Technical Difficulties

We have a problem. Or in the parlance of our times, it appears something is fucked.

Usually in a TTT, individual results are posted along with team results. Only riders who finish with the team get the time of the team. Those who come in on their own are credited with the time they cross the line. This point was driven home today by the sad case of Ted King, who found himself eliminated by just 7 seconds and some less than transparent time keeping methods. Today, however, no such individual results were published. Just the team results and the individual times for the GC.

In any case, this is an issue for the TdF Pool. Unless we find the individual results for today's stage, we can't figure out the vicarious racing equivalent. At least not without putting in a lot more work than I'm willing to do.

If the results don't get published, our best bet is to subtract the overall times for each rider after yesterday's stage from the overall times for each rider after today's stage. If it were that simple, we'd have results already. But in order to do this, we need to find a way to translate one time format (e.g., 12h 47' 24") into a single number, say total number of seconds. If there are any Excel whizzes out there who can create a script that will do this automatically, please let us know.