No, not that A-Team. (Although she’d probably kick some butt.) As discussed recently over at FasterSkier, Brooks just missed qualifying via objective criteria, as she finished 55th in the World Cup overall. That means that if she’s named, it will have to be based upon some discretionary judgement by the coaches. I think you can [...] Related posts:
Woo hoo! Another classic specialist! Ivan Batory has been around the block a few times. The first WC race I have for him is all the way back in the 1994 season. Let’s see, I think I was a freshmen in high school that year. Among Batory’s top 30 results, 63 were classic, 31 freestyle [...] Related posts:
A skier after my own heart, he was! Skating? Bah! That’s for losers! Hjelmeset was the quintessential classic specialist: If you’re basically only going to do classic races, you’d better be pretty good at them, and Hjelmeset certainly was. His World Cup career included 119 classic starts, only 26 freestyle starts and another 9 pursuits [...] Related posts:
This is by no means a comprehensive look at how we fared this year, just one perspective based on a single graph. One of the things that I pay closest attention to is depth: how many different skiers do we have performing at a particular level. The reason for this is that for relatively “small” [...] Related posts:
Hopefully there won’t be any more posts like this for a long while. Fredrik Karlsson died recently, I guess in a snowmobile accident. I didn’t know much about him, but I guess he was on Sweden’s development team. As you might expect for someone on Sweden’s development team, he hadn’t quite made a huge splash [...] Related posts:
Unfortunately, we have a distinct theme for this week’s posts. Jenny Olsson also passed away recently, apparently from breast cancer. She raced, quite successfully, for Sweden for much of the mid-00′s: These are just her WC level distance results (she didn’t sprint much). As you can see, 2002-2003 was her best effort, but [...] Related posts:
In some very sad news, we learned recently that Inge Braten passed away rather suddenly. It is difficult (and probably slightly foolish) to try to quantify a coach’s impact on skiing results, so let’s consider this post a rememberance, rather than an analysis. Perhaps most famously, Braten coached the Norwegian men during their “Golden Era”: (My [...] Related posts:
Last in the series of most improved/unimproved we finally turn to the women’s sprinters: Alena Prochazkova took a major tumble this season in sprints. She had been a fairly reliable presence in the semifinals until this season, when she appeared to often have trouble qualifying. Celine Brun-Lie also saw a major drop-off, but the much [...] Related posts:
Almost done with the series now, just the sprinters who struggled the most this season, starting with the men: This list is notable for a few reasons, first because of the large number of big names on it. Usually there are at least of few people my metrics pick out that I don’t really know, [...] Related posts:
Moving right along to the most improved women’s sprinter (at least, according to the metric laid out in this post). Here’s the collection: As usual, you can click on it for a slightly larger version. Once again, I think we’re seeing that North America had a pretty across the board incredible year in sprinting, with [...] Related posts:
Now we’ll finish up this series with the sprinters, starting with the most improved men. The methodology is simpler here, as we really only need to use finishing place as a metric (although we will still scale improvements so that, say, improving from 40th to 20th isn’t seen as a dramatically larger improvement than from [...] Related posts:
I got an interesting question from a reader the other day that I though I’d follow up on: As you know, the winners of all the continental cups gets to start the World Cup season. There are also intermediate rankings during the season that allows the current continental cup leaders to join the WC’s. My [...] Related posts:
Last in the sequence of related posts covering distance events, the most un-improved women from this season: As always, you can click through for a slightly larger version. The Slovakian Prochazkova takes the cake here with what looks like a small set of somewhat mediocre results after two fairly strong seasons. The small number of [...] Related posts:
These are definitely less pleasant posts to write, but part of any season assessment should include what went wrong as well as what went right. Once again, you can refer to my initial post in this series for an explanation of the general methodology. That said, here’s the twelve men who took the biggest slide [...] Related posts:
Moving on from last time to the most improved in women’s distance events…you can read that post for an explanation of the metrics I’m using, and the usual round of caveats. Here’s the top twelve: As before, you can click through for a slightly larger version. By these measures, Sweden’s Sofia Bleckur comes out on [...] Related posts:
Let’s start wrapping up the 2011-2012 World Cup season, shall we? First, we’ll look at skiers who made the largest jumps, either up or down, compared to last year, beginning with the men’s distance events. As always, you get somewhat different lists of skiers as the “most improved” depending on what metric you use. My [...] Related posts:
Cologna won the World Cup overall, but I always feel like he’s sort of in the background compared to other top skiing personalities. Doing well in the World Cup overall rewards not just speed, but showing up at tons of races and skiing fast. For instance, let’s check out his won/loss record versus the next [...] Related posts:
If you hang around skiing in North America long enough you will eventually hear people talking about point differences between races in Europe and North America (or the US in particular). One of the most common forms of this is the complaint that penalties (and hence points) are artificially high in the US, compared to [...] Related posts:
If you hang around skiing in North America long enough you will eventually hear people talking about point differences between races in Europe and North America (or the US in particular). One of the most common forms of this is the complaint that penalties (and hence points) are artificially high in the US, compared to [...] Related posts:
Just to follow up on a few tweets over the weekend… Skiers from 10 different nations had podium results in men’s events, and only women from 7 different nations did the same. The nations with the most podiums are in stark contrast. For both the men and women, you of course have Norway in the [...] Related posts: