The Tour de France likes to bill itself as the biggest annual sporting event in the world, with teams of the finest cyclists on the planet embarking on a 21 stage odyssey around France (with the occasional sojourn into neighboring countries).  Up spectacular mountains, over cobbled tracks, and at break neck speed, the athletes provide a lung-busting spectacle set against some of the most breathtaking backdrops the sporting world has to offer.

Indeed, for many spectators, the opportunity to explore such beautiful surroundings is a major part of the draw.  Others revel in the super-human efforts the riders go through as they tackle up to 200km every day for three weeks.

The Covid-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc upon the sporting calendar around the world, and cycling has been no different, with the almost year long calendar being scrunched into a few months across late summer and autumn.  The Tour itself has been pushed back from its traditional July slot to the rump of August and most of September.

While events such as the spring classics attract cycling aficionados, the Tour has always had a more widespread appeal.  What Wimbledon is for tennis, the Tour is for cycling, and the three week journey past historic chateaus and through stunning vistas marks the Tour out as an indelible part of summer.

The opening stage should have been raced on the 27th June in Nice, with the competition unfolding against the backdrop of the glistening Mediterranean and sparkling beaches of the Côte D’Azur.  Having had the pleasure of joining the EF Education First team for a few stages of last year’s event, the rolling carnival of this most unique of sporting spectacles is a much loved, and wholly unique institution.

A virtual Tour

Given the vibrancy and energy of the Tour, it can often seem as though the physical efforts of the rider pales into second place to the carnival surrounding the event.  The racing is of course, the reason we’re all there, but it’s not everything the event represents.

The appeal of a virtual event, might at first glance appear to be quite limited, but it’s an experiment that online training platform Zwift is keen to undertake.  They have announced that they will be running a multi-stage virtual Tour de France in their online world in July.

Riders connect their bikes to a smart trainer at home, which in turn communicates with the online platform.  Every pedal you make at home moves your avatar in the online world.  The faster you pedal, the faster your avatar goes.

The eSports landscape is booming, and indeed, the Economist recently made the case for it to be included in the Olympics.  They argued that eSports are often far more popular than some of the more esoteric Olympic disciplines, with a range of professional leagues being played out in packed stadiums. They cite the 1,000 or so professional players of the League of Legends fantasy game, with the World Championship final last year watched by around 44 million people. This dwarfes the number of people in many Olympic disciplines that can earn a living from their chosen sport, with spectator numbers many can only dream of.

Petite boucle

Whereas the real Tour de France features 21 stages, the virtual Tour will be a much shorter affair, featuring 6 stages including the famous final stage on Paris’ Champs Elysees.  Unlike the actual Tour, the virtual Tour will feature a full roster of women’s teams alongside all of the leading men’s teams from the pro peloton. Each team will have four riders, with the general classification prize determined by team success rather than individuals.

The format of each stage is designed specifically for the virtual platform, with Zwift CEO Eric Min revealing that he believes an hour or so of racing is the ideal length for virtual racing to ensure spectators remain engaged throughout.

“I think the right amount of viewing is 60 to 90 minutes at most,” Min told me. “Most bike races often see people tuning into the last 15km of racing, and we’ve limited these races to an hour, both due to the viewing demands of consumers but also the training demands of the riders, as they are actively preparing for the Tour and might arrive at our race having already done 3 hours on the bike.”

The nature of racing in Zwift itself lends itself to a new form of teamwork, strategy, and even skillset.  For instance, the platform offers various gamification elements, such as draft and weight bonuses to help riders go faster, plus there will be new routes to learn.  It’s perhaps no surprise that those riders who have been most successful since lockdown are those who have spent most time familiarizing themselves with the platform and its nuances.

“Racing on Zwift is definitely very different from racing on the road,” EF Pro Cycling’s Lawson Craddock told me. “On the road, you have to focus on the tactics, being in a good position in crucial moments, saving energy whenever you can, and being at your best at key moments of the race. On Zwift, it’s more and less, ‘who’s the strongest guy over the course of the whole race’.”

A new form of racing

The races build upon the Tour for All event that Zwift ran earlier in the year, which allowed them to test out not only racing on the platform, but broadcasting the races via channels such as Eurosport.  The Virtual Tour is set to be broadcast across a wide range of platforms, including SBS in Australia, NBCSN in the United States, and Eurosport across Europe.

“We know that esports has undergone big development during Covid-19 as riders have spent time on the home trainer during lockdown,” Julien Goupil, Media Director at the Tour de France organizer, the Amaury Sport Organisation says. “We will have to see how things go with the event in terms of the broadcasting, the viewing figures, and of course the riders and teams, but of course esports is something we’re looking at.”

It remains to be seen how enduring the popularity for virtual cycle racing will be, but there is already evidence to show that alternative forms of racing have a place at either end of the road racing calendar, with events such as the 6 day track events in Europe and keirin racing in Japan having a long lasting appeal.

While virtual racing is nowhere near the multi billion dollar industry that Japanese keirin racing represents (yet), it does nonetheless show that there is a space for alternative forms of bike racing.  The hosting of a virtual Tour de France as a prelude to the condensed cycling calendar over the remainder of 2020 may be a prelude to things to come.

For many who compete in cycling, whether as an amateur or a professional, there is an almost masonic obsession with statistics.  Riders fret over their power output or their weight.  They fiddle with their position to try and be as aerodynamic as possible.  From a racer’s perspective, these things are all crucial, and they are largely at the heart of virtual racing platforms, such as Zwift.

For those tuning into events such as the Tour de France, however, I suspect those things are a side issue, and far more important is the sheer spectacle and color of the occasion, as this meander through France washes over you each summer.  It seems probable, therefore, that virtual racing will ultimately have more in common with 6-day racing on the track than the 21-day odyssey through France.

Just as there are numerous smaller races used to fine tune form and fitness before the major races of the season, there’s a sense that this is very much such a warm up for the bigger things to come for virtual bike racing.  It’s something riders like Craddock seem only too willing to add to their repertoire.

“It’s pretty incredible how you can see all these incredible racers on the road, just not having that ability to translate that into Zwift racing, and of course you see that both ways too,” he says. “I think both are great forms of racing, they are both so different, so it’s hard to compare, but it leaves room for different skills which is cool.”