How Sam Hill Won the 2017 Enduro World Series By Just .9% 6

If memory serves us correctly (and it might not), several seasons ago, then-Yeti teammates Sam Blenkinsop and Justin Leov had a bit of a gentleman's bet on the World Cup DH circuit to see who could have the lowest cumulative race time after the entire season.  They kept tally on the race truck door and someone won, but don't ask us who.  It seemed like a fun bit of bench racing, so we figured why not do the same with the Top 10 men in the overall EWS standings? We were going to figure out the Top 5 women too, but since 2nd place had a DNF in the mix, it didn't work out.

By Lee Trumpore / Cover photo by Sven Martin

While some may consider these *alternative facts* given our methods of analysis, we'd argue that is exactly why you shouldn't believe everything you read on the internet.

The One-percenters

The 2017 EWS consisted of 82.6 miles of total timed racing across 8 events. Sam Hill's total time destroying this mileage was 5 hours, 24 minutes, 34.63 seconds. That put him 2 minutes, 25.37 seconds ahead of Adrien Dailly (2nd place) and 9 minutes, 55.53 seconds ahead of Richie Rude (10th place). Dailly's time is a scant .9% (that's nine-tenths of one percent or .009) slower than Hill's time.  Richie's is just 3% slower.  The difference in time between Aaron Gwin and Amaury Pierron at the final round of the World Cup in Val Di Sole, on the 3.5-minute track, was just under 1% and Jack Moir in 10th was just over 3% back.  We're not even sure what that means, but we know it's pretty cool.

Just Slightly Shy of a Parsec

Sam's average speed for the entire series was 15.27mph or .13mph (.21 kph) faster than Dailly. That speed difference adds up to an advantage of basically 18 seconds per race or 2.5 seconds per stage. If you stretched each stage end-to-end, Sam's lead is about .7 miles, 1.16 kilometers, 3.6509e-14 parsecs, or roughly the length of the raddest crowd-lined section of the last stage in Finale Ligure.

.13mph is also 686 feet per hour, 11.44 feet per minute, or 2.25 inches per second (5.71cm per second for the rest of the world).  That's about 3 bike lengths (axle-to-axle of Sam's size medium Nukeproof Mega Carbon) for every minute of racing.

More Random Geekery

According the the graph of the spread sheet, Sam's margin to Dailly appears larger than the gaps between other riders within the Top 10.  Clementz and Oton in 4th and 5th were only 29.86 seconds apart, 9th-place Mark Scott was 21.75 seconds behind 8th, and Remi Gauvin was actually a measly 4.28 seconds faster than teammate Florian Nicolai who beat him by one place in the overall.  We hope he claims his deserved bragging rights.

Baller Stats

Not to be outdone, Chris Ball, the man responsible for the Enduro World Series, randomly posted his unique EWS stats as we finished ours. Here's his take poached from his Facebook page:

And a 5th year and 5th visit to Finale comes to a close. So why not end the year on some stats, as everyone loves a stat. Here goes. I've often said enduro is a monster, and forum commenters and riders often ask why we don't do more. Here's some perspective for you from this weekend. The EWS video output took 98 hours of film, 51 hours of presenting/producing, 90 hours of editing, 8 cameras, 1 quad, 2 4x4's, 1 drone equaling 532.2Gb of useable, logged and tagged film and 5636 photographs totalling 225.4gb compressed into 8 online videos, 1 TV show and 6 photo galleries. Add 2 press releases in 4 languages to 16,000 recipients. Added to +30,000 emails about various event updates. Not including the 7692 words Kate wrote in the Race Feed over 166 individual posts.

We had 47 hours of solid on-stage live MCing by 2 MCs, 88 ambulance standby hours, 136 marshals and mountain rescue staff, 2 doctors, 1 nurse and 16 medics covering 2 race days and 7 stages. 32 timing staff days, 800 timing chips, 15 timing upload stations, 150 GPS units, 95 radios, 400 riders, 83 accredited journalists, 22 shuttle buses for liaison stage 1 doing 3 laps each, 2-3 media shuttle buses running for 5 days, 8 Audio-visual staff, 5880 racing hours, 46 trophies and 42 bottles of podium champagne. The after party consumed 45 kegs of beer via 3 bars and 1 DJ.

The course marking team used 2000 marking arrows over 120km of course, 700 poles and 28km of course marking tape. They drove 800km and blew up 1 motorbike over 4 days, broke one toe and worked on average 16 hours per day equaling 32 working days and 512 hours of course marking with the latest finish at 3am.

After 5 years, 38 EWS rounds and the 5th Finale everyone here, in the spiritual home of the EWS, is as amazing as always and so to celebrate we hosted the 1st EWS Gala dinner for 123 guests each eating 4 courses and receiving 12 more awards.

Here's to everyone involved, near and far. I'm taking a holiday. Ciao.

Is it 2018 yet?