We’re getting our racing fix from the Southern Hemisphere this month, as the Santos Tour Down Under 2025 gets underway with the first WorldTour races of the UCI season.
The Tour starts and finishes in Adelaide, with the women’s 322.8 km over three stages, and the men’s race covering 1198 km over six stages, all set across South Australia where riders will take on challenging routes while battling the heat.
UPDATE 30th Jan 2023: unfortunately PrintMyRoute has shut down so I have removed this feature. I’m sure most of us have had rides, runs or hikes that we’re proud to have completed and what better way to show them off than a funky 3D print of the profile. Over the last few years I’ve had numerous conversations with my riding mates about the possibility of doing 3D prints and although they all had fancy 3D printers at their disposal at their engineering jobs, it never got further than that. Fortunately PrintMyRoute stepped up in the summer of 2017 providing this service so now I’ve coded things up so you can easily send your activities, routes and segments straight over to PrintMyRoute direct from VeloViewer wherever you see a 3D profile.
The three most famous European gran fondos on most people’s to-do lists are l’Etape du Tour, La Marmotte and the Maratona dles Dolomites. If this was Gran Fondo Top Trumps each of them would win the hand on at least one aspect. The Etape wins the “Classic” category, knowing that you are riding the same course (almost) as the Tour de France a short time after; the Marmotte wins on raw “Elevation Gain” (5000m!); the Maratona wins on sheer beauty. Which is the “hardest” probably comes down to the weather on the day and how you ride it but lets take a closer look at the routes and stats:
We’ve all seen profiles of many climbs over the years and when looked at individually, taking note of the elevation gain and distance, you can get a good idea of the severity of the climb, especially when they are coloured by the gradient. If you show two of these profiles next to each other then because the elevation and distance scales are usually very different it is very hard to get a feel for how one compares to the other. Last year I tweeted out images of a few climbs sharing the same scales but had to do lots of manually resizing to get them to be correct. Now we have a built in way to compare any segment/climb with any other.
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In summer 2015 Garmin introduced Live Strava Segments and since then both Mio and Wahoo Fitness have also introduced the feature to their recent devices (full list of supported devices). Currently the Garmin devices are limited to bringing in just 100 of your starred Strava segments. This resulted in a number of VeloViewer users asking for a quicker way to manage their starred segments when planning trips away as they were going beyond that 100 segment limit. Strava kindly opened up their API for starring segments so I’ve added in the ability to star and unstar segments in every possible location in VeloViewer to make life a bit easier for you.
Wherever you see the star next to a segment you can now press it to toggle its starred state. These locations are:
I’ve also added a count of your currently starred segments to your Summary page in the header of the “Segment Stats” section which links to your segment list passing the filter to show just the starred segments.
For a long time VeloViewer has had the option to export your activities as a KML file to then view in Google Earth but I always wanted to get the equivalent features embedded within the site. A recent discovery of the Cesium JavaScript library has made this possible and has opened the door to all kinds of interesting possibilities. Piloted recently on the Route Details page I’ve now rolled out this new “Earth” view to your activities and segments.
Kinomap, the home of fully geolocated videos (videos tied into GPS data), are now automatically matching up the 1,000’s of videos uploaded to their site with Strava segments and VeloViewer has entered into a cross-Channel collaboration to connect those with your own data. You will now be able to filter your Segments List and the segments on your Activity and Route Details pages to discover those with Kinomap videos and of course watch the videos embedded in the VeloViewer Segment Details page. So whether you are wanting to relive the views from past rides or check out the roads of your next holiday then this new integration is here to help.
This is one of the most commonly asked question I get but whose answer deserves more than just a place on the FAQ – “How do I view segments on VeloViewer that I haven’t ridden?”. Maybe you’re planning a holiday or about to tackle a race or sportive and you want to check out what you’ve let yourself in for? Well, here’s how to do it.
Although we’d all love to be out riding/running much more often, sometimes we’re stuck, looking at a computer, pretending to work. So to make that time as engaging as possible you can now reccy new routes, swot up on all the details of a segment or relive a ride/run from the past using the new/revised Google Street View integration on VeloViewer. Combine that with the new colour gradients shown on the maps and you get a fantastic way to explore the twists, turns, ups and downs.
A while ago I built a visualisation to display the orientation of roads in a defined area and had requests to have a similar view for activities. Well, two years on (I know!) and here it is, with the added breakdown by the gradient of the roads/trails. Just head to the “Breakdown” tab on any Activity, Route or Segment Details page. Filtering the selection in the top profile (Activity & Routes) updates the visualisation appropriately.