Charting the Giro d’Italia: How the first ‘week’ unfolded
VeloClub member Cameron Harris is back again with his Grand Tour charts. These data visualisations help us to see bike races in interesting and engaging ways, and his charts from the 2020 Giro d’Italia are no different.
As you scroll on down you’ll see a bunch of interactive charts that will help tell the story of the race, plus some of our analysis of those charts. Let us know in the comments below what else you see as you play around with these graphs.
– There’ll always be a lot of movement between stage 1 and stage 2 in a Grand Tour GC swarm chart. This time we saw big changes from stage 2 to stage 3 as well, courtesy of the stage 3 uphill finish. That stage has had the biggest impact on shaping the top of the GC so far.
– You can tell that stage 5 was a tough one in the mountains, judging by the amount of movement. Stage 9 too. But where stage 5 saw only minor changes near the top of the GC (e.g. stage 3 breakaway winner Jonathan Caicedo dropping from second to 39th), stage 9 caused more of a shake-up among the contenders.
– You can see the stage 9 shake-up a little more clearly here.
– Joao Almeida has a handy little lead going into the first rest day thanks to a great stage 1 ITT and a strong ride on the stage 3 uphill finish.
– The top 18 are pretty tightly packed together: within three minutes of the overall lead. This will change in the weeks ahead, of course, but for now plenty of riders are still in the mix.
– This chart shows the cluster of GC times even more clearly. The gap from first to second (30 seconds) is the biggest gap between any riders until you get down to 18th and 19th place (where the gap is 1:21).
– Peter Sagan took the early lead in the points classification but ever since Demare won stage 6 it’s been all purple all the time for the Frenchman. It would seem Sagan is likely to miss out on another Grand Tour points classification this year.
– Jonathan Caicedo (stage 3) and Filippo Ganna (stage 5) showed that a stage win from the breakaway is a great way to earn yourself plenty of KOM points. Ruben Guerreiro took it to another level though. On stage 9, his stage win in the mountains took him from having zero KOM points at the start of the day to leading the KOM classification on 84 points.
– Guerreiro looks like he’ll have some competition from Giovanni Visconti whose already been in several breakaways and looks well placed to have a tilt at the KOM jersey.
– Keep an eye out for the time trial specialists in the lead-up to the stage 14 ITT. Riders who lose a bunch of time and look like they’re doing it easy could be resting up ahead of a full-gas tilt at the ITT.
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