100 Cogs - A unique Tour de France Infographics Project

As a bike rider and Tour de France obsessive, I’ve always been fascinated by whether the legendary pre-war and 1950s tours were really as gruelling and demanding as those old black & white photos of Fausto Coppi and Jaques Anquetil suggest. So to commemorate 100 tours de France, I created a simple visualisation from complex data, of how rider participation and the demands of the course have changed over 11 decades. I used Javascript and Scriptographer with Adobe Illustrator to generate a unique ‘cog’ for each Tour de france, showing rider numbers, dropout percentages, no. of stages, average stage length, average speed, and winners. (click on 'view the PDF' to read the key properly) The main infographic shows ‘100 tours’ and the other shows a single year, 1972. Both the main infographic, and individual years to order, are available to buy as A2 or A1 Giclee prints. (click on the 'buy this' button or email nick@nickwattsdesign.co.uk)