Measuring individual contributions to team success in professional road cycling

Abstract

Assessing individual contributions within teams remains a fundamental challenge. This issue is particularly important in professional road cycling, where personal success hinges on a combination of individual talent and collective effort. Current points-based rankings disproportionately reward team leaders, undervaluing those who contribute through collaborative roles. To address this issue, we propose a flexible framework for collaborative contribution within professional cycling teams that combines individual performance, race participation, and a team-based credit-allocation system. Using data from the 2023 season, we show that our framework identifies meaningful differences in rider contribution that existing ranking systems fail to capture. We then select a parameter configuration for our framework that closely aligns with rider assessments from Pro Cycling Manager, assigning equal weights to individual performance, race participation, and collaborative contribution. Finally, we use this configuration to examine which rider characteristics are associated with gains or losses under collaborative evaluation.