Looking at Data: 2013 Tour de France

2014-03-27 19:42:00 +0000

A long overdue post in my Looking at Data series.

This time we’re looking at some cycling data, a sport I enjoy very much. This data is from the 2013 Tour de France and covers all the 190 or so riders and all 21 stages, and is available for download here (http://www.theusrus.de/blog/tour-de-france-2013/).

Since I last posted work has picked up quite a bit, so this post will be pretty short in comparison to my last post on hospital cost data.

These first two line graphs show rider rank by stage. As you can see, the (eventual) winner of the 2013 Tour, Chris Froome, established dominance, really after stage 2, but took the yellow jersey at stage 7 and held on to it for the remainder of the Tour. For comparison, I also highlighted the rankings of Jens Voigt. As you can see, his rankings fluctuated quite a bit, most likely because he’s a roleur. 

The second chart shows rider ranking changes stage to stage. Its interesting to note that up until about stage 10 there’s a lot of repositioning in the peloton, a sort of sorting exercise going on. After stage 10 the pecking order has largely been established, but there are some surprising moves up the rankings later in the Tour. However, these seem to largely be one-offs (the negative spikes).

Our second set of graphs are two scatterplots plotting final rank (y axis) against a rider’s BMI and age, respectively. I also threw in a trend line (standard OLS regression line). In the case of BMI, Jens is very close to the trend line, but Chris Froome is a clear outlier—his BMI is higher than his final rank should predict. In terms of rider age, Jens is right on the trend line for where his final rank predicts he should be, but you’ll note that he’s one of the oldest riders in the Tour. Chris Froome, again, is an outlier: his age does not correspond well to his final ranking. Goes to show to win the Tour de France you can’t be average!

Finally some maps: the top map gives us an idea of where in the world the riders come from; No surprise here really, the top-3 countries represented are France, Spain, and Italy. The lower map is tongue-in-cheek: what countries represented in the Tour have, on average, the highest BMI? Canada and Brazil. Now there’s some new cocktail party trivia to dazzle your friends with.