Another 24 Hour Lap Time Post!
I'm still working on getting the full lap data for Great Glen, because I'm sure there's a lot of cool stuff in there. In the meanwhile, someone sent me this email that was too well done not to post (with his permission, of course), which answered some of the "but what's the statistical certainty???" questions that were posed in the comments last week. Enjoy.
"Hi Colin,
"Hi Colin,
Don’t know if you remember me. I’m [explanation of how we know each other redacted]. Anyways, I enjoyed your cheater writeup. You’re probably done with comments about this whole deal, but I was bored at work this morning and took a look at some of the lap data. Some of the comments were asking about statistical certainty of Sam Anderson’s night lap times being fake. The short answer is “oh my god, yes”.
I looked at the lap times from the top 10 teams from the 2011 24hogg. I discarded the first lap (running) and then averaged every rider’s laps started before 8 pm and called those day laps, and averaged every rider’s laps started between8 pm and 5 am and called those night laps. So from the top 10 teams, we have a population of 32 riders, and I added Sam Anderson’s laps to the data set. When you plot them, you get this graph:
The dashed blue line represents even lap times day and night. As you would expect, every legit racer is, on average, at least 2 minutes slower in the dark. If you look at the ratio of night:day for the 32 riders, you find with 99.9% confidence that all riders should run lap times 1.078 to 1.147 times slower at night compared to day. And this makes intuitive sense as a good rider running 40 minute day laps and going 8% slower at night would run 43 minute laps.
So onto Sam’s night:day ratio of 0.998. If you run a t-test to determine if his lap ratio is significantly different from a normal person's, you find that there is 99.999999999% confidence that his is an outlier. This translates to a 1 in 1.3 million shot of his lap times happening without some outside influence (cheating, mechanicals, whatever).
You made a great case that something fishy was going on with his lap times. Just though you should know statistics is on your side.
Graham"
Comments
So you're tellin' me there's a chance. YEAH!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KX5jNnDMfxA
Sam is the circle on the dotted line at about y=40 and x=40, aka the only person in the data who rides as fast at night as they do during the day.
I think that's unlikely to be an effective strategy, because it basically hinges on it coming down to a 2-team race, and the leading team deciding to do double laps because they think their cushion is secure. Since a full rotation of double laps costs about 24 minutes (+3 minute per lap for 8 laps), your team would have to be significantly off the pace (30 minutes or more?) by midnight to get the leading team to adopt this strategy, which is a pretty big gap to close once you show your true strength.
...and if the leading team doesn't fall for it (maybe because one of the other 50+ teams at the event are challenging them) then you've effectively just handicapped yourself by riding some laps at less than full gas.
In my experience, with 2 hours of recovery between laps, you can basically ride every lap full gas, and "going easy" for a lap doesn't cause the following lap to be much faster. So it's really hard to "store energy" for later -- at least in my opinion.
I'd be interested in a pre-order.
If you think there is no correlation between cheating in 2011 and cheating in 2014 then you are correct that this is not about night laps.
If someone passed you before the Wilding loop it wouldn't have been Sam, as he started about 14 minutes after you (unless you stopped and waited at the start you would have been on the loop already when Sam was just leaving the tent.) It seems odd then that you wouldn't remember your friend passing you later on that lap. I know I make a point to at least say hi to anyone I know on the trail, and you'd think that Sam would call you out by name when passing you. Like many of the arguments people have employed to defend Sam it completely defies belief. I'd say there is no way you wouldn't recognize your friend passing you.
Sorry man, it sucks when your friends do crappy things, but I think it's time to stop making excuses for Sam. He's probably feeling pretty bad right now and could use the support of his friends. I'd say it's up to the people who actually know him to convince him to admit he cheated and apologize.