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