What Made the Tour Successful? Competitive Balance in the Tour de France, 1947-2017

Jean-François Mignot, Vladimir Bačik and Michal Klobučník
Additional contact information
Vladimir Bačik: Comenius University in Bratislava
Michal Klobučník: Comenius University in Bratislava

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: The Tour de France is the most popular and prestigious bicycle race in the world. Since the 1980s, it has also had increasing economic success. Is such economic success related to improvements in competitive balance among riders, i.e. the degree of parity among opponents and the resulting difficulty to predict the competition's end result? We compute several measures of static (annual) and dynamic (year-to-year) competitive balance for the yellow jersey from 1947 to 2017, both among the top five riders and among team leaders. Our main result is that competitive balance in the Tour de France has not improved much since 1947: the time performances of top riders and team leaders have not become closer to each other – or harder to predict from one year to the next. Therefore, the increasing economic success of the Tour since the 1980s cannot be attributed to improvements in the race's competitive balance. Other factors must have been driving the increasing demand for the Tour, including better-quality television broadcasting of the event.

Keywords: Cycling; competitive balance; sport performance; competitive intensity; Tour de France; quantitative history (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cul and nep-spo
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-02144696v1
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published in Sport in Society, In press, ⟨10.1080/17430437.2019.1621844⟩

Downloads: (external link)
https://shs.hal.science/halshs-02144696v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-02144696

DOI: 10.1080/17430437.2019.1621844

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().