Clearly, I was a bit distracted yesterday, so the week in review is a bit delayed.
- My little guessing game this week was a bit too hard, I think. The answers are posted here.
- We looked at trends over time in variability by athlete, comparing cross-country to biathlon, at the request of a commenter.
Finally, it appears that FIS race scheduling is again in the news, this time with discussions of some wacky ski-cross type event. Reactions have been, well, mixed.
For my part, I’ll take this opportunity to repost the following chart showing the changes in the WC race schedule over the past 18 years or so for the men:
![](http://www.statisticalskier.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/xc_schedulewtmk.png" "xc_schedulewtmk")
I sympathize with the marketing problem that FIS has. Everyone wants skiing to be both exciting and popular. It probably is tough to get advertisers for a product that consists mostly of long races with interval starts. The problem is that by inventing new and ever more “exciting” events, you are tacitly accepting (and reinforcing) the idea that the more traditional events are simply boring.
It may be that it isn’t possible to win the viewing public (in Europe, mostly) back to the notion of more traditional races. But it’d be nice if someone tried.
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