In the few minutes I've allowed myself to do something other than gnash my teeth over the prospect of not seeing Benna in the Tour- deep breath- I got interested in comparing riders with different VDS point values. For instance, at the beginning of the season many of us had to sort through a whole bunch of trade-offs like: who is a better VDS value on your team: 25 point Oscar Freire and some 1 pointer or a combination of 16 point Robbie McEwen and 10 pointer JJ Rojas? We now know that Freire has 757 points, McEwen 300, and Rojas 110 so THAT trade off seems clear but what about the larger question of should you stock up on high cost guys and a whole bunch of scrubeenies or should you take a more even-handed approach knowing that if a real high pointer goes in the tank (Petacchi) you are totally screwed.
So I made a table. That last column gives us the number of riders in each point category who've earned less than 100 points. Take a look and note that for some reason my last two columns are offset. Haven't a clue why but I need to go out and I have no time to fix it:
| Rider Cost | Av points earned | pts/rider cost | #riders | # riders w/ less than 100 pts earned | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 25 points | 822 | 33 | 6 | 0 | |
| 20 points | 608 | 30 | 7 | 0 | |
| 18 points | 514 | 29 | 7 | 1 | |
| 16 points | 319 | 20 | 13 | 5 | |
| 14 points | 202 | 14 | 11 | 6 | |
| 12 points | 197 | 16 | 17 | 10 | |
| 10 points | 186 | 19 | 17 | 6 | |
| 8 points | 76 | 10 | 12 | 9 | |
| 6 points | 113 | 19 | 25 | 15 | |
| 4 points | 98 | 25 | 45 | 23 | |
| 2 points | 56 | 28 | 72 | 58 | |
| 1 point | 25 | 25 | 147 | 131 |
Roughly the higher the rider costs the more return on your money you get.
Of course to do well in the competition you have to do more than just pick a random 25 pointer or even random 20, 18, or 16 pointers etc. since within each group of riders some are doing much better than others. Bert has a VDS point/cost ratio of 48. Cancellara's is 57. Tin Tin's is an unholy 65, easily the best of the expensive riders. Of all the non-one pointers Kreuzinger is currently the best at 273. But as you can see from the table the number of busts among the cheap riders is huge.
It will be interesting to see which, if any, expensive riders can overtake Tin Tin in this VDS point/cost ratio by the end of the year. (Bert would need about 1650 points earned right now to equal him.) Rebellin will probably ride San Sebastian, Deutchland, Vattenfall (not the Vuelta), World RR, Emilia, and Lombardy. Don't know about the Olympics. He could do well in all of them. It is interesting that the 14, 12, and particularly the 8 pointers are generally a poor value. Why is this? is it because they got most of the CQ points from lesser races and so artificially boosted their values for the more particular VDS race set? Why are the 10 pointers relatively better? What am I blatantly missing here?
Also I would love some of the folks here who are in the top 10 or 20 in the VDS standings to say how they picked who they did, particularly if they are scoring big with their cheaper riders.