A weighted approach to identifying key team contributors: Individual productivity in professional road cycling

TL;DR

This paper introduces a weighted productivity measure for professional cyclists that better captures individual contributions within team efforts, addressing limitations of traditional ranking systems.

Contribution

It proposes a novel weighted metric combining race points, redistribution, and CoScore to evaluate individual impact relative to teammates in cycling.

Findings

The new measure provides a more comprehensive cyclist evaluation.

It addresses biases in existing ranking systems.

Applied to 2023 data, it improves recognition of domestiques.

Abstract

Assessing an individual's contribution within a team remains a fundamental challenge across many domains, particularly when recognition for collective achievements is limited to only a few members. This issue is especially important in professional road cycling, where personal success depends on both individual talent and group effort. Existing points-based ranking systems tend to disproportionately reward high-scoring team leaders while undervaluing domestiques - riders who sacrifice personal success to support group performance. To better capture a rider's impact on the team, we propose a weighted measure of cycling productivity that factors in race points, a redistribution metric, and an adapted version of the CoScore formula. This formula assesses an individual's productivity relative to their teammates' performance. Using data from the 2023 season, we show that our approach offers a comprehensive evaluation of professional cyclists, addressing key limitations of existing ranking systems.