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:
Earlier this week I tweeted a little nugget I stumbled across: that Jessie Diggins now owns around half of all top 30 results for US skiers 21 years old or younger over the past two decades. In contrast, the most any single Norwegian contributes over the same time period is around 10% of all their [...] Related posts:Best Young Sprint Skiers: 2009-2010 Should Jessie Diggins Be On The A-Team? Is Sprinting A Young Person’s Game?
I received an email recently from a reader who pointed out to me that Marit Bjørgen completed the 30k classic mass start in Oslo this season in 1:26:09.8, last year at World Championships Therese Johaug did the same course, mass start, skating in only 1:23:45.1, which is only a difference of about 2.8%. Surely, skating [...] Related posts:
Since I was pondering Marcus Hellner’s season just the other day, I thought I’d take a closer look at how his result tend to shift over the course of a season. He has struggled during the later parts of this season, but has that been true before in general? Here are his results in distance [...] Related posts:
I’ve commented on this before, but here’s a slightly more comprehensive look at the historical record. Here is a plot showing Kikkan Randall’s World Cup sprint results as well as those for any other American woman: Note the handful of top twenties just this season, and there’s certainly more results clustered around 30th or so, [...] Related posts:
It struck me glancing at the results last weekend that I feel like Sweden has been having a bit of a sub-par year. Which might seem a little strange, given Johan Olsson’s recent return to form, but hear me out. Certainly, they’ve had some skiers with some great results. But I feel like overall they’ve [...] Related posts:
Since I’ve been neglecting biathlon a bit lately, I figured I owed everyone a biathlon post, particularly given the shocking 5th place finish the other day by Susan Dunklee. So here is some historical data on how the US and Canada have performed at WBCs over the years. First, measured by finishing place: The blue [...] Related posts:
The return of Emil Jönsson: I’ve removed a few times from folks who fell and had extremely outlying times. Jönsson sort of owned this one all day, it seems. Only a moderate difference between the semifinals this time (with the outlying times, just for fun): On the women’s side, Bjørgen was able to hold off [...] Related posts:
Let’s check in on where we’re at with Kikkan Randall and Devon Kershaw’s World Cup points situations. First, Kershaw: I finally figured out a decently efficient way to track WC points during a season, that requires only a minimal amount of data entry by hand. Cologna’s going to walk away with this one, obviously, but [...] Related posts:
The never ending question! A commenter asked about this the other day, and I’m happy to oblige, despite the fact that I’ve covered this general topic several times before. The difficulties with extrapolating from WJC results start with the fact that they comprise at most 2-3 races from a skier’s entire season. And the posts [...] Related posts:
Given the comments on my last post, I thought I’d verify things by altering the second graph to display the race type: Now the difference is very clear. I’ve combined the mass start and pursuit races into just one category (Mass). So clearly for the men the story here is different race tactics in mass [...] Related posts:
Sometimes you have some data and a specific question. Other times, you have some data, and you just sort of noodle around with it aimlessly. Sadly, I’ve been known to do that just for fun. I know, I’m a nerd. So I was looking at the gaps between 1st and 2nd place finishers in World [...] Related posts:
I’m a bit pressed for time at the moment, so not much commentary on these. They are just the updated versions of the graphs I showed on Wednesday, giving some historical context for the results at WJC & U23′s for the US and Canada. WJC – USA WJC – CAN U23 – USA U23 – [...] Related posts: