I was reading FasterSkier’s profile of the Japanese World Cup skiers and a few people commented about how Japan had a good showing at World Juniors/U23s this past season. Naturally that got me thinking about how little I know about these guys, so I thought I’d make some graphs. First up is a simple time [...] Related posts:
This is part two 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:
This is part one 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:
You may have noticed some changes in these parts of the Interwebs over the last few days. Firstly, Statistical Skier has an awesome new logo, designed by my good friend (and very talented in all things web-related) Cosmo. He also happens to be responsible for the best professional cycling blog in existence. If you landed [...] Related posts:
One really simple question that occurred to me while playing with all this skiing data is, How many races do these athletes actually do? Now, I can’t really answer that completely, since I don’t have every single cross country ski race in existence in my database. But what I’m really getting at is the notion [...] Related posts:
This is the sprinting version of my earlier post looking at some of the best young distance skiers on the World Cup circuit last season. The methodology here is basically the same. I’ve set an age cutoff of 24, I’m only considering skiers who did at least four major international (i.e. WC, OWG, TDS) sprint [...] Related posts:Most Improved: Men’s Sprint Most Improved: Women’s Sprint Most Unimproved: Men’s Sprint
Conventional wisdom holds (so I’m told) that World Cup skiers go faster these days for a variety of reasons: improved grooming technology, improved equipment/waxing, larger athlete pool, better training/diet (on average) etc. It would be neat if this trend showed up in results data. Namely, have the top times for races of a set distance [...] Related posts:
Only a few more weeks until ski season kicks off! We took a look at some of better younger skiers from last season. I posted a rundown on some data from the Dartmouth Ski Team’s Moosilauke time trial. We got a quick look at the ages of World Cup skiers, which included the hint of [...] Related posts:
Sometimes it’s a good thing to ask basic questions that everyone thinks they know the answer to. Sometimes you get surprising answers, sometimes not. So, how old are World Cup skiers? In general, World Cup skier ages tend to center around 25-26. These distributions all have a slight right skew, which just means there tend [...] Related posts:
It’s nearing the end of October, which means that if you are a skier hailing from the esteemed institution that I do, that means its time for the Moosilauke time trial. It’s an uphill running time trial beginning at the Moosilauke Ravine Lodge up the Gorge Brook Trail, ending around 3.6 miles later on the [...] Related posts:
“Young” is a relative term, of course, which becomes clearer to me with each passing year. But there are successful cross-country skiers over quite a wide age range, so it might be fun to focus in on some of the younger ones. They are likely the names we’ll be seeing over and over down the [...] Related posts:
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, [...] Related posts:
Well I guess that quiz wasn’t quite as popular. I suppose it was a bit harder than I thought. In any case, the race in question was the women’s pursuit at the 2002 Salt Lake Olympics. That means the top five was Beckie Scott – Mystery Skier D Katerina Neumannova – Mystery Skier C Viola [...] Related posts:
A commenter asked about whether I could take the data from this post and look at trends over time. The answer, of course, if yes! The statistic of interest here is median absolute deviation (MAD), which is a measure of variability. In this case, we’re calculating a MAD value for each skier and each season [...] Related posts:
Another guessing game, this one based on a misunderstanding of a previous one. This time, I’ve graphed FIS points vs. date for five skiers up to an Olympic race where they will all race against each other and finish in the top five. Your job is to identify the medalists and for bonus points the [...] Related posts:
The week in brief: A quick post about how much more volatile biathlon racing is than XC, due to the influence of shooting, of course. I probably didn’t explain the actual statistics very clearly in that post, so if you found it confusing, check out the comments. Also, I’ll follow up on commenter Bolle’s question [...] Related posts:
Can you name a Polish men’s cross country ski racer? Hmmm. Poland has certainly been a one woman show of late, thanks to Justyna Kowalczyk. Which makes the following graph (a continuation of the graphs in this post) not terribly surprising: So here are some Polish men for you: Janusz Krezelok and Maciej Kreczmer. Who [...] Related posts:
I sort of just stumbled across these graphs accidentally. If there’s a point to them, it might be that this is what happens when you have a small ski team that manages to produce a really, really fast skier (or two). You hold on to them for as long as humanly possible. First up, Estonia. [...] Related posts:
Yes. That whole shooting bit. Tricky, isn’t it? So maybe a bit more discussion would be good. This graph shows the distributions of the median absolute deviations (MADs) by athlete and season, for those athletes who competed in at least five major competitions in that season. Biathletes, due to wild swings in shooting performance, are [...] Related posts:
Happy October everyone! Can’t you just smell the ski season around the corner? Previously on Statistical Skier: We took a look at the quality of OPA Cup and Scandinavian Cup (sort of a minor league race series for the World Cup) races as measure by the FIS points awarded to the top skiers at those [...] Related posts: