Monday, July 21, 2014

Tour de France Winners


Tour de France: Where Have the Winners Come From? is an interactive map showing the home countries of all the winners of the Tour de France. Using the map you can view the geographical spread of all the Tour winners since 1903.

I found the results a little surprising. Having grown-up during the period when Lance Armstong seemed to dominate the race almost every year (his wins are obviously now expunged from the records) I was expecting the race winners to be a bit more global. However apart from the American Greg LeMond (winner 1986) all the winners of the race have been born in Europe.

France dominates the map, although Belgium seems to produce a disproportionate number of great cyclists. Another surprise to me was that the great cycling friendly country of the Netherlands has only produced two winners of the Tour de France.

The map itself was created with the underused jVectorMap library.

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