DW Day 1 - The Quitters and Finishers of Prudential RideLondon

by Alex Fridriksson

The first day of dashboard week is here at last! There have been whispers here and there… “dashboard week is coming”. Kind of gives the impression of Games of Thrones “winter is coming”. Some look back on it with horror, some say it was the best.

Today we this week finally arrived and so far things are quite alright!

We had to get the data from the Prudential RideLondon website, which gave no download options or API access. We therefore had to practice our web scraping skills, which was a nice challenge.

We worked together on getting the ETL workflow to work, we tried different approaches, some complex but elegant others were quick and dirty but got the job done.

Eventually, we settled on the quick and dirty way… it did create some problems when we had to bring in over a 1000 pages but through our combined efforts we were proud to have the ETL done before lunch!

alteryx worflow

Not the most elegant workflow, but it got the job done but it got the job done fairly quickly

With the ETL completed, it was on to exploring and visualising the data using Tableau. Even though not all the analysis proved to be directly useful, some of it proved to be quite beautiful.

Tableau art

Having made some Tableau art, it was time to find the right angle to focus on. As usual, this took quite some trial and error.

Eventually, I decided on looking at who were the quitters and finishers of the race.

Here is the final result:

viz