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The sport of cycling has become an arms race. If you’ve read our recent cover story, you’ll know about Team Sky’s strategy of aggregating “marginal gains”, and the evolving 74-point checklist drawn up by Chris Froome’s coach, Tim Kerrison, that encapsulates its understanding of what it takes to win.
Even at an amateur level, a €35.7 billion global industry has developed to provide riders with evermore sophisticated bikes with carbon-fibre frames, electronic gear shifters, hidden brake callipers, and more. Anything to more efficiently convert the power from the rider's legs into speed on the road.
So it’s something of a paradox that television coverage of this sport has been so low-tech for so long. As recently as this year’s Giro d’Italia in May, TV commentators were left using rough estimates of how many seconds separated riders at a given moment in the race.
Fortunately for armchair fans, this is all set to change in time for the 103rd edition of the biggest race in the cycling calendar, the Tour de France. When the riders depart from Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy on Saturday July 2 for the first day of the three-week event, every one of the 198 bikes in the peloton will be fitted with a device designed and developed by Dimension Data.
Dimension Data will make the information available through its own Tour de France website, but also plans to pass it on to broadcasters, who will then have the ability to provide it to their viewers via on-screen graphics.
“It’s a GPS telemetry device,” explained the company’s sports practice executive, Adam Foster. “It has a carbon fibre casing, holds a chipset and a battery, weighs just 60g and fits onto the underside of the riders’ saddles.”
“Every second it sends its coordinates using a radio frequency, we can then use that to plot each rider’s position as the race evolves and convert the information into speed, distance travelled and the gradient of the slope they’re on.”
Read more: The science behind Chris Froome and Team Sky's Tour de France preparations
“Over and above the data we get from the device, we will be bringing other sources of information into the feed. We’ll be taking live weather information from the position of the riders. So if you’re looking at someone who has broken away from the peloton, we’ll be able to tell you specific weather information for that particular coordinate in real time – which direction the wind is coming from, how strong it is. I think that will be very useful for the commentators.”
While cycling fans might welcome the upgrade to their viewing experience, many will wonder why it has taken so long. Amateur cyclists have been able to get their own real-time GPS data while out on the road for many years.
As far back as 1989, broadcasters were using the Look Max One power meter to get data from individual pros’ bikes and relay it to viewers at home. Indeed, similar efforts have been trialled at recent races, but never rolled out consistently, or on such a grand stage.
According to Foster, the big change has been in the reliability of the technology. Even since an earlier iteration of Dimension Data’s device was quietly tested at last year’s Tour, the range over which the signal can be transmitted has increased fivefold.
As a result, he said, the “drop outs” that can interrupt transmission of the data should be few and far between.
“Cycling has not exactly done a great deal to change TV coverage for years, that is plainly evident,” said Dan Lloyd, a former professional cyclist who now works as a presenter on cycling YouTube channel GCN.
As a self-confessed “data nerd”, Lloyd welcomes the move as “a good step” but also warns having access to information is only half the battle. “I don't think it's going to completely revolutionise our viewing experience on its own,” he said, adding commentators and broadcasters may not immediately be equipped to interpret new types of data in a particularly meaningful way.
The pro teams, on the other hand, might be quicker off the mark. Knowing exactly where every rider is at any given moment could influence tactical decisions made during the race. But the other information provided by the new system could also make it quicker and easier to establish some reasonably accurate estimates of opposing riders’ power output.
At the moment, teams treat data about the amount of power their riders can maintain over a given period as top-secret information. Being equipped with the means to more easily and accurately estimate it could help adversaries build up a more detailed picture of their rivals’ strengths, weaknesses and what they would have to do in order to beat them.
But, because this is cycling, there is another layer to the story. Estimates of riders’ power data have also been used in recent times by anti-doping campaigners to identify “suspicious” performances.
These findings were described as “pseudoscience” by Team Sky’s performance director Sir Dave Brailsford, but there are a number of people in the cycling community who believe they should inform the conversation around doping in the sport.
And, since the quantity and quality of information supplied by Dimension Data’s new system has the potential to make it quicker and easier for anyone to estimate riders’ power data, it might increase the pressure on some competitors. At any rate, it should be good to watch.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
