The Cycling Banzuke – Podium Cafe

[Thanks for coming back to the Cafe, I took a bit of a break from writing the past month. But the 2023 season is functionally getting underway now, with Wout Van Aert and Mathieu van der Poel joining Tom Pidcock at the cyclocross races… the posturing begins now, and doesn’t end until the peloton reaches the Roubaix velodrome! Anyway, let the fun begin.]

This offseason the usual cycling media suspects will think of clever ways to assess the offseason and the team, a number of which we were doing ten years ago and don’t feel like doing anymore… but I’ll probably fall back into a few of those traps this winter. But to kick things off, I want to take a completely different view, which I hope will make sense by the end. I want to see if I can capture the hierarchy of cycling by using the Sumo ranking system, a/k/a the banzuke.

Wait, Sumo Wrestling?

Technically the Japanese word “Sumo” includes the wrestling part. And yes! Sumo is an incredibly cool sport once you get to know it and get over the shocking body type stuff, to the point where it becomes yet another fascinating part of the strategy. But my point isn’t to sell you on watching sumo. I just want to borrow their ranking system.

Why Would We Do This?

The quick answer is because sumo uses a ranking system that is a mix of recency and lifetime achievement to sell the product. The origins of sumo are as old as Japan itself, and documents from as far back as 712 CE described celestial Japanese lore as allowing control over the islands to be decided in a sumo match between two gods, Takemikazuchi and Takeminakata, won by the former with an arm-crushing technique which gave him (?) control over the province of Izumo. From this and so much of Japanese culture, which is big on traditional ways in general and valuing age and experience in particular — see anyone with “sensei” attached to their name — it stands to reason that the modern sport of sumo would rank its athletes by something beyond last month’s results.

Cycling, however, uses a pretty strict, what have you done for me this year? system of ranking. Given how fitness works, it’s not a terrible way of doing business, but maybe this thought experiment of trying to impose a longer-term, meritocratic system on cycling will be enlightening in some way.

[Side note: I do…