The Tour of Flanders

The Ronde van Vlaanderen (RVV) or Tour of Flanders is one of the worlds great bike races and one of 5 one day 'monuments'. Flanders is a cycling heartland and its estimated 1 million people will be on the roadside for this year's race as the worlds' top one day cyclists take on the short sharp hills of the Flandrien countryside
I've tried to explain in three charts why this is one of my favourite days of the sporting year.

1. The Hellingen

The race is defined by the Hellingen, a series of short sharp hills or Bergs many of which are cobbled. These categorised 17 Bergs start with 150km to go and the final run up the Paterberg is just 13.5km from the finish, these narrow twisting lanes with large crowds have come to define not just the Ronde but cycle racing in Flanders.

Each of the Hellingen has its own character as shown in the below chart, with the steepest towards the top right and the longer climbs having the bigger bubbles. The Paterberg (pink the the chart below), which features twice at 52.6km and 13.8km to go might only be 360m long in the road book but its 12.9% average gradient makes it the steepest in the race and both times this comes shortly after the Oude Kwaremont (light blue), the longest of the cobbled climbs at 2.2km.

 

2. Small Groups decide the race

The short sharp efforts (even the Oude Kwaremont is only a 5 or 6 minute effort),  act to break up the race leading to small groups of riders being scattered across the Belgian countryside. The nature of this sort of racing especially given the narrow lanes much of the racing is on prevent organised chases and ensure small finishing groups, indeed in 15 of the past 25 editions the winner has had a time gap to the runner up (see below). These small groups are the result of attacking racing which is great watch

3. Its almost always close

This propensity for solo attacks to succeed could give the impression that the finishes are not exciting, far from it with the time gaps often very small, in the past 25 editions the average gap to second place is just 31 seconds, but only 5 times in those 25 races has the gap been greater than 1 minute. Similarly the gap to 10th place (this is a purely arbitrary number I've picked) averages just 01:04 over 25 years.
To add further excitement since the race finish was moved in 2012 to Oudenaarde only Fabian Cancellara's victory in 2013 has seen a gap of more than a minute back to 10th place (in that year his winning margin was a massive 1 minute 27).




Acknowledgements:
Finishing times and gaps from the excellent Procycling stats: https://www.procyclingstats.com/
Hellingen stats from the RVV official road book from: https://www.rondevanvlaanderen.be/en/rvv/elite-men