🚴 Crank the Numbers!

A data-driven dashboard for analyzing professional cyclists' strengths and form.

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 don't 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's 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 × 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. The underlying value is essentially "what is your current average point haul when you compete?" Keep in mind that points in cycling are bursty: a rider may score nothing in a string of races and then earn a huge windfall from a single victory, so the average can be volatile.

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: the gap between rank 1 and rank 2 may be enormous or razor-thin.

Percentile (0–100) — Expresses where a rider sits in the overa 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. Like rank, percentile is an intra-day comparison, but it provides more resolution, especially in the crowded middle of the peloton.