Follow the Tour de France in Google Earths
The marquee event of the 2007 professional cycling calendar is here. And now you can follow every nail-biting sprint, every gut wrenching climb, and every blistering descent of the Tour de France on Google Earth.
A user named TimeTXU from the dutch community website Earthview.nl has made a layer for Google Earth tracing the entire route of the three-week bike race. Here’s a direct link to the KML file. You’ll also need Google Earth, which is a free download.
Le Tour is the biggest, most prestigious bike race in the world. The 2007 edition starts on July 7 with a prologue in London, then runs clockwise around France for the next three weeks, ending with the final sprint on the Champs-???lys???es in Paris on July 29.
Along with live updates from websites like VeloNews and Cyclingnews,
Google Earth is a pretty cool way to follow the Tour if you’re stuck at
work or if you don’t have cable. The zoomable 3-D views of the terrain
are especially nice. Last year, Google worked with the TdF organization
to create an official KML file with additional information about the
route, but so far this year, we’re relying on the Google Earth
community.
A few of us here at Wired are cycling nuts. We used Google Earth last year to check out the countryside and examine some of the switchbacks in the mountain stages. With a little bit of imagination, you can even see the wine-drunk Ikurri???a-waving fans screaming into the faces of the Basque mountain goats.
And we wouldn’t go as far as to suggest any gambling, but let’s say we’ve got 17 pounds of prime Kazakh horse meat coming our way if Alexander Vinokourov ends up with the maillot jaune.
