Nine seasons of tactical AR on the world's biggest bike race.

How do you tell a three-week tactical story on live TV?

The Tour de France is a tactical sport disguised as an endurance one. Every breakaway, every crosswind, every team decision shapes the race — but most of it is invisible to viewers at home. Riders 200 metres apart in the same peloton can be playing completely different games.

NBC Sports came to Promotheus with a challenge: give analysts a tool to actually show what's happening in the race. Not in post-production. Not with pre-built graphics packs. Live, on air, while the stage is still unfolding.

A live AR environment, synced to the race.

Sandbox ingests live race data — rider positions, time gaps, speeds, gradients — and renders a fully manipulable 3D version of the stage on a branded touch-table in NBC's studio. Analysts step into the AR on air, move riders by hand, tilt the road into a climb, and run what-if scenarios in real time.

For TV2 Denmark, the same platform supports a different commentary style and a different audience — without rebuilding the technology. One Sandbox, two broadcasts, two languages, two storytelling traditions.

The Sandbox AR touch-table — NBC studio

Move the race by hand

What the analysts can show.

Over a stage, Sandbox becomes the studio's whiteboard for cycling — the same 3D world reshaped moment to moment to explain whatever the race throws up.

3D pelotonThe bunch rebuilt in 3D on the table — every rider modelled and named, so analysts can point to exactly who is where.

Elevation profileThe road becomes a 3D gradient profile — where the categorised climbs bite, and where the race will be won or lost.

Wind & echelonsA windsock and a fanning echelon show how the bunch splits the moment the wind hits from the side.

Team line-upsFull eight-rider rosters — the leader and the domestiques riding for him — laid out before the stage.

Synced to the live feedSplit-screen with the race: time gaps, speeds and kilometres-to-go update as the stage plays out.

Analyst-drivenBuilt for the desk — analysts explain breakaways and team tactics standing right inside the race.

From the studio floor to the gallery.

Sandbox runs live from NBC's studio: a branded AR touch-table on the floor, driven from a production gallery where dozens of live race feeds are cut together as the stage unfolds. It's a real-time production tool — not a graphics render waiting on an edit.

The gallery — live race feeds

Cut live, on air

Nine seasons. An Emmy nomination. A new broadcast vocabulary.

NBC's Tour de France coverage was Emmy-nominated for Technological Excellence. Sandbox has now powered nine consecutive Tours — from the 2026 Grand Départ in Barcelona onward — becoming a core part of how the race is explained to American and Danish audiences alike.