Daniel Friebe explores how careful consideration of a rider’s potential – sabermetrics, as it’s called in baseball – is beginning to change the face of cycling, thanks to one team in particular.
Is the Moneyball theory about to alter professional cycling’s relationship with statistics and finance?
IT WAS TEMPTING at the time to think that cycling’s old guard had been frogmarched out of the building the day, in autumn 2006, when Giancarlo Ferretti became entangled in the world wide web.
Nicknamed the ‘Sergento di Ferro’ – or ‘Iron Sergeant’ – Ferretti was a living, breathing monument to the savoir-faire that made professional cycling an art form long before it was to become a science. This was surely evolution’s way of telling Ferretti that times were a-changing, and that his had come to its end. An internet scammer persuaded Ferretti that the telecommunications giant Sony Ericsson was ready to bankroll a new team to the tune of 11 million euros a year and Ferretti didn’t wait to meet his new sugar daddies or sign the contracts before assembling his galaxy of stars.
Alas, six weeks later, Sony Ericsson’s Stockholm-based ‘head of sponsorship’, Ron Westland, turned out to be a con-artist operating out of his bedroom in Tuscany. Ferretti had been mercked, or Punk’d, or whatever the kids call it these days.
‘It was all done via email, on this address that I now know must have been made up: ronwestland-sonyericsson@hotmail.com,’ Ferretti lamented later. If it hadn’t been quite so tragic – and wounded Ferretti to the extent that he has never returned to management – it would have been hilarious.
One of Ferretti’s most illustrious acolytes, Alessandro Petacchi, recently said that, despite the precedent, ‘Ferron’ would have no trouble adapting to professional cycling today. Petacchi is probably right – not that much has changed… Not yet, anyway. The team car’s indigenous species is still the ex-pro, admired, like he was in his racing days, for attributes usually surmised with a wistful look and thumb rubbing on forefinger, signifying something that the uninitiated just can’t grasp. A good ‘eye’. His tactical ‘brain’. His métier. All that. Stuff you can’t touch but which you know when you see it. Things that can be learned only in the sport of cycling’s single Ivy League university – the peloton.
Baseball was once like this, too. But that all changed, famously, with Billy Beane and Moneyball. For those who haven’t seen the movie, read the book or bought the T-shirt, a quick summary: a lavishly talented batter in his youth, Billy Beane spent half a decade floundering in Major League Baseball before deciding to reinvent himself as a scout, partly inspired by his own failures.
Beane found his calling at the Oakland A’s – an overspending, underachieving franchise soon to be dragged into an age of austerity by penny-pinching new owners. The pressure was on Beane and his colleagues to maintain if not improve on-field performances while spending a fraction of their old budget.
The solution to their seemingly impossible puzzle was something called sabermetrics. In a nutshell, it was all about statistics. But not any statistics. Certainly not the ones conventionally used by managers, coaches and fans to validate what they had already seen from the dugout, the bleachers or their armchair.
No, these were mind-bending numbers which completely changed the way that people understood baseball – at least the people who paid attention to them. The others claimed they didn’t need sabermetrics: they knew a nice swing when they saw one, or a 90mph-plus fastball, or a fielder with hands like buckets and an arm like a rocket-launcher.
And what they couldn’t see they gathered by browsing the stats – the ones put out by the people who ran the league and which never lied.
Only that was the point the sabermetricians had been arguing for a decade or two, before anyone with any influence had paid them any heed: those stats really did lie, at least about which performance parameters really did win and lose baseball matches. They also skewed the market to the degree that the richest teams in baseball were forking out indecent sums of cash for the wrong players. The guys with good figures in the wrong categories, or who matched the scouts’ identikit of what baseball players ought to look like. The results were a paradox: some of the worst teams in baseball were some of the richest.
At the end of the 1990s, Billy Beane became the driver and poster-boy of the Oakland A’s’ opposite approach: they started spending less and winning more. The reason was that they were spending wisely. Under Beane, the scouts gradually ceded power to the analysts, intuition bowed to evidence and art to science. To the untrained eye, the A’s looked like a bargain bin full of whatever old jumble the rest of the league had rejected; in reality – and the end-of-season victory counts would bear this out – they were a precious mosaic of gems that other team managers had mistaken for useless rubble.
The A’s would make the play-offs four seasons in a row from 2000 to 2003, and set a Major League Baseball record of consecutive wins in 2000. In 2004, journalist Michael Lewis told their story in the book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game.
By this time, Beane had many admirers, one being a 46-year-old American telecommunications magnate named Bob Stapleton. California born and bred, Stapleton says that, in baseball terms, his family was ‘split right down the middle’ between the A’s and their neighbours and enemies the San Francisco Giants. Stapleton declines to specify on which side of the Northern California divide his allegiances lay – but admits that Billy Beane is a ‘brilliant, innovative guy’. So brilliant and innovative, in fact, that, when Stapleton took control of his own sporting franchise in 2007, Beane became ‘the clear inspiration for our programme’.
Beane had set out to exploit inefficiencies in the market for players and the sport as a whole’s conception of tactics. For five years, Stapleton would do the same, perhaps a little less systematically, but with even more success.
In Moneyball, Lewis estimates that every victory cost the Oakland A’s in the region of half a million dollars. Meanwhile some teams were paying six times that amount, around $3million in wages, for each of their wins.
In cycling, Stapleton was able to create an even bigger discrepancy: between 2008 and his team closing in 2011, they notched 282 victories at an approximate cost of just over €100,000 apiece.
Contrast this with Ag2r La Mondiale, who in the same four-year period were shelling out €750,000 for each of their 43 race wins (admittedly slightly hamstrung by high French taxes). Or with Rabobank, whose 89 victory bouquets each came at a price of over €500,000. Or, indeed, with T-Mobile in 2006, who could muster only 16 wins at a combined cost of €15 million.
Of course there are other ways to gauge value in cycling besides race victories. Different teams and their sponsors have different raisons d’être: for some it’s specific goals in selected races, for instance the yellow jersey in the Tour de France; for others it’s the UCI team rankings, while for a third group it could simply be earning exposure for the logo on their jersey. Also, a stage win in the Circuit de la Sarthe can hardly be compared to overall honours in a major tour, which Stapleton’s team never achieved. Nonetheless, few would argue that if Beane had an equivalent in cycling, ‘Blue Chip Bob’ was that man between 2007 and 2011.
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One immediate parallel, besides their ties to California, was that Beane and Stapleton’s teams had previously epitomised those ‘market inefficiencies’ that they would eventually try to exploit. Stapleton’s first and main brief when he took over at T-Mobile in 2006, though, was to do with credibility, not efficiency; it just so happened that in ridding the team of its dopers and facilitators, Stapleton couldn’t help but come across other, glaring weaknesses in the way T-Mobile had been run.
‘Major investment, minimal results,’ is his concise description of what he inherited. Within a few weeks of his arrival, he was waving away the protests of his directeurs sportifs and declaring a purge on the team’s highest-paid, marquee names. One of those directeurs sportifs, Brian Holm, recalled: ‘Bob just said, “Right, him, him and him have to go.” We tried telling him that, no, Wesemann, Kessler and Klöden were the big German stars, they were untouchable, but Bob said we were wrong.’
Over the next few months, Stapleton would replace the old and established with the young and unproven while imposing blanket pay-cuts across his staff. The weird thing was that results improved almost immediately. To the question of ‘How?’, Holm responds succinctly: ‘He whipped our arses.’
Stapleton, as you’d expect, provides a more nuanced explanation. In it are some fragments of what he had picked up from Beane. Others, Beane might have picked up on if he’d worked in cycling…
In other words, the combined brainpower of a group will usually make better decisions than any of the individual components – particularly when the group is diverse. A classic example: in a competition to guess the weight of an ox, the average of all of the guesses will typically be much closer to the right answer than most if not all of the individual estimates. Stapleton and his team appreciated this and applied it to their policy on transfers.
‘It would generally be a conference call led by team manager Rolf Aldag, in which all of the directeurs sportifs and I participated. Rolf would have a list of up to one hundred names and we would go through, one-by-one, listening to what everyone had to say and looking at the available data about each individual guy. Finally, at the end, we’d have a list of guys to talk to.’
‘The wisdom of the crowds’ worked for Stapleton, as it tends to do when the components of the crowd are diverse. In a world where directeurs sportifs double as scouts (Stapleton: ‘They’re the only guys who can see inside the race, beside the riders; our directeurs were at races to manage the team but also to look for new riders’), there are also other reasons to assemble a staff with a broad base of knowledge, geographically speaking. In the team’s best season, 2009, the team’s brain trust comprised two Germans (Aldag and Jan Schaffrath), an Italian residing in Belgium (Valerio Piva), a Dutchman (Tristan Hoffman), an Australian (Allan Peiper), a Dane (Brian Holm) and Stapleton himself.
‘We had all the best talent pools covered,’ Stapleton says. Compare this with Liquigas, whose technical staff in 2009 was made up of four directeurs from one region of northern Italy (the Veneto) and two from another (Lombardy). Other teams, like Cofidis and Lampre, are similarly centralised (read parochial), and either recruit heavily from a single region in which their directeurs specialise (for Cofidis, north-east France, for Lampre north-west Italy) or rely on friends and acquaintances, often former team-mates from their own racing career, as further field for intelligence. Which is fine… except that it doesn’t work nearly as well.
‘If a guy is recommended by a third party, he ends up talking to me, who isn’t from his country, who he doesn’t know, and who has never seen him race. It goes without saying that, say, a young Australian deals with Allan Peiper, who everyone in Australian cycling knows,’ says Stapleton’s former team manager Rolf Aldag.
‘The problem isn’t identifying the talent. With a guy like Edvald Boasson Hagen, the ability’s obvious, but that means it becomes a problem to get the guy, because there’s competition. And that’s where we were good, also because we had a history of turning young guys like Mark Cavendish into big successes.’
Shop for guys with warts. Er, excuse me? Warts? Yes, warts, as in Billy Beane’s shorthand for imperfections, which turn out to have little or no bearing on a rider’s ability to perform. A ‘wart’ could be physical, like the significant difference in the length of former HTC-Highroad rider Patrick Gretsch’s legs, or it could be technical like Peter Velits’s aberration of a riding position. Either way, it’s either superficial or fixable – only other teams haven’t grasped that, and so the rider is underpriced and underrated.
‘Gretsch is a guy who wouldn’t have got through a lot of teams’ screening process, because the discrepancy between his two legs is quite radical. For us he was an easy hire,’ notes Stapleton. Hayden Roulston was another one: best-known to some for what was reported at the time as a bar-room brawl in October 2005, in addition, the Kiwi had nearly been forced out of the sport by a heart condition the following year. He overcame that, miraculously, with Reiki massage, returned to racing and performed creditably with Cervélo in 2009 and 2010, but was still underpriced for a guy who two years earlier had been an Olympic silver medallist in the individual pursuit.
If Roulston went on to do well for Stapleton, Matt Goss did brilliantly. Stapleton says that the Aussie also had ‘warts’. He laughs heartily. ‘I mean, he was hardly a lesson in souplesse on the bike.’ More to the point, Goss had also been under-appreciated and underused as a team leader at Saxo Bank, despite glimmers of precocious brilliance in his three years at the Danish team.
‘Goss is a guy who was clearly, clearly undervalued when we took him,’ confirms Aldag. Just over a year after joining HTC, Goss had won Milan-San Remo. A few months later he had signed for GreenEdge for around five times what Stapleton had paid.
The notion of ‘warts’ wasn’t unique to, or invented by, Billy Beane. As Simon Kuper and Stefan Syzmanski point out in Soccernomics, in the 1970s and 1980s the Nottingham Forest management duo of Brian Clough and Peter Taylor used to actively seek out footballers with personal problems, knowing that they would generally come cheap. They would then work with the player to resolve whatever his particular issue was – often drink, women or gambling. If the potential on the pitch was there, no foible was too daunting – on one proviso: they had to be open about it, then let Clough and Taylor enlist whatever external help was required to fix their vice.
Boozers and betting fiends are rare in professional cycling (we’ll leave the women for now), but there were still echoes of the football managers’ technique in Beane’s and Stapleton’s approach.
‘Whatever their particular issue was, we let them know that we would work with them on it, and had concrete plans to do that,’ Stapleton says.
In many cases, he adds, knowing this exerted a stronger pull on a rider’s motivation than the bigger cheque being waved by another team. Thus, HTC’s limited spending power also became an effective filter, allowing them to recruit people for the right reasons.
‘The guys coming to us were motivated for the right reasons – success and improving, not money,’ says Stapleton. Whether some of the most cash-happy teams in the peloton in 2012 – BMC and Katusha perhaps – can say the same may be a moot point.
There was only one kind of ‘wart’ that would instantly turn Stapleton off: anything in a rider’s history or biological passport that indicated foul play. The majority of UCI WorldTour teams now scrutinise medical files in the same way – Sky even request a rider’s SRM data for a whole month before making a commitment – while lower-ranked teams pay relatively meagre sums for high-risk, high-flyers returning from doping bans.
‘An obviously clean biological passport is worth much more than a more dubious one,’ says Italian rider agent Alex Carera.
Indeed, it is widely known on the pro scene that one major team was very close to signing Alessandro Ballan in March 2009 – but called off the deal having examined his bio passport (coincidentally or not, an Italian magistrate in Mantova later hypothesised that Ballan had undergone a blood transfusion that very month).
BMC wound up getting Ballan for a relatively modest fee for a rider who, at the time of the negotiations, was the reigning world champion. They soon paid for the gamble, though, when the Mantova investigation came to light early in 2010, causing them to diplomatically suspend Ballan for the entire Classics season.
Stapleton’s ace recruiters, of course, disbanded with HTC-Highroad at the end of 2011, but he can take heart from the knowledge that even the ones no longer managing teams retain fully functional wart detectors. Rolf Aldag attended the 2012 Tour of Switzerland in his role as Omega Pharma-Quick Step’s technical consultant. One day early in the race, the German stood shooting the breeze with some friends.
‘The first guy I’d sign is Fredrik Kessiakoff,’ he told them. ‘Really good mountain biker, got great results when he started on the road, had that Epstein-Barr virus for a year or so, and is starting to go well again, but will still be really cheap…’
The next day, Kessiakoff beat Fabian Cancellara to win the 34.3-kilometre time trial in Gossau. A few weeks later he’d be one of the unsung stars of the Tour de France, attacking incessantly in the mountains, and a few weeks after that he’d win another time trial at the Vuelta a España. Aldag claims that he would have snapped up the Swede, warts and all, way back in June.
‘If a guy’s shown something once, and there’s a good and temporary reason why he’s no longer performing at that level, that’s a guy worth gambling on, because the financial risk is very small.’
Sometimes a team manager doesn’t need to look for ‘warts’ to get bang for his buck. Sometimes quite fickle market forces create opportunities – and it’s up to savvy team managers to exploit them. For example: at around the time when Stapleton arrived on the men’s pro scene – and for several years before that – sprinters were bafflingly underpriced. So, at least, says Alex Carera.
‘They were regarded in the same way as goalkeepers in football: you had to have two in a squad, but signing them was really a box-ticking exercise for most teams; consequently they were pretty cheap.’
It could have been something to do with Lance Armstrong hoovering attention and therefore resources towards major tours; it could have been the erstwhile UCI ranking system’s limited rewards for stage wins in smaller races; whatever it was, when Stapleton and his directeurs decided that aiming for overall honours in major tours was risky, expensive and maybe impossible without doping, they discovered that the alternative of a sprint- and time-trial-focused team was, by comparison, both cheap and dependable. Between them, in 2008, sprinters Mark Cavendish, Gerald Ciolek, André Greipel, Edvald Boasson Hagen and Greg Henderson cost Stapleton less than €1,000,000 – but won him 43 races. Sixteen wins that year also came in time trials. Good luck, though, to any manager attempting to load his team with speed in the same way today.
‘The new rankings system has changed everything. Sprinters bring in a lot of points, and consequently have become a lot more expensive,’ says Carera.
A year after bowing out of professional cycling, Bob Stapleton is making his money in much the same way that he made winners at HTC-Highroad: with shrewd investments.
‘I’m doing some private equity stuff. I think I’m better at that than managing a sports team…’ he says. Stapleton is being falsely modest. He knows that the team he created may have been the most cost-effective in cycling history, and he also has clear ideas about how they mastered the market. But if he had only one piece of advice for another team hoping to emulate HTC-Highroad’s success, he says, it would be to strive for a cosmopolitan mix, not just because several ‘talent pools’ will harbour more treasures than one, but ‘because this overrides any dominant subcultures within the team’.
He explains: ‘Sometimes we were going to races with something like 16 nationalities represented between riders and staff, and people left their national biases at home. They were in a new environment, decisions were being made based on merit, and for whatever reason the international element added to the chemistry. People felt it was more special, they felt they were really surrounded by the best, plucked from all over the world. Once you had no more than five or six guys from any nationality in the team, you didn’t have any dominant subculture, so then the culture of the team became the strongest thing.’
All of which could easily have been plundered straight from a management textbook – except the results plead in Stapleton’s favour. It’s also notable that some of the consistently worst-performing teams in professional cycling are among the most homogeneous, with four of the bottom six-ranked teams in the 2012 UCI team rankings drawing two thirds or more of their roster from a single country (Euskaltel, FDJ, Lampre and Ag2r).
Of course lack of money more than lack of diversity may be these teams’ main handicap, and there may also be pressure from sponsors to favour ‘home riders’, but they could, equally, be helping themselves by casting their net wider.
Stapleton recognised early that the existence of several teams or one very rich one in certain countries could inflate the demand for, and hence the price of, riders there. His team never signed a single French rider – not, he says, ‘because of any bias against them, but because they were very in demand from French teams, and so became very expensive for what you were getting’.
The same phenomenon can also have a negative impact on riders’ motivation in certain environments. Raimondo Scimone, an Italian agent who represents the interests of a number of Russian riders, suggests that the Katusha team and its massive investment may have stunted the growth of some athletes from that country.
‘I’ve seen it with a few guys,’ he says. ‘They seem to take it for granted that there’ll be a place for them at Katusha, and it becomes a comfort zone for them. Conversely, foreign teams don’t even bother going after the young Russian guys, because they just assume that they’ll end up at Katusha. But it could be that a Russian would actually be much better in one of those teams.’
It’s perhaps no coincidence, then, that Russians accounted for just under half of Katusha’s roster in 2012 but fewer than a quarter of their wins.fn1 Or, indeed, that Yuri Trofimov, Denis Menchov, Alexandre Kolobnev – in fact, pretty much every Russian with any pedigree prior to joining the team – has scored fewer victories and fewer ranking points since signing with Katusha.
Other pitfalls to avoid are more subtle, but equally intriguing. In both Soccernomics and Moneyball, the authors argue that sports clubs are beholden to often unconscious ‘sight-based prejudices’ – for example, an irrational and unsubstantiated preference for players who are particularly stylish or athletic or just ‘look the part’.
Sometimes it’s simpler even than that: one top English football club started to notice that scouting reports were irrationally, disproportionately biased towards blond-haired players, presumably because they were more conspicuous and memorable. Psychologists call this the ‘availability heuristic’ – a mental short-cut based on the premise that the easier something comes to mind, the more important it must be.
This applies in cycling, too. For example, says Scimone, Denis Menchov was always a relatively hard and modestly-valued sell for a multiple grand tour winner, even before his name was mentioned in connection with various doping scandals.
Scimone suspects that this has as much to do with Menchov’s non-existent media profile as with something else: ‘You never see him in the race. I’m his agent, I sit there watching races on TV, looking for him all the time, but I never see him.
‘Whereas someone like Paolo Tiralongo is never off your screen because he’s invariably riding next to and chatting with his mate Alberto Contador. I’m sure that also has an impact on Tiralongo’s value.
‘Similar with Pippo Pozzato: okay, he’s got the media profile, but he’s also very stylish on the bike. He stands out… even though he can’t win a race even if someone’s pushing him.’
So far, using Bob Stapleton and HTC-Highroad as our case study, we’ve looked at several ways in which a cycling team turned the ignorance or inefficiencies of competitors to their distinct advantage.
Billy Beane had gone a step further, leaning heavily on analytical data to not only guide recruitment but, before that, to shift a paradigm, to change the way a game of baseball was played and understood.
In cycling, for now, this appears to be uncharted territory, for all that Team Sky and their performance analyst, Tim Kerrison, have to some extent debunked conventional wisdom about how to win the Tour de France, at least with a certain type of rider, with a tactic clearly grounded in empirical analysis. Its most obvious, defining characteristic: attacking and responding to attacks was a waste of energy.
‘If we’re going at 450 watts up a climb, it takes 500 watts to go away, and we know that no one can sustain that on a 20-minute climb,’ Bradley Wiggins explained during the Tour. In Beane’s mind, batters and pitchers were reduced to numbers, their vital stats, and it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine that, for Team Sky principal Dave Brailsford now, they become wattages.
The challenge in both cases is keeping emotion out of it. For coaches like Beane, to quote Moneyball author Michael Lewis, ‘winning is simply a matter of figuring out the odds and exploiting the laws of probability… To get worked up over plays, or even games, is as unproductive as a casino manager worrying over the outcomes of individual pulls of the slot machines’.
Brailsford obsessively pores over the best publicly-available resource for cycling results and statistics, the Dutch-run website cqranking.com. Using numbers from the site, he also draws up his own ‘expected value’ graphs plotting rider ages against their rankings; young riders who fall below the required standard (like Chris Froome at the end of his first year with Team Sky, as noted by Cycle Sport magazine at the time) may be granted a stay of execution, but anyone still underperforming as they near and enter their thirties is quickly culled.
‘Those guys, you get rid of them straight away,’ Brailsford has said in the past. It’s tempting to assume that the 35-year-old Spaniard Juan Antonio Flecha fell foul of this rule of thumb at the end of the 2012 campaign, given that, as Billy Beane told Simon Kuper, the author of Soccernomics, ‘Nothing strangulates a sports club more than having older players on long contracts, because once they stop performing, they become immovable.
‘And as they become older, the risk of injury becomes exponential. It’s less costly to bring a young player in. If it doesn’t work, you can go and find the next guy, and the next guy. The downside risk is lower, and the upside much higher.’
Measuring an athlete’s rate improvement or decline over time is easy in cycling, of course. All you need to do is monitor his power outputs with an SRM meter and possibly their other physiological data, in races, training or lab tests. Easy… or it is if he’s already one of your riders. Screening for prospective new signings on the basis of more than just their results and subjective judgement is more tricky, but some are trying.
Garmin chief Jonathan Vaughters claims to trawl the internet for live streams of races from all over the world, around the clock, for the purposes of identifying new targets. Vaughters also says that it pays to be discerning.
‘For example, the Ronde de l’Isard stage race in France is seen as one of the showcases for under-23 riders, and a lot of teams recruit on the basis of who does well there, but there can be big variations between two editions of the race. They tend to do a lot of the same climbs year after year, so you can time them, work out their climbing speed or VAM [vertical metres gained per hour] and compare year on year,’ Vaughters says. He also uses other gauges, he says, that he is not at liberty or willing to disclose.
Our sense, though, is that even teams in the vanguard like Team Sky and Garmin may only be scratching the surface. Not that it’s surprising or their fault, especially not when a much richer sport like professional soccer has only recently begun substituting grizzled old scouts in flat caps with computer nerds who have never kicked a ball.
In the mid-1990s, a handful of visionary managers across Europe, including the Frenchman Arsène Wenger and the Norwegian Egil Olsen, were already using primitive match analysis software, but it was only when management consultancy Opta began logging and publishing data for Premier League matches in 1996 that the geeks started to reach a wider audience.
Today Opta employs well over 100 people, has offices in London, Munich, Milan, Madrid, Montevideo and New York, and logs data for thousands of matches every weekend. As of two years ago, they are also involved in cycling, computing the IG Pro Cycling Index on behalf of spread-betting company IG Markets.
The aim of that is to offer a better answer to the question of who is the world’s greatest cyclist than the official, UCI equivalent – but Opta could one day provide a much more extensive and more useful range of statistics on bike racing.
In football, Premier League clubs driving the statistical revolution like Manchester City, Arsenal, Chelsea, Fulham and Liverpool employ up to eight analysts each, while still also relying heavily on customised data produced for them, at a price, by Opta. The search, though, for the holy grail – a statistic which would provide the ultimate gauge of an individual player’s influence on a game – goes on. One day, assembling the best football team in the world could be as easy as looking down the first eleven names in a spreadsheet and finding the nearest available Emirates sheikh to finance their purchase.
In cycling, who knows what a company like Opta – or indeed an anorak in their bedroom – could one day come up with?
‘I’d love a ranking of the kilometres every rider spends in breakaways throughout the course of a season. That would really help us,’ says Gianni Savio, the manager of the Androni Giocattoli team. And what if such a league table proved irrefutably that breakaways were, on balance, a complete waste of a team’s resources? Evidence like that could change bike races beyond recognition, just as some of Beane’s discoveries have changed baseball. More likely, more mundanely, the stats would be misleading or inconclusive.
‘Okay, it might be interesting to know that a guy gets in a lot of breaks, but just because he gets in breaks for one team, it doesn’t mean that he’ll be able to do it with another team. At HTC our guys were never allowed to go away,’ says Rolf Aldag.
Nonetheless, there could surely be endless information that might give teams that knew how to use it an edge. For example, under which weather conditions is an attack on the Poggio most likely to succeed in Milan-San Remo? What percentage of sprints does Mark Cavendish win when he begins his acceleration 200 metres from the line, and what percentage when he lets rip from 250 metres? Sky and one or two other teams are already examining contingencies like this – albeit on a relatively small scale. But Duncan Alexander, the head of content at Opta in the UK and a long-time lover of professional cycling, can foresee a day when number-crunching plays a much bigger role in their decision-making.
‘Cycling is interesting in that it’s the ultimate sport, but it’s only really the leaders who get to express their value in terms of results,’ Alexander tells me.
‘I think, consequently, most people know what the big stars can do. Where it could be much more interesting is with domestiques.
‘It’s very difficult to rate them with objective data at the moment. Sometimes, it seems to me, it’s more a case of their perceived value being affected by who they know.
‘We could do a lot more with cycling, but it relies on manpower and actually watching the races,’ he continues. ‘For example, for any good assessment of breakaways, you’d need to see whole stages, and they’re not always broadcast.
‘A lot of the action often happens in the first hour, which is only televised at major tours. But, yes, even if I’m biased, I do believe there would be value in it if a team decided to invest in analysis like the football clubs are now.
‘For instance, if you know that if you cover an attack on the Poggio eight times of 10 that the race will finish in a sprint nine times out of 10, and you’ve got the best sprinter, it becomes very interesting.’
So how far will the trend develop, and how quickly? Well, the Sky approach has already turned even some conservative heads, although not every other team has the means or intelligence to mimic Dave Brailsford. It seems likely that Brailsford, Kerrison and Sky’s other coaches will continue to lead the way in terms of data-guided race strategy – not that they will always tell us what they’re up to.
‘The problem with all of this is that, if someone does latch on to something, everyone follows and the advantage is lost,’ notes Alexander. What we do know is that, if Stapleton was inspired by Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s, for what it’s worth, so is Brailsford.
‘What he did was take a really refreshing, clean review of the standard thought processes that had developed over a period of God knows how long,’ Brailsford said of Beane in Cycle Sport. ‘In baseball, they talk about a player having “the full set” if they are good at certain things, but to have someone come in and say, “Are we measuring the right things?” was refreshing… Beane stood back and said he wasn’t going to go with conventional wisdom. Baseball does lend itself fantastically to stats, much more so than road racing, but I do think it’s refreshing that there was an industry where everyone thought in one way until a guy came along and said, “Hang on a minute.”’
The bad news is this: the incentive to employ any such lateral thinking was largely undermined when the UCI introduced the WorldTour in 2011. Under the system, rankings points scored by a team’s riders the previous season become the sine qua non for entry into the most prestigious races, even if those points were amassed in a different jersey. This throws up the potential for farcical scenarios like Euskaltel’s rumoured move for the newly-retired Oscar Freire and his stockpile of points at the end of 2012 – even if Freire had no intention of racing in 2013. Perhaps more to the point, according to Bob Stapleton it has created an ‘inefficient market’ – a false meritocracy that flatters the rich and penalises the poor. Star academies like HTC-Highroad, says Stapleton, are being hustled out of the sport because the WorldTour system takes all emphasis away from rider development and also teamwork.
‘You can’t afford to take a bunch of young guys and build them up like we did, because that’s a whole load of riders in your team with no points,’ Stapleton argues.
‘The system plays right into the hands of the super-rich: the Katushas, the BMCs, the Skys. It also defeats the principal of teamwork; an individual rider can’t focus on working for the team, because he knows he might finish the season with no points and no value. It’s the death of the team-mate. I had a ton of arguments with Pat McQuaid about this, because it totally undermined the stability of our team. If you ask me, if you want people to cheat, this is also the best advert for it. It totally gutted the fundamental goals of our team.’
And, to an extent, gutted the application of any Moneyball-inspired method of recruitment in cycling. Suddenly, in the scrap for starting berths in the major tours and the Classics, only one number matters: a rider’s ranking points.
A decade ago, Cofidis owner François Migraine was widely mocked for his obsession with a previous incarnation of the UCI rankings. Some riders – the Spaniard Bingen Fernandez was one that Migraine often name-checked – earned a contract and made a career out of sprinting for top 20 or top 30 finishes and the accompanying ranking points. Like we said, other team owners and managers laughed. Now they are reduced to doing the same.
‘The contracts being signed by riders these days are heavily, heavily linked to how many points they’ve got. You can almost put a dollar number on every point,’ says Stapleton.
To some fans, of course, this will make no odds. Billy Beane’s rationalisation of what was a highly emotive, often illogical melting pot of variables, like all sports, was in itself deeply unromantic; what’s the difference, they’ll say, if suddenly players or riders or whatever are being selected on the basis of one numerical criterion, like, say, ranking points, rather than some whizz-bang formula concocted by a geek behind his computer?
And they’ll be wrong, because the reason that Moneyball became such a hit, as a book and a film, and the reason that Michael Lewis wrote it, was that it contained a parable of enduring, universal and irresistible allure, regardless of the metaphor in which it is packaged: Moneyball was, you see, essentially the story of David outsmarting Goliath.
But partly thanks to the UCI, in cycling the nerds have largely been kept at bay. For a while yet, it looks safe for the old guard to re-enter the building.
fn1 At the time of writing, Scimone had more on his mind than his underperforming Russians: according to La Gazzetta dello Sport, a Padua magistrate suspected the agent and sports doctor Michele Ferrari of conspiracy to launder money, tax evasion and facilitating doping. Scimone admitted that he was under investigation but strongly denied the allegations.
A freelance journalist specialising in cycling, Daniel Friebe has covered 12 Tours de France and all the major races on the international calendar. He is the roving European Editor of procycling magazine. In 2008, Daniel collaborated with Mark Cavendish on the best-selling Boy Racer (Ebury Press). He is also the author of Mountain High (Quercus) and Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal (Ebury). Daniel has written on cycling, football, golf, cricket and tennis for publications including The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph, FourFourTwo, Spin Cricket Monthly and Outdoor Fitness magazine.