Continuing with my summer reading of XC news, I again perused an one of FIS’s short interviews, this time with Switzerland’s Laurien Van der Graaff. Unlike Masako Ishida, whom we considered earlier this week, Van der Graaff is a sprint specialist, and a freestyle sprint specialist at that. Van der Graaff really did have a [...] Related posts:
I was reading FIS’s interview with Japan’s Masako Ishida with interest, because I’ve really been rooting for her to pull off some strong results. In the interview, she mentions that some of her goals for next season include increasing her presence in the top 5, and in particular making the jump up to some podium [...] Related posts:
Kikkan Randall, the reigning women’s World Cup sprint champion, obviously had a pretty darn good season last year. How does it stack up against some of the best sprint seasons put together since 2005-2006? The first thing that stood out to me is that if you rank the best women’s sprint seasons, Randall participated in [...] Related posts:
By request, we’re looking at how the length of World Cup sprints has changed over time. Specifically, since the length in time of the effort is really more meaningful than the length of the course in terms of distance, that’s what we’ll consider. So the following graph shows the average of the top five qualification [...] Related posts:
Since I’m starting to accumulate a reasonable collection of heat times from World Cup sprint races, I thought it might be interesting to compare general trends between the few seasons I have data on. The biggest trends that you can typically see are the differences in tactics between the men and women. Generally what I’ve [...] Related posts:
Travel is a big issue for cross country skiers, particularly those of us living in North America. Flying back and forth to Europe can be both time consuming and exhausting for athletes. Obviously, this can have some serious effects on performance. Of course, this works both ways. Presumably it’s difficult for Europeans to travel to [...] Related posts:
In a post last week I talked about how I felt that a single early season result wasn’t necessarily a great predictor of how someone will tend to ski (on average) during the rest of the season. I feel like most people would accept that this is, in principle, generally true. Just because you pop [...] Related posts:
Following up from last time, we’re still discussing the recent USSA rule changes for qualifying for WJC/U23s. Now, it’s not like USSA has a ton of options here, but I would like to point out a few difficulties with pre-qualifying an athlete using only a single result. Being a stats guy, I always think about [...] Related posts:
As often happens, FasterSkier gifted me with a handy topic for a few posts to kill time with over the summer by publishing a summary of USSA’s new criteria for automatic qualification for WJCs/U23s. For WJCs, the FIS point cutoff has been lowered to 50 for both men and women (it used to be higher [...] Related posts:Post-WJC/U23 Development: Canada North American Race Penalties Over Time Predicting FIS Points For World Cup Races
This is just a quick note as I sift through some of the alpine skiing data. I’ve made similar plots as these for XC skiing in the past, so these are just the same idea but for the US alpine folks. First a look at the men: This is tracking the results (per race) for [...] Related posts:
This is just a quick note as I sift through some of the alpine skiing data. I’ve made similar plots as these for XC skiing in the past, so these are just the same idea but for the US alpine folks. First a look at the men: This is tracking the results (per race) for [...] Related posts:
Everyone wants to nab podiums at the World Cup level, which means everyone can be pretty fascinated with the development characteristics of those skiers who end up on the podium. Here’s yet another way to slice that. If we take the skiers who’ve attained at least one podium result at the WC level between 2006-2007 [...] Related posts:
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:
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: