There was plenty of data to dig into at WTCS Abu Dhabi. We have a separate post for the splits breakdown from the race, but that only tells half the story.
Below, you will find all the graphs and plots you need to analyse what happened at the first WTCS race of the year.
Swim
The women’s swim distribution really demonstrates just how strong Sophie Coldwell was in the water.
The Density of Athletes shows how many athletes exited the water at each interval behind Coldwell.
As the line marking the concentration of athletes is basically flat until the 15 second mark, that means that the athletes that followed Coldwell did so one at a time. They were strung into a line. The takeaway from this is that it shows just how high Coldwell’s pace was. Indeed, only five women were able to get within 15 seconds of her.
You can see a slight lull before the bulk of the field emerge around 35 seconds behind Coldwell. After 40 seconds, the concentration of athletes really dropped off which goes to show that the majority of the field exited the swim in a pack 35-50 seconds behind Coldwell.
In contrast to the women’s swim distribution, there’s a steady flow to the men’s graph. That means that there was no real break and that all the athletes followed one another.
Similarly, there was no real drop in the density of athletes. The last athletes out (around 45 seconds behind Vincent Luis) came out at a slightly higher concentration than the leaders. That means that no one got “dropped” on the swim in the men’s race.
The biggest cluster in the women’s swim peaked at a density of 0.038. Meanwhile, the men’s swim concentration peaked at around 0.028. That is quite a sizeable difference.
As a result, the indication is that the men’s race had no major clump of athletes. Rather, the athletes were in a constant stream behind Vincent Luis.
Bike
The first thing that jumps out from the bike lap times is that Cassandre Beaugrand and Summer Rappaport had identical bike splits on the first lap. Only Rappaport made it into the front group though.
That gap in the water was thus crucial in allowing the breakaway to escape. Without it, it is highly likely the main pack would have been able to absorb the leaders in the first pack.
It was not until lap 3 that the breakaway really began to put some time into the main group. While the leaders had a better lap 2, they had not added a great deal of time to their swim lead.
Lap 4 was also a bad lap for the main group as they lost around 12 seconds to the leaders.
On the final lap, the main group managed to match the breakaway, but it was too little too late.
We have also highlighted Yuko Takahashi as one of the strongest riders in the third pack on the circuit. They simply could not match the speed of the breakaway or main group.
In the above plot, you can see how the main pack in the women’s race lost members and lost time with every lap. At the end of lap 1, the main pack had 44 athletes and was around 20 seconds behind. By the end of the bike, the gap was almost 50 seconds and 9 athletes had been dropped from the pack.
Meanwhile, in the men’s race, the big talking point on the bike was Hayden Wilde. It is clear from the above graph that Wilde lost all his time on lap 1.
Thereafter, he matched the field despite riding alone.
We can also see the early speed on lap 1 that Matthew Mcelroy used to bridge to the main group having emerged from T1 in the third main pack.
In the absence of video footage here, how can we prove Wilde was alone with the numbers?
The following graph shows that.
Groups must be at least 5 seconds apart to be considered a group. Wilde is the little number 1 at the far right of the graph for the whole bike. That indicates that he rode alone. Indeed, he spent most of it two minutes behind the leaders.
At the end of lap 1, you can see three main packs. Luis and Coninx were in pack one (13 men) having pushed the pace on the swim. They could not, however, get the group to work efficiently and so pack two, consisting of Yee and Bergere (28 men) caught them in lap 2.
Geens and Mcelory were in pack three (15) and they did not catch the front until lap 3.
Gustav Iden was alone, as was Hayden Wilde in last place.
In addition, you can see how Bergere attacked and formed a three man breakaway. That would grow to five men but the lead was reduced to less than five seconds by lap four.
In the end, the front pack simply grew bigger and bigger across the bike as more athletes joined it.
Run
In the run distribution graph, the leader refers to the athlete with the fastest split. In the women’s race that honour went to Cassandre Beaugrand.
The biggest concentration of women came 40 seconds behind Beaugrand. After that, there was a second peak in the density around 90 seconds behind.
To help illustrate the above graph a little more, there were seven women other than Beaugrand that ran under 17 minutes. Beugrand ran 16:38 while the 7th fastest runner ran 16:59.
Therefore a 21 second gap covered the front 7 women.
A gap of 9 seconds covered the 7 women that ran between 17:24 and 17:33. That little cluster of women finishing close together represents the highest point on the graph.
The biggest concentration of men came almost 60 seconds behind Alex Yee.
The rise to that peak, though, was not quite as steep as in the women’s graph. That indicates that the gaps between the men behind Yee were smaller than the gaps between the women behind Beaugrand.
Twelve men managed to run sub-15 minutes in Abu Dhabi. The biggest concentration of men, though, ran between 15:20 and 15:40.
