If you look at where previous winners of the world's most famous cycling race are from, a surprisingly common pattern emerges.
The cyclists taking part in this year's Tour de France may not know about Zipf's Law, but it's hidden in the statistics of their sport
The distribution of the 103 Tour de France winners by nationality – excluding seven stripped from Lance Armstrong – produces a pattern reminiscent of Zipf's law Even when looking at the paragraph above, we can see that there are some extremely common words, such as "the", mixed with rarer words such as "startlingly" and "appearances". In a large enough text, while it is much less likely for any particular rare word such as "startlingly" to appear than any particular common word like "the", what Zipf's law is telling us is that there are far more rare words than there are common ones.
A closer look at the scale of these hand-drawn tracings of Welsh coastline shows that two of the sketches are zoomed in sections of the others itself argues that there are latent or unobserved variables which work to mix together multiple components that by themselves do not obey Zipf's law, but when combined do. In the context of word-frequency, for example, the components are the different parts of speech .
But what does that mean for this year's race? Sadly, Zipf's law speaks only in generalities and doesn't offer us answers to such specific questions. Whatever happens though, even as the memories of their last win fade from the public's consciousness it's going to take many more years for the evidence of France's early domination of the Tour to fade from the data.
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