Saturday, 3 May 2025

Withdrawals in the Women's Tour de France 2024

For those who don't know, maths is not my subject. I enjoy statistics and it's the only thing that stopped me failing A-Level maths, because it makes sense. 

So when so many members of the Tashkent City Women Professional Cycling Team and the Human Powered Health Team withdrew in different stages of the race that the lines in the Kaplan Meier graphs go into the negative, the maths part of my brain is screaming because you can't have negative survival rates, and the statistician in me says either those teams were awful or something appalling happened. Kaplan Meier survival curves split by teams. Two lines go negative. One is an oakleaf green which stands for Tashkent City Women Professional Cycling Team. It goes into the negative at stage 1, then flips again into the positive at stage 4. The brown line that flips into the negative at stage 8 is the Human Powered Health team. When the green line for Tashkent then goes positive again because the amount of riders they lost in another stage versus the amount that remained, I become reasonably convinced of my "awful or appalling happened" thesis. 

It turns out there's something more interesting going on with the Tashkent City Women Professional Cycling Team. 

They are a Continental Tour team who gamed the system to get a women's Tour de France invite, because that was their aim (https://www.rouleur.cc/blogs/the-rouleur-journal/200-euro-salaries-inexperienced-youngsters-and-gaming-the-system-tashkent-city-justify-their-place-at-the-tour-de-france-femmes). And that's before we point out that most of them were teenagers, in a sport that acknowledges it's hard to finish the race that young (https://www.cyclingnews.com/news/people-can-think-what-they-want-tashkent-city-women-respond-to-criticism-after-four-riders-abandon-tour-de-france-femmes/) 

I'd also like to raise a toast to Yanina Kuskova, the one Tashkent City rider to finish. She's now riding for Euskadi. 

This race did seem to have a lot of withdrawals. Bar chart of withdrawals in the 2024 TDFF. Tashkent City finished with only 1 rider. Arkea, FDJ Suez and Uno-X all finished with all their riders. 

It appears that stages 4, 7 and 8 were diabolical. Pie chart. Three stages, 4, 7 and 8, contain three quarters of the withdrawals. 
The all-rider Kaplan Meier chart also bears this out. Kaplan Meier chart of all withdrawals from the TDFF 2024. It drops to 0.975 after one stage, and stays that way till stage 3, then drops to 0.9 by stage 4. It continues to drop, but more slowly, to 0.85 at stage 6. It then drops to 0.77 at stage 7 and 0.7 at stage 8. Over the years I've been doing this for both the men's and women's Tour de France, this is is the lowest percentage of finishers. 


Stage 7 was again general evil, building up to the Alpe d'Huez. 

 Stage 8 was the Alpe d'Huez itself. Meet the Alpe - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpe_d%27Huez#Cycle_racing 

Interestingly, despite that, none of the withdrawals were due to racers finishing outside the time limit, they were either mid-stage abandons, or did not start the stage withdrawals. Pie chart of withdrawals by type. Orange, withdrawals due to mid-stage abandonments, are 72% of all withdrawals, while did not start the stage abandonments were 28% of all withdrawals.
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