In this installment of Victims & Nemeses, we consider the Swedish star skiers Marcus Hellner and Charlotte Kalla. Who are their victims (people they defeat often by small margins) and nemeses (people who beat them often by small margins)? Let’s take a look… Alexander Legkov (RUS) and Pietro Piller Cottrer (ITA) take the prize for [...] Related posts:
So far, applying my alternative sprint points measure to look at skiers with major improvements or declines between seasons has worked OK, but when we turn to female sprinters who saw a major decline things get dicey.First off, let’s acknowledge that Claudia Kuenzel-Nystad is getting a bum deal here. She squeaked into consideration by doing [...] Related posts:
My Summer of Weddings continues this weekend, with some travel and a race to follow. Fun times! Here’s what we’ve acomplished at Statistical Skier this week: Putting Distributed Sprint Points to good use we looked at the most unimproved male sprinters from last season. Following a suggestion from a reader, I looked at whether there [...] Related posts:Week In Review: Friday, June 11th Week In Review: Friday, June 18th Week In Review: Friday July 16th
Who? Yeah, I’d never heard of her either. One of the coolest parts of working on this website is learning how much I didn’t know about international ski racing. The fact that I don’t know about this Swiss skier doesn’t really say anything about her (she’s done 115 World Cup races, 7 World Championship races [...] Related posts:
That’s what Marcus Hellner says, according to FasterSkier. Let’s go to the numbers, shall we? These are all the times these two guys raced against each other last season (distance races, anyway). Positive values indicate a victory for Hellner and vice versa. You can see Northug’s strength in mass start races, and that Northug had [...] Related posts:
We’re picking up from where we left off last time, so go check that out to get up to speed. What happens if instead of only looking at two groups (skiers reaching the podium, skiers not reaching the podium) we get a little more sophisticated and include more information? First, let’s just look to see [...] Related posts:
I recently received the following query from a reader: I have looked lately into the Junior Worlds results and World Cup/World Championships results of all 2010 Olympic Gold medalists and almost all of them had an outstanding careers while they raced as juniors…If our end goal is to win Olympics then we have to look [...] Related posts:
The degree to which Distributed Sprint Points sensibly pick out skiers who had large drop offs or improvements between the ’08-’09 and ’09-’10 seasons appears to be mixed. But for the sake of symmetry, let’s look at the unhappy end of these trends. The table below shows the male skiers with the biggest drop offs [...] Related posts:Trends In US Skiing Performance: Sprint
What’s have you missed this week? Read on and I’ll tell you… We wrapped up some of the Tour de France graphs, even the fancy animated ones. I demonstrated that there’s nothing special about the Tour de France, graphically anyway. I’ve started putting my crazy contraption, Distributed Sprint Points to good use, looking at the [...] Related posts:
Another installment looking at how athletes have faired following WJC/U23 racing. This time we’re looking at Germany, a country that gained some notoriety over the last 10-15 years for a dramatic turnaround in athlete development. At least, that’s what I remember the conventional wisdom being. We’ll start with just the basic graph (click through for [...] Related posts:
The career retrospectives took an unintentional week off last Friday due my being distracted by the Tour. Milan who? Again, a skier who’s name I should probably know, but did not. He’s a Czech skier who’d been competing internationally since around 2000. Particularly since he looks like a fun guy. Sperl won a Bronze medal [...] Related posts:
I apologize again for the heavy cycling bent I’ve been on lately. You just can’t pass up the chance to make fun graphs like these, though. This is just your standard bumps chart for GC rank from the 2010 Giro d’Italia. Somewhat confusingly (to casual bike fans like me) the colors of the jerseys are [...] Related posts:
In a short piece on FasterSkier the other day, I showed a graph that examined the FIS points vs. age trends of skiers broken down by their success at WJCs or U23s. In it, I highlighted only the American athletes, apart from the general trends for all skiers. I thought that I’d continue with a [...] Related posts:
Continuing on from Monday’s post, we turn now to the most improved women sprinter last season. Here’s the table of the top ten most improved female sprinters on the World Cup: First, the familiar names (at least, familiar to me). Korosteleva and Ingemarsdotter are both excellent sprinters who’ve been around for at least a handful [...] Related posts:
The guys at FasterSkier were kind enough (again) to post something of mine at their site. You can read it here. I’ll be following up that article with more graphs highlighting skiers from different countries over the next week or two, so stay tuned… Related posts:Victims & Nemeses: Marit and Justyna Edition Bits and Pieces… [...] Related posts:
Here are the final, updated versions of the fancy, animated sprint and mountain points “graph” and the plot of riders who didn’t finish the Tour with mouse-over text added. Remember, Chrome, Safari or Opera are the best browsers to use for these. I don’t think any of these work with Internet Explorer and the animated [...] Related posts:
Now that I’ve introduced Distributed Sprint Points (DSPs), an alternate measure of sprint race performance, we’ll go ahead and give it a trial run, warts and all. Since DSP is decidedly still in the experimental phase, take this with a hefty grain of salt. My procedure will mostly track what I did to measure the [...] Related posts:
With the final stage complete, it’s time to wrap things up with some final versions of the charts I’ve been making over the past week. Actually, this isn’t really the final post. I’ll be tinkering with some of them and posting what I come up with from time to time. Also, the fancier, SVG (scalable [...] Related posts:
Cycling and the Tour de France have invaded Statistical Skier this week. If you’ve been tuning in here for the skiing content and find this trend distressing, you can console yourself with the fact that the Tour will end soon. On the other hand, I’ve enjoyed the cycling stage race graphics and so I have [...] Related posts:
Earlier this week I introduced an idea I had for calculating a points-like measure for sprint racing that was applicable beyond the qualification round. You can go back and review the methodology here. In this post I’d like to revisit this idea and look at how these new points look when ranking athletes. First, I [...] Related posts: