With the Giro done it’s time to review the standings of wins by the pro teams so far this season. Since the last look after the spring classics the top four in UCI World Tour are unchanged although OPQS have substantially extended their lead.
In terms of race days we’re now almost halfway in to the season with over 250 days of racing completed. So whilst OPQS dominate, on average 88% of the time they don’t win.
With the classics done where do different teams stand? As the chart above shows there’s a difference between the quantitative and the qualitative with some scoring numerous wins but often at a lower level.
Also with the Tour de France wildcards being announced soon, below is a look at the second division pro continental teams.
In my column in Issue 2 of 2r Magazine I looked at the options available for team licences with a view to bringing some more stability to the system. Whilst we can explore franchises and more, one of the cheapest and quickest solutions is to publish the UCI’s criteria for scoring riders and teams.
For years teams had been ranked on a secret system that few understood leading to a lot of head-scratching and confusion. Only last Thursday the UCI quietly published Annexe-2014/UCI/A-10… better known as the Sporting Value criteria.
With Paris-Nice and Tirreno-Adriatico done, an update to the team victory rankings. OPQS now lead thanks to recent wins from Sylvain Chavanel and Tony Martin, a sign that the Belgian team can win on almost every front, with the probably exception of the high mountains and the overall classification of grand tours.
Vacansoleil-DCM and Euskaltel-Euskadi are the two teams without a win. A problem? Yes and no as I’ll explain below with the story of Wout Poels.
It’s early in the season but as you’ll see below, not as early as you might think. Here is the state of play so far with the win count for the 18 World Tour teams.
Think of a pro cyclist and who you think of? Alberto Contador, Philippe Gilbert or Mark Cavendish? Well they’re amongst the obvious picks. But if you wanted to pick the typical pro, think of a 27 year old Frenchman instead because that’s what the numbers say.
Having looked at the World Tour stats across 18 teams, now it’s time to take a broader view across all the 38 teams in the World Tour and the Pro Continental circuit plus to look at the differences between these two groups.
Overall there are currently 914 riders with an average age of 27.7 years. France just beats Italy as the largest supplier of professional cyclists but there are some surprising results from some countries, for example did you know Colombia has more pros than Britain or Denmark? Or that the US has more pros than Germany?
There are 507 riders from 43 nations registered with the 18 UCI World Tour teams for 2013.
The average age of a rider is 28 years and 2 months. The oldest rider is the 41 year-old Jens Voigt (Radioshack) whilst Vacansoleil-DCM’s Danny Van Poppel is the youngest pro aged 19.
Here’s a look at the 2013 peloton in numbers. There’s a look at rider age, the “oldest team” and also analysis of how many pros come from each country and more.
The chart above shows the split of points between stage races and one day races for the UCI World Tour in 2013. Out of a total of 16,664 points available during the season, 69% are to be won in stage races. This is disproportionate on a calendar of 154 days of racing where stage races account for 140 days or 91% of the calendar.
Is this a bias for stage races? Who gains and who loses? And what do smaller teams do when they decide how to spend their budget on riders or deploy tactics on the day?
The chart shows the number of race days in the UCI World Tour for each month of 2013. We might thing April is the biggest month of the spring campaign but March has racing. March is not just a busy month but a vital one for it is also the biggest month of the year when it comes to UCI points, and by a long way.
Similarly we might take July to be the highpoint of the cycling season but it turns out there are more ranking points to collect in September.
Whilst we follow cycling for excitement instead of arithmetic, analysing the numbers helps assess the incentives and structures within the sport. In the first part of a statistical analysis of the 2013 UCI World Tour here is a look at the distribution of race days and points.
What are the key races? Which months of the year count the most? The answers and more are below.
Many athletic sports have their references, benchmarks and records. Running a mile under four minutes, breaking 10 seconds for the 100m sprint, sailing around the world in under 80 days and maybe one day doing a marathon under two hours. But road cycling has none of these, we barely notice the time taken to complete a race and usually the average speed is immaterial. Absolute speed counts for little. Everything is relative.
Sometimes it can be hard to review. When a rider wins a race were they the strongest on the day, are they the fastest in history? When Fabian Cancellara took Simon Gerrans to the finish in Milan-Sanremo who was the better rider? This caused debate at the time but history records only one name. But what if we could take more measurements during a race. Are there new measures we can use to compare performances or do these not matter?