As always, there’s lots of stuff I could focus on, but we can’t have everything. Â As is usually the case, the weekend was a bit of a mixed bag for the North Americans. Â Kris Freeman continued to look quite strong despite some bad luck with his poles. Â Alex Harvey and Devon Kershaw had much stronger weekends this time around. Â Kikkan Randall had more solid distance races, although her sprint race wasn’t stellar. Â And so on.
Let’s start out with the same style graph I used in my earlier post, only this time highlighting the North Americans:
While I haven’t labeled the athletes individually, it should be pretty clear who’s who. Â Harvey clearly was having a great weekend but couldn’t hold on in the skate race yesterday. Â Kershaw and Freeman did well despite pretty pedestrian sprint races. Â As for Randall, if she had had an ok (for her) sprint race, that could easily have bought her 20 seconds, and with a great sprint race (if we kept the distance results the same, which isn’t really realistic) she could have contested for a place in the top five.
I need to comment  a bit more on Stephen and Arritola, since I disagree somewhat with the characterization of their freestyle races in this FasterSkier recap.  As a commenter on that article correctly points out, much of the gains in overall place they made were the result of other skiers DNF/DNS-ing (at least half, or a bit more).  I’m sure this will spark some measure of debate, but I have to agree with the original commenter.
Let’s start with the graph above. Â We’re plotting seconds from the median skier after each stage, so in the case of Arritola, she lost time yesterday on the median woman, not just the leaders. Â Stephen held about even relative to the median woman. Â If we isolate just their skate performances yesterday in terms of FIS points compared to their other WC starts we get the following:
Of course, now we’re comparing them only to the winner on Sunday’s stage (Therese Johaug). Â Even then, it looks like Stephen had a decent race while Arritola had a pretty bad one. Â For an even closer look at the data, we can focus in on just the head-to-head matchups for each woman versus their competitors from Sunday and look at the difference in their respective percent back. Â First, Liz Stephen:
Keep in mind that unlike some of the other versions of this graph that I’ve made, this includes pursuits and mass starts, since yesterday’s race wasn’t an interval start race. Â Also, I nudged the dots for yesterday’s skate race over a bit (the blue) so they are more visible. Â As always, the red line indicates the median for all races in a particular season.
Once again, this looks like an ok race for Stephen, but nothing spectacular, though perhaps a modest improvement on her other races this season. Â As for Arritola:
This looks less good overall (above zero is bad, below zero is good), but again, not substantially different from Arritola’s races so far this season.
As always, I don’t mean to pick on these ladies. Â I just think it’s important to be clear about when people have raced well or not.
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