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:
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:
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:
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:
World Junior/U23s are underway, of course, in the exotic locale of Turkey. Monday wasn’t a spectacular day for the North Americans in the WJC freestyle sprint. For some quick context, here’s a look at the historical results in each discipline for the US: I’m just using finishing place here, rather than FIS points, since I [...] Related posts:
As always, thanks to Jan at worldofxc.com for the heat time data… I’m beginning to get a feel for the relationship between heat times and sprint courses. It’s hard, cause I’m not actually there skiing on the courses, so I do the best I can reading about them. But it seems this course was pretty [...] Related posts:
Two topics today. Rybinsk Field Strength I’m including the Moscow sprints here, but generally these races are notorious for low attendance. They require some of the most travel for many of the Europeans and they are often scheduled very near the Scandinavian nation’s national championships. Did this year’s races attract a stronger or weaker field [...] Related posts:
What a weekend for North America! It has to be said, so I”ll get it out of the way right at the top: the turn the World Cup takes through Russia is generally not fully attended and this year was the same, although perhaps not as dramatically as before. But there were plenty of notable [...] Related posts:
I think I’ve been remiss in mentioning this, but as always thanks go to Jan at worldofxc.com for helping to provide the heat times for these sprint races. Let’s see how the men’s finalists fared first: There were apparently some crashes in this race, as evidenced by the outlying slow times. But in general I’m [...] Related posts:
The weekend after the Tour finishes will have smaller fields, and this was no different. Still, The Americans will take the results regardless of who else shows up. Here’s how the women’s finalists progressed during the day: Flat courses will tend to produce times like this, where the qualification round is quite fast, and then [...] Related posts:
Once again, a bit after the fact…the heat times analysis for the freestyle sprint the other day. Men Starting with the finals: That was decidedly slow, tactical final. Interesting that David Hofer had such fast times in the quarters and semis. Semifinal 2 was slightly faster, but not by a ton. Women As for the [...] Related posts:
I was skimming FasterSkier’s write-up of the Tour de Ski prologue yesterday and noted their comment about how Liz Stephen “… is generally stronger over longer distances, performing better in 10k’s than 5k’s and even better still in 15k’s.” That has been my informal impression as well, but I was suddenly skeptical about whether her actual [...] Related posts:
This will just be a short note with similar graphs as last time, only for a few of the major European nations. Men’s Distance Sweden continues to generally improve. Note that in terms of top thirty performances, Norway has steadily declined over the years, but not among the top ten or better level. So they’ve [...] Related posts:
During this lull before the Tour de Ski, I thought I’d show some graphs quickly summarizing how the US and Canada have fared thus far with some historical context. I think we all have a good sense of what’s going well (American women), what’s going not so well (American men) and what’s going OK (Canadian [...] Related posts:
Oh yeah, there were some distance races in Rogla on Saturday too, huh? Once again, this will be short on the words; just some pretty pictures. The US women had another strong outing: Once again I’d note the continued downward trends for Holly and Kikkan and the generally flat trend for Liz. (Ida still has [...] Related posts:
Sprint Recap Thanks again to Jan over at WorldOfXC.com (and FIS’s ability to not wreck them, although they tried!) we have the sprint heat times from Saturday. Starting with the women’s semifinals: Semifinal 1 was markedly faster, no? It doesn’t appear that Kikkan suffered for it, but then the Düsseldorf course is unusually short for [...] 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:
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: