Twitter and the Tour de France

I am fan of pro­cyc­ling an par­tic­u­larly the grand tour events, the Tour De France (TdF), Giro d’Italia and Vuelta a Espana. It all star­ted years ago when I star­ted cyc­ling and SBS star­ted show­ing selec­ted stages. I quickly real­ised it is not the best cyc­list that wins, but a com­bin­a­tion of cyc­list, team and strategy and I was hooked.

Back then, I did not look for inform­a­tion online while watch­ing the TdF. I would always catch up the next morn­ing with the res­ults and pre­view that day’s stage. Over the years that has slowly changed. Last year, while watch­ing the Tdf, I used Friend­Feed to talk to cyc­ling fans and kept up to date with vari­ous web­sites. Even man­aged to find stream­ing video to catch stages before SBS star­ted broad­cast­ing and some stages of the Vuelta.

How­ever, everything changed at the Tour Down Under when Lance Arm­strong intro­duced Twit­ter a large num­ber of top pro­fes­sional cyc­lists. Once you found them you get a bet­ter under­stand­ing of what is hap­pen­ing and find­ing out the news quickly. For example Levi Leipheimer broken wrist and hav­ing to aban­don the tour, the same way most news out­lets did by a Lance Arm­strong tweet. Again today’s aban­do­ment by Tom Boonen via a Steven de Jongh tweet.

In addi­tion to riders, you have twit­ter­ing team man­agers, mech­an­ics and other per­son­nel, cyc­ling journ­al­ists as well as other cyc­ling fans. The big advant­age of being in con­tact with other fans on twit­ter is you can find resources quickly, includ­ing stream­ing video, I watched every stage of the Critérium du Dauph­iné Libéré and Giro this year, thanks to Twit­ter. When races did not have stream­ing video or audio, there was a twit­ter­feed of what was hap­pen­ing in the race.

A few tips

Search on #pro­cyc­ling hashtag, find the hashtag for the event, for the Tour de France it is #tdf and open a search win­dow in tweet­deck to fol­low a race.

Fol­low Stee­p­hill and Cyc­ling Fans for the latest resources.

Go fol­low some pro­cyc­ling twit­ters and you will often find that pro­cyc­lists fol­low other procyclists.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 19th, 2009 at 10:25 pm and is filed under Just geek, social networks . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.