Feb 20, 2006
Tour of California: Best Cycling Race Website?
Race websites vary in their quality. The Tour de France website has been the best so far because of their great design and real-time race updates in just about any language you like. The Tour of California’s website now trumps any other cycing race website ever created. With the backing of Adobe and Google a great website has to be the result.
Google Maps
The ToC website uses Google Maps to show the location and layout of each stage. This may be considered a lazy way of showing the stage maps since you can easily map out the courses, but it is actually very useful. In the past race websites would show a course route as a stand alone map. The result is a lone squiggly line with little to no idication of side streets. You could not get any idea of the actual neighborhoods they would traverse or the actual streets they would pass by. The Tour de France and Giro D’Italia have extensive guides that tell you when and where the race is expected to arrive with variations for speed. The ToC doesn’t get down to that level, but the Google Maps do allow you to get a very solid idea of where to go if you want to see the race.
Video
Who needs to wait for the ESPN2 coverage at 2am? I DVR’d the coverage last night and probably will not watch it tonight or tomorrow. That coverage is pretty much useless to me and I am a huge cycling geek/dork. If I was half interested in cycling I wouldn’t even bother to watch and the ToC would not even be on my radar. So how do we get video of the site at a decent time? The ToC website has a live race tracker that includes video of the race. Adobe bought Macromedia (makers of Flash and Flash Video) a while back and since they are a major race sponsor, they are showcasing Flash Video. Google, YouTube and countless other video sharing sites are using Flash Video as the default video player because of the ubiquity of the Flash plugin and ease of playing Flash video within a web page. The result is smooth video of the day’s highlights with a quicker turn around time than a major sports network. I will try to use the race tracker to follow today’s stage and will report back on what actually happens during a road stage.
I think the use of Google maps to lay out the precise tour routes is amazingly handy.
The video is also a great idea. Too bad execution has (so far) been so sucky.
I agree with Fritz. The GoogleMaps and video give the website leverage over any other race website out there, although it’s impossible to tell how long a video will be “Buffering” or anything.
Hey guys. I wrote the Tracker and would like the feedback from real cyclists. I’m getting plenty from webgeeks. For the record, the Tracker itself uses Yahoo as its map source, while the main website oddly uses Google. At one point we were showing street names in the Tracker too, but it made the GPS visualization a mess. Is it odd that there are two sources of map data available? Also, sorry that our back-end servers (that provided video and GPS) were so poor. The providers were all running beta software and hardware and, well, you saw the results. Hopefully you got at least one good viewing with everything running? Want to know more or give more feedback? Give me a shout at http://www.allanpadgett.com if you wish!
Allan