German biathlete Kati Wilhelm (sporting some delightful red hair, I might add) is the last (finally!) in my list of retiring athletes to cover. Â That Wikipedia link tells me that she was actually dubbed “Little Red Riding Hood” by the German press due to both her hair and a red hat she wore for all races.
Wilhelm is an exceptionally accomplished biathlete: I found 69 podium finishes in major events (World Cup, Olympics or World Championships), which included 4 individual Olympic medals and 5 more from World Championships. Â And of course that’s on top of numerous medal winning German relay teams.
Let’s take a look at her results:
Another classic looking skiing career here: several years of steady improvement, a peak, and then a few years of decline right before retirement. Â Two things stand out to me in these data. Â First, 2003-2004 stands out as kind of an off year. Â Second, look at that string of lots of very fast races between 2005-2006 and 2008-2009! Â Wilhelm appears to have been extremely consistently near the top at big races.
Next, the same data but broken down by race type:
I guess I’d say that the only salient feature here is that Wilhelm might not have preferred the 15km distance event.
As far as shooting is concerned, I have Wilhelm shooting 82.4% overall, 80.5% prone and 84.3% standing over her entire career. Â Interestingly, she seems to have shot considerably better standing than prone. Â How did this stack up against her peers?
Wilhelm’s shooting improved dramatically over time:
Recall that the dashed lines represent the shooting performance of top ten finishers for each season. Â Notice that the green line (standing) is nearly always above the red line (prone), which isn’t typical.
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