[NOTE: the live tracking link in this article was for 2006 ONLY. Here is a link to Street View imagery and routes for the 2008 Tour de France in Google Earth.]
The Tour de France coverage in Google Earth gets even better. The author of the Tour de France Google Earth file, showing the routes of the stages of this 2006 year’s race, has now added an ability to provide live tracking of race progress. Download the TdF network link 
, then open the “Tour de France 2006” places folder and turn on “Live TDF“. You will see saw a red bike showing the current progress of the race, and it indicates the distance travelled and local time stamp. Read more about the TdF 2006 network link in the earlier GEB story. Here’s the post by the author announcing the new tracking.
Here’s what the author says about yesterday’s stage and the new network link:
Saturday the prologue is taking place in Strasbourg. Today we start the first stage over 185 km, mostly flat. The network link has been updated to include the live tracking red bicycle.
You should see the red bike sitting near the 5 km mark on the track. It is showing a timestamp at 1:47:30, which is the time of the last test…
About Frank Taylor
Frank Taylor started the Google Earth Blog in July, 2005 shortly after Google Earth was first released. He has worked with 3D computer graphics and VR for many years and was very impressed with this exciting product. Frank completed a 5.5 year circumnavigation of the earth by sailboat in June 2015 which you can read about at Tahina Expedition, and is a licensed pilot, backpacker, diver, and photographer.
Hi everybody,
Thanks to licfer666 for his job.
We developped with some friends a real time tracking live Tour de France system.
We equipped 2 cars from BOUYGUES TELECOM Team with a GPS/GPRS blackbox. These boxes send each 15 seconds real time locations with speed. Enjoy yourself downloading our freeware on http://www.routefocus.com
Now that’s cool!
Been tracking it for a while now accross some high res areas of Franch.
Very Impressive
There is also an live and interactive Google Maps app online: http://www.ubilabs.net/tdf
The Placemark with live coverage beeing my work, I am proud to anounce:
Look at http://www.letour.fr. They have published a coverage of the TdF for GE on their site.
I was contacted by Google last week where they asked permission to use my work as a basis for the official coverage by the Tdf organisation comitee.
Wow, thats cool, beeing asked by the big ones.
So all of you working hard to publish realy good GE placemarks. WE have it in hands to make the world more GE aware!
We can expect to see some more details on start and arrival locations in the http://www.Letour.fr version.
This is fantastic!
I’d like the Tour de France and I follow it on the Dutch TV. This live tracking is perfect!
I’ll be doing the Tour de France with a former U.S. Postal Rider, named Marty Jemison. He has a tour group that follows the TdF. I hope to be blogging about my experience, and I’d like to also put Google Earth on my blog to give readers a live showing of the race. How can I do that?
Bottom line is to get your real time position. That could be done in several ways. The main issue is to have enough power supply all along the way and full gprs coverage too.
Contact me if you want some more info.
And congrats to do this amazing loop on a bicycle. I prefer doing it in front of routefocus 😉
I’ll be doing the Tour de France with a former U.S. Postal Rider, named Marty Jemison.
I’ll be doing the Tour de France with a former U.S. Postal Rider, named Marty Jemison.
Tour de France 2008. I prepared a Google Map in terrain view wit all the stages of the Tour 2008. See:
http://www.hotels-in-france.nl/index.php/Le-Tour-2008.html
Hello Husken, don’t you know whether some KML or KMZ for Google Earth exists ? F.e Yours, from Your web ?
On my blog I published an overview of all stages and the full track of all Tour de France 2008 stages in Google Earth (more detailed than Husken’s version).
You can check it out at http://paris.thover.com/story.php?ID=106&l=en
The day I launched my first stages of the Tour de France 2008 there was no map of the stages on paris.thover. Of course I visited the blog of Thomas Vergouwen. It takes some time to find the link for the stages and it seems that you need Google Earth. My: http://www.hotels-in-france.nl/index.php/Le-Tour-2008.html is a single Google Map with all the stages without Google Earth. In my eyes the stages are rather complete enough to give visitors an impression of the tracks of the stages. In the time between the start of the Tour de France 2008 we will improve the map and add your ideas and suggestions. Everything of course depeding on the time we have: it’s only fun and hobby.
Husken probably didn’t really look around good enough (he got stuck on the page about the 2007 Tour de France), because a very basic map of the stages has been published on October 26th already (the day after the Tour 2008 presentation which I assisted to in Paris) at http://paris.thover.com/story.php?l=en&ID=67 and while the stage details have been published little by little I have drawn the precise stage routes on 28th Feb, 24th Mar and 31st May at http://paris.thover.com/story.php?l=en&ID=106
Of course my detailed map is also available in Google Maps directly … just read what’s written on my blog since February (at the very end of the article)!!
No hard feelings, but … 😉
Stage 10 is at velopeloton.com and another set of stages (9, 10, 15, 16, 17) have just been published at climbbybike.com. Sidenote: the two interpretations of stage 10 differ.
Any other stages of Le Tour de France 2008 published anywhere else?
A very simple method to send live position is to have a Windows Mobile PDA, or a java phone, an unlimited subscription to GPRS/UMTS with Bouygues or SFR in France (15eur/month) (it will work even with a 9eur/month 15mb during 3 weeks), and use gpsgate.com software (20eur). It will update live data on gpsgate.com website with Google Maps, for free.
Other cheap software similar to gpsgate.com is available: mologogo, gpsshare, gloposis, and more.
Tour de France 2008 on Google map:
http://www.mapstars.com/index.php?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=426
Does any body know if live gps data will be available anywhere for the 2008 race?
I’d be will to scrape it and put in the paris.thover kml
Jon
I wonder if the new arrival in the sponsor list – Garmin (team Garmin-Chipotle, ex-Slipstream) – will bring anything new at this level. Some of the Garmin GPS devices are made for road biking but I’m not aware of any Garmin device updating the position in realtime on a server… although the e.g. Garmin Edge 705 can send position data to other such devices in a range of 3m.
It seems that the last Tour of California was followed with GPS live data, sponsor being CSC. They’ve advertised some GPS devices on the bikes but not sure how they work and who builds them.
Finally, I think it is not necessarily important to update the gps position of every runner every 30s. It would be sufficient to have a human watch the live TV and then move the pointer on a Google Map whenever s/he realizes the runners are in some area, based on the TV commentary. This can be done technically very easily, with free web interfaces e.g. gpsgate.com – but one needs a set of TV watchers to coordinate effectively…
Apparently Orange (a cell operator) will send live GPS data from their vehicle, using apparently 3dtracking software(3dtracking.net).
http://www.orangedansletour.com/gps.php
It would be cool if live tracking could be linked up to social bookmarking of news events that occur along the way – geo-tagged social bookmarking or something.