The Tour de France is without doubt one of the – if not the – most famous cycling championships in the world. With hundreds of participants from all over the world, covering distances between two and three thousand miles, the Tour de France attracts not only millions of spectators each year, but also TV viewers in alomst 200 countries all around the globe.
In the past, our view of the Tour was restricted to a number of TV camera perspectives that would follow the participants from fixed positions, from cars, motorbikes, and helicopters. But the view is always one from the outside, never taking us any closer than what a spectator would see attending the event in person.
The only people who know what it’s like to be on the inside of the Tour — in a crowd of cyclists struggling their way uphill, pacing through a valley and taking bends at immense speeds — are the participants themselves. So unless you’re a cyclist and partook in the Tour, you probably have as little an idea of what it’s like to experience it first-hand.
Thanks to new legislature, however, all that has changed. This year, Tour de France participants were for the first time allowed to put action cams on their bikes to record their experiences from a first-person view – and what spectacular imagery they recorded! If you thought that the Tour looked hectic and crowded on TV, wait until you’ve seen the videos below. Bad weather and group crashes included.
(Via Gizmodo)
