As promised, race snapshot graphs today’s sprint races. First the reduced versions (top 30, plus North Americans) and the full versions are below the fold (the names on those might be a bit small; there were a lot of racers!). Updated: Bit of a mishap with some of the athlete’s names created some errors. Fixed [...] Related posts:
Aside from being a yummy holiday treat, Thanksgiving turkey is a term used (in North America, at least) to refer to ski racers who come out of the gate kicking everyone’s pants off in November or December and then fizzle out for the rest of the season. A friend urged me to write a post [...] Related posts:
Several people have commented that my summary graphs should take into account skier’s potentially differing abilities in skating and classic. (We could slice up the data as thinly as we’d like: mass start vs. interval, etc. But that will get complicated quickly, so let’s add technique and see how it goes for now.) I pondered [...] Related posts:
Now for some of the folks across the pond. I’m less familiar with a lot of the European racers, so who I focus on will be largely dictated by what stands out to me in the data (or you can drop me a line if you think there’s someone I should put under the microscope!), [...] Related posts:
I’ll have a post up tomorrow running through some of the notable European results from the weekend. The short version of the weekend’s distance races goes something like this: Good: Kris Freeman, Kikkan Randall, Noah Hoffman, Liz Stephen Bad: Canadian men, Chris Cook Meh: Morgan Arritola, Andrey Newell Americans Here’s a closer look at the [...] Related posts:
In the run up to the World Cup season, I had been trying to think of ways to create a single graph that would do a decent job of communicating how good each person’s race was in the context of their past results. I wanted something relatively simple and easy to read that would hopefully [...] Related posts:
Statistical Skier’s Week In Review has it’s first sponsor, Skadi Nordic! If removing the snow and ice from the bottom of your boots is your least favorite part of skiing, I’d head over to their site and check them out, cause they’ve solved that problem. World Cup racing finally gets underway this weekend in Gällivare, [...] Related posts:
I’m squeezing in the last preview post for the Canadian ski team just under the wire! For both Ivan Babikov and George Grey I’m going to focus in on the distance events. They both certainly do sprints in stage events like the Tour de Ski, but I think it’s fair to say they both have [...] Related posts:
Since I’ve been making some graphs now and then for the folks at skidpepp.se, I’ve been paying more attention to the Swedish skiers. I noticed that one performance last weekend that turned some heads was Maria Rydqvist’s second place finish in the distance race in Bruksvallarna, behind Charlotte Kalla. Of course, everyone was quite some [...] Related posts:
Continuing with my previews (gotta get them out before Saturday!), we’ll move on to the Canadian women, or at least two of them. As has been noted elsewhere, since the retirement of both Beckie Scott and more recently, Sara Renner, the Canadian women haven’t had as much success as the men. Let’s look at two [...] Related posts:
So on Monday I posted some graphs that were intended to provide some context for some of the distance race results over the weekend. Sprinting wasn’t left out in the cold because I dislike it (although, to be fair, I’m sort of a traditionalist in this respect; I will always love distance racing more, sorry!), [...] Related posts:
I thought it only fair that I give our good neighbors to the north the same treatment as I did with the USST previews. These will be a bit shorter on the gab, though. We’ll start things off with Alex Harvey and Devon Kershaw. Both of these guys are probably more of a threat in [...] Related posts:
This past weekend was chock full of racing in Finland, Norway and Sweden. There’s way too much for me to analyze, even looking at just the North Americans, so I’m going to focus in on just a few performances that I found particularly interesting. Even so, this post will be quite long. Results ranged from [...] Related posts:
And we’re off…! The first really big weekend of racing is underway, and there’s already some good signs for the US, with Kikkan Randall winning the freestyle sprint in Muonio and Ida Sargent finishing a strong 11th. The weekend continues with more distance races in Muonio (FIN), Beitostoelen (NOR) and Bruksvallarna (SWE). World Cup action [...] Related posts:
SkiTrax and FIS are holding a fantasy World Cup contest, roughly modeled after the very popular fantasy baseball or fantasy football competitions that we all know and love. Basically, you pick four men and four women (plus a “bonus” man and woman, from outside the top 15 rankings from last year), and then your “team” [...] Related posts:
Kris Freeman is simply the best distance skier in the US at the moment, male or female. In fact, he probably has been for at least the past 4 years or so. Unfortunately, that means he’s under a lot of pressure to produce quality results, medals in particular. That’s not terribly fair, in a cosmic [...] Related posts:
This is part four in a short series of season preview posts on USST athletes in which I’ll review each skier’s results to date and make some guesses about how they’ll fare in the upcoming season. I don’t have any special insight into the future beyond my database of past race results, and I certainly [...] Related posts:
I was listening to FasterSkier’s podcast the other day and was a bit startled to here one of the participants mention me by name!1 The topic was whether we tend to see the same few skiers at the top in women’s sprint races more than in men’s races. In other words, are we more likely [...] Related posts:
This is part three in a short series of season preview posts on USST athletes in which I’ll review each skier’s results to date and make some guesses about how they’ll fare in the upcoming season. I don’t have any special insight into the future beyond my database of past race results, and I certainly [...] Related posts:
First real races of the season are this weekend in Rybinsk and Muonio! So far I’ve managed a decent posting schedule along with my teaching job, but now we’re adding the task of updating (and cleaning) my results database as new races roll in. This is harder to automate than it may seem, mostly because [...] Related posts: