Unsung Heroes of the Tour de France is an application for exploring riders and teams performace in the most famous bike race in the world. Media coverage of the event is very intense, but often it is only focused on a very limited amount of riders and teams - this application aims to draw a picture of the complete race, enabling all riders stories to be told at the same level.

You can download a sample A2 size print of the output showing Team Saxo Bank here.

Team Saxo Bank's Nicki Sørensen's role in the race is far from the media intensive roles of the team captains, yet he is indispensable for the team as his support of the captain, Andy Schleck, in the mountains is key to the teams success. The screen grab above indicates the massive time losses Nikki Sørensen had when hitting both the Alps and the Pyrenees.

The software also highlights the difference in entire teams performances, team Radioshack won the Team competition and the teams efforts are clearly visible compared to a team like Lambre.


Team Radioshack:




Team Labmre:

The application has a minimal interface that let's you navigate to a specific team or rider and enables zooming on the time-axis (left hand side) to explore the time-losses (and gains) at the individual stages.


Selecting team Garmin from drop down menu:




Selecting (the not-so-unsung-hero) Lance Armstrong from the riders dropdown:




Zooming into the time axis, height of application now showing a gap of 1 hour:

The data for application was scraped off www.letour.fr and compiled into a Google Spreadsheet, this enables the application to update as new information arrives and makes the application perform well as a day-to-day monitoring tool of the cycle race. If you are interested, then I have shared the dataset here: Tour de France 2010 standings complete.