Edge-processing of timing data at the World Track Cycling Championships

The situation

• A major international sports federation and global media company entering season two of a live broadcast track cycling league
• Season one had streamed race results to a mobile app; season two required real-time processing of power, cadence, and positional data at the trackside itself
• Four independent delivery partners — sensor data, broadcast graphics, mobile application, and edge compute — coordinated by a specialist sports technology consultancy
• We were engaged by a major cloud platform provider's professional services division to deliver the edge compute workstream

What we did

• Architecture pivot: revised initial Apache Kafka proposal to a NestJS application on the platform's managed streaming service — latency requirements were less extreme than assumed, single device per venue, one-language stack simplified delivery and handover
• Team assembly: recruited and onboarded the developers who built the NestJS application, defining the role specifications from the architecture and managing them through the professional services engagement
• Edge device automation: the compute platform was a ruggedised cloud region in a box — no direct SSH access, VM provisioning via CLI, network configuration through a hardware panel. We built a complete deployment automation suite for repeatable trackside setup
• Pre-season testing: validated the full pipeline at velodromes in Lille and Paris
• Live delivery: stood up, tested, and operated the system at every event across France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the finals in London — processing live telemetry from the track to the screen without interruption

The outcome

• Real-time edge compute pipeline delivered across a full international season of live broadcast events
• Sensor telemetry integrated with on-screen graphics and a mobile application
• Every event delivered successfully, including the finals in front of a live audience in London