Grand Tour Final Day Victories

DumTT

A Grand Tour has never been closer. Five riders could still conceivably win this race. Any of the five could have a puncture, have a bad day or need a poo at a bad time – which could leave the door open for any of the others to take the overall victory.

The favourite remains Tom Dumoulin. He is the superior time trialist having put time into all of his rivals on the Stage 10 time trial to Montefalco. Every time trial is different – length, terrain, weather etc. But let’s take what we learned from Stage 10 and apply it to today’s test. The table below shows how many seconds per kilometre Dumoulin put into his rivals over 39.8km and how much time this would translate to over a shorter 29.3km stage.

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The Tour Preparation Puzzle

2016 Tour de France Prep

Nobody knows. You don’t know. I don’t know. Christian Prudhomme doesn’t know. Chris Froome doesn’t know. Even David Brailsford doesn’t know.

Nobody knows who is going to win the 2016 Tour de France.

My day job is in sports betting. Even if you have solid mathematical models taking all of the previous 102 editions of the Tour into account you’d still be nowhere near knowing who will win. If you had the results of every cycling race ever, the performance data from every training ride of every rider, analytics on tactical performances of every team and the biological passport data from every rider in the race, you still wouldn’t know.

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