Tour de France and Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift

Vision

Eight years of co-innovation

Continual improvement lies at the heart of all competitive sports, the need to find that extra something that will ensure that they reach the finish line before their competitors.

For Amaury Sport Organisation (A.S.O.) their multi-year digital transformation journey has focused on continually creating new experiences for their fans, both long-time followers and those who may be discovering the Tour for the first time.

They’ve leveraged the power of networks, edge computing and the cloud to transform race operations, enabling them to make faster decisions informed by real-time data.

A.S.O. and NTT have walked this journey together over the past eight years, constantly searching for new ways to innovate and digitally transform this iconic event.

In 2015, at the start of our partnership, we created a solution that enabled A.S.O. to track riders in real-time, leveraging this intelligence to change the way broadcasters covered the race.

Each year this has been expanded to include enhanced data analytics, the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to gain greater insight into the race on an increasing number of digital channels for fans. The data we’ve collected has been used to drive enhanced, data-driven storytelling, providing insights to audiences on social media and broadcast; continually evolving this capability with improved visualizations and new stories for fans each year.

The 3D Race Tracker augmented reality application uses this data to provide fans with a real-time view of the progress of the race on their mobile device integrating a 3D map with data insights and the ability to track individual riders in real-time.

In 2021 we created a digital twin of the Tour de France turning the roads of France into the world’s largest connected stadium. This digital twin provides race organizers with an unprecedented view of the race, allowing them to monitor not only the progress of the riders but also all the supporting vehicles and the start and finish zones.

Just as A.S.O. have always looked to explore the possibilities technology offers over the previous 108 editions of this iconic event, 2022 is no different. We’re taking the technology we deployed in 2021 and taking it to the next level, providing race organizers with greater visibility, officials with a view of everything happening on the road and fans with greater insights into this amazing event. And we’re bringing all this digital coverage to the inaugural Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift.

Transformation

Evolving the world’s largest connected stadium

In 2022 we’re creating the next generation of the world’s largest connected stadium. With a fully digitized environment, race organizers now have a digital view of almost every element of both the Tour de France as well as the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift.

To create the digital twin of the Tour we leverage a digital fabric consisting of IoT sensors, edge computing, networking connectivity technologies, and real-time analytics. This creates an accurate model of the entire 3,400km of the race route as well as all other areas associated with the race.

Through this, organizers can monitor key locations, assets, crowd information, and live race data, to enable a more seamless event experience and race operations.

Critical to delivering this is our ability to ensure we capture data from the edge of a highly dynamic network and provide this data back to users wherever they are.

IoT devices, including sensors on every bike, vehicle tracking technology and cameras are all critical to ensuring that we’re able to provide all their stakeholders with the insights they need.

Leveraging edge computing, we’re able to make the real-time data captured by the system is immediately available to the Race Commissaires following the riders in the official race vehicles. Where they were previously only able to view the race through the broadcast feed, they now have access to all the live data collected, even when they’re deep in the mountains. This provides them with access to insights that enable them to make the best decision possible when enforcing race rules and ensuring the safety of the riders.

Our ability to deliver this level of intelligence at the edge is enabled by our decision to leverage the most appropriate infrastructure and cloud platforms for each element including physical, virtual, containerized, and serverless technologies. The same technology powering our data analytics platform in the cloud ensures that race officials and organizers always have access to the latest information.

This flexible, agile and highly available architecture was developed together with A.S.O. and allows us to spin up additional resources almost instantly, including delivery of the first-ever virtual Tour de France on Zwift in 2020, and to create parallel instances to support new events such as the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift.

The insights provided by our data analytics platform powered by this hybrid architecture have enabled us to create a digital twin of the event, using a range of different IoT sensors across event vehicles, assets and locations. This digital twin provides the race operations team with full visibility of all aspects of the event, bringing together information that was previously only available in multiple different systems, or not available at all. We’ve also created a digital twin of our Big Data Truck – our race operations hub at the end of every stage of the races – to give our own teams better visibility of race operations.

Delivering this represents a unique and expansive network challenge – connecting a race traveling through some of the most remote corners of France, to support teams and fans in different corners of the globe.

This requires a range of different networking technologies working seamlessly together in an environment where security is paramount.

Our software-defined, edge-to-cloud, and multicloud network enables high-performance cloud services while also empowering the team from five continents across the globe to work seamlessly with the right collaboration tools.