VeloHuman

Category: Sundries

  • 2014 Rider Ranking Analysis: A Data-driven Approach

    2014 Rider Ranking Analysis: A Data-driven Approach

    Last week, VeloHuman published an article focused on the breakout stars of the 2014 season, continuing a tradition begun in 2013. Just as was the case last year, much of that analysis came out of a data-driven approach: VH charted rider performance differentials from last season to this one by looking at the points riders accumulated in that timeframe according to both Cycling Quotient and WorldTour Rankings and comparing the difference from one year to the next. Such an analysis makes it easy to see the most dramatic shifts in performance across the professional peloton. Providing a bit of data visualization and also the raw data itself proved a popular decision last year, allowing readers to draw their own conclusions about the ups and downs of the season, so VH decided to provide those tools again this year! Without further ado, the 50 biggest CQ points swings (for riders who were active this season—Mauro Santambrogio, suspended for the year, was left out of the graphic) between 2013 and 2014:

    Click here to view the full-size, single image version.

    Just a few of the highlights that jump out from the graphic: injuries obviously played a huge role in 2014. Back problems, heart problems, broken wrists, broken collarbones, and broken ribs accounted for much of the red in the Top 50. For some riders, however, the dropoff in performance could not readily be attributed to a fracture or other ailment. Peter Sagan stood on two Monument podiums and won a Tour de France stage in 2013; he didn’t make a single Monument Top 3 and he went winless in the Tour this year. He still finished 2014 ranked 9th overall in CQ Points, but instead of progressing, as may have been expected of the still young star, Sagan seemed to stagnate. Alberto Contador, on the other hand, overcame injury to soar this season. He may have missed out on Tour results but he dominated the one-weekers of the early season, taking victory in Tirreno-Adriatico and Pais Vasco and 2nd in Catalunya and the Dauphine, and then came back with a vengeance in the Vuelta.

    The red bar to the left of Vincenzo Nibali’s name may come as a surprise, but it shouldn’t; these are season-long rankings that take into account performances across the racing calendar. Nibali probably wouldn’t give up his season for the world, and a victory in the Tour de France makes it easy to ignore the entire rest of the year, but the Italian stage racing star plainly underwhelmed in the contests leading into the 2014 Tour, and did not put in many race days after Paris.

    Heralded rising stars like Michal Kwiatkowski, Tom Van Asbroeck, Fabio Aru, and Tom Dumoulin soared up the various popular rider ranking systems this season and that is reflected here, but a few of the breakout performances you may have missed are shown as well: Pete Kennaugh made statements in several Continental Tour races, and with the powerful support of Team Sky he should continue to develop. Jerome Baugnies of Wanty – Groupe Gobert has been a consistent performer in lower level races across the past few months. Niccolo Bonifazio, who just turned 21 last month, has taken big results at home in Italy and abroad; he just won three stages and the Points Classification, as well as taking 2nd overall, in the Tour of Hainan, a fine way to close out his first full season as a pro.

    The data visualization above offers some highlights from this season’s year-over-year rider ranking data but there is plenty more information to be gleaned from the raw numbers. If you are handy with data manipulation, you can draw conclusions of your own: click here to download the 2013–2014 data for the Top 500 riders of the season (on the CQ Ranking scale). Inside, you’ll find identifying biographical data (name, team, country, and birthdate) and CQ Ranking and WorldTour data from 2013 and 2014 along with the differentials across both seasons, so that you can filter and sort to your heart’s content as you make your own analysis. Keep in mind that Cycling Quotient’s ranking system and the WorldTour ranking system are different and favor different things—the CQ Ranking values Continental level results, for instance, while the WorldTour rankings do not. In fact, non-WorldTour riders do not score WT points at all even if they get results in WT races, which is why WorldTour ranking data doesn’t exist for plenty of names on the list. Both systems have their advantages, and ultimately, the sport’s biggest names score highly on both scales anyway.

    Feel free to share your thoughts here in the comments or on Twitter @VeloHuman!

    -Dane Cash

  • Riding into the Offseason

    Riding into the Offseason

    Offseason

    The conclusion of the Tour of Beijing was also the conclusion of the 2014 WorldTour and, therefore, the start of several months of R&R for most of the pro peloton. Several big names enjoyed one last hurrah in the 2.HC Japan Cycle Cup (won for a second time by Garmin-Sharp’s Nathan Haas), but with that race in the books, the vast majority of WorldTour riders have begun their offseason, with only a select few top-level pros still participating in races like the Tour of Hainan.

    Most of the peloton will welcome the opportunity to rest and recover, but the offseason does come with an unfortunate side effect: the professional road cycling world inevitably quiets down a bit during the wintertime! For instance, there won’t be any VeloHuman race previews until January, when the 2015 WorldTour kicks off with the Tour Down Under. Even after that, things don’t really get rolling until early March and the double billing of Paris-Nice and Tirreno-Adriatico. But that doesn’t mean things will be completely silent around here or in the road cycling world at large during the cold-weather months: there’s always something happening in this sport, and even when the biggest stars aren’t racing on the asphalt, some recognizable names are racing in the dirt (cyclocross season is here!), the routes of next year’s major races are being revealed all the time, and several top riders are still hunting for teams for the upcoming season. In other words, stay tuned! There is still plenty of analysis to come here at VH even during the long dark offseason. Be sure to follow @VeloHuman on Twitter to stay connected.

    -Dane Cash

    Photo by Contando Estrelas.

  • 2015 Road World Champs Courses Revealed

    2015 Road World Champs Courses Revealed

    RIchmondbyRiver

    The routes of the 2015 UCI Road World Championship races were announced yesterday. As someone who has lived almost his whole life within an hour or two of Richmond, Virginia, every piece of news involving the 2014 championships reignites my amazement that the first USA-hosted champs race in decades will be taking place in this small Southern city.

    The geography of central Virginia might not initially strike an observer as likely to provide an interesting race profile, but the wonderful thing about a circuit race is that it allows otherwise small challenges to become serious obstacles over repeated visits. Richmond is not in a mountainous region of the state. Its streets are not paved with an abundance of cobbles. But the few steep slopes and the few sections of cobbled roadway, taken on time after time over the course of a day’s racing: that can make for quite a demanding showdown. That’s what the Richmond road race promises to be, now that its course has been revealed.

    Another important aspect of this road race will be its technicality. The circuit contains one complete 180 around a skinny median, and a number of other very sharp turns as it cuts back and forth through city blocks. Richmond is not a massive city with miles of sprawl, but this race is taking place right at its urban center. It is going to be hotly contested and it could get hairy. The last four kilometers of each lap are going to include three steep inclines, basically guaranteeing an abundance of attacks to thrill everyone making the trip.

    And the best part? Virginia has a sizeable contingent of cyclists and cycling fans, but I’d expect the majority of people coming to these events are going to be new to live bike racing. This is a country that, especially in the last year or so, has simply not been a place where interest in the sport has run particularly high. Bringing this race to this place offers a chance to show a group of people who might never have tuned into NBC Sports just how thrilling bike racing can be. That’s what’s so exciting about the course unveiled today: I think the Richmond World Champs will offer an excellent opportunity for the sport to reach out to a new fanbase, and what I”m seeing with this new course looks like a great start.

    The time trial course looks like it will offer a nice challenge as well. 53 kilometers of road with a few small bumps and some twists and turns toward the finish line will provide a good balance; the technical challenges will be there, the elevation will change enough that it will at least mean a few seconds here and there, but overall it looks like a good old-fashioned race of truth.

    And American coverage being what it is, I am even more excited with both the location and the specific courses as they’ve been laid out: as much time as media outlets broadcasting in the home country will focus on local culture and history (and they will, because that’s how cycling coverage works in this country), Richmond, and these roads, will offer plenty for viewers to enjoy. Fans here and abroad will surely be treated to an abundance of riverside shots and a thorough rundown of the rich history of this place when the peloton comes to Virginia in 2015.

    For now, Omloop het Nieuwsblad awaits, with WorldTour stage races Paris-Nice and Tirreno-Adriatico right round the corner. Check back in soon for previews of both!

    -Dane Cash

    Photo by Bill Dickinson.

  • The 2014 Season Has Arrived

    It’s been radio silence for a little while here at VeloHuman during the offseason as we got some recovery time in while the riders did the same. With the Tour Down Under (and a Tour de San Luis with a very impressive field) just days away, it’s time to get back into regular season mode. You can expect the WorldTour race outlooks to be coming strong as ever in 2014 to go with some changes to our look and even a foray into social media.

    Looking forward to seeing you more! Stay tuned for the imminent TDU preview and much more in 2014.

    -Dane Cash

  • 2012-2013 Rider Ranking Data

    Yesterday, I offered some perspective on riders I thought made strides this season (just scroll down a bit if you haven’t read my thoughts yet). Much of that analysis was driven by my own observations, but I did a fair bit of data work to add a level of comprehensiveness that I would not have otherwise achieved. I work a lot with data analysis at my day job, and I couldn’t help myself when I started thinking about tools I might use to analyze rider performance! I figured I might as well share that data with anyone who is interested.

    I took Cycling Quotient’s top 200 riders and gathered various ranking data on them, namely: rider name, birthdate, nationality, 2013 team, 2012 CQ rank and points, 2013 CQ rank and points, 2012 UCI rank and points, and 2013 UCI rank and points. I calculated the changes in rank and points for both systems, and also the absolute values of points changes for both systems, and ended up with a table that was sortable based on many different factors. For those of you who are also bored and starving for cycling info this offseason, I hope my work will offer some solace!

    Here is the file, for download at your convenience:

    2012-2013 CQ and WorldTour Ranking Data

    If you know your way around Excel, you can sort and filter this info to your heart’s content. Want to examine the top-ranked British riders under the age of 28? Open in Excel, go to the data tab and apply filters, filter date of birth and nationality as you like, sort on CQ rank (or WorldTour rank if that’s what you’re looking for) and voila! I found sorting on absolute value of points deltas to be quite enlightening in terms of visualizing which riders saw the most emphatic changes from 2012 to 2013. Here are the top 25 biggest swings in CQ points out of that list of 200 in a handy bar chart from Datawrapper:

    25 Biggest Swings in CQ Points out of Top 200

    You can visualize all kinds of info if you know what you’re doing. And no matter how you feel about the UCI WorldTour system, the WT points swings you’ll see in the file actually do a pretty darn good job of tracking rider performance at the highest level from one year to the next; one of Cycling Quotient’s most valuable features is that it assigns a meticulously plotted points value to every pro (and national/world championship) race on the calendar. Thusly, young up-and-comers who have a lot of success on lower circuits make their way onto the CQ radar well before they make their way onto the world stage. At the same time, this means that it can be a bit harder to use CQ ranking to visualize which riders made big statements with top-level victories, which is essentially the point of the WorldTour ranking system. However, don’t forget the Pro Continental riders do not score WT points, meaning that those who rode for Europcar in 2013 will be absent from the WT rankings, etc.

    Some interesting top-level tidbits: how amazing was Chris Froome’s 2013? Even after a very successful 2012, Froome raised the bar to an unprecedented degree with his 2013. Meanwhile, nobody came close to Froome’s compatriot Bradley Wiggins in terms of sheer dropoff in results. Joaquim Rodriguez is an interesting case: even with another Monument victory, 2nd place at the World Champs, a podium finish in the Tour, and a host of other successes leading to his second straight WT number 1, he saw a pretty steep points decline on both the CQ and WT scale. The data also remind us that despite a Tour filled with interview focused on his apparent demise, Mark Cavendish still had one heck of a season; don’t forget his 5 Giro victories on route to that race’s points classification victory. And for a final note, remember that this list includes those riders in Cycling Quotient’s top 200 for the year: that means that one of the biggest performance drop-offs of the season isn’t reflected anywhere, because Ryder Hesjedal is not one of CQ’s top 200 this year!

    I hope my data compiling allows you to crystalize your own opinions about rider performance trends. And don’t get too down if you’re an Edvald Boasson Hagen or Simon Gerrans fan: remember how big an impact injury can have on a rider’s performance in any given year. And with that, I’ll leave you to your analysis! Enjoy.

    -Dane Cash

    Rider data from cqranking.com and uciprotour.com, data visualization from datawrapper.de.