A weighted approach to identifying key team contributors: Individual productivity in professional road cycling
Aitor Calo-Blanco
TL;DR
The paper tackles the underrecognition of key team contributors, such as domestiques, in professional road cycling by proposing a weighted productivity metric that blends UCI points, participation-based egalitarian redistribution, and a CoScore-inspired credit with participation and importance weights. The measure is defined as a convex combination controlled by $\alpha$ and $\beta$ and solved as a fixed-point system, yielding rider-level scores $x_i(s)$ from season data. Applying the method to the top 22 teams in the 2023 season (643 riders, 182 races, 36,910 days, 280,852.75 UCI points) demonstrates that a balanced configuration (REF: $\alpha=1/3$, $\beta=1/2$) aligns more closely with intuitive rider value and produces a more equitable assessment than the standard UCI points alone. The approach provides managers and scouts with a transparent, configurable tool to evaluate both leaders and domestiques, with potential applicability to other collaborative domains beyond cycling.
Abstract
Assessing an individual's contribution within a team remains a fundamental challenge across many domains, particularly when recognition for collective achievements is limited to only a few members. This issue is especially important in professional road cycling, where personal success depends on both individual talent and group effort. Existing points-based ranking systems tend to disproportionately reward high-scoring team leaders while undervaluing domestiques - riders who sacrifice personal success to support group performance. To better capture a rider's impact on the team, we propose a weighted measure of cycling productivity that factors in race points, a redistribution metric, and an adapted version of the CoScore formula. This formula assesses an individual's productivity relative to their teammates' performance. Using data from the 2023 season, we show that our approach offers a comprehensive evaluation of professional cyclists, addressing key limitations of existing ranking systems.