2023-07-01 04:00:33
Installation of optical fiber at the top of the Puy de Dôme, in the Massif Central, by the operator Orange, in anticipation of the Tour de France stage on July 9. Orcines (Puy-de-Dôme), April 4, 2023. THIERRY NICOLAS / PHOTOPQR / LA MONTAGNE / MAXPPP
Saturday July 1, Henri Terreaux will set off for his 26th consecutive Tour de France. Always with the same point of stress. Director of the event for the telecom operator Orange, the technical partner of the organizer Amaury Sport Organization (ASO), he ensures, with a team of around fifty people (technicians, logisticians, drivers, etc.), the connection in very high speed of the largest cycling race in the world, from the start to the last finish line, which this year is from Bilbao, Spain, to Paris.
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“A network cut of 1 millisecond, and it’s a riot”, shudders Mr. Terreaux, thinking of the anger of Patrick Chêne, commentator of the Tour for France Télévisions from 1989 to 2000. In 1999, deprived of images a few minutes from the arrival at the top of a mountain stage for a technical problem, he threatened to broadcast a message on the air saying that the black screen was the fault of the telecom operator. A satellite link set up urgently had avoided public affront and, probably, saved Mr. Terreaux’s job.
For a long time, on the Tour, the work of the technicians of the PTT then of France Télécom, the ancestors of Orange, consisted in reserving telephone lines in the hotels or cafés close to the finish line so that the journalists might dictate their articles to their newsrooms or go on the air on the radios.
One of the most watched sports competitions
Today, the image has become king for the third most-watched sporting competition in the world following the Football World Cup and the Olympic Games: 41.5 million French viewers in 2022 (cumulative audience for all of the twenty-one one stages), 150 million Europeans and several hundred million in the rest of the world. La Grande Boucle is broadcast in 190 countries, by 100 channels, including 60 live, some as powerful as the American NBC Sports. Since 2022, the race has even been the subject of a Netflix series, co-produced by ASO, whose first season of eight episodes has been broadcast since June 8. A second season will be filmed this summer.
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On each of the twenty-one stages, five cameras placed on motorcycles and two cameras on board helicopters must not miss anything either of the race, at the front or at the back of the peloton, or of the natural or historical heritage of the regions crossed. Above them, a relay plane and a helicopter make loops in the sky to recover the images with parabolas before injecting them into the Orange network. This must then experience no interruption or latency to route them to the television control vans.
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