The UCI, the teams and the professional riders have long been calling for modernisation of professional cycling, but it took the power and finances of Tour de France organisers ASO to finally apply modern technology to the race. Through its partnership with South African company Dimension Data, the ASO rolled out live GPS tracking of every rider in the Tour de France this year. While the system itself was rushed into place and at times flawed, it promises to bring a whole new aspect of the race to fans, commentators and historians alike.
Adam Foster, Group Executive for Dimension Data, himself a keen cyclist and triathlete, spoke to Cyclingnews about his group's effort to come up with a system to display the GPS data in a very short time frame. Their partnership with the ASO was only made final in March, giving them just weeks to roll out "the solution" before the Tour de France start in Utrecht.
"We announced a five-year official partnership in the first week of March this year," Foster said from Gap after the second rest day of this year's Tour. "Since then we've been working with ASO and their existing partners to roll out the telemetry solution. The ASO is responsible for the physical device and the transmission of the data to the servers in the finish area, from there we convert that to the kind of information that is displayed on the beta tracking site and is being broadcast on the TV - the rider speed, etcetera at the end of stages.
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"Obviously we've had to work extremely quickly to get it ready for this year's Tour, but I'm delighted with how it's gone. We couldn't be happier with the way it's been going."
Over the airwaves
The ASO approached Dimension Data in December of 2014, just after 11 WorldTour teams announced they had formed a partnership called Velon, which aimed to advance the sport through the use of on-board video, position tracking and data to present the races in a better way for the fans. The goal is to keep innovating and potentially share revenue from said innovations amongst themselves.
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