Tour de France -- 2020 Style

I doubt too many people will remember 2020 as their favorite year.  The global pandemic has taken lives and altered what most people think of as a "normal" life.  The sports world has been rocked by the pandemic, too.  From March Madness being canceled to my Vandy baseball team being denied a chance to repeat as champs to the Indy 500 being run in August, nothing about sports feels normal.

The 2020 Tour de France had to be postponed from its normal hold on the month of July to a late August start.  This year's Tour de France will take place before the Giro d'Italia.  How will cyclists perform in the 107th Tour de France in such a crazy year?  How will redesigned training schedules and what could only be strained personal lives affect what we cycling fans see once racing commences?  There won't likely be fake fans as in baseball, but we may not see the large crowds we are used to seeing on the big climbs and at finish lines.

I'm anxious to see how my research group's model performs this year.  With so much uncertainty surrounding the months that led to this day before the Tour de France begins, it's impossible to predict how well our model will do this year.  Will cyclists be rested and faster than usual?  Will they be so unaccustomed to the late August start that racing will be slow?  I certainly don't know.  But I'm excited to watch some elite cycling!

Stage 1 begins tomorrow in the southeastern French coastal city of Nice.  The 156-km (96.9-mi) stage has riders looping up north before returning to Nice for the flat sprint to the finish.  Our prediction is given below.

• Stage 01:  3h 41' 53" (prediction)

Noah Baumgartner, a third-year physics major here at the University of Lynchburg, joins me again this year in modeling the Tour de France.  We don't have a "pandemic" parameter for our computer model!  I only hope that once the stage begins, the cyclists once again show us what the best of the best can do.