Tuesday 26 July 2011

How Cadel Evans won the Tour de France

Alas, now that the Tour de France has duly finished, I need something to do with my days, rather than watching the ITV4 highlights.

With that in mind, and inspired by a Cycling News article, I thought it would be interesting to have a look at how Cadel Evans (or Cuddles to his friends in the media) won the Maillot Jaune after resolutely keeping with the Schlecks in the mountains and then thrashing through the Time Trial.

To do this, I scraped the results of each of the 21 stages of the Tour (code will appear shortly) and then used Tableau Public to visualise the results predominantly using a Bump Chart, which shows how each rider compares to the average at each stage. Statistical Skier has produced some excellent analysis of the results and presented them similarly here.

Within the visualisation, it's possible to look at how a rider has done - just right click on their name and choose the highlight option.

It's also interesting to look at how multiple riders have done. One way of doing this is to filter down the list of riders based on their ranking or team, selecting these riders from the list below and then highlighting or filtering on these riders using a right click - for example, the battle between Evans and the Schlecks, or the performance of Thomas Voeckler.