How Tour De France Is Transforming Its Tech Game, Making Cycling Fun To Watch For Sports Fans

Cycling is like eating a donut in reverse.

It's painful (if you're trying to lose weight), you don't want to do it (unless you are fasting), and it's simply boring (in my humble opinion). It's no fun. Also you can never be at ease on those uncomfortable bike saddles, most of which resemble hydraulically pressed male genitalia.

But for all that personal discomfort, cycling as a sport definitely has my respect and fascination. Especially the Tour de France.

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If you haven't seen the Tour, you've missed out the scenic French countryside juxtaposed against 200 sweaty men cycling like their life depends on it.

The landscape couldn't be more picturesque for one of the greatest annual feats of human sporting endurance. Oddly enough, the terrain couldn't be more challenging to capture and broadcast it all, demanding herculean feats of technology in its own right.

Data hungry sports enthusiast

Hailing from South Africa, Scott Gibson uses cricket to explain how cycling is evolving as a spectator sport.

"Just think how the introduction of bowling speed or ball tracking through DRS has now become an integral part of watching cricket on the screen," says Scott, "And how we as an audience have become used to that kind of data analysis, and never quite complaining about it."

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ALSO READ: Behind The Scenes At Formula 1 - How The Internet Connects Millions Of Fans To Live Race Action

Cycling right now is undergoing that transformation, according to Scott. He explains how back in 2015 the organizers of Tour De France approached the company he works for and signed them on as the official digital partner. The rest, as they say, is history.

The company is Dimension Data, where Scott Gibson is the Group Executive of Digital Business Solutions. "We began from focusing on what data to present on the television screen of viewers of Tour de France, so that's when we implemented an IoT solution for them to track bicycles."

It sounds pretty simple, right? Cars in Formula 1 have been doing that for sometime now, showing all sorts of telemetry to dazzle viewers' eyeballs, so what's the big deal in doing something similar for bicycles in the Tour De France?

Scott chuckles, "Everyone assumes that France has great coverage for cell phones and GSM technologies, but reliable data access is a huge challenge the minute you arrive in the mountains, in the Alps, where you struggle to get cellular coverage. So we had to put together a radio frequency network from scratch, kind of like a moving Wi-Fi stadium, an impenetrable radio bubble that moves with the cyclists to track their data efficiently at all time."

Tracking sports online

Positional data of every cyclist is tracked every second, and at last year's Tour De France the Dimension Data team were successful in having 99.8% coverage.

"We use Formula 1 as our north star, we want to create a F1 experience for Tour De France, where we show live positional data of cyclists, gap between two cyclists, and dynamic virtual leaderboards, but it's challenging because of the conditions," says Scott. "Because Formula 1 takes place in a small race circuit, they have less moving variables to take care off when they deploy their Wi-Fi bubble on any given race day."

Creating a moving Wi-Fi network to cover Tour de France

If you've seen Tour de France coverage before, you must've noticed TV crew cars following the cyclists from a safe distance. Turns out they aren't just capturing visuals, they are like moving Wi-Fi modems that gather data from cyclists and relay it back and forth to the communications hub.

The tracker on bikes at Tour De France

"We've a tiny USB stick sized transmitters fitted to every bicycle competing in Tour De France," Scott mentions, "Data transmitted from them is picked up by special receivers built into the cars that follow the riders."

Those cars are part of Euro Media, the official broadcaster of Tour De France, Scott tells me. "We piggyback our data stream on top of Euro Media's broadcast signal," explains Scott. "So first data is generated on the bicycle, and some intelligence is transported from the bicycle into the receiver fitted on a motor vehicle following closely behind."

From the car the data then goes up to a helicopter, and from the helicopter to a communications hub. "From there it goes into the cloud where we do all sorts of big data analysis and some of that is fed back into the broadcast signal that viewers finally get to see," according to Scott.

data analysts

Tour De France is a 3,500 km long cycling race split into 21 stages over 23 days. "We have a control centre that sits at the finish line of every stage, like a small server farm that has to move every single day as the race progresses. And we actually have a lot of processing power inside that mini, mobile data center moving from one finish line to another."

An avalanche of data

Dimension Data helps the Tour de France capture a LOT of data over the course of the cycling tournament's three week duration.

As much as 379,800 terrain points are captured to record upward or downward slope, 11,394 weather updates are captured across 18 metrics and refreshed 633 times during the entire race. For every rider, 1.9 million GPS entries are made capturing positional longitude, latitude data, along with altitude and speed at any given second. For all the riders participating in the Tour De France, a combined 151 million data points are captured in real-time. But this is just individual-based data.

Cars following behind the riders

There are several group-based data sets captured by Dimension Data for the Tour, if we assume an average of 2 groups across the entire race (43 data points per second for grouping & 990 data points around group composition), as much as 392,333,400 group data points are captured during the entire race.

Apart from the individual riders and groups, if you add on top a layer of AI prediction with its own data analysis, as much as 3,178,937,394 data entries are created during Tour De France. This is just mind-boggling.

"What we aren't collecting is biometric data of the cyclists, things like heart rate monitoring or energy spent," Scott mentions. "We can do that, we have the technology to capture that information if needed, but current cycling contracts and the relation between ASO (organisers of Tour de France, more on them below) and the cycling teams on who actually owns that data. So ASO has currently instructed us to only capture data on the bicycle and not of the cyclists at the moment."

Learning from Tour De France

Scott admits his company's core focus isn't about selling the IoT solution they've built for Tour De France for other sports, but it's about showcasing what data can do for their core clients in financial services, healthcare, retail and other verticals.

data crunching in the cloud

He explains this through Tour De France's first AI and machine learning prediction algorithm his team deployed in 2017. The task was simple - predict the winner of every stage of the Tour. The AI prediction had a 75% success rate, which isn't terribly bad given how getting anywhere close to 100% success rate is simply impossible, given the hundreds of variables that competitive cycling has at any given time.

"This is still a great way to show our clients how by using basic data, you can start to see trends inside your retail or healthcare or automotive vertical, and it will allow you to apply your analysis and management of that data in a much more knowledgeable and time efficient manner," Scott says. "Imagine if an AI machine algorithm can successfully predict trends on your data analysis with a 70-75% accuracy, you can apply your human talent to add the missing 25-30%."

The Tour is evolving and learning, too

"For me the partnership with Dimension Data has been one of full trust, when it comes to the digitization of the Tour De France," says Julien Goupil, Media Director at ASO (Amaury Sport Organisation) which organizes the Tour de France every year.

live race data on a mobile app

Julien observes that digitizing the Tour has made it more palatable for newer audiences, who don't necessarily follow sports on television. "On Tour de France today, we have 70 million video views, 12 million unique viewers of the website, and driving downloads of the official app," he says. "So the association with Dimension Data has really contributed greatly, especially in getting young people in following the sport, which is important to us compared to four-five years ago."

Also for the traditional TV signal broadcast, Julien says "Thanks to Dimension Data and the logistic apparatus they have in place during every Tour de France, we get much more information than before which we can then display on television screen and make the sport more exciting and engaging for television audiences."

Julien points to live-tracking of cyclists within the mobile application as a clear winner, being powered and developed by Dimension Data, and this has "made the Tour de France more enjoyable than before."

Acknowledging the geographical challenges in putting together a non-stop Wi-Fi network, across all stages of the Tour as no easy feat, Julien mentions technologically the Tour De France still has a long way to go before it can match up to Formula 1's level of engagement.

helping cycling evolve as a spectator sport

But there are plans in place to spice things up very soon, according to Julien. His team at Tour de France is figuring out the concept of Smart Stadium for fans to get a more life-like track-side experience of the Tour from the comfort of their chair, with perhaps the possibility of VR-AR enabling that enhanced viewing experiment. There's also talks on standardizing a Smart City Wi-Fi solution, especially with city-wide cycling services, but it's all still in very early stages right now.

Obviously, technology is at the heart and soul of all these new initiatives. To enable innovative experiences for athletes, viewers and organizers, and help transform cycling in some ways and make it more modern.