Look at the Stats! Season Wrap-Up

Look At The Stats is Mark Shilton’s nerdy project, merging his interests of following mountain bike downhill and playing with data. This is a special, post-season analysis, looking at the various trends and the pursuit of “the perfect season”…

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So the dust has settled, the champagne has been sprayed for another year and the riders go off to relax after a job well done or to lick their wounds and start planning how it could all go better next year. They say you learn best from your mistakes so I thought I’d give you a bumper run down of where riders won and lost it throughout the season. Prior warning, this is a long one so put the kettle on, make yourself and cuppa and settle in for some stats!

The battle for the crown

The obvious place to start is the season long tussle between Gee Atherton and Steve Smith for the overall title. You can see below that whilst Gee dominated the early season, there was a key shift in momentum around the middle of the season. Is there an argument for giving Remi Thirion some credit for Steve Smith’s overall win? Without his incredible performance on the final sector at Vallnord, Gee would have won three in a row and his momentum could well have been unstoppable. As it was, he had a big bobble in the final sector, Thirion took the win, and then he had a few crashes at Mte Ste Anne whilst Smith was charging. Whilst Gee was faltering Smith just relentlessly ate into the 200 points he had to claw back with awesome consistency as we’ll see later on.

The power of being consistent

It sounds blindingly obvious, but it is true that the man who was clearly the most consistent rider across the season was the deserved winner of the World Cup. I’ve stitched together all of the ranking heatmaps for the season here and you can quite easily see Smith’s unbelievable knack of being on the pace throughout the whole season. The only even slightly light area on the whole of Smith’s line is 13th fastest on the top section of Vallnord. Other than that he was in the top 10 in all of the remaining 17 sectors raced. In contrast you can clearly see how Atherton lost time in Sector 3 in Vallnord and Mte Ste Anne and his through his unplanned tree hug in Sector 2 at Hafjell.

Looking down the list it’s also interesting to see little streaks of form show up and die away for individual riders. Mick Hannah started well, had an average mid season around Mte Ste Anne/Hafjell and then came back strongly in Leogang. The same is true for Sam Blenkinsop but his lean patch came at Val Di Sole and Vallnord. You can also see Aaron Gwin’s struggles at Fort William followed by a slow return to form that was cut short by injury. Hopefully he’ll be back at full gas next season to give Atherton and Smith a run for their money…

Another way to see the most consistent riders is to show how many fastest, top 5 and top 10 sectors each rider had. Here’s the top 20 overall riders and although Gee Atherton managed the most fastest sectors with five, Smith was clearly more consistent with an amazing 15 out of 18 top 5 sectors across the season and 17 out of 18 in the top 10.

Fast starter or a sprint finisher?

Just in case you’ve not worked out that I am a serious statto at heart, this is probably my geekiest chart yet. I wondered whether there were any riders who were particularly good starters but who fade in the final stages or vice versa. So, I plotted the same sector ranking data but split it by Sectors 1, 2 and 3 and the results are really interesting. The closer to the right each dot is, the better the position so a good rider will have dots clustered to the right. Steve Smith’s consistency shines through here too with a set of dots clustered way to the right for each sector. It’s really interesting to see that gee Atherton was next lower then third fastest at the first split all season, but it was in sectors 2 and 3 that things started to go wrong for him and Sector 3 was certainly his least favourite part of the race with three placings around 20th.

A few other riders stand out too. Mick Hannah appears to have enjoyed the middle part of his races this year but had mixed results in Sectors 1 and 3 and Sam Blenkinsop was a slow starter but a hard winter of training seems to have paid off with consistently good results in Sector 3 throughout the season. The other rider who stands out for me here is Troy Brosnan, simply because he was clearly running pretty consistently all season. You can see this in the heatmap and bar chart above as well but he was consistently just slightly off the top pace of Atherton, Smith and Minnaar. He also seemed to start slowly with a cluster around 20th place then speed up as the races progressed with better looking results in Sector 2 and then better again in Sector 3. This his first full season back from injury so it is interesting to see this pattern and I’ll be intrigued to see if a season of successful racing will give him the confidence to push it harder next year.

The running clock and the pursuit of the perfect season

If you’ve been following the DH World Cup for a while you’ll have seen Dirt’s running clock before, an alternative measure where, instead of points, you just add up the times for each round to see who finished the whole World Cup quickest. One bit that hasn’t been done before as far as I can see (and I have to thank ‘Diogo’ who commented on the final Look At The Stats of the season over on the Dirt Magazine website for the idea for this!) is to take the fastest time for every sector and work out the ‘perfect’ season. So here it is, all 23 mins, 06.256 seconds of it!

The perfect season…

Round	Sector	Rider	Time
Fort William	1	Gee Atherton	01:00.021
	2	Brook Macdonald	03:01.918
	3	Michael Hannah	00:34.089
Val Di Sole	1	Gee Atherton	00:58.388
	2	Greg Minnaar	01:19.878
	3	Gee Atherton	00:53.898
Vallnord	1	Gee Atherton	00:40.124
	2	Samuel Hill	02:28.409
	3	Rémi Thirion	01:06.399
Mte Ste Anne	1	Gee Atherton	02:47.023
	2	Samuel Blenkinsop	00:46.778
	3	Greg Minnaar	00:25.369
Hafjell	1	Steve Smith	01:22.213
	2	Steve Smith	01:10.822
	3	Samuel Blenkinsop	01:07.139
Leogang	1	Steve Smith	02:21.041
	2	Loic Bruni	00:31.014
	3	Michael Hannah	00:31.733
Overall			23:06.256

Maybe not that interesting in itself, but if you take a look at the running clock and see how close each rider got to this ‘perfect time’ we see yet another indication of Steve Smith’s unbelievable consistency across the season. Although he only had three fastest sectors, he was only 3.5 seconds behind the perfect season!

A few of the top riders didn’t qualify for this as they didn’t complete all six races which threw up a few interesting placings in the top 10. I wrote above about Troy Brosnan’s consistency if not full on pace and this shines through here with the third fastest running clock of the year, leapfrogging Hannah, Bruni and Blenkinsop compared to the points standings. In fact only 26 riders got a time for all six, underlining the difficulty of the sport in staying fit, focused and upright whilst riding right at the limit.

The running clock top 10

Name	Time	Gap	Gap from perfect
Steve Smith	23:09.816		+00:03.560
Gee Atherton	23:18.697	+08.881	+00:12.441
Troy Brosnan	23:36.222	+26.406	+00:29.966
Samuel Blenkinsop	23:37.422	+27.606	+00:31.166
Loic Bruni	23:44.936	+35.120	+00:38.680
Marcelo Gutierrez Villegas	23:47.440	+37.624	+00:41.184
Michael Hannah	23:47.801	+37.985	+00:41.545
Rémi Thirion	23:48.222	+38.406	+00:41.966
Brendan Fairclough	24:00.970	+51.154	+00:54.714
Marc Beaumont	24:07.272	+57.456	+01:01.016

The final word

So there you have it, a whole season’s drama, excitement, victory and defeat distilled into a few charts and graphs. It might not be quite as exciting as watching the real thing live but I hope that my ramblings have helped give another angle on the incredible skill levels, temperament and fine margins that the top riders in the world operate at. Steve Smith’s whole year of preparation, practice and training came down to whether he could deliver the goods in a specific 23 minutes of that year. There’s not many of us could handle that pressure. Bye for now and see you next year!

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With the season under wraps and winter on its way, the time-honoured tradition of rampant off-season speculation begins. A big thanks to Mark for all the hard work and analysis he’s provided over the course of the series, and we’re looking forward to the 2014 edition already.