More riders complain about wattages set at tempo (by Sky)

[kwikki]

Well yes. It's about associations being made that shouldn't be made. Brailsford is a master at presenting something as evidence of clean riding when it is no such thing. (I say master...but it's not really)

 

[Armchair Cyclist]

Re: More riders complain about wattages set at tempo (by Sky

No, more money does not mean more success for no reason other than more money.

It does. Multiple studies have been done of the Premier League (a completely free market system, like cycling and unlike baseball), which show the correlation between wage spend and eventual league table finishing position is almost exactly 1:1. In other words, if your salary bill is the fifth highest in the league, you will in well over 95% of seasons finish fifth.

Can you cite one of these "multiple studies" that show that the 5th highest salary budget team comes 5th in the Premier League 95% of the time. Sounds like you are making up statistics to make your assumption sound like more than an assumption.

Using this for the season just finished, Spearman's rho = 0.43: if you consider Leicester to be too much of an outlier, leaving them out of the equation gives 0.59, still nowhere near the 1:1 correlation you claim.

 

[Benotti69]

Leicester City blew the wage thing out of the water.

 

[Zinoviev Letter]

Re: Re:

More money = more wins is simply not true. It may have a tendency to be true, there are certainly examples where it is true, but it is untrue often enough that it is not an explanation in and of itself. I really don't see how that can be argued.

I simply tire of Sky apologists (for the most part, and certainly NOT including ZL in this) using "bigger budget" as some kind of argument that they are doing this clean. The argument does not hold up to any examination of the logic.

Now if someone is to say "they win more because their budget allows them to do X/Y/Z specific things, and here is specifically how these things give them N amount of improvement over the field", then there is a conversation to be had.

Any advantage can be squandered, or it can be usefully taken advantage of to varying degrees. Having a great deal more money than most of the competition is just such an advantage. Sky are not squandering this particular advantage.

How they are primarily making use of it is not complicated and not the province of "marginal gains". They have spent their surplus cash on hiring a whole bunch of riders who are either fringe GC men or are riders who have sometimes produced excellent climbing performances without showing consistency or are simply obvious big climbing talents. They have hired so many of these riders that some of them can't even make the Tour team as domestiques, which is also fine from the point of view a super rich team, because they provide competition for places and make sure that there is a top level full train available regardless of some rider being off form. And then they've put them to a use that maximises their strengths and doesn't require three week consistency from anyone who has never demonstrated it before.

This is the part of the Sky story that really is obviously about buying success. It's not about transforming anyone who came up through their ranks or came in as a non-climber. There's nothing hugely mysterious about this element of their approach - buy in the best available riders to form a train, using greater resources to make them offers that other teams can't or won't match. This is essentially a variant of what rich teams do across sports (with the partial exception of some US sports where the league rigs the game in various ways to give a leg up to weaker outfits).

That this is particular issue is explainable through Sky wielding one huge advantage, money, in no way indicates that there are or aren't other advantages in play. One of the problems with this forum, and with a lot of cycling debate in general, is that we tend to see every issue and every differential through the doping lense. But the fact that doping influences outcomes does not mean that all outcomes are only explained by doping. People on both sides of this argument consistently make simplistic mono-causal assumptions about the sport. So those who think that Sky are doping refuse to believe that there are any other real advantages that one team might possess over another, even so blindingly obvious an example as having a multiple of the budget of most of their rivals. While those who want Sky to be clean approach the debate as if demonstrating that Sky are richer and that being richer gives them advantages somehow implies cleanliness. These issues are distinct - being able to spend big bucks on buying in support riders is an advantage independent of whether or not anyone or any team is juiced to the moon.

 

[Zinoviev Letter]

Re:

Leicester City blew the wage thing out of the water.

That is willfully obtuse even by your standards.

 

[red_flanders]

Re: Re:

More money = more wins is simply not true. It may have a tendency to be true, there are certainly examples where it is true, but it is untrue often enough that it is not an explanation in and of itself. I really don't see how that can be argued.

I simply tire of Sky apologists (for the most part, and certainly NOT including ZL in this) using "bigger budget" as some kind of argument that they are doing this clean. The argument does not hold up to any examination of the logic.

Now if someone is to say "they win more because their budget allows them to do X/Y/Z specific things, and here is specifically how these things give them N amount of improvement over the field", then there is a conversation to be had.

Any advantage can be squandered, or it can be usefully taken advantage of to varying degrees. Having a great deal more money than most of the competition is just such an advantage. Sky are not squandering this particular advantage.

How they are primarily making use of it is not complicated and not the province of "marginal gains". They have spent their surplus cash on hiring a whole bunch of riders who are either fringe GC men or are riders who have sometimes produced excellent climbing performances without showing consistency or are simply obvious big climbing talents. They have hired so many of these riders that some of them can't even make the Tour team as domestiques, which is also fine from the point of view a super rich team, because they provide competition for places and make sure that there is a top level full train available regardless of some rider being off form. And then they've put them to a use that maximises their strengths and doesn't require three week consistency from anyone who has never demonstrated it before.

This is the part of the Sky story that really is obviously about buying success. It's not about transforming anyone who came up through their ranks or came in as a non-climber. There's nothing hugely mysterious about this element of their approach - buy in the best available riders to form a train, using greater resources to make them offers that other teams can't or won't match. This is essentially a variant of what rich teams do across sports (with the partial exception of some US sports where the league rigs the game in various ways to give a leg up to weaker outfits).

That this is particular issue is explainable through Sky wielding one huge advantage, money, in no way indicates that there are or aren't other advantages in play. One of the problems with this forum, and with a lot of cycling debate in general, is that we tend to see every issue and every differential through the doping lense. But the fact that doping influences outcomes does not mean that all outcomes are only explained by doping. People on both sides of this argument consistently make simplistic mono-causal assumptions about the sport. So those who think that Sky are doping refuse to believe that there are any other real advantages that one team might possess over another, even so blindingly obvious an example as having a multiple of the budget of most of their rivals. While those who want Sky to be clean approach the debate as if demonstrating that Sky are richer and that being richer gives them advantages somehow implies cleanliness. These issues are distinct - being able to spend big bucks on buying in support riders is an advantage independent of whether or not anyone or any team is juiced to the moon.

It is certainly true that they've hired a couple of good climbers, and this certainly supports your budget argument. I also agree that the budget and doping topics are distinct. That said, they've also turned more than a few nobodies into guys who shred the peloton at a rate I find unbelievable. When this is pointed out, there are far too many responses that excuse this or point to big budget as the reason.

Thanks for your responses, very thoughtful and well considered.

 

[gooner]

Re:

Leicester City blew the wage thing out of the water.

That's wrong in the first place. There will be always be the odd exception to it but in football overall, league finishes strongly correlates with wage spend.

See Soccernomics.

 

[Armchair Cyclist]

If you want to ignore Leicester, would you rather think of Chelsea (biggest salary, came 10th)? Or Southampton (6th in table, 14 on the salary scale)? Or relegated teams Newcastle and Aston Villa (7th and 12th in salaries table respectively)? Sunderland (10th salary) at least avoided relegation by coming 17th, or maybe Watford and Bournemouth who came 13th and 16th instead of 19th and 20th?

Can you point at a season that has a correlation coefficient > 0.75 ?

 

[pastronef]

Re: More riders complain about wattages set at tempo (by Sky

I found this on the WeightWeenies forum

I get that Sky has a ton of money, but literally how stupid are the other teams/GC guys?

Froome won the 17km in just over 30min. It wasn't hard to predict that it would be won at a speed at or over 20mph.

At those speeds aero gains matter, especially with no draft. Even with lots of climbing.

Quintana on shallow wheels on a TT bike, but Valverde on a disc? Aru, Porte, and others on road bikes with clip ons and almost no aero gear? They're either lazy, stupid, or both. At this point in the game with Sky being so focused it is equally lost by the others for not being equally as focused. Most people on Slow Twitch understand the optimal equipment to use, but these DS are letting their riders go out on unoptimized setups against a rider and team that they KNOW has simulated the climb and knows what speed it will be done at. It's really not all that difficult if you have millions of dollars to spend.

Seriously, hire 3 or 4 interns from some top school, give them the route and past times, have them calculate approximate speeds and then pick the optimal equipment. Have your rider do it in training to get used to it. And then lose maybe a minute less to Froome.

Then there is Froome being more mentally committed. He has been hated on and speculated more than anyone else, but remains calm and does his thing. People think he's boring for it, but he keeps doing it and keeps winning.

Sky also had the advantage of starting fresh with money and top tier status. This alone is big. They were able to pull staff from all over, but especially from their highly evidence/science based national track team. They weren't like a lot of teams who evolved from the ashes and organization of other teams and probably didn't have to deal with a lot of the baggage.

If the others have already given up then cycling has a problem much worse than doping- a bunch of cowards who don't have the professionalism to actually try. I don't get the impression that all that many teams are in the end of it. Tell Quintana he can only go home and train if he executes every training ride perfectly like Froome. It's been written that Porte has issues with this, I'm sure BMC have worked with him on it. Astana is rumored to have very regimented training with some riders/squads. And like Sky extend this same mentality to the domestiques and make them earn their Tour spots.

 

[Cannibal72]

Re: More riders complain about wattages set at tempo (by Sky

No, more money does not mean more success for no reason other than more money.

It does. Multiple studies have been done of the Premier League (a completely free market system, like cycling and unlike baseball), which show the correlation between wage spend and eventual league table finishing position is almost exactly 1:1. In other words, if your salary bill is the fifth highest in the league, you will in well over 95% of seasons finish fifth.

Can you cite one of these "multiple studies" that show that the 5th highest salary budget team comes 5th in the Premier League 95% of the time. Sounds like you are making up statistics to make your assumption sound like more than an assumption.

If I were citing stats to make my assumption seem like more of an assumption, I'd be doing it wrong. You're misreading my assumption anyway: I think Sky are doping. I just don't think their team-wide program is notably more effective and contains notably different drugs to everyone else's. Anyway, while you could have found this out for yourself, I will provide you with the studies from the goodness of my heart:

Stefan Szymanski, a professor at the University of Michigan, went back to 1978 in the English leagues. Found a 90% correlation.
In their book The Numbers Game, David Sally (Dartmouth professor) and Chris Anderson (Cornell professor) extend the study to Germany, Italy, and Spain, since 1992. 94%.
ESPN analysed top four position from 2001 to 2015. 84% of the time, the clubs with the four biggest wage bills took the 4 spots.

@Benotti69: you're making an elementary statistical mistake. These analyses take in dozens of seasons and at least eighteen clubs in each season. Taking Szymanski's study, for instance: his analysis is of 34 seasons, and let's take an average of 22 teams across the four leagues (it's changed). That equals 3264. Your example is 1 club in 1 league in 1 season. That doesn't invalidate a proper academic analysis. That falls within the 10%. That's a fluke. Cf http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/donald-trump-has-a-20-percent-chance-of-becoming-president/ for more details of this common mistake. In short: if you run the 2016 Paris-Roubaix 100 times, x number of times - with x likely being bigger than 90%, a domestique won't win from the breakaway. He did. That's why it's <100%. If you run Liverpool-Sunderland on the 17 October 2009 100 times, over 90% of the time the game won't be decided because the keeper tried to save a beach ball. But it was.
It's the law of large numbers: eventually there will always be something statistically improbable. 95% doesn't mean 'virtually certain' (as it does in colloquial speech), it means '19 out of every 20'. There will always be that 1/20 occurrence. Doesn't mean statisticians are wrong, it means they're right. They're just unlucky that the cases that people pay most attention to are the cases when the thing that happens once every twenty seasons happens - as it should, just not often.
Finally, who won La Liga this year? Team with 2nd highest wage bill. Who won Bundesliga? Highest wage-payers. Who won Serie A? That'd be the team with the highest wage bill. And Ligue 1? Etc etc ad nauseam.

 

[Zinoviev Letter]

The discussion about the Premier League has become garbled by someone casually overstating the uniformity with which wage spends correlate with finishing positions and with pedantic responses to that overstatement. Wage budgets are the main determinant of success in the Premier League, but not in the absolute sense that everyone finishes in budget order 95% of the time. Budgets determine instead what rough tier within the league a club belongs to and historically have been by far the best predictor of winners (almost always one of the two biggest wage spenders) and top four finishes (usually the four biggest spenders but with more exceptions).

This is the important (and indeed only relevant) point about the Premiership comparison. Budget matters and it matters enormously. Although why anyone thinks that's a controversial statement in the first place remains somewhat baffling to me.

http://www.espnfc.com/blog/tactics-and-analysis/67/post/2476622/premier-league-dominance-is-down-to-wages-but-can-be-broken
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fancy-stats/wp/2014/09/05/here-are-the-premier-league-teams-that-have-made-the-most-of-their-payrolls/

 

[Zinoviev Letter]

Re: Re:

It is certainly true that they've hired a couple of good climbers, and this certainly supports your budget argument. I also agree that the budget and doping topics are distinct. That said, they've also turned more than a few nobodies into guys who shred the peloton at a rate I find unbelievable. When this is pointed out, there are far too many responses that excuse this or point to big budget as the reason.

Thanks for your responses, very thoughtful and well considered.

Thanks.

As far as transformations go, I fully agree that there have been startling ones at Sky. And ones which cannot be explained by money in the same way.

 

[Cannibal72]

Re:

The discussion about the Premier League has become garbled by someone casually overstating the uniformity with which wage spends correlate with finishing positions and with pedantic responses to that overstatement. Wage budgets are the main determinant of success in the Premier League, but not in the absolute sense that everyone finishes in budget order 95% of the time. Budgets determine instead what rough tier within the league a club belongs to and historically have been by far the best predictor of winners (almost always one of the two biggest wage spenders) and top four finishes (usually the four biggest spenders but with more exceptions).

This is the important (and indeed only relevant) point about the Premiership comparison. Budget matters and it matters enormously. Although why anyone thinks that's a controversial statement in the first place remains somewhat baffling to me.

http://www.espnfc.com/blog/tactics-and-analysis/67/post/2476622/premier-league-dominance-is-down-to-wages-but-can-be-broken
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fancy-stats/wp/2014/09/05/here-are-the-premier-league-teams-that-have-made-the-most-of-their-payrolls/

As I say above, it's not quite 95%, and there's no studies on the PL alone. But it's 90% across the four leagues since '78, higher in Italy, and higher still with Germany and Spain included.

 

[Zinoviev Letter]

Re: Re:

The discussion about the Premier League has become garbled by someone casually overstating the uniformity with which wage spends correlate with finishing positions and with pedantic responses to that overstatement. Wage budgets are the main determinant of success in the Premier League, but not in the absolute sense that everyone finishes in budget order 95% of the time. Budgets determine instead what rough tier within the league a club belongs to and historically have been by far the best predictor of winners (almost always one of the two biggest wage spenders) and top four finishes (usually the four biggest spenders but with more exceptions).

This is the important (and indeed only relevant) point about the Premiership comparison. Budget matters and it matters enormously. Although why anyone thinks that's a controversial statement in the first place remains somewhat baffling to me.

http://www.espnfc.com/blog/tactics-and-analysis/67/post/2476622/premier-league-dominance-is-down-to-wages-but-can-be-broken
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fancy-stats/wp/2014/09/05/here-are-the-premier-league-teams-that-have-made-the-most-of-their-payrolls/

As I say above, it's not quite 95%, and there's no studies on the PL alone. But it's 90% across the four leagues since '78, higher in Italy, and higher still with Germany and Spain included.

I haven't got access to the book you are drawing this from, but I assume that the correlation is between top budgets and top finishes? Rather than there being 90% correlation between each individual team's place in the wage budget league and their finish in the actual league?

 

[argel]

Re: Re:

the point is to say HOW more money equals better performance in the case of Sky. How does their money get them better performance, specifically? There are possible answers to this, but just repeating the "bigger budget" talking point doesn't answer it.

More money = more wins is simply not true. It may have a tendency to be true, there are certainly examples where it is true, but it is untrue often enough that it is not an explanation in and of itself. I really don't see how that can be argued.

I simply tire of Sky apologists (for the most part, and certainly NOT including ZL in this) using "bigger budget" as some kind of argument that they are doing this clean. The argument does not hold up to any examination of the logic.

Now if someone is to say "they win more because their budget allows them to do X/Y/Z specific things, and here is specifically how these things give them N amount of improvement over the field", then there is a conversation to be had.

But we don't see that. We see talking points like "marginal gains" and "bigger budget" as if these stand up to any scrutiny. Which they do not.

People will believe what they want to believe.

Sorry but this is not true. This post was made 3 above mine and is a very good argument, Instead of addressing it, you've tried to ignore it and pretend there aren't well articulated arguments that money has had a major effect on Sky's success.

viewtopic.php?p=1980330#p1980330

 

[red_flanders]

Re: Re:

the point is to say HOW more money equals better performance in the case of Sky. How does their money get them better performance, specifically? There are possible answers to this, but just repeating the "bigger budget" talking point doesn't answer it.

More money = more wins is simply not true. It may have a tendency to be true, there are certainly examples where it is true, but it is untrue often enough that it is not an explanation in and of itself. I really don't see how that can be argued.

I simply tire of Sky apologists (for the most part, and certainly NOT including ZL in this) using "bigger budget" as some kind of argument that they are doing this clean. The argument does not hold up to any examination of the logic.

Now if someone is to say "they win more because their budget allows them to do X/Y/Z specific things, and here is specifically how these things give them N amount of improvement over the field", then there is a conversation to be had.

But we don't see that. We see talking points like "marginal gains" and "bigger budget" as if these stand up to any scrutiny. Which they do not.

People will believe what they want to believe.

Sorry but this is not true. This post was made 3 above mine and is a very good argument, Instead of addressing it, you've tried to ignore it and pretend there aren't well articulated arguments that money has had a major effect on Sky's success.

viewtopic.php?p=1980330#p1980330

*Sigh*. You appear to have missed my responses to the post you're linking here. I've addressed ZL's posts as completely as I can. Read more closely please before you jump in with this. Thanks.

 

[argel]

Sorry, I didn't understand that ZL was referring to him.

I still think it's a ridiculous standpoint that you take. Refusing to accept that the capacity to hoover up potential team-leaders and use them as super-domestiques is a huge advantage. Look at the lieks of Konig, Roche etc who are not even at the Tour. They have a massive amount of resource to bring in any rider worth a gamble and more importantly, they detract from their rivals at the same time.

 

[gooner]

Re: Re:

The discussion about the Premier League has become garbled by someone casually overstating the uniformity with which wage spends correlate with finishing positions and with pedantic responses to that overstatement. Wage budgets are the main determinant of success in the Premier League, but not in the absolute sense that everyone finishes in budget order 95% of the time. Budgets determine instead what rough tier within the league a club belongs to and historically have been by far the best predictor of winners (almost always one of the two biggest wage spenders) and top four finishes (usually the four biggest spenders but with more exceptions).

This is the important (and indeed only relevant) point about the Premiership comparison. Budget matters and it matters enormously. Although why anyone thinks that's a controversial statement in the first place remains somewhat baffling to me.

http://www.espnfc.com/blog/tactics-and-analysis/67/post/2476622/premier-league-dominance-is-down-to-wages-but-can-be-broken
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fancy-stats/wp/2014/09/05/here-are-the-premier-league-teams-that-have-made-the-most-of-their-payrolls/

As I say above, it's not quite 95%, and there's no studies on the PL alone. But it's 90% across the four leagues since '78, higher in Italy, and higher still with Germany and Spain included.

I haven't got access to the book you are drawing this from, but I assume that the correlation is between top budgets and top finishes? Rather than there being 90% correlation between each individual team's place in the wage budget league and their finish in the actual league?

It's wage spend. Szymanski emphasised it again last year in another book he released. Although he showed a graph from league finishes for over 50 years and it correlates too.

 

[Cannibal72]

^gooner's right. The 90% figure is an average of any one club's wage bill versus league position over approximately 15 years.

(the books, by the way, are the Anderson/Sally Numbers Game and Kuper/Szymanski Soccernomic and Why England Lose. All are well worth a read.)

 

[Armchair Cyclist]

Re: More riders complain about wattages set at tempo (by Sky

No, more money does not mean more success for no reason other than more money.

It does. Multiple studies have been done of the Premier League (a completely free market system, like cycling and unlike baseball), which show the correlation between wage spend and eventual league table finishing position is almost exactly 1:1. In other words, if your salary bill is the fifth highest in the league, you will in well over 95% of seasons finish fifth.

Can you cite one of these "multiple studies" that show that the 5th highest salary budget team comes 5th in the Premier League 95% of the time. Sounds like you are making up statistics to make your assumption sound like more than an assumption.

If I were citing stats to make my assumption seem like more of an assumption, I'd be doing it wrong. You're misreading my assumption anyway: I think Sky are doping. I just don't think their team-wide program is notably more effective and contains notably different drugs to everyone else's. Anyway, while you could have found this out for yourself, I will provide you with the studies from the goodness of my heart:

You then go onto to quote something that in no way justifies the assertion that you made.

So you misquote me in a way that totally inverts the meaning (I said "more than an assumption", not "more of an assumption"), whereas you asserted that multiple studies proved very specific detailed statistical facts, and you attack my supposed error while failing to acknowledge that yours was pure fabrication.

Congratulations: the first person to go on my ignore list here in years.

 

[Cannibal72]

Wait, what? Here's an article from the FT: (https://next.ft.com/content/f340caae-47cd-11e1-b646-00144feabdc0)
"The correlation between players’ wages and league position was about 90 per cent, if you took each club’s average over about 15 years."
That....kind of is what I said. (And the 95% figure's right across the big four leagues.)

 

[gooner]

Re: More riders complain about wattages set at tempo (by Sky

Wages are key in cycling too.

Granted Froome's transformation but would Sky have kept him until now if they didn't have a big budget to pay him after his big rise. Would Porte have signed his deal back in 2013 if that wasn't the case? He likely would have left a lot earlier. Wages attract and primarily help enforce you keep your top talents. Otherwise you're basically just a feeder team.

 

[BYOP88]

Re: More riders complain about wattages set at tempo (by Sky

Wages are key in cycling too.

Granted Froome's transformation but would Sky have kept him until now if they didn't have a big budget to pay him after his big rise. Would Porte have signed his deal back in 2013 if that wasn't the case? He likely would have left a lot earlier. Wages attract and primarily help enforce you keep your top talents. Otherwise you're basically just a feeder team.

This and what a few others have said.

If Sky can afford to pay König, Roche, Kwiatkowski etc to basically stay at home in July and keep them away from a rival team, then in the world of sports it makes a great deal of sense.

Now I'm not saying that any of those guys would challenge Froome for the yellow jersey, but König has finished in the top 10 in all 3GT's and may well have been a useful dom/someone to send up the road for Movistar/BMC etc.

 

[Cannibal72]

Re: More riders complain about wattages set at tempo (by Sky

Wages are key in cycling too.

Granted Froome's transformation but would Sky have kept him until now if they didn't have a big budget to pay him after his big rise. Would Porte have signed his deal back in 2013 if that wasn't the case? He likely would have left a lot earlier. Wages attract and primarily help enforce you keep your top talents. Otherwise you're basically just a feeder team.

This and what a few others have said.

If Sky can afford to pay König, Roche, Kwiatkowski etc to basically stay at home in July and keep them away from a rival team, then in the world of sports it makes a great deal of sense.

Now I'm not saying that any of those guys would challenge Froome for the yellow jersey, but König has finished in the top 10 in all 3GT's and may well have been a useful dom/someone to send up the road for Movistar/BMC etc.

And - at the risk of looking at this through the bipolar lens ZL identifies - they can afford to keep them happy and quiet regarding clinical matters.

 

[Saint Unix]

Re: More riders complain about wattages set at tempo (by Sky

I found this on the WeightWeenies forum

I get that Sky has a ton of money, but literally how stupid are the other teams/GC guys?

Aero gains matter, but on a short stage with more than 800 metres of altitude gain, so does reducing weight. Riding with a disc wheel on a TT bike means you're dragging a heavier bike up the hill.