Rider profiles

[Ferminal]

http://www.cyclingnews.com/riders/alberto-contador-velasco

Have there ever been any ideas to expand these profiles?

You could keep their team history, list their major results and for some riders a synopsis of their career so far.

Furthermore, you could "track" each cyclist to provide their latest results through the profile, at least for every race which CN provides results for. So when you put in the results for Stage 3 Tour de France, it could automatically update each rider who competed. So then you go to Contador's profile and it says he came 59th at 0", whilst you're there you can see all his other results with everything linking back on each other. Eventually you build up a very big database with lots of linkages.

 

[Francois the Postman]

I find the rider profiles one of the most underwhelming parts of this site.

I'd like to see CN as a specialist site, a place that has specialist knowledge that can't be found anywhere else, and gives insightful information about the sport's flagships.

The totality of their date of birth, current team, and email address are several camel rides away from what I expected when I press on any rider's profile on a specialist sit, or the specialist site.

I appreciate staff resources are limited, but there are tons of users here, on the forum in particular, who could easily and quickly add some real interesting information about the riders and teams.

I find I'm often googling around just to discover if a rider I haven't heard of is a climber, can put in a half-decent time trial, is a classic rider or a stage rider, etc.

Short bios that also give some idea what the rider's strengths and weaknesses are, what type of rider it is, or what role they play in a team, would be awesome, and I think offer real added value to the site.

There was a Sky team overview in Pro Cycling Magazine recently that had a rider overview that I really enjoyed, even most of them were hardly unknown quantities to me. I'd love to see something similar for all teams, especially for the teams that are hardly ever discussed in detail, but are bound to be on some forum contributor's radar here.

I am sure we have that knowledge around by the bucket load here. It would be sweet if it could be tapped into and made available in a very logical place.

My site wish for 2010 anyway.

 

[the truth.]

there are loads of sites to help with rider info

http://www.cqranking.com

try typing other words after www.

it will amaze

 

[Francois the Postman]

there are loads of sites to help with rider info
http://www.cqranking.com
try typing other words after www.
it will amaze

I know, it's a big web out there. And fans and stats nerds all over the place.

But most of them still tell me surprisingly little about a rider, without doing more googling on the back of what they present me with, cycling news included.

Take an obvious example to the site you highlighted: Philippe Gilbert

And?

On the whole I end of with rows of results only, and then I still have to figure out what sort of stage #8 at the Vuelta in 2008 was. I am web literate enough to get to the answers I want, and being able to read more than just English certainly helps, but I frequently get more from an Euskaltel fan here who quickly puts 3 or 4 new riders into easy to grasp English context, than 20 minutes of pot-lock surfing tells me.

The expertise for meaningful and helpful basic descriptions of rider's abilities is certainly here. seems a waste not to capture that somehow.

I just think it would be nice to have a specialist site who provides complete pro-rider overviews that one the whole give more than palmares, and let you do the heavy lifting from there.

 

[Anonymous]

cycling weeklys profiles are fairly good, but there are still large holes in theirs as well..