TdF Rest day: July 21, 2010

After 17 days of cycling, the riders have been offered a well-deserved rest day. Yesterday's stage was hard with two category one and two hors category climbs. Tomorrow will be at least as tough with two more category climbs and a finish on the Tourmalet (hors category). Luckily the race will finish three days later.

Dropouts

After 17 racing days only 26 riders have left the race. This is a low number, which in the game history only can be compared with the number of dropouts in 1999. In that year there were also 26 dropouts at the second rest day but that day came after 15 stages. The average number of dropouts at this stage of the race is about 40.

Despite the low number of dropouts, only 20 participants of 464 (4.3%) have a complete team. The best ranked of this group is Wim Penninx at place 228 with 441 points. Many game participants had Tyler Farrar or Frank Schleck in their team but these two cyclists have left the race.

There are 184 teams which lost only one rider and 195 that have lost two. The largest loss, 4 riders, was suffered by seven participants. The best ranked of these teams are Keven Fitzpatrick and Mike Brad at 188th place with 475 points. The team of our current leader, Rune Førsund, has lost two riders.

Popular cyclists

In the previous editions of the game, we have compared the performance of the robot participant Jan Modaal, composed from the list of most favorite cyclists in the game, with teams that contained the most popular cyclists of the countries that provided 10 or more participants to the game. This year we have built 10 of such country-specific teams. Each of them contains the most frequently chosen cyclists of the participants of that country. The team lists have been constructed in the same way as that of the robot participant team. This is how the country teams are doing after the sixteenth stage:

 Plc  Per Pnt Name
  17. 96% 520 Team The Netherlands
  35. 92% 505 Team Germany
  66. 85% 492 Team France
 115. 74% 476 Team New Zealand
 118. 73% 475 Team Norway
 172. 62% 458 Team USA
 196. 57% 452 Team Canada
 205. 55% 450 Team Australia
 228. 50% 441 Team UK
 300. 35% 407 Team Belgium

This list contains the projected place of the team in the overall rankings (Plc), the percentage of participants it would have beaten (Per), its score (Pnt) and its name. Two of the country teams manage to outperform more than 90% of the game participants: Team The Netherlands and Team Germany,

The scores of the country teams will be updated after each stage. Their recent score sheets can be accessed by searching for "Team" followed by the name of the country in the participant search page.

Participant teams

As usual the participants have constructed teams with different purposes. There are teams that are targeted to win sprint stages, for example that of Bastin Verweij and teams which have as a goal to win the mountain stages, like the team of Wicher Otten. Probably there are also some teams as well that are constructed for winning time trial stages. We will see these appear in the top of the stage rankings on Saturday. Most other participants have attempted to construct a team that could win the game by selecting a mix of top sprinters and good climbers.

Other than in previous years, this game edition does not seem to contain teams that consist mostly of members of one country or cyling team.

The optimal team

It is interesting to see what team would have obtained the largest possible score at this stage of the race. This is one possible team that would have been able to obtain 660 points at this stage of the race, 101 more points than game leader Rune Førsund:

Name:    Optimal Team
Date:    20100720 17:45:19
Country: 
E-mail:  
                            tot  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
 1. T. Hushovd              123 15 18 15 15 15  .  .  .  . 15  . 15  .  . 15
 2. M. Cavendish             73  .  .  . 14 14  .  .  . 14 14  . 17  .  .  .
 3. A. Petacchi              84  .  . 13 13 16  .  .  . 13 13  . 16  .  .  .
 4. R. McEwen                66 14  . 14 12 14  .  .  .  . 12  .  .  .  .  .
 5. A. Schleck               59  . 13  .  .  .  . 11 11  .  . 13  . 11  .  .
 6. A. Contador              52  .  .  .  .  .  . 10 12  .  . 10  . 10 10  .
 7. J. Rojas                 49  .  . 11  9 11  .  .  .  .  9  .  9  .  .  .
 8. S. Sanchez               44  .  .  .  .  .  .  8 10  .  .  8  .  8 10  .
 9. J. Van den Broeck        30  .  9  .  .  .  .  7  .  .  .  7  .  7  .  .
10. L. Mondory               26  .  .  .  6  .  .  .  .  .  6  .  8  .  6  .
11. E. Boasson               20  .  .  5  5  5  .  .  .  .  .  .  5  .  .  .
12. D. Menchov               16  .  .  .  .  .  .  4  .  .  .  4  .  4  4  .
13. R. Gesink                 9  .  .  .  .  .  .  3  .  .  .  3  .  3  .  .
14. D. Cunego                 6  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  2  .  .  .  .  2  .  2
15. J. Rodriguez              3  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  1  .  .  1  .  1  .  .
                    Points: 660 29 40 58 74 75  0 43 36 27 69 46 70 46 30 17
               Percentiles: 100 97 78 95 86 85  0 77 94 90 83 94100 96 99 37

Interestingly enough, even this team has a stage in which no points were obtained: stage 7. Actually only 50 of the 464 participants (11%) have managed to collect points in every stage. The highest ranked of these is Michael Jiggins, currently at place 8. There are only three participants that have collected more than 10 points in each and every stage: George Atkins, Pon Juicer and Vanessa Jaeger.

Game veterans

Game veterans are people that have participated ten times or more in the game. This year an overview was created of the performances of these participants. The veterans are ranked based on their ten best percentile scores. The top ten of the list looks likes this:

                            years: 94 95 96 97 98 99 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09
  1. 939 13x Michael Botzet         -  -  - 78 51100 96 91 92 88 99 97 87 94 90 92
  2. 930 11x Cameron Henderson      -  -  -  -  - 93 94 99 90 70 96 98 81 95 89 95
  3. 921 15x Nico Wienders          - 90 63 95 23 95 84 98 89 69 39 92 88 84 92 98
  4. 916 13x Gerard Creemers        -  -  - 97 95 94 97 56 85 85 89 73 96 81 93 85
  5. 909 14x Michael McQuillen      - 76 68 78 94 90 86 98 98 72 98  - 91 76 86 90
  6. 895 13x Jos Droste             -  -  - 87 90 95 97 75 98 81 80 89 67 87 87 84
  7. 888 14x Arthur Denneman        -  - 84 97 63 36 76 99 95 63100 65100 57 91 81
  8. 887 16x Jan Modaal            63 95 81 97 55 72 69 89 89 89 79 83 78 84 97 83
  9. 883 12x Stefano Heyer          -  -  -  - 98 68 98 90 86 77 83 81 69 99 80 91
 10. 882 11x Jean-Luc Bulliard      -  -  - 89 67 64 96 97 94 77 95 98 93 76  -  -

On average, these participants have taken part 12 times in previous editions. All of them have scores around or even over 900, which indicates that they regularly beat more than 90% of the people taking part in the game. Two of the ten participants have won the game in the past and one of these has even won the game twice. Altogether, six of the previous 16 editions of the game have been won by the current game veterans.

As an experiment, we have constructed an average team based on the cyclists of the best 20 veterans of the list. At this moment this team is doing better than the overall average team (502-478 points) but the top 20 team is not yet winning the game: its current projected overall position is 42nd.

Who will win the game?

After 15 stages in the game, the number of points that separate the top ten in the overall rankings is 28, which is quite a lot. Probably the future game winner is among the participants in this top ten. We can attempt to predict the game result by estimating how many points the participants will earn in the coming four stages. These include two flat stages, a mountain stage (Thursday) and a time trial. Unfortunately, the Saturday time trial is the first of its kind in this Tour, so we have no previous time trial scores to base the estimation on. We will assume that the GC contenders that did well in the mountains, will also do well in the time trial and count the time trial as a mountain stage.

The next table contains the predicted final participant position in the overall rankings, the position after stage 16 (between brackets) and five numeric columns. The first (cur) shows the player's current score, the second (fla) and third (mou) the points (s)he has obtained in the flat stages and the mountain stages, the fourth column (exp) contains the number of points the player is expected to obtain in the next four stages and the final column (tot) holds the expected total score. The expected number of points for the next four stages was computed with the formula (2/8)*fla+(2/7)*mou.

        cur fla mou exp tot
  1 (1) 559 419 140 145 704 Rune Førsund (Norway)
  2 (2) 543 443 100 139 682 Saverio Heyer (Italy)
  3 (3) 538 371 167 140 678 Jan Van Dieten (The Netherlands)
  4 (3) 538 400 138 139 677 Etienne Gaasenbeek (The Netherlands)
  5 (5) 537 406 131 139 676 Stefano Heyer (Switzerland)
    (6) 536 368 168 140 676 Tom Denters (The Netherlands)
  7 (6) 536 412 124 138 674 Wil Gommans (The Netherlands)
  8 (8) 534 420 114 138 672 Michael Jiggins (Canada)
  9 (9) 532 425 107 137 669 Emanuel Correia (Portugal)
   (10) 531 386 145 138 669 Tom Scanlon (USA)
 11(10) 531 412 119 137 668 Pantini Maher (Australia)
 12(12) 524 401 123 135 659 Jonathan Peeters (USA)
 13(13) 523 415 108 135 658 Anton Krijgsman (The Netherlands)
 14(13) 523 425  98 134 657 Rocky W. Meadows (USA)
   (15) 522 404 118 135 657 Rob Spaans (The Netherlands)
 16(15) 522 417 105 134 656 Fred Haslin (France)
 17(17) 519 391 128 134 653 Nico Wienders (France)
 18(18) 518 383 135 134 652 Guus Van Zadelhoff (The Netherlands)
 19(19) 517 398 119 134 651 John Stine (USA)
 20(19) 517 407 110 133 650 Bushrod Johnson (USA)

According to this prediction, Rune Førsund of Norway will win the Internet Tour de France Game 2010 with a margin of 22 points. The last time, we attempted to predict the outcome of the game, in 2006, the predicted winner ended up at second place and the game was won by the predicted number six. The remaining stages in the game will reveal who will actually win the game.

Last update: July 26, 2010. erikt(at)xs4.all