Data. It’s a big, all-encompassing buzzword that is everywhere you turn in cycling nowadays, controlling the narrative and generating discussion. Power passports, GPS trackers, and even Tadej Pogačar inadvertently – or deliberately? – sharing his power files on Strava. Numbers are everywhere.
But this proliferation of data is causing a problem. Or better said, numerous problems, spawning ever more political footballs. Something that ought to be relatively uncomplex – harvest the data, crunch it into something digestible, and then use it to enhance understanding of performance or the storytelling of a race – is being bogged down by concerns over ownership, privacy and fears over who would profit from monetising it. Data is now even being used to find possible dopers.
A really quite geeky area of technology is blowing up into one of cycling’s trickiest dilemmas for both the sport’s governors and protagonists. The expectation is that things aren’t going to be settled any time soon.
What is data?
Over the past two decades, especially as cycling computers and wearables like sports watches have become ubiquitous, performance data has evolved from laboratory figures mostly available only to the professionals to something that every single amateur now has easy access to.
Power numbers, heart rate and cadence are data points that form the basis of objectively analysing performance, with heart rate variability, glucose monitoring and analysis of sleep considered as the next step-up in performance metrics. Then there are more advanced data points that tend to only concern professional athletes or the most hardcore of racing amateurs: coefficient of aerodynamic drag (CdA) and rolling resistance of tyres.
More basic than any of the above is location, better known as GPS data: where a rider is physically at – it’s so simple, but it’s causing one of the biggest headaches right now. But before we get into that, Cyclingnews has seen a copy of a rider contract from a WorldTour team which highlights what a rider’s ‘personal data’ refers to. Beyond generic identity and contact information, data includes “laboratory test results for evaluation of physical potential, race data through platforms like TrainingPeaks and Strava and 3D Scanning results to evaluate aerodynamic potential.”
Medical data is also listed, but can only be collected and processed by the team and the UCI, cycling’s governing body, if it’s “pertinent to the rider’s…
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