Jazzing Up The Tour de France

The first article on cycling in a while and it is all about the Tour de France.

ASO tried to change up the TdF by making it all excitement, all mountains and the last two days has backfired significantly. Even the keenest of fans were tempted to (or did have) a nap on stage 5. Stage 6 looked like it could be a breakthrough moment as Ineos-Grenadiers (formerly Sky, Ineos) went to the front, but that was only to keep them in position for a narrow climb and not to attack.

Lots of tweets about how to liven up the opening week, many good options have been suggested about the race profiles, but I’m going to give credit to the ASO they were called to change the race, and they did – just didn’t work. I could go into how they changed it and why it worked and why it did not, but others can do that a lot better.

My thinking, inspired by Robyn Davidson and Mike Franchetti was to change up the in-race competitions outside of the GC and jazz up the TdF.

UCI limits races to four competition jerseys and then there is the team competition and most combative rider for the previous stage. So, we are going to restrict my ideas to just three (plus the GC).

Jersey 1, GC: The Race must have a GC Competition, so that is 1 jersey used up.

Jersey 2, Consistent Finisher: I would go on for ages about how I would change up the Green Jersey, but I do think that a race does need to reward the stage finishes without creating safety hazards. My idea is pretty simple and that the first 10 finishers of each stage get 11 points, 10 points, 9 points and so on. The final addition to the rule is that anyone who finishes on the same time as the 10th over the line gets 1 point - could be 161 riders or could be 0.

If this looks sort of familiar it’s because it is inspired by Will Newton and his Fantasy Five’s competition he use to run before going over to GCN.

Quick Screenshot of Rules:

Top 10 Rankings: Deceunick – Quickstep lead the charge with 1st and 2nd after 2 stages.

Jersey 3, Combativity Jersey: The award turns into a jersey and it uses the Polka Dot’s a symbol of its inspiration. Now, this is limited by the data I can get quickly and easily (if anyone can send me to a place with it all required information that would be amazing), but I still think it’s a great idea. This is also the inspiration for the article.

At the moment, we have immediate sprints and KOM sprints as well as bonus sprints - it’s a mess basically. So, what if we jazz up the KOM competition and make it more exciting. My approach would be to make it like golf (lowest score wins) with the 1st rider over the KOM/Sprint/Bonus Sprint getting the lowest amount of points until we get to zero points. As it is inspired by the KOM competition, I used the KOM point scorer totals to judge how many people should score points.

However, this is where it changes because you can only get points if you are in the breakaway. (If there are 8 people in the breakaway, the default score is 0 points for anyone in the peloton and the 8th rider gets -1, the 7th rider gets -2 and so on). This means that the Polka Dots can’t be won by 1-2 day attack from a failed GC rider (cough Bardet cough) but a 3-week effort.

As it is still the KOM inspired competition, anything outside of Summit finishes always count as you can get points from the peloton, but Summit finishes no longer count towards the jersey. This is all about making it more achievable and more rewarding to be aggressive throughout all 3 weeks.

I am giving a bonus point for anyone that got into the breakaway (even if they failed themselves).

So far, the default score is 0 points after 6 stages with the two leaders, Cosnefroy and Perez. on -18 with Gogl, Van Avermaet and Lutensko on -13.

Top 10 of Combative Jersey Competition:

Jersey 4, The Debut Jersey: Its all well and nice that we see in theory under 25 riders have a jersey to compete against each other while the older, better riders go after Yellow. Only a slight issue is that Bernal, Pogacar, Higuita, Daniel Martinez were all favourites of some sort going into the race.

My solution would be a debutant jersey so the leader on GC of any Tour de France debutants would wear a special jersey to show off how well they are doing for their first time in the race.

Top 5 of the Debutant GC:

Onto the future: I plan to explore different options for KOM Jersey and perhaps other jerseys on the rest day so if you have any suggestions just reply on twitter or comment.