I’ve decided to embrace my inner geek and do some analysis of the Downhill World Cup this season and stick it on a blog. Basically an excuse to combine two of my interests – mountain bikes and mucking about with data visualisation.

Given the apparent Strava obsession round these parts (for better or worse) I thought this might be right up the street of many STW forum dwellers. I did some stuff on the Pietermartizburg round a while back (which got tweeted by Gee Atherton & Rob Warner which was good for the pageview count!) and I’ve just done a quick look back over last year’s Val Di Sole race to whet the appetite for this weekend. Would be great if you had a look and let me know what you think!

http://lookatthestats.blogspot.co.uk/

For all you geeks out there, I constructed the charts in a Google Docs spreadsheet and just tweaked the code you get given when you choose the ‘Publish’ option on the chart. The heatmap was created using R and tweaked in Inkscape – all free software