Have you ever been watching a professional bike race, seen the riders climbing some idyllic alpine pass, and thought to yourself “Where is that?” Or maybe you’ve seen pro riders winding along some majestic stretch of coastline in the summer sun and told yourself “I need to ride there” Or perhaps you’ve just found yourself wanting to learn more about where a certain race actually goes, and how its route changes from year to year.
Australian Escape Collective member Sam Fritz had thoughts just like these. They’re what prompted him to create WorldTourCycling.com, “a global interactive map of WorldTour bike races.” At its most basic, it’s a site consisting of a giant, 3D map of the earth, with thousands of routes from high-level bike races layered on top. Look a little deeper and the site has plenty to offer for all cycling fans – whether they ride bikes themselves or not.
Origins
WorldTourCycling has only been online for a few months, but its origins can be traced back more than half a decade.
Fritz got into cycling sometime around 2015, then in his mid-20s, when a friend gave him an old Giant road bike which he started riding for a bit of exercise. Soon he was heading off on bikepacking trips – first through Tasmania, and later, elsewhere around Australia, through New Zealand (twice), and over in Malaysia.
Somewhere along the way, Fritz says, he fell in love with the sport of bike racing. So much so that, this year, he’s watched almost every stage of every Grand Tour – no mean feat as an Australian forced to tune in in the early hours.
“Part of the reason the website came about was seeing roads on the Tour,” Fritz tells Escape. “‘I wonder where that is? That’s a phenomenal road. I want to go ride that road.’” Fritz started wondering why there wasn’t a site that pulled together all the race routes from the top races in one convenient place, to help visualise the sport’s geographic footprint.
Fritz reckons the idea of building the site first came to him in 2018. It would be around three years until he started working on it in earnest.
“I got the flu, and was like, ‘Well, I can stay in bed for a week and watch Netflix, or I could actually start doing it,’” Fritz recalls. “‘I don’t think anyone else is working on it. I’m passionate about bike racing, and I make maps for a living. I’m probably fairly well suited to do this.’”
By day, Fritz is a geospatial analyst who works for the New South Wales Government in the road safety space, helping to identify unsafe intersections. But while he was indeed well suited to developing a map-based project, he’d never really built a website before.
He started watching YouTube videos and found himself going down “a million different little rabbit holes” to learn what he could about web design. He also leaned on ChatGPT.
“I don’t know that this [site] would exist without it,” Fritz says. “I can say to [ChatGPT], ‘I want to build a sidebar with charts and I need code to do this. This is the format that my data’s in.’ I can paste existing code in and say, ‘Is there any problems with this?’”
Over time, as Fritz learned more and built more, the site started to take shape. And then he put it out into the world in late July 2024.
What you can do with it
The most simple feature of WorldTourCycling is the ability to scroll around and see where various bike races have gone over the years, but there’s a lot more functionality lurking beneath the surface. Selecting a specific race route brings up a range of insights on that particular race – how far it was and with how much climbing, who won it, and more besides.
You can filter the displayed routes by race, say, to see the various routes taken by different editions of that race. You can also filter by gender – men’s and women’s WorldTour races are included – or you can see where upcoming races are scheduled to go. You can also click on the winner of a given race to see more info about that rider, including how many races they’ve won, when they won them, and where they were won. Click through to Mark Cavendish, for example, and you’ll get a visualisation of where he claimed all 35 of his Tour de France stage wins.
Fritz hopes that, besides just being something interesting to look at, his site will help give cycling fans greater context about the sport they’re watching.
“You might be new to the sport and not know that Liège and Bastogne are in eastern Belgium, right? This is assumed context,” Fritz says. “And I guess the way that I want to build this is that you can set your context, and you can decide how you want to use this product to learn whatever you want to learn.
“I feel like something like this should exist, something like a record of where bike races went and who won them in [one] spot. Parts of that exist in a range of different platforms, but pulling them together was the aim.”
Perhaps the most exciting capability for cycling fans is the ability to help you ride on roads used by the professionals in some of the world’s biggest races. With WorldTourCycling it’s not just possible to see where individual stages of individual races went – by using a heatmap, the site shows which roads are used in races with greatest frequency, often a good indicator of which roads (and indeed regions) might be good for cycling.
Regions of interest
Even just a few minutes of exploration on WorldTourCycling reveals some interesting findings that mightn’t be obvious without a site like this. Some examples:
- Nearly every road of any significance has been used in the Basque Country for a race at some point or another.
- Likewise the Romandie region of Switzerland which has been criss-crossed by both the Tour de Suisse and Tour de Romandie (with men’s and women’s races for both).
- Of course, it’s a similar story in the Flanders region of Belgium which is home to a bunch of races, not least the Tour of Flanders, Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, and E3 Harelbeke.
- The routes for the men’s Paris-Roubaix and Milan-San Remo change very little from year to year.
Fritz, too, has learned some things by poking around the map. Like this curious bit of trivia: German sprinter Marcel Kittel took all four of his Giro d’Italia stage wins outside of Italy (one each in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland in 2014, and two in the Netherlands in 2016).
Behind the scenes
Given his work as a geospatial analyst, Fritz is efficient at processing the data to add new races to WorldTourCycling. But it’s easier to do that for some races than others.
Tour Down Under organisers, for example, publish full GPX files for each of their stages online, making it quick and easy for Fritz to get new stages into his site. But most other organisers are far less helpful, meaning Fritz sources a lot of GPX files from online forums.
“La Flamme Rouge: this forum has been invaluable,” Fritz writes on the WorldTourCycling About page. “You will have seen their profiles on many race preview articles as well as on ProCyclingStats. It’s a community forum of bike race lovers and does great work.”
More than a few times Fritz has also used Strava data from pro riders, either as an original source to add a new race to his map, or to help validate another data source.
At present, Fritz has a couple decades worth of races displaying on his site, but only from certain races.
“Most of the Women’s WorldTour goes back to sort of 2016,” Fritz says. That was the first year of the Women’s WorldTour, having been born out of a precursor series called the Women’s Road World Cup. “Some of the men’s one-days go back to the 2010s, the Grand Tours go back to 2001.”
In addition to those WorldTour races, the site also features routes from events like the Olympics (going back to Sydney 2000), and the Road World Championships (also back to 2000).
What’s next?
As you might expect, Fritz has plenty of ideas about how he can update and improve the site, beyond adding new races as they happen. Displaying elevation profiles when a user selects a given race route is an obvious next step.
“A Vuelta stage with 4,000 metres of climbing – it could be a big climb at the beginning and a big climb at the end, or it could be just lumpy and rolly all day, and they play out very differently,” Fritz says. “And just saying, ‘Well, this is 140 km with 4,000 vert doesn’t paint the whole picture of that.”
Fritz would also love to introduce a feature that serves as a primer of sorts to the WorldTour, visualising the way the series starts in Australia, heads to the Middle East, before heading to Europe for the bulk of the season. A way to help introduce newer fans to the sometimes-unintelligible tapestry that is the men’s and women’s WorldTour calendar.
For Fritz, WorldTourCycling is a solo passion project. Rather than making money from the site, it actually costs him money (through web hosting, for example). But he has no plans to charge users for access – he’s happy absorbing the site’s costs for now, knowing that he’s providing something of value, both to those who use his site, and indeed to himself.
“I genuinely enjoy this stuff,” he says. “I think it’s worthwhile so I hope other people do too. I spend a lot of time on the website itself, just exploring. I’ll have a race on one laptop and then this on another monitor, just playing around and exploring.”
The fact that race routes can even be explored like this is a reminder that road cycling isn’t quite like other sports. It’s not just that the sport is contested in a beautiful, open arena that changes from day to day – unlike in other sports, cycling’s arenas are open for everyday fans to go and experience for themselves, following in the tyre tracks of the world’s best.
In creating WorldTourCycling, Fritz has made planning such an experience noticeably easier, while also providing a valuable resource for those who want greater geographical context about the ins and outs of pro cycling.
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