WJC & U23 Sprints

World Junior/U23s are underway, of course, in the exotic locale of Turkey. Monday wasn’t a spectacular day for the North Americans in the WJC freestyle sprint. For some quick context, here’s a look at the historical results in each discipline for the US:

I’m just using finishing place here, rather than FIS points, since I think that’s often more understandable for people with World Juniors. Obviously, the first distance races were this morning (I wrote this last night) so I’ll update those on Friday.

As you can see, while the men didn’t have a great day, they really haven’t qualified more than 1-2 skiers in a long time. So while it’s not great, it doesn’t seem dramatically different from what we’ve seen over the past 5-6 years. What I notice with the women is that we’ve actually seen 3 straight years of declining results. While the median result this year isn’t much different than last, the top result has steadily decline.

And of course, here’s the same graph for the Canadians:

The “average” junior women’s sprinting result for the Canadians has been declining, but they seem to manage send 1-2 skiers through to the heats. The men have just plain struggled a bit for several years in a row now.

Similarly, here’s the same graph for the U23 sprint, first for the Americans: