The title of this post has dramatically over-promised on the actual content. Sorry. I’ve talked a little before about race penalties. Since race penalties are specifically intended to adjust for the strength of the field, I thought it would interesting to think up some way to see how well they do that. Everything having to [...] Related posts:
Conventional wisdom (and probably a fair bit of physiology research) holds that going fast over short distances is a skill we tend to lose as we age. Are fast World Cup sprinters younger than fast distance skiers? Let’s look at the age distributions of top thirty racers in sprinting and distance races since the 2003-2004 [...] Related posts:
The USST has expanded somewhat, adding several younger skiers. Acknowledging that FIS points are only a small piece of performance assessment, it has interested me that at various times USST staff have mentioned comparing skiers’ FIS points to medalists, or some other group of top skiers. So here are two graphs showing the younger US [...] Related posts:USST Preview: Liz Stephen & Morgan Arritola USST Preview: Simi Hamilton & Noah Hoffman USST Preview: Kikkan Randall
In a previous post I raised the question of whether biathletes might be more likely to shoot clean (i.e. hit all five targets) if they have just shot clean at their most recent trip through the shooting range. I left off with some numbers that suggested this was the case, but they were aggregated over [...] Related posts:
The concept of a “hot hand” is a popular one in various sports, and has been variously bunked, debunked and rebunked in numerous contexts. A common manifestation of this idea comes from basketball, where fans routinely feel that players will get “hot” during a stretch of a game during which they make a much higher [...] Related posts:
With Marit Bjørgen (and only a handful of others) dominating the women’s WC circuit last season, I thought I’d check out how this compared to past seasons. I took all WC, OWG, WSC and TDS races for each season and counted the number of distinct skiers finishing at four different levels: 1st, top 3, top [...] Related posts:
With the modern chip timing tools used today ties should be fairly rare. They do still happen, though: This shows the number of ties per race of each type for WC, OWG, WSC and TDS races for men and women. As we might have expected, there are considerably fewer ties in mass start style races. [...] Related posts:
A while back I responded to a reader requesting that I look into any connections between a skier’s performance at World Juniors and subsequent medal winning. My conclusions there tended toward the ambiguous, since 2-4 races (from World Juniors) just isn’t a whole lot of information. But we can also just take medalists and look [...] Related posts:Skiing Performance and Age Post-WJC/U23 Development: Canada Guess The Medalists!
The obvious follow-up from the last entry in this series is to look at the folks who have the strongest tendency to fall further behind the leaders as the race progresses. Not surprisingly, this group will include a lot of the more marginal skiers from smaller skiing nations. I did filter out people for whom [...] Related posts:
Continuing with my series of posts looking at some split time data (kindly provided by Jan at WorldOfXC.com), we turn to identifying some folks who tend to ski better (as measured by their % behind the leaders) towards the end of a race than the beginning. I actually fit a model on this one (gasp!) [...] Related posts:
A very brief note appeared on FasterSkier the other day noting that Canadian Dasha Gaiazova has apparently been removed from the World Cup team. No one would comment because apparently an appeal is underway, so I don’t imagine we’ll hear much about it until that process has played itself out. My impression has been that [...] Related posts:
The Italian legend Hilde Pedersen are excellent examples of elite cross country ski racers who continued to excel at the international level into their 40’s. While continuing to compete on the World Cup circuit at that age may not be common, cross country skiing is known for its athletes developing later than in other sports. Top skiers often continue to be competitive through their late 30’s. In light of these observations, it is natural to...