Yeah, we all saw it. Jonas Vingegaard dominated this TT like nobody has dominated a TT since...well...since when exactly? If you want an answer to that you came to the wrong post, but I'll write some other stuff instead.
So what I did is I tried to come up with a metric showing how dominant a TT performance was, which I will call dominance index because why not. I divided the gap between the first two riders by the gap between the first and the 10th rider. So we basically get the portion of the spread of the top 10 that lies between the front two. If we get a dominance index of 0.1 that means the gap between 1st and 2nd is 10% of the gap between 1st and 10th.
A higher dominance index means a more dominant win. Btw, I just as well could have divided the gap between the first two and the winning time, that would probably give you similar results. I felt comparing time gaps is more telling but you are free to disagree about that.
Because I don't have infinite time and am generally not overly skilled in working with data I only looked at TdF ITT's in the post Armstrong era, so from 2006 forward. Feel free to look further back, I'd be especially interested in a comparison with how much Indurain dominated TT's. So, what are the results from 2006 to 2022:
| TdF 22 2 | 19 | 108 | 0,175926 |
| TdF 22 1 | 5 | 20 | 0,25 |
| TdF 21 1 | 19 | 60 | 0,316667 |
| TdF 21 2 | 21 | 81 | 0,259259 |
| TdF 20 | 81 | 174 | 0,465517 |
| TdF 19 | 14 | 61 | 0,229508 |
| TdF 18 | 1 | 83 | 0,012048 |
| TdF 17 1 | 5 | 16 | 0,3125 |
| TdF 17 2 | 1 | 37 | 0,027027 |
| TdF 16 1 | 63 | 144 | 0,4375 |
| TdF 16 2 | 21 | 70 | 0,3 |
| TdF 15 | 5 | 32 | 0,15625 |
| TdF 14 | 99 | 178 | 0,55618 |
| TdF 13 1 | 12 | 112 | 0,107143 |
| TdF 13 2 | 9 | 111 | 0,081081 |
| TdF 12 1 | 7 | 15 | 0,466667 |
| TdF 12 2 | 35 | 129 | 0,271318 |
| TdF 12 3 | 76 | 185 | 0,410811 |
| TdF 11 | 7 | 128 | 0,054688 |
| TdF 10 1 | 10 | 35 | 0,285714 |
| TdF 10 2 | 17 | 218 | 0,077982 |
| TdF 09 1 | 18 | 40 | 0,45 |
| TdF 09 2 | 3 | 62 | 0,048387 |
| TdF 08 1 | 18 | 47 | 0,382979 |
| TdF 08 2 | 21 | 141 | 0,148936 |
| TdF 07 1 | 13 | 32 | 0,40625 |
| TdF 07 2 | 74 | 159 | 0,465409 |
| TdF 07 3 | 51 | 170 | 0,3 |
| TdF 06 1 | 1 | 9 | 0,111111 |
| TdF 06 2 | 60 | 104 | 0,576923 |
| TdF 06 3 | 41 | 241 | 0,170124 |
Here you have the results of 31 TTs. In the first column I somewhat clumsily named the stage (if there is a 1 at the end that means we are talking about the 1st TT of that Tour, etc), the 2nd column is the gap between 1st and 2nd, the 2nd column the gap between 1st and 10th and the 3rd column the dominance index. That's the column we care about. As you can see results between 0 and 0.5 are somewhat common, with 2 results reaching the 0.5 barrier, but none surpassing 0.6. Those two wins were by Tony Martin in 2014 and Serhiy Honchar in 2006.
So, how does Vingegaard's performance match up to this?
Pretty good. Vingegaard's TT is in 3rd place, beating out legendary TTs like for example Pogacar's win at LPdBF in 2020. That's probably the obvious comparison to make and indeed the two results look similarly dominant. In fact what motivated me to make this post was someone saying that just like in 2020, one rider dominated while the 2nd favorite had a disappointing performance. Except, was Pogacar actually that disappointing? Let's pretend for a second Vingegaard hadn't ridden today and instead Pogacar won in front of Van Aert. How dominant would that win have been?
| TdF 23 (without Vingegaard) | 73 | 118 | 0,618644 |
Yes you are seeing this right. The dominance index is 0.62. Without Vingegaard there is a good argument to be made that this would have been the most dominant TdF TT in the post Armstrong era. More dominant than anything Cancellara or Martin ever produced. More dominant than his own infamously dominant LPdBF TT in 2020. Way more dominant in fact. No other result comes close to 0.62.
But that of course makes you wonder. What would Vingegaards dominance index have been without Pogacar. Brace yourself:
| TdF 23 (without Pogacar) | 171 | 211 | 0,810427 |
0.81! That is so completely off the charts. This means that the gap between Vingegaard and Van Aert was over 5 times larger than the gap between Van Aert and 11th place. And btw, in case you are wondering what happens to Martin's and Honchar's wins if you exclude the 2nd placed rider, the answer is, not much. Honchar's index increases from 0.577 to 0.587 and Martin's index from 0.556 to 0.591, so both of them remain under the 0.6 mark. Vingegaards dominance index increasing to over 0.8 is completely bonkers.
So what's the takeaway? Was this the most dominant TT performance in history? Probably not. The title was clickbait all along. But I still found it interesting to somehow quantify how incredible todays performance was.
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