It's one week before the big races, which means this Saturday is the Team Pursuit. This event pits two teams in opposite corners of the track, and it's basically a game of cat-and-mouse for the 15-lap (12 for women) race. Times are taken from each team's third-place rider, so this truly is a team event - communication and drafting plays a crucial role.
Here is the team pursuit schedule for Saturday. On the men's side, you might want to watch Gray Goat vs. FIJI (7:06) and Cutters vs. Phi Delta Theta (7:30) in the preliminaries. On the women's side, the top preliminary pairings include Teter vs. Wing It (7:18) and Delta Gamma vs. Kappa Alpha Theta (7:42).
I was fiddling around with some numbers to see how well this event - the only real team event of the spring series - foreshadowed the race results
Follow the jump to see some stat-crunching.
* I compiled some more stuff this morning - it's not worthy of a new post, so I'm adding it to the bottom of this one.
Basically, there were 13 men's teams that qualified for my little analysis.
- I only looked at teams that had at least one top-10 finish since 2000.
- I looked at only the guys' race and used results from teams that had competed in both the team pursuit and race in at least 5 of the past 8 years.
- I only used results from years in which teams competed in both events in the same year
- Reminder: the 2002 and 2006 team pursuit events were canceled (*update - thanks for the help!)
With these 13 teams, I compared their team pursuit place with their race finish position. Some notes:
- Overall, the 13 teams during the past eight years placed on average 1.8 places worse in the race than in the team pursuit.
- Only two teams averaged an improvement on their race day position compared to their team pursuit finish.
- Rankings sorted by Team Pursuit average finish: 1. Cutters (2.4), 2. Phi Gamma Delta (5.6), 3. Alpha Tau Omega (7.4), 4. Team Major Taylor (7.75), 5. Dodds House (8.0), 6. Phi Delta Theta (8.8), 7. Beta Theta Pi (10.4), 8. Sigma Phi Epsilon (11.25), 9. Delta Upsilon (11.9), 10. Phi Kappa Psi (12.3), 11. Pi Kappa Phi (13.4), 12. Delta Tau Delta (14.2), 13. Sigma Chi (14.5)
- Rankings sorted by Race average finish*: 1. Team Major Taylor (3.25), 2. Cutters (4.3), 3. Dodds House (6.4), 4. Phi Gamma Delta (6.7), 5. Alpha Tau Omega (10.2), 6. Phi Delta Theta (11.6), 7. Delta Upsilon (14), 8. Beta Theta Pi (14.4), 9. Delta Tau Delta (14.6), 10. Phi Kappa Psi (14.7), 11. Pi Kappa Phi (15.4), 12. Sigma Phi Epsilon (17.25), 13. Sigma Chi (18)
* I don't think anyone would argue TMT has done better in the race than the Cutters. However, remember for this chart I only looked at years in which teams competed in both events. For TMT, that only includes '03, '04, '07 and '08. During these years, TMT's average race finish was 3.25. This exceeds the Cutters since the Cutters participated in both events all eight years (which included a 7th and 12th place finish), bringing down their race average.
- Rankings sorted by difference between team pursuit finish and race finish: 1. Team Major Taylor (4.5), 2. Dodds House (1.6), 3. Delta Tau Delta (-0.4), 4. Phi Gamma Delta (-1.1), 5. Cutters (-1.9), 6. Pi Kappa Phi (-2), 7. Delta Upsilon (-2.1), 8. Phi Kappa Psi (-2.4), 9. Alpha Tau Omega (-2.8), 10. Phi Delta Theta (-2.8), 11. Sigma Chi (-3.5), 12. Beta Theta Pi (-4), 13. Sigma Phi Epsilon (-6)
So, what are the takeaways from this? Um...
- Teams do finish on race day relatively close to their team pursuit position.
- Team Major Taylor does much better on race day than on team pursuit day.
- Cutters continue to dominate (four team pursuit wins and four race wins since 2000). I didn't need stats to prove that.
This morning, I looked at the team pursuit results since 2000 and found the average race finish place based on finish in the team pursuit (i.e. the average finish place in the Little 500 for teams that finish 2nd in the team pursuit is 3.57). I only looked at the top 25 places, because most of the past team pursuit results have about 25 teams competing.
Here are the results, which I think show a decent correlation between team pursuit and race position. I list team pursuit finish first, average race finish second and difference between the two places third.
1st place Team Pursuit - Avg. race finish: 3.43 (-2.43 difference)
2nd place - Avg. race finish: 3.57 (-1.57)
3rd place - Avg. race finish: 4.57 (-1.57)
4th place - Avg. race finish: 6.42 (-2.42)
5th place - Avg. race finish: 8.57 (-3.57)
6th place - Avg. race finish: 5.56 (+0.44)
7th place - Avg. race finish: 10.67 (-3.67)
8th place - Avg. race finish: 10.14 (-2.14)
9th place - Avg. race finish: 9.29 (-0.29)
10th place - Avg. race finish: 10.86 (-0.86)
11th place - Avg. race finish: 11.00 (0.00)
12th place - Avg. race finish: 12.57 (-0.57)
13th place - Avg. race finish: 19.43 (-6.43)
14th place - Avg. race finish: 14.71 (-0.71)
15th place - Avg. race finish: 16.71 (-1.71)
16th place - Avg. race finish: 20.00 (-4.00)
17th place - Avg. race finish: 21.00 (-4.00)
18th place - Avg. race finish: 22.50 (-4.50)
19th place - Avg. race finish: 18.67 (+0.33)
20th place - Avg. race finish: 22.71 (-2.71)
21st place - Avg. race finish: 23.43 (-2.43)
22nd place - Avg. race finish: 28.00 (-6.00)
23rd place - Avg. race finish: 25.83 (-2.83)
24th place - Avg. race finish: 23.17 (+0.83)
25th place - Avg. race finish: 28.25 (-3.25)
