The next Tour de France is still five months away, but the 2008 pro cycling calendar is already in full swing. The week-long Amgen Tour of California, one of the first big races of the year, is currently making its way down the Golden State's coast. You can catch nightly coverage of the bike race on the cable network Versus, or you can follow along online using some very cool Adobe technology.
The Adobe TourTracker is a Flash-based multimedia feast. You get a big window showing the action in Flash video (like Kelly Benefits' Jonathan Sundt taking a solo flyer on the rainy roads of stage 2 as he tries to catch BMC's Scott Nydam, shown above) with the ability to switch between two camera angles on the fly. You also get a text feed for updates, overhead and elevation maps of the route and the ability to track the locations of any of the 136 riders on the roads.
Last year's Tour of California was the first race to incorporate CSC's real-time object field tracking technology. It was an experiment at the time, with the company outfitting seven riders' bikes with tiny GPS devices. It must have been a hit, because this year, every rider in the race can be tracked using an updated version of the same system.
The race is broken up into daily stages of around 100 or 120 miles per day. Like other open-road sports, the outcome at the finish line is largely determined by the tactics that play out along the route. It takes a lot of the mystery out of bike racing -- which can seem impenetrable to casual viewers -- to watch an entire race in real time.
