When the IBU World Cup kicks off in Östersund, Sweden, on Sunday, it will feel much the same like any other year – after all, the northern city has hosted several of the last biathlon openers. But that first race will feel decidedly different as well. For the first time, Östersund is hosting not only three individual races for both men and women, but also a mixed relay, which will be held a week earlier...
Welcome to the latest installment of FasterSkier’s season previews! Here we break down what to expect from the US Ski Team’s cross-country athletes on the international stage in 2012-2013. With the pre-World Cup races in Muonio, Finland, just around the corner, now is a good time to take stock of what happened last season. When it was time to write this preview a year ago, the Americans were coming off of a very different winter....
Quick post, continuing on from Tuesday, with the race snapshot graph for the men’s race: Strong race for Will Brandenburg, I’d say. Related posts:Week In Review: Friday Mar 11th Performance Trends In US Alpine Skiing Alpine World Cup – Soelden Related posts:Week In Review: Friday Mar 11th Performance Trends In US Alpine Skiing Alpine World Cup – Soelden
(Note: This article has been updated to reflect the number of competitors registered as of Friday, Nov. 16, and approximate number of red-group skiers.) With the Alberta World Cup in Canmore less than a month (more precisely, four weeks) away, Organizing Committee Chair Ken Hewitt said it’s been a whirlwind at work. The phone rings by the minute, emails are piling up in his inbox, but it’s all good. As of Friday, Hewitt wrote in...
There was some XC racing in Finland over the weekend I’d like to write about, but FIS hasn’t posted the results yet, so while we wait, some more race snapshot graphs from the alpine WC slalom’s over the weekend (also in Finland). Today the women: I follow alpine racing much less closely than XC (even [...] Related posts:
of twenty thirteen, we’ll be producing the show regularly. Expect interviews with the country’s biggest cross-country skiing stars and coaches, plus analysis from the FasterSkier crew. This week, Topher Sabot and Nat Herz interview Erik Flora, the head coach of the Alaska-Pacific University Nordic Ski Center club team, which includes World Championships medalist Kikkan Randall, and U.S. Ski Teamers Holly Brooks, and Erik and Sadie Bjornsen. Randall has been dealing with a stress fracture in...
This past spring, nine Canadians learned they prequalified for their nation’s World Cups in December. Most had an inkling they were in the mix; last season’s NorAm winners Kevin Sandau and Alysson Marshall automatically guaranteed themselves starts in every Québec and Alberta World Cup race, as did the second-place finishers Brent McMurtry and Emily Nishikawa. But then there were some wild cards, like Canadian national-team biathlete Rosanna Crawford. In March, Crawford jumped into a couple...
Continuing with the athlete development theme recently, here’s a graph showing the age at which a skier races in their first WC versus their overall median WC result: For fairly obvious reasons, you have read this fairly carefully, particularly at the more extreme ages. I wouldn’t pay much attention to either panel past the age [...] Related posts:
Note: For more on Professor Ljungqvist’s fight against doping in Sweden, and its effect on Scandinavian sport culture, you can read
I got a request for some similar graphs from my podium development posts, but focused more on the domestic scene. So, for example, we had this graph: This showed the age at which future WC podium finishers achieved a particular milestone. So let’s turn to just US and Canadian skiers who have simply participated in [...] Related posts:
It is saying nothing new to point out that Kikkan Randall becoming the World Cup Sprint Champion last season was a breakthrough for U.S. skiing. The enormity of the moment in March when an American woman was handed the crystal globe has been well documented since the conclusion of the 2012 season. Each photo that has surfaced online this summer of Randall, her trophy and a new group of wide-eyed fans is a reminder...
Just following up from Tuesday with the race snapshot graph for the women’s GS race on Saturday: Related posts:Race Snapshot: IBU World Cup 1 Women Race Snapshots: IBU World Cup 1 Men World Cup Field Strength Follow-Up Related posts:
While we’re waiting for the cross-country season to get under way… The alpine World Cup season kicked off this past weekend in Soelden, Austria with Giant Slalom events for both men and women. Here’s a race snapshot graph for the men’s race on Sunday: American Ted Ligety won by a rather impressive margin. Apparently, that [...] Related posts:
You can say a lot about Marty Hall—and, in fact, most of it has probably already been said. The former coach of the American and Canadian national cross-country ski teams is an outspoken and prolific observer of the sport today, but that’s nothing new. He famously implied that the Russians were doping at the 1988 Olympic Games, and an Ottawa newspaper story upon his departure from the Canadian squad referred to him as the “opinionated...
Well, ok, not ever. Just over the past 20 seasons or so. There are all sorts of different ways we could measure this. First, some ground rules: I’m only going to look at actual World Cup races, no Olympics or World Championships. I’m also excluding Tour de Ski events because these are my rules, so [...] Related posts:
For the third time this year, the U.S. Ski Team ran into their counterparts on the biathlon squad earlier this week when both groups were in Utah for their respective training camps. “The biathletes were at Soldier Hollow yesterday as was the entire U.S. Ski Team,” skier Noah Hoffman wrote in an e-mail to FasterSkier on Tuesday. “Cross country was doing a speed (10-15 seconds) session classic. I’m not sure what was involved in the...
As promised from last time, here we have the detailed development plots for sprinting. First the men: And the women: As before, these are big, so click on them for the full versions. Also, remember that if you don’t see a line indicating one of the events, that’s because two or more events happened at [...] Related posts:
Less than 2 months before the Sprint Québec presented by Québecor which will host the FIS Cross-Country World Cup presented by Viessmann (Press release) Québec City, Thursday, October 11, 2012 – December 6 to 9, winter will be on our doorstep and downtown Québec City will be dressed in its finest white for the Sprint Québec which will host the FIS Cross-Country World Cup. For the very first time in Québec City, the top cross-country...
As promised from last time, I’m going to show you the un-aggregated data from Tuesday’s plots. This means we’re going to have some big graphs, bigger than I typically think is useful, but no matter. I’ve plotted FIS points versus age for each of the male and female skiers with a podium result in a [...] Related posts:
I happened to be thinking about visualizations of athlete development recently, and in the process cooked up the following graph: What I’ve done here is to take the podium finishers in major international events for the past five seasons and recorded each person’s age when they received their first (individual) WC/OWG/WSC start, when they scored [...] Related posts: