When you look at the countries of the past winners of the Tour de France, a surprising pattern appears.
The Tour de France is the most famous cycling race in the world, where cyclists from different countries compete for three weeks to win the yellow jersey.
Millions, including myself, enjoy watching these athletes race through the beautiful French countryside.
This summer, while reading about the upcoming race, I saw a graph showing the number of Tour de France wins by country.
It showed a clear pattern: France has the most wins with 36, Belgium has exactly half with 18, Spain has a third with 12, and Italy has a bit more than a quarter with 10.
This pattern reminded me of “Zipf’s law,” a mathematical rule that shows how often things happen in a predictable way.
Zipf’s law is seen in many places, like how often words are used in a book. The second most common word is used half as often as the most common word, the third is used a third as often, and so on.
I tested this with my own book, and it matched well with Zipf’s law. For example, the word “the” appeared 6,691 times, “of” appeared 3,330 times (about half as often), and “to” appeared 2,445 times (about a third as often).
The Tour de France winners’ pattern fits Zipf’s law too, just like word frequencies in a book.
This law isn’t just for words; it’s also found in other areas like the size of cities, the number of scientific papers, and even the sizes of moon craters.
Zipf’s law is part of a bigger idea called a “power law,” which shows how different things relate to each other mathematically.
However, the exact reason why Zipf’s law works for the Tour de France isn’t clear. Early races had many French cyclists, which could explain why France has so many wins.
If we only look at races after World War I, the pattern fits Zipf’s law even better.
So, what does this mean for this year’s Tour de France? Zipf’s law doesn’t predict specific results, but it shows that France’s early dominance will be evident in the data for many years.
Source: BBC