This week, we re-posted a great piece from the Statistical Skier (Joran Elias). Before jumping into this episode, it’s worth taking some time to digest some of the findings. He wrote the piece in response to a podcast we posted after the classic sprint in Oberstdorf, Germany. In that sprint, Norway’s Johannes Høsflot Klæbo had an astounding qualifier. In the podcast following the race, we discussed Klæbo’performance and the time-back to some skiers in the field.
What does it all mean? Well, Klæbo still crushed it. However, the Statistical Skier’s analysis helped put some things into perspective.
“This is one of the problems with measuring performance based on only the winner,” Elias wrote. “Devon talked (correctly, I think) in the podcast about how if you’re 15 seconds back from the winner in qualification that’s a pretty good signal that you’re not going to win. But, it is a potentially quite misleading signal about how you skied relative to your own performance history!”
Jump on in head first.
(This might be one of those occasions when it helps to have a computer open to the Statistical Skier piece when listening.)
You can find more great material from the Statistical Skier here.
