New Zealand Continental Cups Sprint

Continuing on in our over-analysis of the recent New Zealand FIS races, we turn to the sprints. It’s much harder to do anything sensible with these races (even given that I’ve over-analyzing things!) since the fields are so small even the difference in placing between specific skiers is potentially misleading. However, just for fun let’s focus like last time on a younger sprinter, Len Valjas:

Again, this is the difference in finishing place between Valjas and a selection of folks from the New Zealand sprint race. Positive values mean Valjas won and vice versa. Note that he finished a lot closer to some of these Russians that he normally does, but again, that may be a function of the small field. It’s hard to do much analysis on these sorts of races without the heat times.

My only other note is that Kris Freeman slightly underplayed how good his sprint FIS points were from this race. Here’s a graph of all the sprint qualification results I have for him with the New Zealand race in red:

Definitely good sprint FIS points for him, but it’s more like the 5-6th best all time. Of course, a lot of those are from a long time ago in potentially very different sprint race formats, distances and courses.