BTS: Tour de France

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How wind tunnel data, official route topography, multi-screen live feeds and 21 daily outside broadcasts bring the most brutally mountainous Tour De France ever to fans on their sofa.

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The 112th Tour de France begins on Saturday, July 5 in Lille with 22 teams and 176 cyclists covering 3,338.8 km over 21 stages six of which are hilly and six classified as mountain stages including an individual time trial which finishes on a mountain summit.

Those might be the bare facts but it doesn’t begin to tell the story of the herculean effort of the athlete’s toiling up hills most of us would give up on within a metre, nor of the travelling circus that constitutes the tour’s organisation and media coverage.

This is last year that the Warner Bros. Discovery owned broadcaster shares rights in UK with ITV. From 2026 it will have exclusivity.

This year TNT Sports has linear coverage of every stage in the UK and Ireland. Eurosport will deliver linear coverage of every stage across Europe; every stage is streaming on HBO Max and discovery+ is streaming every stage in the UK, Italy, Germany and Austria ahead of HBO Max launching next year.

The host broadcaster is France TV working for Tour organiser Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO) with technical provision subcontracted to Euromedia Group (EMG).

TNT Sports takes the clean feed and the dirty feed which is produced by France TV and EMG, plus the six isolated feeds from motorbikes covering the peloton and feeds from two helicopters which circle the route.

New for this year’s Tour from TNT Sports is a second screen experience available on discovery+ in a quad screen format.  The multiscreen format debuted for the Giro d’Italia and gives constant coverage of one heli feed and three motos.

The feeds are brought into TNT Sports’ gallery containing a video and audio switcher and replay functions. “We produce that with commentary so viewers are always getting the front of the Peloton, the mid of the Peloton and the back plus the heli feed,” says TNT Sports Head of Cycling Guy Voisin.

TNT Sports also has a unilateral motorcycle feed in amongst the Peloton, the feed from which is also delivered alongside the host feed and muxed by EMG.

Currently viewers are unable to select one of the quad views and play it full screen. “It’s strictly a platform limitation on D+ but we we're going to be able to do it from next year on HBO Max,” Voisin says.

“There are two reasons to do this. The first is for super fans who gets to watch images that they may not see in the host produced version. We know from Giro d’Italia that super fans are watching. It’s not a huge amount, but we're in the percentages.

“For example, in a time trial instead of just the helicopter we can offer a motorcycle following individual riders. If you’re a fan of a Norwegian or Greek rider you can follow them from start to finish and not necessarily rely on the production feed who may think that the French or English riders are more important and cut to them more.”

It also helps explain the story of the race when the peloton, leaders and stragglers are split along way apart.

Additionally, the race teams themselves are able to view the multi-screen and react more quickly to events on track then would be immediately obvious from just seeing the traditional host broadcast.

TNT Sports trailed the concept during Italian race Strade Bianche sharing the ISOs with 13 of the 18 World Tour teams. “For them the importance was, they were able to see an incident happen in the race and report it back to their chase cars 90 seconds before they would have seen it on the broadcast feed. They’re able to judge tactics and the safety of the race. We offer it to all the teams so it’s equal.”

A prime example during the Gira was when a sporting director of one of the teams messaged Senior Cycling Producer Doug Ferguson to say he was watching the quad split in the chase car when one of their riders had a fall.

“It was a minor fall but the incident wasn't shown in the world feed because it happened in the middle of the Peloton (not affecting the race leaders),” Ferguson explains. “Because they were watching the quad screen it meant that their mechanic in the back of the car was ready straight away to fix a new wheel and get the rider back in the race quicker than normal. That, they said, was fantastically helpful. It probably saved them two minutes of race time.”

21 OBs and a moving town

The RF technology that EMG provides has improved to the point that there are rarely issues with signals dropping.  Signals from the motos are broadcast to a plane circling at 26000ft and received by its onboard satellite. This is retransmitted back to the TV compound on site where there are two antennas (main and back up) that are constantly tracking the plane for the best signal.

“The only real dropout is where we get incredibly bad weather or when they're going through a tunnel,” Voisin says.

The host feed is effectively a production of 21 different outside broadcasts in which the TV compound moves from stage to stage over three weeks. “It’s a moving town every single day,” says Ferguson. “It's a sight to behold. It's at least 4000 vehicles (teams, media etc) on the road. Each official vehicle is allocated a number and I’ve seen numbers over 9000 on the road.

“The guys who put the barriers out in the last 3K drive through the night to get to the next finish town, set them out then sleep all day. They don't see the race.”

TNT Sports receives its ten signals at one of two tech hubs at Hilversum and London’s BT Tower. There it is demuxed and enters the TNT network as IPTV which is then manipulated into unilateral feeds for 47 countries.

A number of countries have their own TNT Sports’ production wrapping around the race, among tem Spain, France and the UK. A team in Paris produces the ‘pan feed’ for countries that don’t have a local production. This is a multilingual feed produced in 19 different languages.

The UK show is presented from The Curve at Stockley Park Studios where Ferguson is senior producer. He also helps develop different analytical techniques, several of which are new this year.

For example, with Italian time trial specialist Filippo Ganna, who rides for Ineos Grenadiers, TNT Sports gained access to wind tunnel data from the testing Ganna made in April for a slightly tweaked riding position.

“Basically, he had his hands slightly lower down on the handle bar which completely changes the aerodynamic profile,” Ferguson explains. “We convert that raw data to explain why the teams take so much time and effort to use expensive wind tunnels and find 10 watts of difference, which could be the difference between first and second place.

“We recreate this data with all the coefficient drags and air particles showing the air flow over the rider in different positions. We can show how different riding positions can make a critical difference in time on the course.”

During the coverage, ex pro cyclist Adam Blythe can use the graphic to explain why, when the rider is in a lower position, they could hold it for a longer time.

“We take highly complex science and make it understandable and functional which for the Tour is vital because the aim is to attract new fans,” Ferguson says. “This is the sport’s Ryder Cup or Lions Tour or Grand National. It’s the event that everybody watches who doesn't normally watch pro cycling.”

Original data for meticulous storytelling

TNT also got access to wind tunnel tests with double Olympic champion Remco Evenepoel last November in California. He was working on a position for a mountain time trial (which features in the Tour this year).

“His position was really low on the bike,” Ferguson says. “He's like a blooming eel. Highly wind resistant but for a climb when the bike is at such a steep angle his normal riding posture was restricted. So, they were trying different positions to get him higher on the bike. While they were trialling that, they realised that his hands were bumping off the visor of his helmet – so they cut a piece out of the visor out and eventually got him to a position where his hands are right up to his face but he can still see.

“We're going to use that wind tunnel information to explain it in presentation - none of which we could do if we were just in a normal studio.”

All the top riders post some elements of their data although many won’t reveal their weight so as not to give too clues to the opposition.

Voisin says the teams are understandably a bit secretive about some of it. “At the same time, they are dealing with the recent history of cycling which is not always pretty. The more they can explain their speed and their preferences in a fair and technologically advanced way the better it is for the sport. They all understand this.”

He continues, “We’re in constant discussions with the teams. They give us good access. They’ll let us into team buses and wind tunnels. This is a lot to do with how we share back with them.”

Since 2023, TNT Sports has given the teams three minutes of bespoke video content. Voisin explains, “Whenever we own worldwide rights for highlights [and it has the rights to two thirds of the 300 pro cycling races worldwide] we give them three minutes for their social media. That helps us because they will promote our wider coverage but they also give us access because we're giving them something back. We have the rights, you guys are the gladiators, here's a little something back in exchange for putting on a great show. They have opened their doors much wider than ever before and specifically in the last year.”

The Tour makes available data about power, cadence, speed and heart rate but these are a fraction of the amount of sensors the athletes’ wear. Most data is restricted. The Jumbo-Visma team, for example, have a shirt which contains a breathing sensor revealing information about the exchange of oxygen in the blood.

“They pull that data off it in real time but use it internally since during the race it could be very determining,” Voisin says. “There are sensors that can determine when an athlete is low on blood sugar and therefore a good time for the opposition to attack. These sensors have been banned. The UCI is working very hard at making sure that nothing can be taken out of context to affect the race.  We have limitations on which sensors we can use in the race right now.”

“You can even get stress and strain levels out of the WHOOP data [a wrist worn sensor that captures data on an athlete’s physical condition] and that could be considered useful to a competitor. It's a big negotiation every time we want to put any type of data in the feed.”

Mapping mountains and explaining incline

The routes are announced in October for the following year’s tour. APO provides the teams with GPS files and mapping which they input into an app called Velo Viewer.  TNT Sports has just begun using this too as the basis for analysis presented in 3D AR graphics.

“The red sections are very steep uphills, the blues are very steep downhills, and you can select whatever section you want to look at in any detail,” Ferguson explains of the source topology. “You've got maps so that for a Finish Line, teams can look in detail to understand where to position themselves for specific turns. Teams will have all of this displayed in the car and we're now using this on set.

“One of the hardest things to get across is how difficult a climb is. Most people can't really get their head around numbers like 19 kilometres at 7.5 percent. In the UK, in particular, there's absolutely no comparison that we can make. Hardknott Pass is 30 per cent in sections but it's only 4-5k long.”

To mark the 50th anniversary of the Tour’s King of the Mountains competition, the organisers have constructed a route with over 50,000 metres of elevation gain.

Stage 6 on July 10 covers 201.5km from Bayeux to Vire Normandie through the heart of ‘Norman Switzerland,’ a hilly region in northern France known with tight roads and more than 3,500 metres of elevation gain in one day.

Stage 18, Vif to Courchevel Col de la Loze on July 24 is 171km long has a 5,000m elevation gain, with summits culminating on top of the 2,304-metre Col de la Loze. It’s the hardest stage in the 2025 Tour de France.

“That's horrendous. We can display that animated out of the floor in front of our studio position so our presenters, when they step towards it, will almost be dwarfed by its scale. It looks much more dramatic than saying its 20K at 6.4 per cent.”

A returning graphic is the inclinometer, a life size Subbuteo figure on a bike, demonstrates the angle of the rider on the climb, which at one point on the route inclines to 20 per cent.

“It's horribly steep, but saying that it’s 20 per cent for these 200 metres is nowhere near as good as showing it. It's a serious point. That could be the point where a rider breaks. At this point they’ve already got three weeks of fatigue in their legs. It might only take 200 metres at this severity to lose the race. It gives us an emotive but simple way to talk about it."