Here are a few of my favorite things from this years wondrous Tour de France.
It was the most entertaining race in years for many many reasons. More than these.
I was just scribbling during the Champs and this came out. We had number 5 before now we are on to the alphabet.

Continue reading this post »

Much has been made of the fact that one can't win the Giro - Tour double nowadays, but I noticed an interesting fact: In the last five years every winner has ridden two Grand tours in a Year sometime, generally before some of their victories.

Continue reading this post »

Based on the spreadsheet from a previous post here are the best possible VDS Teams at the end of the tour. I give three versions - Best possible, best without Contador and best with Andy Schleck. Quick numbers:

Best with Alberto 16715 

Best w/o Alberto has Evans 16564

Best with Schleck 16449

All pretty good! The second two are closer than the differences in the top riders because the less cost let better cheap guys be added in. I can get get results for other combinations easily enough if anyone wants.

Continue reading this post »

VDS for Math Nuts

This is going to be a funky post about maximizing VDS teams. It is going to delve into esoteric programming techniques and show how the VDS system is an example of a generally hard problem. Here there be equations. No apologies. You can skip to the end to see the results. Amazingly Open Office and Excel have just the tools we need to solve these. We do live in days of miracle and wonder!

Continue reading this post »

I seem to write something about this about once a year somewhere. Hope it helps. This year was tragic in what has made me write. As big rides are happening all over right now I hope this reminder keeps someone safe!

Continue reading this post »

"It's faster Now". Michael Barry has a diary  on Velonews with an interesting observation. His point is that stages are raced much faster now than when he started in 1996 and that there is no piano on most - the speed is high for a long time at the start before a break gets loose. Also the climbing attacks aren't all out by a team that gets to the base of the big climb together so much anymore, but rather all the big guns are pretty much isolated nowadays by the middle of the big climb, and it is individual attacks.

Given this I thought it would be interesting to look at the last 20 years of Giros and just look at overall speeds. I took the average speed for the six years when MB started his career 1996-2001, the last 6 years and the six years from 1989-1995 to see if things changed. They have in an interesting way.

1989-1995 Ave Speed 37.56 kph Ave Length 3677 k

1996-2001 Ave Speed 37.74 kph Ave Length 3828 k

2003-2008 Ave Speed 38.28 kph Ave Length 3471 k

So there is definitely an increase of speed over the years. A half k per hour increase is nothing to sneeze at - that often is more than the difference between first and off the podium. And three quarter of a k since the early 90's. Uh huh.

The second interesting thing is that the race has been getting shorter, or rather, it got longer for about 10 years and is now getting shorter again. This definitely could have something to do with the speed also, but the earlier 90's races were closer to the current length with quite slower times.

It was interesting that the fastest Giro in the last 20 years was not done by an extraterrestrial Basso but by the quote maker Simoni who averaged 40.1 kph in 2001, the only person in the last 20 years to do this. Of course the course makes a difference in one year, that is why I averaged over 6 years, to reduce the impact of year to year course change. There has definitely been an increase in Forte and even Sforzando riding over Piano riding lately. Part of this I think is increased visibility and strength due to Pro Tour rules. These are now relaxed, but I do think they may have helped the Giro get to another level. We'll have to see if the attacking style on the mountains follows the newer way as Barry says. One more thing to look forward to. Mr. Barry is one excellent diarist.