Odds of Winning the 2011 Tour de France
In the last month there has been a flurry of posts around a type of graph I’ve liked since first glancing through Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information a couple of years ago. Now known as Slopegraphs, this graph is a minimal way of displaying the change in single variable data over time. Done correctly you can glean a surprisingly large amount of information from such a small amount of ink. Check out Charlie Park’s post for a much more detailed overview.
I thought it would be interesting to use such a graph to show what’s happened to the favourites in the first 10 stages of the 2011 Tour de France. Using betting data from bodog (it was the only source I could find the pre-race odds from), I think the graph below accurately shows how the various favourites have fared in the opening stages through both their positions on the axis, as well as the gradients showing improvement in comparison to the other riders.
So here’s my relatively quick attempt:
Let me know what you think, what can be improved, that this was a stupid idea, etc.. on twitter (@sesh).
