The Idea
Professional cycling is a sport of incredible complexity. Riders compete across wildly different terrains - flat sprints, hilly classics, high-mountain stages, time trials - and within a team, they take on very different roles. A pure sprinter and a Grand Tour leader both earn points, but their strengths are fundamentally different. Crank the Numbers! tries to capture that nuance.
Points as a Proxy for Strength
Race results alone do not tell the full story: a 10th place in the Tour de France is a very different achievement from a 10th place in a minor one-day race. Points systems (UCI rankings and a custom weighting) translate finishing positions into comparable numbers, accounting for race prestige and field depth. These point totals, accumulated over a rolling window, serve as a continuous strength signal for every active rider.
Diversifying Strength into Categories
A single number can never describe a cyclist. That is why strength is broken down along several axes:
- Terrain profile - Flat, Hilly, Mountain: where does the rider earn points?
- Role - Leader vs. Domestique: does the rider win races, or does the rider set up teammates to win?
- Terrain x Role - Combining terrain with domestique attribution reveals riders who are, say, elite mountain domestiques but rarely contenders themselves.
These category breakdowns power the radar charts on the Rider Analysis page, giving an at-a-glance shape of a rider's profile.
Tracking Progress Over Time
Cycling careers span years of evolution. A young talent might start as a flat-terrain helper and gradually develop into a GC contender. To make this visible, every rider's strength is computed daily using exponentially weighted moving averages (EWMA):
- Talent - A slow-moving baseline that represents stable, long-term ability.
- Current Strength - A faster signal that reacts to recent results.
- Form - The difference between the two: positive means the rider is performing above baseline, negative means below.
This decomposition makes it easy to separate a rider who is genuinely improving from one who is merely on a hot streak.
Display Modes
Every chart and ranking table can be viewed in four display modes, each revealing a different facet of rider strength:
- Absolute - The raw rolling-average point score. This is the hardest number to interpret at a glance: without context you cannot tell whether a given value is "high" or "low." Its real power lies in self-comparison. Because no cross-rider adjustment is applied, the scores faithfully reflect a rider's own balance of strengths - making it the ideal mode for the radar chart, where the shape matters more than the scale.
- Rank - A straightforward daily leaderboard position (1 = strongest). Ranks are computed intra-day, so they compare all active riders on the same date. Easy to read, but they compress the distance between riders.
- Percentile (0-100) - Expresses where a rider sits in the overall distribution on a given day. A score of 95 means the rider is stronger than 95 % of all active riders in that category at that point in time.
- Min-Max (0-100) - A normalised score computed over a rolling 30-day window. The strongest performance in the last 30 days scores a perfect 100, and all other riders are scaled proportionally against it.
Pages
Use the sidebar to navigate:
- Rider Analysis - Explore a rider's talent, form, and category breakdown over time. Compare head-to-head with a second rider.
- Rider Rankings - Daily leaderboard across all active riders, with multiple display modes.
- Race Analysis - Compare team-level strength heading into a specific race.
- Scenario Explorer - Stress-test a hypothetical race against the model.