Here is the 2026 page for the Tour Pool I've been a part of for 19 years. It's fairly early in the Tour, so it's too early to say how well Team Florky will do.

Here is the 2025 page for the Tour Pool I've been a part of for 18 years. I'm on team Florky which are in second to last place as I write this. Which is pretty typical (so typical that this post from one year ago team Florky was also in second to last place!).

Here is the 2024 page for the Tour Pool I've been a part of for 17 years. I'm on team Florky which are in second to last place as I write this. Which is pretty typical.

As I have since 2007, I am scorekeeping a Tour de France fantasy team pool. Please click here to see how poorly my "Team Florky" is doing as the tour progresses.

As I have since 2007, I am scorekeeping a Tour de France fantasy team pool. Please click here to see how poorly my "Team Florky" is doing as the tour progresses.

As ever, please check this link to see how poorly my Tour de France pool team ("Team Florky") is doing. Maybe one of these days I'll actually try to put a team together that performs well.

But probably not.

For the eleventh year, I am the scorekeeper for a Tour de France Pool. My team, "Team Florky," has already lost one of its better riders after the first stage. This year looks to be as poor a performance as usual, then, for my team.

See full results here.

Here's the standings page for the 2016 edition of the Tour de France pool. Go Team Florky!

My Tour Pool 2015 page is up! Check it out daily after each stage to see how terrible my team (Florky) is doing (as it does every year!).

My Tour Pool 2014 page is up! Check it out daily after each stage to see how terrible my team (Florky) is doing (as it does every year!).

Just a quick note: It's time again for the 2012 edition of the Tour de France pool hosted by Kris Wells. I am the scorekeeper, which I have been for several years.

I've posted the 2010 Tour Pool results page. I did absolutely no research for my team, and I'll probably do just as well as all the other years I've participated. I have a few more sprinters than normal this time, so hopefully I'll get some more bonus time than what I usually get, which is very little.

For this year I bought a pass so I can watch the Tour online, live or time shifted after the daily stage is over, for something like $30. I feel that this is entirely appropriate because it jibes with my issues with subscription television. There are several channels on Cable/Satellite that I would like to have (Comedy Central, old SciFi (not the SyFy it has turned into), Versus, Discovery...), but the large majority I can do without. The media companies make it impossible to pick and choose the channels in an a-la-carte fashion, so I choose to have no subscription TV at all. Paying for this specific event just once, rather than month over month, allows me to view what I want, where I want, and it saves me money.

Oh, and I think Contador will win this year, and Lance will be top five.

The 2009 Tour de France pool is over, and Team Storky came in fifth. In terms of the time gap to the winner, this team did better than any I've been part of before. But it lacked several things: luck and winners.

The team lost Levi Leipheimer, a nearly-guaranteed top-five finisher, Jens Voigt who always finishes tours well-placed and is capable of winning a stage, and Robert Gesink, a promising young Dutch rider who has won a Tour of California stage ahead of Leipheimer and finished seventh in the 2008 Vuelta a España. No other team in the pool lost a single rider of the caliber of Leipheimer, nor three riders of such skill and ability.

The team also got exactly two time bonuses, for a total of 25 minutes of bonus time. This put Team Storky as the second-lowest team in terms of accumulated bonus time, ahead of only the astoundingly unlucky Team John Arnold. Team Wells got over eight times as much bonus time as Team Storky. On one stage, a group of eight escaped from the pack and reached the finish before everyone else. Of those eight, three were on Team Storky. Time bonuses go to first, second and third. The Team Storky riders got forth, fifth and seventh. That outcome is emblematic of the kind of luck the team had throughout the tour. It appears that to win the pool, a team needs at least a sprinter or two that can finish well-placed on a number of stages reliably, something my team didn't have.

Above: The fire department was training across the street from my apartment on Sunday, in no way related to the Tour de France. I just wanted to share that.

It's Tour time again, and I've posted the team rankings after today's prologue in Monaco. You may remember this from last year, when I didn't do very well. I hope to do better this year. For once I actually put some thought into my choices.

I'll update the rankings every day after the stage as quickly as I can!

For the last few years I've participated in a friendly Tour de France fantasy pool with some friends. We get together, have a barbecue, and pick teams of riders. It's very much like fantasy football or baseball teams. Each team pays $20 to enter, which goes to the winner (naturally). However, the winner is obliged to use that money for a party after the Tour, so everyone wins in the end.

Some years ago an Excel spreadsheet was written to help calculate the scores. It's kind of clumsy and surprisingly un-automated. So I threw together a Python script in an afternoon which is much more automated and puts the results on the web for easy viewing.

Above is the graph of how each team is doing as a function of stage. Along with three friends I formed two teams, "Storky's Bitches" and "The Pump Handles." Neither names were my first choice; I blame Kris Wells. I've never done very well at the Tour Pool, and it's looking like this year will be no different. Of course, it's early, so things may change.

Take a look at the full results page, and check back each day throughout the Tour to see how things are progressing.