Just recently the guys at FasterSkier and the Nordic Commentary Project got together for a podcast, where they discussed a range of topics in international ski racing. One topic that they touched upon was the fact that cross country skiing has an ever increasing number of race formats. I listened with interest to that section, [...] Related posts:
Inspired by the slightly different charts found here, a chart of a different flavor today. At that link, Martin has wisely adjusted plots of time back for each stage by the median. I’ve taken that idea and plotted the time back in the GC category for each stage, but I’ve split it up by team [...] Related posts:
JunkCharts was nice enough to feature the Tour de France charts I’ve been playing with as a break from skiing data. I learned via one of the commenters there that (unsurprisingly) I’m not alone in this game. See here for a handful of similar charts, including ones from previous years. Related posts:Tour de France Bump [...] Related posts:
Adam, over at NordicXplained, asks: “Everyone knows how well the Canadian men’s team did at the Olympics, but the question that I wanna know is how well they stacked up against other countries. Even though they didn’t win a medal, their average placing in many races surely could have been higher than traditional powerhouses like [...] Related posts:
My good friend, and general cycling expert, Cosmo recently tweeted about what he perceived as more GC (overall ranking) shakeups taking place in Tour de France stages with a downhill finish as opposed to uphill, mountaintop, finishes. He then followed that up with a comment to that effect, linking back to my bumps chart as [...] Related posts:
Another couple stages in the books, time for an update of the bumps charts. Contador’s still in yellow, Hushovd is back in green and Chartreau is still in polka-dots: Hopefully the gray lines are easier on your eyes. As for Cosmo’s question about downhill finishes having more GC impact than the mountaintops, I’m not sure. [...] Related posts:
Take that vector graphics animation! For an explanation, see my previous effort. Reminder: This should work in Chrome, Firefox and Safari. But consider it experimental. Reloading the page should restart the animation. I confirmed that this won’t work in Firefox, and that the one SVG plugin for Firefox has been discontinued by Adobe (although apparently [...] Related posts:
This was just too cool for me not to put up on the site, even though I’m not completely happy with it. The data are fairly simple: add up the sprint and mountain points across all riders on a Tour de France team for each stage. So for each stage, each team gets the ordered [...] Related posts:
If you’re like me, you follow bike racing enough to grasp the basics and be familiar with most of the big names. I’ll typically follow the TdF fairly closely, but other than that my cycling news consumption pretty much consists of whatever cool stuff Cosmo happens to write about. That means that when the TdF [...] Related posts:
I’ve fussed in the past about the weaknesses of FIS points in distance events, but they really are quite useful. Sprint events, however, just don’t have an equivalently simple and useful numerical summary. I’ve resorted to using the final finishing rank (i.e. what place you came in, after the elimination rounds), but I’ve never been [...]
So I decided that updating these every day would get tedious. Here’s the standard bumps chart after stage 14 and the corresponding average speed bumps chart is below the fold: And the average speed version: You’ll notice that this one looks a bit different. I’ve added red squares that correspond to dropped riders. The squares [...]
Now that I’m back from travelling for a bit (but only for a bit) things were a little more busy this week at Statistical Skier. I debuted an interesting way to mine skiing results data to search for skiers with similar careers and used it to look at “similar” skiers to Beckie Scott. I reproduced [...]
Commenter ryank asks if I can color code the lines for each rider according to their team. I can, but it doesn’t lead to a great looking plot. The reason is that there are just way too many teams and distinguishing that many colors just isn’t pleasant. But I’m nothing if not responsive to my [...]
First off, many thanks to Cosmo for the shout out on Twitter. My traffic today will be much larger than usual. Updated charts after today’s stage (and some new stuff too) below the fold… Here’s the updated bumps plot for the GC standings after Stage 12 today: The yellow jersey is unchanged (Andy Schleck) but [...]
Thanks to NordicXplained I’ve been alerted to several more athletes retiring after the 2009-2010 season. These next three may be somewhat less famous than the other skiers I profiled, but that doesn’t make them less important or less interesting! For instance… …Swiss skier Reto Burgermeister, who has one of the coolest names I’ve ever seen, [...]
(Updated with results from today’s stage.) A few years ago I saw that someone had made some bump charts based on Tour de France results. (I actually was alerted to them via Junk Charts). Brilliant! Sadly, it hasn’t seemed to catch on, as I haven’t seen these sort of graphs floating around much since then. [...]
Now that I have some athlete similarity code up and running, let’s take it for a spin, shall we? The basic idea is to pick a skier (Beckie Scott in this case) and then mine my results database for skiers who’ve had similar careers. This is a fairly complicated task with a lot of steps. [...]
This idea comes from a similar sort of game that baseball stat heads play. The idea is to match up similar athletes based upon their performances. In baseball, we’d look at a whole slew of statistics for some current player’s career and then scan through the historical records and find other players who had similar [...]
A week on the road for me, so things have been a little slow. Here’s what’s been happening while I travel around to watch my friends get married… I showed a simple visualization of the men’s Olympic relay, although I made a bit of a mistake, omitting the Czech team. Sorry! We continued with our [...]
A late addition to the skier retirement series is German Claudia Nystad (before she married she raced under the name Claudia Kuenzel; FIS hyphenates her name, so I will too). Kuenzel-Nystad has quite a few Olympic and World Championship medals, although most of them were in relays. She has 8 medals (all gold and silver) [...]