A commenter noted that it was interesting that Petra Majdic showed up as being “statistically significantly” better at longer distance races (as opposed to sprint races), although just barely. It turns out this is a good example of the statistical concept of leverage. Check out the following graph that compares skiers at each end of [...] Related posts:
Since we supposedly do statistics around here, the goal here will be to ‘statistically’ identify folks who specialize in longer distance races. By that I mean people who tend to ski better (relative to their own performance) in longer races. The fun part is to see whether the folks we single out match up with [...] Related posts:
I started writing an answer to a comment to Monday’s post, but it started getting long, so I thought I’d make it a short post, instead. Basically, the question was how can the points be so different between OPA and Scandinavian Cup races when the penalty calculation methods is exactly the same. Recall that these [...] Related posts:
I started writing an answer to a comment to Monday’s post, but it started getting long, so I thought I’d make it a short post, instead. Basically, the question was how can the points be so different between OPA and Scandinavian Cup races when the penalty calculation methods is exactly the same. Recall that these [...] Related posts:
Some comments on a recent post got me curious about the FIS points awarded at OPA Cup races. Similarly to my commenters, I’d noticed that oftentimes the top skiers at an OPA Cup race would receive very low (i.e. good) points for that race, and that this often wouldn’t seem to match up well with [...] Related posts:
Some comments on a recent post got me curious about the FIS points awarded at OPA Cup races. Similarly to my commenters, I’d noticed that oftentimes the top skiers at an OPA Cup race would receive very low (i.e. good) points for that race, and that this often wouldn’t seem to match up well with [...] Related posts:
A companion post to my previous entry looking at some of the Finnish men. I’m using a sort of cohort style plot. They compare each athlete’s FIS points (similar to, but not exactly, what FIS uses for their rankings) to those of athletes who have gone on to finish in the top ten in a [...] Related posts:
A companion post to my previous entry looking at some of the Finnish men. I’m using a sort of cohort style plot. They compare each athlete’s FIS points (similar to, but not exactly, what FIS uses for their rankings) to those of athletes who have gone on to finish in the top ten in a [...] Related posts:
It’s pretty crazy to think about, but the 2011-2012 FIS racing season officially got under way last week with some sprint races in Germany. I don’t know much about the circumstances of the venue, but I’d love to know how they put these races on. I’m guessing artificial snow? Still, they claim to have used [...] Related posts:
Companion to the other test post. Pardon the disruption. Related posts:EqPB: Test Run Post-WJC/U23 Development: Italy Post-WJC/U23 Development: Norway Related posts:
A quick follow up to my previous post on the same topic for women. Swap Germany for Russia, and otherwise the answer is largely unchanged: Once again, this is the number of skiers born since 1988 who’s best FIS points results last season averaged better than 50 FIS points. I used a more strict cutoff [...] Related posts:
Answer: Norway. And Russia. Looking forward to the upcoming season, I’m somewhat astounded by the number of talented young Norwegian women on the horizon. Here’s a quick snapshot of what I’m talking about. I took female skiers born no earlier than 1988 who did at least 3 FIS races last season, and averaged their best [...] Related posts:
If you imagine a typical skier’s career in FIS points, it will often follow a vaguely parabolic shape: they get faster for a while and then get slower for a while. Somewhere in between there they “peaked”. Our goal in this post is to estimate approximately when this occurs for each athlete and then see [...] Related posts:
Marit Bjørgen pretty much wiped the floor with folks last year in distance events: As a stats guy, when I see extreme events I tend not to expect them to repeat themselves. The general principle here is called regression to the mean. Extreme events are just unlikely, so it doesn’t make sense to expect them [...] Related posts:
On Monday I looked at the ratio of women to men in FIS races during the 2010-2011 season. This will just be a quick update on that to look at the same data, but over time. The same caveats apply here. I’m only looking at participants in FIS sanctioned races, which misses lots of races [...] Related posts:
A commenter noted a few other classic specialists in my post on Erling Jevne the other day. So how did they fare against Jevne? It’s generally important to note here that my data stops in 1992, and several of these folks were active before then. In Kirvesniemi’s case, way before. Jevne and Sture Sirvetsen were probably [...] Related posts:
Erling Jevne wasn’t the best skier during his era, having to compete with folks like Dæhlie and Smirnov among others. And he wasn’t even the best classic skier, most likely. At least, he was still mostly losing to those two guys even in classic races: Jevne fared better post-1997, but Dæhlie always had at least [...] Related posts:
As promised from last time, a quick look at some similar data broken down by race length. I’ve filtered out the occasional “strange” race length, to focus on just the standard 5, 10, 15, 30 and 50 kilometer distances. The metric is the same: the median number of skiers within a fixed percent of the [...] Related posts:
I received an email recently asking about field strength for the men’s and women’s WC fields, particularly as it applies to mass start races. Lately we’ve seen the men’s field engage in a fair bit of pack skiing, whereas the women’s field strings out more quickly. First, I want to dispatch with a common bit [...] Related posts:
On various occasions I have looked at FIS point race penalties, in a very general, roundabout way. Most recently, I looked at whether the FIS points you get in a non-World Cup race accurately reflect what you would have scored if you had raced in a World Cup race. The answer appeared to be: kind of. At [...] Related posts: