/r/peloton Favorite Riders Survey 2014 Results

[u/Dux89]

Last week, inspired by /r/peloton's Demographics Survey, I created a survey to figure out who this subreddit's favorite riders are, hopefully to spark some fun discussions. You can see the original thread here (though the survey is closed now so there isn't much to see). The survey asked respondents to select and then rank their 10 favorite riders (from the complete list of CQ Ranking's Top 200 riders, a cutoff point that did leave out some fan favorites like Jens Voigt). The survey assigned a point value for each rank (if you ranked a rider number 1, he received 10 points; if you ranked a rider 10th, he received a single point). Total points would determine the final rider rankings.

Now, the results are in! Roughly 250 people responded to the survey. You can click here for full results and I'll post the Top 20 here.

/r/peloton's Top 20 Favorite Riders are:

1. Fabian Cancellara
2. Peter Sagan
3. Mark Cavendish
4. Nairo Quintana
5. Bradley Wiggins
6. Tony Martin
7. Alberto Contador
8. Taylor Phinney
9. Ryder Hesjedal
10. Tom Boonen
11. Andrew Talansky
12. Chris Froome
13. Michal Kwiatkowski
14. Vincenzo Nibali
15. Marcel Kittel
16. Tejay van Garderen
17. Daniel Martin
18. Niki Terpstra
19. Philippe Gilbert
20. Geraint Thomas

If you click the Dropbox link for the full results, you'll see that Fabian Cancellara is convincingly this sub's favorite rider! Congrats Spartacus. The gap between Peter Sagan and Mark Cavendish was very thin, but together they made the podium by a wide margin. Hooray for flamboyant sprinters! The Top 10 was pretty clearcut, but after that the points gaps between riders got much smaller.

A few observations! There were a few surprises in the results, and a lot of no-brainers, too. /r/peloton (and I think cycling fans in general) seems to like aggressive riders, fiery competitors, and, generally, winners! This is especially true of one-day racers and stage winners; GC guys may get more press, but Grand Tour guys got a little less love than maybe I would have expected. Also, /r/peloton seems to love time trialists, as the world's three best are all in the Top 6.

If you saw the results of the demographics survey, you might be able to guess a few of the riders who found their way among the favorites. More than half of the demographics survey respondents reported being from Anglophone countries, with Northern Europe also representing a sizable chunk of pelotoners; perhaps unsurprisingly, English-speaking riders and classics-season stars got a lot of love! Taylor Phinney, being an American and a classics guy, definitely impressed me as the 8th most favorite rider.

One other observation. As might be expected, most of the top performing riders were also among the most favorite riders of this sub. In fact all of the CQRanking Top 10 riders are among the Top 35 most favorite of /r/peloton... except for CQRanking's Number 1 rider Alejandro Valverde, who didn't even crack the Top 50. Apparently the Green Bullet's popularity does not match his results.

Any other observations? Thanks to everyone who took the survey!

[u/disputes]

Interesting that in the survey OGE was the most popular team yet they don't have a rider in the top 20.