2016年1月9日土曜日

Who will Win 2016 Tour Down Under? One Step Forward Over Simple Statistics

Many World Tour riders start their season with the Tour Down Under. You may wonder how each rider's condition is. There are few clues compared to races in the middle of a season. You can guess some Australian guys go full swing. e.g. Drapac guys especially will make hard effort to earn world-wide reputation in their home country. In addition, Australian and New Zealander riders have competed their nationals. It is easy to say Richie Porte and Rohan Denis are in good shape according to Australian national TT.

How are the others? See stats. Good starting point is checking the summary page by procyclingstats as usual.


I want to know one step further. Some riders are good at bang from the beginning of a season. Others are not. One of the reason is that riders living in the Southern Hemisphere riders are able to train in hot condition. However guessing each rider's winter training condition is almost impossible. So I go for data visualization.

I downloaded last three years GC points of top 25 GC ranking riders.
e.g. 2015 season of Richie Porte is as follows.

I plotted each race's points. X-axis represents days from the 1st January. Y-axis represents PCS Points by GC results.

It seems that he competes very well from the beginning of seasons.
I repeated the same processing for top-25 riders. Here is the result.


Three line graphs for one rider. Finally I picked four riders in red circles. The norms are 1. their performance are relatively high (averages and peaks are higher), 2. at least in two seasons, they competed well from the beginning of the seasons, and 3. they ended their season early enough in 2015. I picked four riders without knowing each circle represents which rider. I confirmed their names and am satisfied.




This is a very primitive technical analysis which is applied to riders' results. I am glad if you can get new insights from stats.

2016年1月5日火曜日

How Large are the Riders in Peloton Today?

ProCyclingStats.com has contributed to dramatic improvements to check professional road cycling results since its launching. I am a big fun of it.  I check their site almost everyday and imagine how other rivals compete in other races. Right after I race, I am looking forward to checking their publishing the result, not from officials because PCS's UI is far smarter everytime.

Also, I love data analysis. Actually, I worked for one year in a data science company after experiencing Champion System Cycling Team (Pro Conti) in 2013. After one-year retirement, in 2015, I am back to cycling. I struggled a lot to become fit again in 2015 and am getting better. I decided to do smarter not only harder in 2016. 

It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles ---Sun Tzu

To know my rivals, PCS is very good start point, right? I gathered Height and Weight information of Pro Tour and Pro Conti riders from their site.

Firstly I simply plotted all of them. The number of riders is 957. 800 of their height and weight are registered.

I find I am relatively short and light compared to PT/PCT guys. To tell the truth, I knew it... haha.

Secondary, I explored trends by nationality just for curiosity.


I noticed several interesting trends.
  • France, Italy, and Spain have very similar trends. See eclipses.
  • Belgium, Netherlands, and Germany also look similar.
  • British and Danish riders have smaller variety compared to others.
  • Colombian riders are apparently short and light. Probably a lot of climbers.
  • Swiss & Czech riders have wider variety.
  • Off course Japanese guys are short and light. I am not an exception.