Career Retrospective: Martina Beck

Biathletes retire too!  I will be the first to admit that I know a lot less about biathlon than cross country, though, so these athlete profile posts for biathletes will be as much for my benefit as yours.

Martina Beck is (was) a very fast German biathlete.  The International Biathlon Union has a nice article about her career and her decision to retire.  Rumor has it she was an excellent shot, as well.

Since I’m much less of a biathlon expert, rather than pontificate on specific race results let’s just look at some data for her career…

I’m accustomed to skiers starting out quite slow and steadily improving.  Beck appears to have been pretty uniformly fast for nearly her entire career.

Using percent back has its advantages, obviously, but we still miss some interesting stuff.  For instance, Beck’s two faster OWG races in 2006 were actually good enough for silver medals (individual and pursuit).

The 2002-2003 season stands out, at least from a data perspective.  She just wasn’t very slow that year.  Subsequently, things seemed to revert to “normal”: centered around 5% back with some much better and some quite a bit slower.

The other interesting thing to note is the tendency to have seasons with almost no results between 0% and 2.25% back or so.  I wonder if this is a result shooting performance…

In any case, Beck has seen fewer top results over the past few seasons, and her slower races appear to be getting slower.  Again, pretty typical for someone nearing the end of a career.

Since we don’t have technique differences to ponder (biathlon only employs skating) let’s look at potential differences between race format:

I’ve labelled these by race length, but biathlon race formats have been quite stable over the years.  The 7.5km is a “sprint”, which just means it’s short and they only shoot twice.  The 15km is the “individual” and is an interval start race.  The 10km is a pursuit race, usually based on the results of a previous sprint race.  And the 12.5km is a mass start race.

I’d call that a slight preference for the longer mass start and individual races, particularly at her peak.  If the rumors are true and Beck was indeed an excellent shot, this would make sense for her to be somewhat better in events that involved more shooting.

Let’s look at her shooting stats:

The solid lines are Beck and the dashed lines are an aggregate of the top ten female finishers for each season.  The rumors appear to be true.  Beck was indeed one of the better shots around.  Two seasons in particular, 2002-2003 and 2007-2008 seem better than most of the rest.  For her entire career, I have Beck shooting 90% prone, 87% standing and 88% overall.  How good is that?  Well, keep in mind that I only have data back to around 1991 or so, but here’s a table of shooting stats for women since then with at least 300 shots:

Women’s career shooting stats for athletes with at least 300 shots.

Name	Nation	Prone	Standing	Overall	Number of Shots
ERTL Barbara	ITA	0.935	0.927	0.931	520
TANANAIKO Irina	BLR	0.912	0.895	0.904	1090
JONSSON Jenny	SWE	0.933	0.873	0.903	330
JONSSON Helena	SWE	0.895	0.907	0.901	1720
MALLAT Annukka	FIN	0.89	0.912	0.901	890
TANANAIKO Irina	UKR	0.921	0.868	0.895	380
LEVCHENKOVA Natalia	MDA	0.892	0.892	0.892	1690
BECK Martina	GER	0.901	0.869	0.885	3820
BRUNET Marie Laure	FRA	0.898	0.868	0.883	1000
PONZA Michela	ITA	0.907	0.86	0.883	3830
BAVEREL Florence	FRA	0.898	0.864	0.881	3330
KHVOSTENKO Oksana	UKR	0.892	0.867	0.88	2470
HOLOPAINEN Maija	FIN	0.889	0.868	0.879	380
IOURIEVA Ekaterina	RUS	0.873	0.88	0.877	820
FORSBERG Magdalena	SWE	0.926	0.824	0.875	2330
AKHATOVA Albina	RUS	0.873	0.875	0.874	2650
DORIN Marie	FRA	0.887	0.855	0.871	870
SKARDINO Nadezhda	BLR	0.912	0.829	0.871	1090
KETTUNEN Outi	FIN	0.916	0.822	0.869	1170
PIDHRUSHNA Olena	UKR	0.89	0.845	0.868	620
FALTUSOVA Lenka	CZE	0.896	0.836	0.866	900
KRISTIANSEN Elin	NOR	0.91	0.814	0.862	420
KUDRASHOVA Olga	BLR	0.848	0.875	0.861	960
HÖGBERG Elisabeth	SWE	0.9	0.818	0.859	560
ROGSTAD Solveig	NOR	0.869	0.848	0.859	750
TERESHENKO Natalia	UKR	0.89	0.829	0.859	490
BEER Katja	GER	0.872	0.841	0.857	2410
KARAGIOZOVA Iva	BUL	0.882	0.825	0.854	1530
ROMANOVA Iana	RUS	0.868	0.839	0.854	560
SALONEN Eija	FIN	0.864	0.844	0.854	1190
ANDREASSEN Gunn Margit	NOR	0.85	0.85	0.85	3360
EKLUND Catarina	SWE	0.806	0.894	0.85	320
GRUBBEN Linda	NOR	0.897	0.803	0.85	1910
CLAUDEL Veronique	FRA	0.887	0.812	0.849	1040
PALKA Krystyna	POL	0.851	0.848	0.849	1660
HENKEL Andrea	GER	0.873	0.824	0.848	4450
ZAITSEVA Olga	RUS	0.853	0.84	0.847	2210
HOLUBCOVA Katerina	CZE	0.897	0.793	0.845	2690
PETROVA Olena	UKR	0.876	0.815	0.845	2440
ZUBRILOVA Olena	BLR	0.887	0.802	0.845	1650
NIOGRET Corinne	FRA	0.832	0.856	0.844	3370
BURLET Delphyne	FRA	0.831	0.855	0.843	2030
BARNES Tracy	USA	0.858	0.826	0.842	690
MEDVEDTSEVA Olga	RUS	0.857	0.826	0.842	2960
MILLER SMITH Joan	USA	0.875	0.81	0.842	590
ZUBRILOVA Olena	UKR	0.89	0.793	0.842	1950
ALEXIEVA Nadejda	BUL	0.886	0.795	0.841	440
YU Shumei	CHN	0.84	0.839	0.84	1490
MURINOVA Anna	SVK	0.852	0.825	0.839	2980
MAKAROVA Joulia	RUS	0.859	0.818	0.838	340

There are women who’ve shot somewhat better, but they all have many, many fewer shots.

I don’t have any big conclusions here.  Like I said at the start, a lot of what I write about biathlon will be as much about me learning about the sport and it’s athletes as anything else.  But if there’s some more sophisticated number crunching that you’d like to see for biathlon, let me know in the comments and I’ll try to oblige.

Related posts:

1. <Career Retrospective: Rene Sommerfeldt
2. <Career Retrospective: Claudia Nystad (Kuenzel)
3. <Career Retrospective: Reto Burgermeister