CONTEXT
The 96th Tour de France is made up of 21 stages and covers a total distance of 3,500 kilometres. There are five types of stages: 10 flat, seven mountain, one medium mountain, two individual time-trial and one team time-trial stage. The three-week event draws one of the world’s largest viewing audiences.

PARTNERS
The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) has an agreement with the Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO), organiser of the Tour de France, to be the European broadcast partner for the Tour de France for 2009-2011. This decision extends the longstanding partnership between the two organisations, and allows European audiences to follow these races through extensive free-to-air TV and radio coverage by EBU TV and Radio members.

Eurovision is handling the worldwide satellite distribution for our Members as well as on behalf of ASO for its rights holders around the world. This represents a total of 78 hours of material distributed worldwide – in both High and Standard Definition.

CHALLENGES
According to Sonia Tan and Olivier Perrin, Eurovision resource managers, the biggest challenge associated with the Tour de France operation this year is logistics. “Because of the nature of the event – a continuously moving contest covering more than 3,500 kilometers – the entire technical set up for unilateral and multilateral trasnmissions has to be moved and rebuilt on a daily basis.”

In addition, there is unpredictability at each new location: weather, set-up, power issues and many more, all have to be considered and dealt with. This is what makes the Tour de France such a challenging event, especially when you consider that it can take several hours to move and rebuild the location on any given day, and then consider that this must be done every day for three weeks!

Dealing with these challenges requires the Eurovision teams on site and in the bureaus to work very closely together. Cooperation, flexibility and the willingness and capability to work differently every single day are the keys to Eurovision’s success with this event.

“The spirit of the team and determination to persevere and overcome all obstacles day by day is most impressive. It’s what our members and our customers expect – and require – and we deliver on this every single day of the Tour.” — Olivier Perrin, Eurovision Resource Manager.