I have not written a blog post since last year's Tour de France summary. Most of 2022 had me busy with media work, especially the latter half with the World Cup. Though I am woefully behind on social media, I put most of my media work on my professional Facebook page. But I will do as in past years and write a blog post for each stage of this year's Tour de France. Rising sophomore and University of Lynchburg physics major Adam Sanders has worked on acquiring terrain data for the stages. The model I have developed over the past 20 years, with great help from my students, will once again be employed to generate stage-winning time predictions. We do not model a particular cyclist; we try only to predict the winning time based on the typical cyclist who wins a given stage type.
Stage 1 of the 110th Tour de France commences and ends in the Spanish city of Bilbao. The 182-km (113-mi) medium-mountain stage takes riders on a clockwise loop at the northern coast of Spain. This year's race looks to have more climbing stages, so there could be a lot of early jockeying for position in the general classification. Our prediction is given below.
- Stage 01: 4h 21' 07" (prediction)
It is always exciting to see how our first prediction does. After watching the Netflix series Tour de France: Unchained, I was reminded again of just how much we cannot know when it comes to modeling such a complicated sporting event. There is so much team strategy that we are not privy to. But it is a lot of fun nonetheless to put physics and modeling to the test!
