Fredrik Karlsson

Hopefully there won’t be any more posts like this for a long while. Fredrik Karlsson died recently, I guess in a snowmobile accident. I didn’t know much about him, but I guess he was on Sweden’s development team. As you might expect for someone on Sweden’s development team, he hadn’t quite made a huge splash in World Cup races, having never cracked the top 30 in a distance race, and he’d only done one WC sprint race.

But if you look at his results with FIS points, you can clearly see that while he was relatively old (~27) he had not “stalled out” in terms of improvement:

No major jumps in performance, just a very steady, consistent improvement. By last season, his median FIS point result in distance races was good enough to be one of the top 15 Swedish men:

Name	YOB	Median FIS Point	Total Races
HELLNER Marcus	1985	2.290	24
OLSSON Johan	1980	3.272	12
RICKARDSSON Daniel	1982	9.472	24
SOEDERGREN Anders	1977	11.392	17
JOHNSSON Jimmi	1985	17.912	7
AHRLIN Jerry	1978	18.116	7
FREDRIKSSON Mathias	1973	20.782	13
ERIKSSON Jens	1987	20.932	15
NELSON Lars	1985	22.024	25
HALFVARSSON Calle	1989	24.430	12
JONSSON Fredrik	1990	25.884	21
ANDREASSON Rikard	1979	26.552	10
BRINK Joergen	1974	27.410	10
KARLSSON Fredrik	1985	30.100	15
OTTOSSON Markus	1986	34.124	16