziers - Nov 18-20. The 2004 edition in Chartres.
- 32 teams representing individual cities
- 7 programs for a total of 9 hrs on Sport+
- combined with a shooters competition

For television all players have wireless microphones so viewers can hear their comments, discussions, and the occasional 'gros mot' ;-).

Here are two short promotional movie clips that give an idea of the preparations and some nice shots.
They're zipped, so you need to download and extract them first with Winzip or similar. Then you get a .mov file to watch with Quicktime. Viewing at twice the original size (zoom 200%) works fine.

Masters de Petanque 2004 (10 Mb)
Trophée Obut 2004 (12 Mb)