I can’t keep up on the enormous number of good young skiers from every nation. I have a hard enough time with just those in my own backyard, the US and Canada. So it’s fun to look at some folks from other countries that I’m not so familiar with. For instance, here are some graphs [...] Related posts:
It’s pretty crazy to think about, but the 2011-2012 FIS racing season officially got under way last week with some sprint races in Germany. I don’t know much about the circumstances of the venue, but I’d love to know how they put these races on. I’m guessing artificial snow? Still, they claim to have used [...] Related posts:
Companion to the other test post. Pardon the disruption. Related posts:EqPB: Test Run Post-WJC/U23 Development: Italy Post-WJC/U23 Development: Norway Related posts:
A quick follow up to my previous post on the same topic for women. Swap Germany for Russia, and otherwise the answer is largely unchanged: Once again, this is the number of skiers born since 1988 who’s best FIS points results last season averaged better than 50 FIS points. I used a more strict cutoff [...] Related posts:
Answer: Norway. And Russia. Looking forward to the upcoming season, I’m somewhat astounded by the number of talented young Norwegian women on the horizon. Here’s a quick snapshot of what I’m talking about. I took female skiers born no earlier than 1988 who did at least 3 FIS races last season, and averaged their best [...] Related posts:
If you imagine a typical skier’s career in FIS points, it will often follow a vaguely parabolic shape: they get faster for a while and then get slower for a while. Somewhere in between there they “peaked”. Our goal in this post is to estimate approximately when this occurs for each athlete and then see [...] Related posts:
Since earlier this week I gave some context for what people’s performances would roughly translate into compared to how Kris Freeman and Liz Stephen skied on the WC last season, I thought I should provide some context for my context, so to speak. So the following two graphs show how various folks from last years [...] Related posts:
Same story as last time, only the women this time. Kikkan Randall may have made a better benchmark, but Liz Stephen is no slouch in WC distance events either. As before, all of this is highly approximate. I’ve taken Stephen’s races from last season, removed some of the least comparable (prologue’s for example), and then calculated where [...] Related posts:
This annual rollerski race was this past weekend, and as usual attracted a fair number of good domestic skiers. With the US Ski Team attending, it’s a good chance for folks to test themselves against folks like Kris Freeman. As with any other race, it’s natural to ask what the results “mean”. There are no [...] Related posts:
Marit Bjørgen pretty much wiped the floor with folks last year in distance events: As a stats guy, when I see extreme events I tend not to expect them to repeat themselves. The general principle here is called regression to the mean. Extreme events are just unlikely, so it doesn’t make sense to expect them [...] Related posts:
On Monday I looked at the ratio of women to men in FIS races during the 2010-2011 season. This will just be a quick update on that to look at the same data, but over time. The same caveats apply here. I’m only looking at participants in FIS sanctioned races, which misses lots of races [...] Related posts:
Fast and Female is a great organization, operating mainly in the US and Canada to promote women’s participation in skiing (or sports, more generally). I’ve been thinking about women’s participation in sports recently, so I thought I’d look up some data. Using all FIS sanctioned races from the 2010-2011, the following graph shows the ratio [...] Related posts:
I’m really sad that Vincent Vittoz retired, mainly because I really, really wanted him to win an Olympic medal. The French men are left with two guys who are pretty well established: These graphs show only their major international results (WC, WSC, etc.). Manificat’s stupendous win in 2010 is looking more and more like an [...] Related posts:
A commenter noted a few other classic specialists in my post on Erling Jevne the other day. So how did they fare against Jevne? It’s generally important to note here that my data stops in 1992, and several of these folks were active before then. In Kirvesniemi’s case, way before. Jevne and Sture Sirvetsen were probably [...] Related posts:
Erling Jevne wasn’t the best skier during his era, having to compete with folks like Dæhlie and Smirnov among others. And he wasn’t even the best classic skier, most likely. At least, he was still mostly losing to those two guys even in classic races: Jevne fared better post-1997, but Dæhlie always had at least [...] Related posts:
With the recent news that Andrus Veerpalu’s doping suspension has been made official, a sad story sort of ends. I’m always glad to see doping rules enforced, but it’s also not the way I want to hear about my favorite sport in the news. Over the years, Veerpalu has raced against many people: Name Number [...] Related posts:
As promised from last time, a quick look at some similar data broken down by race length. I’ve filtered out the occasional “strange” race length, to focus on just the standard 5, 10, 15, 30 and 50 kilometer distances. The metric is the same: the median number of skiers within a fixed percent of the [...] Related posts:
I received an email recently asking about field strength for the men’s and women’s WC fields, particularly as it applies to mass start races. Lately we’ve seen the men’s field engage in a fair bit of pack skiing, whereas the women’s field strings out more quickly. First, I want to dispatch with a common bit [...] Related posts:
On various occasions I have looked at FIS point race penalties, in a very general, roundabout way. Most recently, I looked at whether the FIS points you get in a non-World Cup race accurately reflect what you would have scored if you had raced in a World Cup race. The answer appeared to be: kind of. At [...] Related posts:
The title of this post has dramatically over-promised on the actual content. Sorry. I’ve talked a little before about race penalties. Since race penalties are specifically intended to adjust for the strength of the field, I thought it would interesting to think up some way to see how well they do that. Everything having to [...] Related posts: