What a weekend for North America! It has to be said, so I”ll get it out of the way right at the top: the turn the World Cup takes through Russia is generally not fully attended and this year was the same, although perhaps not as dramatically as before. But there were plenty of notable [...] Related posts:
I know the Moscow city sprints were exciting and all, but I’ll have some posts on them and the Rybinsk races next week. For now, as promised we have the follow-up for sprinting from Wednesday’s post. These are the folks with the largest improvements in performance (within season). As before their results from this season [...] Related posts:
Since I feel bad picking on Vibeke Skofterud twice now, I thought I’d follow that up with a look at that kind of trend among all skiers. Today we’ll look at distance results, Friday we’ll consider sprinting. I hauled out my favorite statistical canon for this one, a mixed-effect model that compares each skiers results [...] Related posts:
Back in December I posted a short note about how Vibeke Skofterud has a tendency to ski considerably better in the early part of the season. Since we’re in the midst of a break between WC periods I thought it might be good to check in and see how things are progressing: Those are her [...] Related posts:
First of all, I’ll echo Nat Herz’s big ups to Andrew Musgrave for finishing second at Norwegian Nationals the other day. I’ve always been a bit fascinated by Musgrave, probably because North Americans identify with any reasonably successful, promising skier not from Scandinavia or the usual European nations as fellow “outsiders”. So I’m always kind [...] Related posts:
I was interested (rather than offended) to read about Noah Hoffman’s pacing strategies in Sunday’s classic WC race. I have a limited supply of data on split times (what I do have is thanks to Jan over at worldofxc.com, though) so the following data is definitely incomplete. Hoffman seemed determined to not start too fast, [...] Related posts:
I think I’ve been remiss in mentioning this, but as always thanks go to Jan at worldofxc.com for helping to provide the heat times for these sprint races. Let’s see how the men’s finalists fared first: There were apparently some crashes in this race, as evidenced by the outlying slow times. But in general I’m [...] Related posts:
Jessie Diggins I’ll confess that I don’t much care for team sprints, so I suppose it’s not a surprise that I was more impressed by Diggins’ individual sprint than her podium performance paired with Kikkan last weekend. When I collect results data, I only track age very crudely, using the year of birth indicated by [...] Related posts:
Ok, so I lied in the title. This post has almost nothing to do with Torin Koos. The whole reason I started this blog (or, at least, one of them) was that it seemed to me that folks in the XC skiing world had all sorts of weird beliefs about their sport that ought to [...] Related posts:
The weekend after the Tour finishes will have smaller fields, and this was no different. Still, The Americans will take the results regardless of who else shows up. Here’s how the women’s finalists progressed during the day: Flat courses will tend to produce times like this, where the qualification round is quite fast, and then [...] Related posts:
You’ll recall that recently this rivalry has been fairly one sided, no matter how much Justyna’s fans want to believe otherwise. The previous two season simply saw Marit winning far more of their head to head match-ups. At the start of the season, things looked even worse for the Justyna camp, as she struggled quite [...] Related posts:
As with most stage races these days, the Tour de Ski included some handicap start pursuits. Generally, the athletes will start in a staggered fashion based upon their time back in the overall standings, and the first person to the finish line wins the stage. This creates some very unusual incentives for the athletes, depending [...] Related posts:
I didn’t do nearly as much writing about the Tour as I would have liked, but here are some graphs summarizing the way things shook out. Men Here’s a bird’s eye view of the men’s Tour, measured using seconds behind the median skier: These sorts of bump charts are nice, as they can allow you [...] Related posts:
Once again, a bit after the fact…the heat times analysis for the freestyle sprint the other day. Men Starting with the finals: That was decidedly slow, tactical final. Interesting that David Hofer had such fast times in the quarters and semis. Semifinal 2 was slightly faster, but not by a ton. Women As for the [...] Related posts:
There’s just too much racing going on during the first half of January to comment on it all. But the first rest day of the Tour de Ski certainly deserves some notes. So here’s a look at the current leaders of the Tour, compared to how they’ve fared in previous years, starting with the men: [...] Related posts:
I was skimming FasterSkier’s write-up of the Tour de Ski prologue yesterday and noted their comment about how Liz Stephen “… is generally stronger over longer distances, performing better in 10k’s than 5k’s and even better still in 15k’s.” That has been my informal impression as well, but I was suddenly skeptical about whether her actual [...] Related posts:
This will just be a short note with similar graphs as last time, only for a few of the major European nations. Men’s Distance Sweden continues to generally improve. Note that in terms of top thirty performances, Norway has steadily declined over the years, but not among the top ten or better level. So they’ve [...] Related posts:
During this lull before the Tour de Ski, I thought I’d show some graphs quickly summarizing how the US and Canada have fared thus far with some historical context. I think we all have a good sense of what’s going well (American women), what’s going not so well (American men) and what’s going OK (Canadian [...] Related posts:
The only sure way to know, of course, is to wait a few weeks and see what happens when she gets to Europe. But there’s been some commentary from the peanut gallery about how dominant Diggins has been on the domestic circuit so far. This is one of those problems that FIS points are supposed to [...] Related posts:
Oh yeah, there were some distance races in Rogla on Saturday too, huh? Once again, this will be short on the words; just some pretty pictures. The US women had another strong outing: Once again I’d note the continued downward trends for Holly and Kikkan and the generally flat trend for Liz. (Ida still has [...] Related posts: