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Videos: On-bike footage from opening days of Giro d'Italia

From Saturday's TTT to today's cracking Stage 4, Velon puts cameras on bikes as race heads through Liguria...

Today’s Stage 4 of the Giro d’Italia is being hailed as one that will be remembered for years and Velon, formed last year by 11 UCI WorldTour teams, had cameras on two riders’ bikes under the deal announced last week with organisers RCS Sport.

Those men were Ivan Rovny of Tinkoff-Saxo, and Lampre-Merida’s Xu Gang as the race headed from Chiavari to La Spezia, where young Garmin-Cannondale rider Davide Formolo took a fine solo win, his first victory as a pro.

It’s the third stage of the race in which on-bike cameras have been used – the first was Saturday’s team time trial into San Remo, when they were with Orica-GreenEdge rider Esteban Chaves.

The Australian outfit put in the fastest time to send Simon Gerrans into the maglia rosa, and although the overall lead has changed hand twice since, it’s stayed within the team, with Michael Matthews and now Simon Clarke taking their turns at the top of the GC.

Chaves himself now leads the best young rider classification.

There’s also film shot from bikes ridden by members of the Lotto-Soudal, Giant-Alpecin, LottoNL-Jumbo and Trek Factory Racing teams during Sunday’s second stage into the Ligurian capital, Genoa, where the sprint was won by Team Sky’s Elia Viviani.

Simon joined road.cc as news editor in 2009 and is now the site’s community editor, acting as a link between the team producing the content and our readers. A law and languages graduate, published translator and former retail analyst, he has reported on issues as diverse as cycling-related court cases, anti-doping investigations, the latest developments in the bike industry and the sport’s biggest races. Now back in London full-time after 15 years living in Oxford and Cambridge, he loves cycling along the Thames but misses having his former riding buddy, Elodie the miniature schnauzer, in the basket in front of him.

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mikroos | 9 years ago
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Which cameras do Orica use? I'm just asking to know which brand to avoid. The quality is terrible!

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Daveyraveygravey | 9 years ago
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I love these, but can see Jase's point. I'd like to see data overlaid like in the F1 coverage; speed, gradient, time gap to leader that kind of thing. I guess the teams would be nervous having heart rate power and cadence live for their rivals to see?

Love the TT film, although "our" seems to be stuck at the back. Might just be how it was edited though.

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jasecd | 9 years ago
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Hmmm, I'm not convinced what the value of this is really. They're cool shots but without being intercut with proper footage for context it's quite one dimensional.

I loved the footage from Degenkolb's bike in the Tour of California last year but once you've seen one shot from inside the bunch, you've kind of seen them all.

We're clearly still years away from having live cameras on every bike in the race but if they can offload this footage and intercut it into highlights packages then it might have some value but as stand alone shots I'm not so sure.

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shifty27 replied to jasecd | 9 years ago
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jasecd wrote:

Hmmm, I'm not convinced what the value of this is really. They're cool shots but without being intercut with proper footage for context it's quite one dimensional.

I loved the footage from Degenkolb's bike in the Tour of California last year but once you've seen one shot from inside the bunch, you've kind of seen them all.

We're clearly still years away from having live cameras on every bike in the race but if they can offload this footage and intercut it into highlights packages then it might have some value but as stand alone shots I'm not so sure.

Agreed.

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