Lots of racing this weekend, obviously, but the Muonio results only appeared on the FIS website today, so they’ll wait for later in the week. I was intrigued, though, but Therese Johaug’s strong races in Norway. For many reasons, it will be difficult to accurately parse early season results this year. Many people are focused [...] Related posts:
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:
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:
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:
After correcting a few typos in the the “official” results I thought we’d look again at the time histories for Dartmouth’s Moosilauke time trial. The following graph depicts every result (except for 2011, which I still can’t find anywhere). The blue is the median for each individual running; this includes both summer and fall times. [...] Related posts:
As FasterSkier mentioned the other day, the Dartmouth Ski Team’s Moosilauke time trial is a pretty neat data set, since they’ve kept the data going back quite a ways. Interpretations are sometimes a challenge, since the course has changed from time to time when trail work is done. My sources tell me that in addition [...] Related posts:
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:
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:
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:
A curious report surfaced a while back that included some doping allegations around Juha Mieto and Manuela Di Centa. I can’t say that I’d ever heard any rumors about either skier in the past. As with every other post I’ve done on a skier accused of doping, this look at their results data isn’t meant [...] Related posts:
This post is somewhat of a teaser trailer for the sorts of things we can do once we have a complete record of major international ski results stretching back to the 70′s. A natural and possibly controversial question is whether the World Cup field has become more or less competitive over time. Intuitively, I think [...] Related posts:
Continuing on from last time, we’ll single out a handful of skiers who appear to do significantly better in shorter sprint courses. Same methodology as before led me to pluck out the following three skiers: In general, the effects in this direction tended to be weaker and less dramatic, even at the extreme ends of [...] Related posts:
The notion of an athlete preferring distance races of a particular length is pretty familiar, but what about sprinting? The differences between a 0.8km and a 1.8km sprint course may not seem like much compared to the differences between a 15km and 30km race. But (while I’m not a physiology expert) it seems likely to [...] Related posts:
That’s an easy one: probably not. I’m referring, of course, to his recent pronouncements about the upcoming season, in which he claims that he will win 7 World Cups, the Tour de Ski overall title, as well as 3 golds at World Championships. Obviously, given Northug’s history I’m not inclined to take this too seriously. [...] Related posts:
Liz Stephen destroyed the women’s field this weekend in the annual Climb to the Castle rollerski race. The margin, just over 5 minutes in a race that took the leaders between 40-45 minutes is certainly impressive. But I think that margin doesn’t provide much useful information. Time trials that are most useful as gauges of [...] Related posts:
Following up from last time, we’ll look a little more closely at the individual trends among some of the top Swedish women in distance and sprint events. First the distance skiers (click through for a larger version): Not surprisingly, Charlotte Kalla is generally the top performer here. But notice that there’s a bit of a [...] Related posts:
Reading the recent interview with Rikard Grip, the Swedish women’s coach got me thinking about how they’ve fared recently. From a very broad perspective for the whole team, we have the following in distance events: Clearly their depth has greatly improved, as evidenced by the dramatic rise in the number of top 30 results per [...] Related posts:
Kris Freeman and Kikkan Randall have been basically the top US skiers for quite some time now. (I’m sort of brushing Andrew Newell under the rug here, mostly just due to time contraints. I’ll do a follow up on him next week.) Freeman has been more or less unquestionably the best US male distance skier [...] Related posts:Victims & Nemeses: Kris Freeman Is Qualifying In The Top Ten A Good Sign For Kikkan? Top 10 Qualification vs. Making The Final
Since the interviews on the FIS websites is one of my main sources of post topics during the off season, we’ll continue in that vein with one from a while back with Øystein Pettersen. In it, he talks about how his focus this season is (unsurprisingly) the classic sprint at World Championships. Pettersen has been [...] Related posts: