Here’s what’s been cooking on the site this week: We played a fun little guessing game, in which I asked you to predict which of five skiers would land on the podium in their very next race. The answers were revealed today, here. I veered off into some running data, looking at the relationship between [...] Related posts:Week In Review: Friday July 16th Week In Review: Friday July 23rd Week In Review: Friday July 30th
Back on Monday I posted the graph shown below and posed a question: It turns out I didn’t ask my question very clearly, because I had to keep updating the post with clarifications. So that’s my fault. Maybe this time I’ll do better. What I did was plot a part of the time series of [...] Related posts:
I’ve mentioned before that one of the reasons I enjoy writing posts about skiing is that I learn stuff about my sport. Writing up a career retrospective post for German biathlete Simone Hauswald was one of those experiences. Simone Hauswald has competed internationally since 2000-2001, although she only did a handful of World Cups until [...] Related posts:
In one of the articles I wrote for FasterSkier.com, someone asked a question in the comments that I thought was interesting, so I dashed off a quick answer. Sadly, as is common when I do something quickly, I made a mistake. So I need to correct the record. Commenter triguy mentioned that it would be [...] Related posts:Skiing Performance and Age Introducing: Biathlete Rankings A New Sprint Points Method
I’m breaking the rules and posting about running instead of skiing. But skiers spend quite a bit of time running, and I’ve developed an interest in ultrarunning, so I thought this might be fun. I was reading about the Comrades Marathon recently, and was suitably impressed that those runners are stringing together roughly 55 sub-6 [...] Related posts:
Five mystery skiers, all women. For each skier, their very next (distance) race is a WC, OWG or WSC race. Which of them are going to finish on the podium (top 3) in their very next race? To make things a bit more challenging, I’ve omitted the x axis labels (which is date, not age), [...] Related posts:
It’s been a light week at Statistical Skier; had to move the Statistical Residence to a new (much improved) locale closer to work, so things have been a bit hectic. We mucked around with the speeds that skiers travel at, looking at differences between races in Europe and the US. A short not on rivalries, [...] Related posts:
Another helpful commenter reminded me that Norwegian Tore Ruud Hofstad also retired this past July. My results for Hofstad stretch back to World Junior races in 1998 up to his retirement in 2010. I think one of the reasons I may have overlooked him is that he didn’t really race much last season. In fact, [...] Related posts:
I’ve talked about the amusing notion of victims and nemeses before. Let’s look at some extreme cases. Remember that a victim is someone you beat by a small margin (rather arbitrarily chosen by me to be less than or equal to ten seconds). A nemesis is just the reverse: someone who beats you by such [...] Related posts:
I was following Andrew Gardner’s twitter feed a while back during the USSA spring meetings, and he mentioned a comment by James Southam that American courses are far easier than those in Europe. 1 That got me thinking about whether there was any way I could look at this question using, you know, data. The [...] Related posts:
Here’s what’s been cooking this week on Statistical Skier… I tried to wrap up the cross-country retirement posts, was told I forgot a few and so tacked on a post for Kristina Smigun-Vaehi. I snuck in a little cycling graph, showing the riders from this year’s Giro d’Italia who dropped out along the way. I [...] Related posts:
I can’t believe I forgot about the dominant Estonian skier Kristina Smigun-Vaehi. For individual events (distance and sprint), her stats are amazing: three Olympic medals (2 Gold), four World Championship medals and forty-nine World Cup podiums. 106 of her 161 World Cup results were top ten finishes. She might not have as much Olympic hardware [...] Related posts:
Continuing in my series of posts (see here and here) we move on to Norway. This presents some problems, graphically, since as you might imagine there are many, many more Norwegians who’ve skied well at WJCs or U23s. This means that if I simply recreate the graphs following my previous examples, they will likely be [...] Related posts:
One of my articles for FasterSkier.com looked at variability in skier performance, particularly among elite World Cup skiers. In truth, I kind of dashed that article off in a hurry simply because Kris Freeman happened to make a comment about the topic on his blog, and have always wanted to come back to the subject. Variation [...] Related posts:
Apparently this is our modern rivalry on the men’s side of things. I suppose the Norwegians and Swedes will always find something to torment each other over, so this one is as good as any. Obviously, this story has many chapters left to be written, but let’s take a look at how things have progressed [...] Related posts:
I thought it would be nice to collect all the cross-country skier retirement posts in one place, in case you missed some along the way. So here they are… Rene Sommerfeldt (GER) Sabina Valbusa (ITA) Anna Olson (SWE) Sara Renner (CAN) Virpi Kuitunen (FIN) Claudia Nystad (GER) Reto Burgermeister (SUI) Milan Sperl (CZE) Laurence Rochat [...] Related posts:
I’m continuing to play with creating simple, annotated scalable vector graphics (SVGs) with this cycling data, as practice. It also gives me an excuse to look back at this years Giro. In this addition, we’re plotting the races of those riders who didn’t quite make it to the finish line. First plotted by general classification [...] Related posts:
Cue the creepy music, it’s Friday the 13th! We finally wrapped up the most improved/unimproved series from the 2009-2010 season, looking at the most unimproved female sprinters. We had another installment of Victims & Nemeses, this time focusing on Swedish stars Marcus Hellner and Charlotte Kalla. Next, we looked at age vs. FIS point plots [...] Related posts:
Biathletes retire too! I will be the first to admit that I know a lot less about biathlon than cross country, though, so these athlete profile posts for biathletes will be as much for my benefit as yours. Martina Beck is (was) a very fast German biathlete. The International Biathlon Union has a nice article [...] Related posts:
Yet another in a continuing series. This time, Italy. First up is the original form of the graph where each panel contains athletes grouped by their best performance at WJCs or U23s (1-5, 6-10, etc.): As before, the blue lines are trends for the entire population in each panel, the red lines are the trends [...] Related posts: