u/Trick-Palpitation831

The 2026 Tour de France makes it’s Grand Depart tomorrow! 🚵‍♀️

Tadej Pogačar is the clear favorite, but it looks like organizers wanted a closer race this year…

For years, the tour featured lots of individual time trial stages. In the early 2000s, we were getting close to 125km of individual TT stages. This year’s tour features a very lean 26.1km of individual TT riding.

I wondered why this might be the case. I took a look back at the number of individual TT stages and the number of mountain finish stages and their relationship to the tour’s final margin of victory. Surprisingly, more individual TT stages was related to a greater margin of victory, while the number of mountain stages was not.

It looks like individual TT stages give the best GC riders a big chance to extend their lead, while mountain stages have much less of a pronounced effect.

So, the organizers have elected for fewer individual TT kms this year, to let the GC riders battle it out in the mountains - creating a closer race through clever route architecture.

For what it’s worth, Pogi is still my favorite and my fantasy TDF captain. 😎

If you like this style of analysis, subscribe to my substack for longform content as well as snippets like this about all sports: https://danflemingdata.substack.com/

https://preview.redd.it/lwmj896741bh1.png?width=2400&format=png&auto=webp&s=e9065e36aed586d5471520a5478fffa86fad0200

https://preview.redd.it/gaozp43841bh1.png?width=2800&format=png&auto=webp&s=169f33cbde759a2e9279731137250fedeba7468c

I dug into 90+ years of World Cup history to see if hosting actually gives teams a competitive edge on the pitch.

The pattern is stronger than I expected!

Across World Cups from 1930–2022, 16 out of 19 host nations outperformed their usual tournament performance when playing at home. In several cases, the jump was dramatic, Uruguay (1930) and England (1966) both improved by the equivalent of multiple tournament stages and went on to win the whole thing.

There are a few exceptions (Spain 1982 underperformed, while South Africa 2010 and Qatar 2022 roughly matched their baseline), but overall the trend points in one direction: host advantage isn’t just noise, it shows up consistently in results.

That said, the sample is small and context matters. Many countries only host once, so a single tournament can heavily skew perception. It’s not proof of causation, but it is a surprisingly consistent historical signal.

With 2026 underway and multiple host nations involved, it raises an interesting question: are we about to see this pattern repeat again? They're all doing quite well so far!

I dug into 90+ years of World Cup history to see if hosting actually gives teams a competitive edge on the pitch.

The pattern is stronger than I expected!

Across World Cups from 1930–2022, 16 out of 19 host nations outperformed their usual tournament performance when playing at home. In several cases, the jump was dramatic, Uruguay (1930) and England (1966) both improved by the equivalent of multiple tournament stages and went on to win the whole thing.

There are a few exceptions (Spain 1982 underperformed, while South Africa 2010 and Qatar 2022 roughly matched their baseline), but overall the trend points in one direction: host advantage isn’t just noise, it shows up consistently in results.

That said, the sample is small and context matters. Many countries only host once, so a single tournament can heavily skew perception. It’s not proof of causation, but it is a surprisingly consistent historical signal.

With 2026 underway and multiple host nations involved, it raises an interesting question: are we about to see this pattern repeat again? They're all doing quite well so far!

Full breakdown + data here:
👉 https://danflemingdata.substack.com/p/does-hosting-the-world-cup-actually

https://preview.redd.it/774py020ftah1.png?width=5100&format=png&auto=webp&s=33d1bdbe20e3dd1cf312d57e9d6588c477fac822