Continuing on in our over-analysis of the recent New Zealand FIS races, we turn to the sprints. It’s much harder to do anything sensible with these races (even given that I’ve over-analyzing things!) since the fields are so small even the difference in placing between specific skiers is potentially misleading. However, just for fun let’s [...] Related posts:
Hey, the first international ski races of the 2011-2012 season took place recently in New Zealand! They are officially FIS sanctioned races, but my impression is that they have a bit more of a training camp time trial feel to them. The Americans, Canadians, some Russians, and then an assortment of Japanese, Korean, and locals [...] Related posts:
Once again, I use the term junior a little lightly. That’s especially true for the women, since it’s a bit more likely to see younger women establish themselves on the WC scene. So some of these names aren’t really “up and comers” anymore, but they are still quite young. As before, we’re using FIS points, [...] Related posts:
I use the term ‘Junior’ fairly loosely here. Mainly I’m referring to folks who are young enough to be at the very start of their (hopefully long) career. I basically just grabbed the names of the skiers with some of the best FIS points results last season who are no older than ~23 (although that’s [...] Related posts:
Conventional wisdom (and probably a fair bit of physiology research) holds that going fast over short distances is a skill we tend to lose as we age. Are fast World Cup sprinters younger than fast distance skiers? Let’s look at the age distributions of top thirty racers in sprinting and distance races since the 2003-2004 [...] Related posts:
The USST has expanded somewhat, adding several younger skiers. Acknowledging that FIS points are only a small piece of performance assessment, it has interested me that at various times USST staff have mentioned comparing skiers’ FIS points to medalists, or some other group of top skiers. So here are two graphs showing the younger US [...] Related posts:USST Preview: Liz Stephen & Morgan Arritola USST Preview: Simi Hamilton & Noah Hoffman USST Preview: Kikkan Randall
I haven’t done one of these in a while, but with Mika Myllylae in the news recently I thought this might be fun… This head-to-head matchup might not be the first you’d think of to look at, but you end up with an interesting graph nonetheless. As always, I grabbed the 54 races where Myllylae [...] Related posts:
In a previous post I raised the question of whether biathletes might be more likely to shoot clean (i.e. hit all five targets) if they have just shot clean at their most recent trip through the shooting range. I left off with some numbers that suggested this was the case, but they were aggregated over [...] Related posts:
The concept of a “hot hand” is a popular one in various sports, and has been variously bunked, debunked and rebunked in numerous contexts. A common manifestation of this idea comes from basketball, where fans routinely feel that players will get “hot” during a stretch of a game during which they make a much higher [...] Related posts:
With Marit Bjørgen (and only a handful of others) dominating the women’s WC circuit last season, I thought I’d check out how this compared to past seasons. I took all WC, OWG, WSC and TDS races for each season and counted the number of distinct skiers finishing at four different levels: 1st, top 3, top [...] Related posts:
With the modern chip timing tools used today ties should be fairly rare. They do still happen, though: This shows the number of ties per race of each type for WC, OWG, WSC and TDS races for men and women. As we might have expected, there are considerably fewer ties in mass start style races. [...] Related posts:
A while back I responded to a reader requesting that I look into any connections between a skier’s performance at World Juniors and subsequent medal winning. My conclusions there tended toward the ambiguous, since 2-4 races (from World Juniors) just isn’t a whole lot of information. But we can also just take medalists and look [...] Related posts:Skiing Performance and Age Post-WJC/U23 Development: Canada Guess The Medalists!
The final installment of the 2011 Tour de France graphs, and what a fun race that was this year! Plenty of excitement (for some not so fun reasons) early on and then plenty of exciting racing towards the end. Good stuff… As usual, you can click on them for slightly larger versions. Here’s the same [...] Related posts:Tour de France Charts Tour de France Graphs: Fancy Versions Tour de France Graphs
The obvious follow-up from the last entry in this series is to look at the folks who have the strongest tendency to fall further behind the leaders as the race progresses. Not surprisingly, this group will include a lot of the more marginal skiers from smaller skiing nations. I did filter out people for whom [...] Related posts:
Continuing with my series of posts looking at some split time data (kindly provided by Jan at WorldOfXC.com), we turn to identifying some folks who tend to ski better (as measured by their % behind the leaders) towards the end of a race than the beginning. I actually fit a model on this one (gasp!) [...] Related posts:
Rest day number two is upon us, so it’s time to update my graphs tracking the race thus far. First the standard ‘bump chart’ showing the GC picture through the first 15 stages: And for comparison, the same graphs for all the Tour back to 2005 (click for larger version): And another version broken down [...] Related posts:
Fellow blogger (and, full disclosure, good friend) Cosmo kind of stirred things up a bit with post regarding attrition rates in this year’s Tour. My cycling blogging has been mostly just for fun, as I’m not much of a cycling expert, so I mostly do it to entertain those folks who enjoy mixing sports, numbers [...] Related posts:
The Tour de Carnage France is well underway. I planned to post a few graphs on Monday, the Tour’s first rest day, but a skiing post took precedence. So these graphs run through yesterday’s Stage 10. As usual with these cycling posts I’m not going to say much. I’m just putting the graphs out there [...] Related posts:
The Tour de Carnage France is well underway. I planned to post a few graphs on Monday, the Tour’s first rest day, but a skiing post took precedence. So these graphs run through yesterday’s Stage 10. As usual with these cycling posts I’m not going to say much. I’m just putting the graphs out there [...] Related posts:
A very brief note appeared on FasterSkier the other day noting that Canadian Dasha Gaiazova has apparently been removed from the World Cup team. No one would comment because apparently an appeal is underway, so I don’t imagine we’ll hear much about it until that process has played itself out. My impression has been that [...] Related posts: