The Vuelta TV feed drops the time gaps during the last few km. Any idea why they do that?
My assumption, as I idon’t have any inside information, is that they take the time gaps from the motorcycles, so towards the end they probably get moved around a lot ready for the finish so would not be reliable. Sometimes you can see this happen in the middle of a race when the gap suddenly start counting down quickly before they realise.
I’ve done a lot of work in live TV broadcast for cycling, and as was mentioned before, the time gap information is taken from GPS units mounted on the motos and/or official cars on course. So we are on generally the camera motos for time gaps but if they are out of the way then there is no information. Often a lot of manual manipulation of time gaps happens as well, so quite often time gaps are not as accurate as you would think!
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Thanks. Makes sense.