Strava Launches Tour de France Hub with Routes/Segments/Rider Uploads

June 21, 2022 by |Sports Technology News and Reviews|Comments (19)

StravaTdF2v2

Back a few months ago, Strava teased an upcoming Tour de France hub that’ll allow you to track riders, stages, segments, and more – for both the men’s and women’s races this year. Today, that new hub launches ahead of the Tour de France starting next week. Albeit, since riders haven’t done the riding thing yet, you won’t quite see all the data goodness till after finishing those first few stages.

There are essentially a few core sections to this whole thing, which is in a new hub within the app, really the first time we’ve seen anything like this to my knowledge. In short, there is:

A) Complete listing of all stages: This includes the exact Stage routes and the ability to zoom in on any portion of the map, including in 3D view
B) Consolidated pro rider upload page: For riders that upload to Strava (which, is the majority of them), you’ll be able to find the riders activity file and do whatever it is that you normally do when it shows up in your feed
C) Consolidated list of key stage Strava Segments: Strava has gone through and highlighted a handful of key Strava Segments on each stage (from what would otherwise be thousands and thousands of Segments). So you can see how the riders do on that, as well as perhaps compare it to your own efforts if you’ve ridden it in real life.
D) Various Strava Challenges: Strava has also created challenges around time, distance, and elevation that you can partake in. Or, you can just do like every other proper cyclist and sit on the couch and yell at your TV instead.

Now as noted, this all launches today, and assuming you’ve updated your Strava app recently, you should start seeing this at the top of the Feed, or you can click on this link here to get right into it (from the mobile app). Doing so brings you to this page below, which on the top shows the overall route, and then down below has some of the challenges, as well a link to the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift (the 8-day variant for the women that starts later in July).

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Clicking to explore the Stages, you’ll be brought to Stage 1, where you can browse the Stage in either regular map view, or 3D map view.  Down below is an ‘official’ segment, which I presume just means the curated one for that section. Given Stage 1 is a time-trial stage and simply a short 13km circuit around Copenhagen, they didn’t exactly have a lot of options for ‘proper’ Strava Segments. As you can see, this one is 0.7km long at 0.2% incline.

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(The Tour starts in Demark this year for the first few days, before going to France, then sauntering into Belgium for a short bit, then back to France, then dipping into Switzerland for a few stages, before finally going back to France and staying put.)

If you tap the ‘All’ button, you’ll see a listing of all Stages. First the men’s and then the women’s stages (since that’s the date order):

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You can then tap on any given Stage for the same details as before, this time I selected the July 14th Alpe d’Huez stage (Stage 12), which looks much cooler in the app, and has the three major climbs of the day (Col de la Croix de Fer, Col du Galibier, and Alpe d’Huez). That should be an epic race day, appropriate also being Bastille Day (La fête nationale française).

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All of this is pretty cool. About the only caveat is that as someone living in Europe, I don’t see any easy way to tap on these routes and create a normal Strava route from it that I can ride. Obviously, these routes exist somewhere as proper Strava Routes, but it’d be great for Strava to stick a list somewhere (or, perhaps it’s somewhere but just not findable). Countless people ride these routes during the Tour de France (usually morning of, day before/after).

Again, these are all obviously pulling from just a Strava Route ID, and it’d be great to have said listing of those route ID’s (also, it may surprise you to learn that getting the *precise* TdF routes ahead of time is actually really challenging, most of the time this is only really available in the final days via various media/press packets, and not actually published anywhere in a public way – so if Strava puts these somewhere logical, that’d be awesome).

(Speaking of lists, Strava actually used to have a consolidated Top Cycling & Top Running routes for many cities on a simple blog page. But with their newish insta-routing rollouts, they’ve sadly redirected all those pages to a generic marketing page. Those Top 10 route pages were awesome, and I often used them in a number of cities, as they were legit human-curated completed with photos and more. Here was the page for the Amsterdam routes, you can still find it in the Internet Way Back Machine from last fall though. What’s silly is that Strava is/was the dominant result for all these cities before they redirected these, which they’ll ultimately lose to other pages.)

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In any case, I’m looking forward to seeing how this all works once the riders start pedaling. I don’t expect the data to be that exciting after the first day, given the shortness of the Stage, and the fact that it’s a time trial stage. But, once we get into the main stages, it should be pretty interesting – especially if they have the vast majority of the Peloton onboard.

Back in March when they announced this, they noted that last year “72% of the men’s peloton and 68% of the women’s peloton were on Strava.” and that “This year, we expect it to be universal” – hopefully that’s the case. And, hopefully, after a few days of this going live, we’ll see other athletes jump onboard as well.

Certainly, it behooves riders to get themselves onboarded into the list, since that in turn means more people will see their accounts, which in turn draws more attention to their sponsors, which in turn is what makes professional cycling ultimately tick. Just like any other professional sport.

With that, certainly more to come from the Tour de France next week, stay tuned!

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19 Comments

  1. Matt T LeGrand
    June 21, 2022 at 8:35 am #1

    I hope you get the chance to do a tech from the tour video like you’ve done in the past. Best of luck buddy 👍

    Reply
  2. Paul Tomblin
    June 21, 2022 at 8:38 am #2

    A few years ago I noticed that the pros would often wait a day or two before uploading a race day. I wonder if there was some sort of game of chicken going on that they’d only upload if specific other riders uploaded first. Or they’d cut out the power meter data.

    I train with a fellow kayaker who is completely paranoid about his competition knowing about his training even though he’s 60 years old and there isn’t any money on the line in kayaking. I mean paranoid to the point where he’s demanded I don’t mention his name on my blog or YouTube videos if we’re training together, he even made me take down videos because it caught him saying something about his training. All his Strava workouts are private unless he wants to steal one of my CRs. I liked to point out that pro riders with millions of euros on the line aren’t as paranoid as him, but he doesn’t care. I just laugh and refer to him as “the other guy” on my blog and put in a music clip whenever he talks on my videos.

    Reply
  3. BikePower
    June 21, 2022 at 8:40 am #3

    I’ll be watching the TdF (both the men’s and women’s) but I did not “Follow” the new Strava “Hub” simply for fear that Strava will give me stage results before I have a chance to watch the stage. I’m in the U.S. and often ride in the morning and watch the stage in the afternoon. The last thing I want to do is to check Strava after a ride and see who won the stage. Has Strava said how they are planning to present information about each stage? Will they push data into your feed that contains spoilers or is it up to the user to make a selection to see stage data?

    Reply
    • Geoff
      June 22, 2022 at 12:45 am #4

      This is a really good point. I’m in Australia, and don’t want the results spoiled each morning. @DCRainmaker, have Strava said anything about this? Is it possible to remain spoiler-free?

      Reply
    • Kevin
      June 30, 2022 at 6:43 am #5

      Was going to ask the same question. It looks like a nice feature but I hope they’ve thought about the spoiler aspect.

      Reply
  4. Heinrich Hurtz
    June 21, 2022 at 8:43 am #6

    OK. Really cool. But, in looking at the various stages, I do not see course profiles. I am I just being a dunce in not finding them?

    Reply
  5. Pavel Vishniakov
    June 21, 2022 at 9:33 am #7

    Annoyingly, the same functionality isn’t on Strava Web.

    Reply
    • hdb
      June 22, 2022 at 9:47 pm #8

      Agreed. A lot of the new “bells and whistles” roll out on the app and never get implemented on the web version, but at the same time, the app lacks many of the functionality available on the web (flybys, fatigue and form on fitness graph, and more). I don’t think Strava has a coherent technology plan (or maybe even a plan at all) for their product interfaces.

      Reply
  6. Treskelion
    June 22, 2022 at 2:01 am #9

    My wife uploads to Strava; I’m content with Garmin, why duplicate my efforts?

    Reply
  7. Bruce Burkhalter
    June 22, 2022 at 4:37 am #10

    Thanks for the links to the Amsterdam Strava routes. I forgot about those. I’ve been here for two months and using routes from Maats and Kaptein. Always good to have more routes!

    Are you going to see any stages? I was just in Copenhagen and they have TdF stuff up everywhere.

    Reply
    • Ray Maker
      June 23, 2022 at 2:48 am #11

      Yup, I’m headed up early Thursday morning and will be there a couple days. :)

      Reply
    • Bruce Burkhalter
      June 23, 2022 at 4:00 am #12

      I was dumb and didn’t wear a mask and got covid. :-(

      Only took 30 minutes to get through security at Schiphol on a Friday morning. Lots of people there but it went fast. With all the news, expected it to take 4 hours. :-)

      Reply
    • Ray Maker
      June 23, 2022 at 5:53 am #13

      Yeah, the last few trips I’ve taken have been pretty consistently an hour (for security). I think GPLAMA was an hour leaving, but Des a bit faster.

      I only just recently discovered the RTL page that shows the calendar of expected numbers by day at the airport, helping a fair bit to judge things. It’s a few weeks old, but most summer plans would be locked in now for most people.

      * link to rtlnieuws.nl

      Reply
  8. Nic Zuraw
    June 22, 2022 at 7:36 pm #14

    Strava is increasingly trying to become a social media entity – I just want to see my own activities and those I follow – plus analytics. Not lots of filler and promotions that I can’t turn off.

    Thinking it will soon be time to unsubscribe and find an alternative. Shame I’ve been with them from Beta…

    Reply
    • Ray Maker
      June 23, 2022 at 2:48 am #15

      To be fair, that’s literally in the title of their homepage (Strava.com): “The Social Network for Athletes”

      I don’t mind the TdF stuff. I think sometimes the challenges can become a bit crazy, but I don’t even notice it anymore. My brain just filters it out automatically.

      Reply
    • Paul S.
      June 23, 2022 at 7:46 am #16

      I might be misremembering, but didn’t I have to sign up to see the Tour de France portal? They’d probably keep nagging if I didn’t, though…

      As for challenges, the major problem of cheating would simply vanish if they got rid of the leader boards and turned them into personal challenges. Maybe keep the ability to see the people you follow in the same challenge, but I really don’t need to see all of the cheaters.

      Reply
  9. Shay
    July 3, 2022 at 11:51 pm #17

    I guess Strava was way over optimistic.
    Less than 50% of the riders end up uploading their activities and almost non of them show their heart beat and Power data which is the interesting data.

    Reply
    • Ray Maker
      July 4, 2022 at 3:11 am #18

      Indeed, hovering super-consistently around 80-85 riders for the first three stages.

      That said, I’m willing to give them till Wednesday on this one, for a few reasons:

      A) I wouldn’t be surprised to see some riders behind on Strava (toggling from private to public), and today being a rest day, they might catch-up.
      B) It wouldn’t surprise me either if Strava themselves hasn’t got all the riders tagged. Perhaps new accounts, etc… This is a holiday weekend in the US (including Monday), so I’d give them till end of Tuesday to sort things out.
      C) I could also see some Strava/ASO to teams pressure here on Monday/Tuesday. The Strava partnership was very visible at the Tour itself, across many mediums. Let alone the digital side. If I was Strava, and whatever I paid for this partnership, I’d be mildly annoyed that whoever promised more rider participation (be it ASO or teams or both), isn’t materilizing. All that takes is a single message going out to the teams with flowery language about sponsorship visibility for teams/etc via Strava rides.

      But yeah, it’s not off to a good start, but I’m willing to give it a few days to settle out.

      Reply
    • Shay
      July 4, 2022 at 3:25 am #19

      With the lack of the important data such as Power (Watts) you have time to look for other ‘fun facts’ such as –
      – Wout van Aert using EDGE 130 on the TT stage but 830 on the other 2 stages… I guess every gram counts.
      – On the TT stage – most riders start their timer a few good minutes ahead of the ‘green light’… Don’t have time to mess with that once their pushing the pedals.
      – Cadence from these PRO riders is incrediable…
      etc.

      Reply