2024: The stats you didn't know you needed. (1)
01 December 2024, by Mark van der Linden
The 2024 season is officially over, and in fact, the first races of the 2025 UCI season have already taken place. With that in mind, we thought it was the perfect moment to share some numbers that wrap up another fantastic cycling season. Here are the stats you didn’t know you needed!
Let’s start by looking at the ultimate distance riders of the past season. And when we think of distance riders, there’s one name we can’t ignore this year: Lachlan Morton. The former EF-Education pro did the seemingly impossible this year. Lachy cycled around all of Australia in just 31 days. The Australian completed the 14,210 kilometers in 30 days, 9 hours, and 59 minutes—over a week faster than the previous record. To put that into perspective, that’s three times as long in the saddle in one month as Tadej Pogačar spent riding with a bib number on all year.
So, to chart the distance conquerors of 2024, we’ll measure them against the Lachlan Morton benchmark.
Figure 1. Riders with most race kilometers in 2024, compared to Lachlan Morton's 14.210 kilometer Ride Around Australia.
| # | Rider | Times Lachlan's distance | Races |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | MARTIN Guillaume | 1.039 | 88 |
| 2 | CHAMPION Thomas | 1.01 | 89 |
| 3 | VAN POPPEL Danny | 1.003 | 86 |
| 4 | KRISTOFF Alexander | 1.001 | 83 |
| 5 | BITTNER Pavel | 0.995 | 90 |
| 6 | HAMILTON Chris | 0.99 | 89 |
| 7 | GAMPER Patrick | 0.989 | 91 |
| 8 | ALEOTTI Giovanni | 0.983 | 85 |
Guillaume Martin is the rider with the most race kilometers this year, clocking up a total of 14.764 kilometers. That’s 1,039 times the distance of Morton’s ‘Ride Around Australia’. In fact, only four riders rode more race kilometers throughout the entire 2024 season than Lachlan Morton did in that one crazy month.
Knowing that, there was another interesting stat we wanted to dive into. Except for time trials, criteriums, and a few other exceptions, every race starts with a neutralisation - a few kilometers grouped behind the race director’s car. This is to safely exit the city, ride past some regional highlights, or to give the race sponsor a little spotlight. But which riders spent the most kilometers this year between the so-called 'depart fictif,' the rolling start, and the 'depart réel,' KM0, the rolling or official start of the race?
Figure 2. Riders with most kilometers in pre-race neutralisation.
| # | Rider | Total KM neutral | Races |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | KRISTOFF Alexander | 426.2 | 75 |
| 2 | GESCHKE Simon | 414.8 | 75 |
| 3 | CHAMPION Thomas | 413.8 | 80 |
| 4 | VAN POPPEL Danny | 405.5 | 71 |
| 5 | ABRAHAMSEN Jonas | 394.7 | 69 |
| 6 | ALLEGAERT Piet | 394.2 | 67 |
| 7 | MARTIN Guillaume | 389.6 | 63 |
| 8 | ZINGLE Axel | 380.1 | 61 |
And the winner is... Alexander Kristoff! The seasoned Norwegian sprinter spent the equivalent of just over 10 full marathons in the neutral zone. That’s a long time!
Let’s stick with the sprinters and their contemporaries for a moment. While the Uno-X Mobility rider secured his 96th professional victory, 6.306 days after his first pro win in 2007, there’s another rider who holds an even more impressive record: Mark Cavendish. With his historic 35th Tour de France stage win on July 3rd of this year, he now holds the record for the longest gap between his first and most recent professional victory for active pro riders. Cav's first win, at the Course de la Solidarité Olympique in Poland, was already 18 years and 4 days ago on that very day. For all active riders there's another rider topping that achievement. His name is Oscar Sevilla. His first professional win was even in another millennium: Tour de Romandie stage 4 on the 8th of May 1999. His last professional win (for now) was 24 years, 5 months and 1 day later, winning the Tour of Hainan overall classification.
From the fastest rider of the past decades to the slowest of this season. Because while there can only be one winner, there’s always someone riding at the back. Which riders were those this year?
Figure 3. Riders with most bottom-10 results this season.
| # | Rider | Bottom-10 results |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | VAN DEN BERG Julius | 30 |
| 2 | LEIJNSE Enzo | 29 |
| 3 | NABERMAN Tim | 26 |
Funny enough, four Dutch riders top this list. And even more interesting, all four are from the same team. It must be strategy! The group of riders surrounding top sprinter Fabio Jakobsen is tasked with saving as much energy as possible in stages that aren’t crucial. This approach has led to best friends Fabio Jakobsen and Julius van den Berg finishing in the last ten positions in 38% of their races.
Another point of interest is who was effectively the slowest rider last season. In this statistic, calculated based solely on WorldTour races, there’s a noticeable overrepresentation of Kazakh riders from Astana Qazaqstan Team. This doesn’t necessarily mean they are the least suited for WorldTour races; it could also reflect the difficulty of the races they’ve been placed in, their current form, or the strategy they employed. One thing is clear, though: you won’t find any real high-flyers on this list.
Figure 4. The 5 slowest WorldTour riders in season 2024.
| # | Rider | KM | Avg. speed |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | BRUSSENSKIY Gleb | 5418 | 37.7 |
| 2 | MADAN Ahmed | 1595 | 37.9 |
| 3 | CHZHAN Igor | 4017 | 39.2 |
| 4 | VINOKUROV Nicolas | 9010 | 39.2 |
| 5 | PETILLI Simone | 8708 | 39.6 |
Opposite the riders with the slowest average speeds, we highlight the most aggressive attackers. These were the riders who were most often found in breakaways during the past season:
Figure 5. Riders that were in the break the most often this season.
| # | Rider | #races |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | POGAČAR Tadej | |
| 2 | ABRAHAMSEN Jonas | |
| 3 | SOLER Marc | |
| 4 | TAROZZI Manuele | |
| 5 | DE BONDT Dries | |
| 6 | LAZKANO Oier | |
| 7 | ALAPHILIPPE Julian | |
| 8 | CORT Magnus |
And if we know which riders attacked the most, we naturally (right?) also want to know which races featured the biggest breakaway groups chasing victory. Well, those were these races:
Figure 6. Biggest breakaways this season.
| # | Race | #riders | Break successful? |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Giro d'Italia | Stage 15 | Yes | |
| 2 | Tour de France | Stage 17 | Yes | |
| 3 | Tour de France | Stage 13 | No | |
| 4 | La Vuelta Ciclista a España | Stage 18 | Yes | |
| 5 | Coppa Agostoni - Giro delle Brianze | Yes |
Oh, and just before we go, we wanted to check out the most successful brands of the past season. Which gear brand gathered the most victories in the WorldTour? This is the list:
Figure 7. Most succesful gear brands in WorldTour-races in 2024.
Counted in wins, excluding GC's
Counted in wins, excluding GC's
| # | Brand | #wins | #teams |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Shimano | 19 | |
| 2 | Wahoo | 9 | |
| 3 | Continental | 8 | |
| 4 | Prologo | 7 | |
| 5 | Elite | 5 | |
| 6 | Garmin | 10 | |
| 7 | Enervit | 2 | |
| 8 | Vittoria | 8 | |
| 9 | Oakley | 4 | |
| 10 | Scicon | 3 | |
| 11 | SRAM | 5 | |
| 12 | Quarq | 5 | |
| 13 | ENVE | 2 | |
| 14 | Tacx | 4 | |
| 15 | Pissei | 1 | |
| 16 | Colnago | 1 | |
| 17 | MET | 1 | |
| 18 | Selle Italia | 7 | |
| 19 | FSA | 3 | |
| 20 | Roval | 2 |
Shimano winning here may come as no surprise. The Japanese brand has been the most prominent logo on and around professional bikes for many years. What does stand out, however, is that Wahoo performs significantly better than its competitor GARMIN. Why might that be?
Figure 8. Number of professional teams per year with Wahoo gear.
Figure 9. Number of professional teams per year with GARMIN gear.
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