Here’s what’s been cooking on the site this week:
- We played a fun little guessing game, in which I asked you to predict which of five skiers would land on the podium in their very next race. The answers were revealed today, here.
- I veered off into some running data, looking at the relationship between average pace and the length of races for world record level runners. This post prompted a short, but fun discussion in the comments. Also, see here for a tangentially related post at Andrew Gelman’s blog (a very famous statistician at Columbia) about marathon pacing that prompted me to publish this post when I did.
- I revisited an idea from way back in the comments section of one of my first articles for FasterSkier.com, measuring how competitive the World Cup circuit is over time (i.e. has it gotten more or less competitive) using something called churn.
- Athlete retirement posts continue (seemingly forever!) with the biathletes that I know of. This week, it’s German Simone Hauswald, and she certainly did finish her career on a high note!
- Finally, NordicXplained has a nice post up recapping the summer’s news in cross-country skiing in which they mention the skier retirement posts I’ve been doing. Check it out!
We have another long weekend ahead of us (Labor Day), which if you know anything about my summer so far means you’ll know that I have another wedding to go to. This will be number five (of six!). That means Statistical Skier will be probably be quiet until Tuesday. Next week will see a return to some cycling posts (Vuelta a Espana) along with the regular skiing content.
I also have some new….”material”, shall we say, that I’m pretty excited about. I’ll be sharing more of that with you over the coming weeks and months.
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