Olympic RR: It's all about the bike

The Olympic Road Race shares an otherwise rare trait with the World Championships in that, as a professional bike race, members of the same team don't each ride the same bike. National teams are typically composed of members of more than one trade team, where riders use the bikes assigned by their trade teams. So an analysis of results by bike goes beyond an analysis of teams.


I used the following formula for points for a placing, rounding to the nearest integer:
points = 21 - place + 80 [ exp([1 - place] / 2] - exp(-10) ]
In other words, for places 1 - 20: 100,68,47,35,27,22,18,15,13,12,11,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1


The results: despite missing out on the gold and silver, Cervelo takes the top honors over Orbea. With 4 Orbea-sponsored Webcor/Alto Velo women in the women's race, Orbea has a good chance to take the road overall, but Cervelo sponsors the powerful Cervelo-Life Force team including Team USA's top rider Kristen Armstrong, so could well hold onto its top place. Of course, if I add in the time trial results, all bets are off, but it looks good for Cervelo, which has a number of excellent time trialists in both the men's and women's fields.


Anyway, enough... here's the data:
















#bikepoints
1Cervelo118
2Orbea100
3Specialized71
4Giant35
5Ridley21
6De Rosa18
7Colnago12
8Trek11
9Pinarello10
10Time7
11FRW5
12Felt4
13Cannondale1




Of course, I could apply this same formula to teams. However, this is enough for now.

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