▲ 126 r/peloton
Tour stage 3: it will take place, but no spectators will be authorised in France
eurosport.fru/vertblau — 13 hours ago
▲ 95 r/peloton
[Bloomberg] Telefónica Weighs Ending Movistar Cycling Team Sponsorship
bloomberg.comu/vertblau — 24 days ago
▲ 122 r/peloton
Next year's Vuelta España Femenina will take place at the end of the season, immediately following the men’s event, UCI announces
The announcement was made as part of a series of UCI decisions, incl. allowing Belarusian riders to ride under their flag as was already posted
u/vertblau — 30 days ago
▲ 66 r/peloton
Do organiser skinsuits confer a disadvantage in time trials?
Whenever an important time trial in a Grand Tour comes around and a favourite is leading one of the classifications, a discussion always springs up about whether having to wear the organisers’ skinsuit is a disadvantage for that rider. Most recently this came up again before this Giro’s stage 10 ITT, with some sources even claiming this would cost Vingegaard 30-60 seconds over the 42km.
To be honest this discussion has always annoyed me somewhat – mainly because I don’t like the idea of teams that are already richer benefiting even more directly by developing faster skinsuits to dominate TTs. So I thought the complaining about having to wear organisers’ skinsuits (after all, usually an indicator of being in the lead) was a bit rich.
But still, I was intrigued – is it really a disadvantage? The numbers bandied about often seemed quite exaggerated. And since AI tools have made it much easier to scrape and assemble data these days, I decided to see if there was any way to test this hypothesis.
I gathered data on all individual time-trials in GTs from 2006 to 2025, the last 20 years of racing, excluding prologues since no jerseys would have been distributed yet, as well as mountain time trials since there have been too few to analyse them separately. For each GT, I took the ITT performances of the final top 10, so as to focus on GC contenders, and recorded whether they were leading a classification at the time.
My original idea was to build a very simple model, with speed as the dependent variable and length and elevation as the independent variables, and then test if wearing an organiser skinsuit had any statistically measurable effect. Unfortunately, I then realised that such a model would be completely statistically unsound, mainly because of the confounding effect of those riders leading a classification usually being the better ones. And even if it weren’t for that, the results were statistically insignificant under several different configurations.
However, I didn’t want to let all that data go to waste, so I decided to make some nice charts instead, to give an impressionistic idea of the data. The charts cover all riders who have at least 3 ITTs in an organiser skinsuit in the dataset (unfortunately the Giro 2026 is not in, so no Vingegaard). Speed is plotted against dénivelé (vertical meters). Full dots indicate wearing an organiser skinsuit, while hollow ones indicate wearing a team skinsuit. The size of the dots is scaled to the length of the TT. I’ve also plotted a simple OLS trendline, which for some riders (Evenepoel, Pogačar, Roglič among others) is quite close to the data, and for others (MAL notably) is much further away. I’m sure this data will interest fellow pelotoners despite the statistical failure, so here it is without further ado:
Carapaz
Contador
Evenepoel
Froome
López
Majka
Pogačar
Quintana
Rodríguez
Roglič
Schleck
Valverde
S. Yates
Edit: many people have said the axes should be the other way around, here are all the charts with the axes reversed: https://imgur.com/a/tt-charts-reversed-axes-bBeeDQx
u/vertblau — 1 month ago