f a n t a s y     c y c l i n g

I have a website dedicated purely to fantasy cycling, called Tour Fantasy, focusing on stage races. Classics may be added in the future. Previous tours were the 2009 Tour de France (the very first one I did!), the 2009 Tour of Missouri, the 2010 Giro and 2010 Tour of California. The first Tour was crudely done in 2009, updated by hand, with the aid of a few shell scripts. It was a real last-minute decision... a couple days before the Tour de France began that year, I was looking for free fantasy cycling websites and didn't find any to my liking. So I made my own. In 2010, I wrote some actual CGI programs to handle team creation, point updates, and so on, and ran the Tour of California and Giro d'Italia while living in Taiwan! It was reassuring that it all worked out okay while being so far from home. Hopefully I can do a good Tour de France this year. Some other fantasy cycling sites have cool features that would be nice to implement in Tour Fantasy. The main one is the ability to have mini leagues, so small groups of friends can compete against themselves without having the clutter of 100+ other teams in the rankings. Maybe that can be done next year, but as it stands the site isn't yet popular enough to justify mini leagues. The entire site is a mini league! A few key things I'm proud of: First of all, Tour Fantasy doesn't have any ads. I think they look heinous and cheap. Second, there's no javascript, and no flash type garbage, so the site can be used by pretty much anyone. And third, it's free. Maybe a betting system feature could be added in the future but it's not a serious consideration at the moment. It's better to focus on the fun and the drama of the cycling race itself. 2011 races include (only) the Tour de France. In 2012 I hope to do Paris-Nice, the Giro, Tour of California, Tour de France, and the Tour of Colorado.