2024, the most predictable spring?
26 April 2024, by Bert Lip
The first grand tour of the season is about to start, which means we can take a look back at the first part of the season. We've seen some incredible racing, but unfortunately we missed out on some long awaited duels. Another thing one might have noticed is that quite often the pre-race favorite took home the victory. At ProCyclingStats, we decided to analyse the question, was this the most predictable spring season in a long time?
Fortunately, we can say something about who the players of the PCS game think is the pre-race favorite by counting the number of stars assigned to a rider. More stars means players deem this rider a likely winner. As a comparable measure we take the percentage of the maximum stars possible per rider. There is a five star maximum per rider, so if there would be a 1000 players in a game, the upper limit of stars is 5000 for any rider. If a rider receives a total of 2000 stars, the percentage is 40%. Now we have established this parameter, which races yielded the most predictable winners this season?
Figure 1. Most predictable winners this season.
This is an interesting list. In eight out of 19 WorldTour races the winner had over 50% of the maximum predictability score. Now you are wondering, how was this in previous years? By applying the formula from the statistic above, we computed the average value since the start of the game in 2016 for races before May 1st.
Figure 2. Predictability per season.
From this, we can jump to the conclusion that 2024 was the most predictable spring season so far. With a predictabiliy score of 35.5%, it beats 2023 which was the highest score up to then.
Figure 3. Predictability of the monument spring classics per season.
An even more staggering picture emerges if we look at the value per year for only the monument spring classics. Never before in the game it was so easy to pick the winner.
Though there is always a story behind the statistics, these numbers answer to the feeling that a lot of races were quite predictable. Will this be true for the Giro d'Italia or will some unexpected rider snatch the victory from Tadej Pogacar?
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