Years ago, I read Connie Carpenter and Davis Phinney's book on cycling. In the age before blogs and online diaries, it was one of the few American books on cycling written by someone with real world experience. It had a frank, pragmatic approach to cycling competition, with a significant portion of the book based on life in the peloton, and colorful anecdotes about such idiosyncratic contemporaries as Bob Roll. At its heart, however, it was a cookbook for success. Little bits of information from the book stayed with me, for instance, in the section on women's cycling, I remember Connie impressing upon the reader that women's racing came down to the sprint.
In the intervening years, I have heard that women's sprint fact repeated as a dictum, with scant evidence to support it aside from anecdotal references, or tangential, dry, unapproachable research. Also -- and I am not alone in parroting this fact -- women's cycling has changed. The competition is stronger, with more women making the jump from the elite ranks of other sports to give life on the road or trail a try. That's great to see. Today's top cycling women, like today's female marathoners, are rapidly closing the gender gap, and in the process giving us fans an ever-improving show of athletic prowess and determination. Check out Kristin Armstrong's time in her last National Championship or the Tour of the Gila ...she's right up there with the men. While these comparisons are interesting, it's not the real point. (The women's side of the sport stands on it own, but that's another story -- I'll write on that later.) I decided to do a quick analysis of the 2009 National Race Calendar mass start events. It's not my best data analysis work -- it'd get me grief at my day job -- but here are the basic facts:
- Out of 38 races, 32 ended in a sprint for the line. (See the attached chart)
- 26 were an allout field sprint, the balance were sprints from a breakaway
- Most of the conditions were dry, as far as I could see from the reports, the only seriously wet finishing conditions resulted in a breakaway and a sprint among the finishers.
- Criteriums and road races had different splits, obviously, with 6 out of 14 road races ending in a full field sprint, and 20 out of 24 criteriums ending in the bunch gallop.
The solo breakaways were definitely the exception, and were significant shows of overwhelming aerobic power. Kristin Armstrong took 2 of 6. Hills were also a factor, meaning power to weight, but my half-baked analysis did not include topography. (And for that matter, the weight of riders was not considered. Shame on me. I know what I'll be bringing to NRC races next year. You might recognize me as the guy with the scale imprint on his face, or worse ... if the scale is no longer visible and I'm walking funny.)
If the raw tabular data, or the pie chart, were even the least bit interesting, I'd show it to you. Trust me. It says the same thing in another way. There's more to glean from the data, but the quick takeaway is this: sprinting in the women's American scene matters. We knew that, but there it is. The data are the data. It also means that, in the first half of race, those women that launch futile attacks against the group are mostly betting against the house. Unless diffused responsiblity kicks in, they're probably doomed (oh, there's another topic for later). And while we mostly know that great sprinters are born, not made, the other species of riders should note: sprinting for the win takes a team of all types of rider. I hope we'll get some of our own data on that later.
--Joe Laltrello
