In July, Dimension Data announced details of its data analytics for the Tour de France in the form of data regarding sprint speeds, average speeds across the 21 stages, distance covered and climbs associated with the lowest average speed. The data was made available by means of a partnership with the Amaury Sport Organization and the 22 teams that participated in this year’s Tour de France. Dimension Data and the ASO organized the implementation of live tracking sensors under the seats of each cyclist. Subsequent to the implementation of the live tracker, Dimension Data took responsibility for the aggregation, cleansing and analytics of the data within its big data analytics platform. Whereas previously cycling fans were limited in their ability to follow the Tour de France by means of live television content, Dimension Data’s real-time big data analytics and data visualization platform allowed users to track their favorite rider or riders, obtain aggregated statistics about groups of riders and review real-time data about data points such as cyclist speed, elevation climbed and distance traversed. The Dimension Data cloud delivered real-time analytics on rider position, speed and their relationship to other groups of cyclists by means of an analytic platform that used MongoDB and SQL Server for data aggregation and IBM Streams for real-time analytics on streaming data feeds. The 198 riders in the 2015 Tour de France generated approximately 75 million GPS readings that were tracked on the Dimension Data analytic cloud and transformed into a Beta live tracking website that gave fans and the press an unprecedented level of detail and granularity into the unfolding of the tournament. Going forward, Dimension Data plans to deepen its partnership with the ASO to deliver increasingly enhanced end user experiences to fans and followers of the Tour de France, over and beyond the delivery of real-time analytics. Now that the ASO and Dimension Data have succeeded in building the infrastructure that can deliver analytics that specify the highest recorded sprint in 2015 was 78.48 km/hr or that the average speed of all cyclists across all 21 stages was 38.34 km/hr, Dimension Data plans to build progressively richer end user portals, websites and dashboards to help fans experience and understand the tournament in the years to come.
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