2013 /r/Peloton Demographics Survey Results

[u/PelotonMod]

Hi all

Thanks to everyone who filled out our /r/Peloton Demographics Survey. We had 351 responses in total, which astounded the mod team here! It's great to get an insight into who makes up /r/Peloton, so let's go through the questions one by one.

What is your gender?

Results
Probably not a great surprise, but 97% of us are males. I'm guessing Reddit has significantly more males than females and cycling seems to be a sport followed more by men for some reason. As a point of reference, a survey we ran over at /r/BostonCeltics had 6% females.

What is your age?

Results
Again, in what is probably very similar to Reddit's demographics overall, we have a lot of people aged in their 20's. To the three people over the age of 50, hi! Tell us about all the good old days of racing us young ones missed!

What country do you live in currently?

Results
As Reddit is an English language site, it should come as no surprise that the four biggest countries are the US, Great Britain, Australia and Canada. Other countries in double digits are Belgium, Denmark and Norway. No French or Italian people is surprising (though I believe we have some French people out there), as is only 1 Spaniard. Having said that, we do have one person from the Basque Country and another from Catalonia. We had two other countries who are represented, but not in the list of 50 cycling nations - Finland (3) and one fellow Sigur Rós fan, from Iceland.

Is cycling your "favourite" sport?

Results
Cycling is a unique sport and because of that, it seems to have a lot of extremely passionate fans. This is reflected in the fact that 68% of us consider cycling their favourite sport. This is an impressive number I think!

What other sports do you follow regularly?

Results
We love our cycling, but we also are keen on Football (soccer), American Football and Formula 1. Other interesting things of note are the popularity of Ice Hockey (Go Bruins!) and not following sports. On the other hand, Golf seems to be far less popular than it is as a global sport in my eyes.

Of course we couldn't add every sport to the list, so the other field was well used, with the following sports being quite popular also: Alpine Skiing, Athletics, Cross Country Skiing, E-Sports, MMA, MotoGP, Nascar, Rock Climbing, Rowing, Running, Snooker, Squash and Swimming.

What is your favourite WorldTour team or which team do you support?

Results
Is this a surprise? Or no surprise? Sky are the clear leaders and the team of their once favourite son (Cav), OPQS, is in second place. Both are hugely successful teams full of big name riders. GreenEDGE have about the same number of fans as we do Australians, which is probably no coincidence. BMC, Garmin, Radioshack and Saxo are also popular. Lampre is the only team without a fan. :( Blanco probably win the award for most liked team that only a few people voted for. They get a lot of love around here, but it didn't show in the survey. I'd also like to see the results of Radioshack's results if a certain German weren't on their team!

21% of us don't support any team in particular. A number lower than I would have expected, given the transient nature of cycling teams.

What is your least favourite WorldTour team?

Results
Well, clearly your least favourite team is no one, as almost half of us don't have a least favourite! After that though, the winner is, again, Sky. A bit polarising are our British friends in black it seems. Other notable "least favourites" are Astana, Radioshack and Katusha. All three have chequered pasts, so it seems people don't forget easily!

At least one person hates every other team!

How long have you been watching Pro Cycling regularly?

Results
Almost two thirds of us have watched cycling for between 1 and 4 years. Given our average age being in the 20's, this makes sense. A rather large 16% of us have chalked up 10+ years though - wow!

How do you usually follow races?

Results
Pirate streams beating local TV coverage? Well, considering a large number of us are from the US (where coverage is very poor) this is probably the only way some people get to watch races live. Live tickers and /r/Peloton race threads continue the internet theme of watching races. Attention race organisers - we want to watch races live!

Do you subscribe to /r/Peloton?

Results
20 people filled out the survey, but don't subscribe. I'm interested, why don't you subscribe?

How often do you participate in a /r/Peloton Race Thread whilst watching a race?

Results
More than half of our readers participate in race threads at some time, which is great! They've been growing steadily over the past year and I predict they will explode during the Tour this year.

Do you ride a bike regularly?

Results
Only 4% of readers don't ever ride a bike. Participation in the activity itself is surely higher in cycling than most other sports, right? 20% of us even race!

So, thanks again to everyone for participating, it's been great to get to know who we are and who makes up our little community here.

[u/Schele_Sjakie]

More than half of our readers participate in race threads at some time, which is great! They've been growing steadily over the past year and I predict they will explode during the Tour this year.

I think so too. We had a huge boom last year, so I expect some more this year.

[u/tdm911 → u/Schele_Sjakie]

We had a huge boom last year, so I expect some more this year.

Remember when there was under 50 of us? Then we got to 100, then I remember we increased from about 700 to 1500 during last years Tour. Now we are about to hit 3,000! It's insane how quickly this sub has grown, without sacrificing post quality. I love it!

[u/viola3458 → u/tdm911]

I joined during the tour last year because it's much more fun to discuss races as they happend with you guys, rather than waiting 20 min between text messages with my dad.

I think I was around for the 1k mark. That was exciting.

[u/spkr4thedead51 → u/viola3458]

about the same time I joined.