Week In Review: Friday Nov 5th

First real races of the season are this weekend in Rybinsk and Muonio! So far I’ve managed a decent posting schedule along with my teaching job, but now we’re adding the task of updating (and cleaning) my results database as new races roll in. This is harder to automate than it may seem, mostly because I have really absurd standards for preventing errors. Regular expressions can produce a feeling of God-like power, but it’s tough for even God to anticipate all possible athlete name mis-spellings.

At the moment I’m anticipating being able to keep up with it all, but we’ll see.

Posts from this week:

The first two installments of my USST season preview series, looking at Liz Stephen and Morgan Arritola, and then Noah Hoffman and Simi Hamilton.
A look at a skiing nation that probably doesn’t get much attention, Japan. Specifically, we looked at how they fared at World Junior Championships and U23′s last season.

The USST previews will continue next week with Kikkan Randall, Andrew Newell and Kris Freeman.

Finally, I shared this video I stumbled across on the Statistical Skier Facebook page, which I thought was amusing, despite not understanding the language. See if you can spot the skiers racing with a water bottle! It’s the very first World Cup mass start race in Castelrotto, ITA in 1987. Trail design hadn’t quite adjusted to the new format.