Just as I did yesterday, let’s take a closer look at the results form Saturday’s World Cup mass start race in La Clusaz, France, this time focusing on the North Americans. Â As I discussed yesterday, we’re going to use percent-back difference plots from mass start or pursuit races to evaluate each skier’s race, since the FIS points awarded in mass start races can be a bit misleading.
Starting off with the Americans, Morgan Arritola:
Both Arritola and Stephen seemed to have excellent races if you go by their place (18th, 19th) but pretty terrible races using FIS points. Â Clearly, the FIS points are misleading in this case. Â While the entire range of dots from Saturday’s race (blue) doesn’t seem markedly different than last season, what interests me is the median (red), which was almost 5% points better in that race than what Arritola typically managed last season (or ever, quite frankly). Â And if you think that’s a big jump compared to last season:
Granted, this is looking only at mass starts and pursuits, which happened to coincide with some truly horrible races for Liz Stephen last season. Â But Saturday’s race still looks about as good, or slightly better than what she was managing the previous two seasons.
Men’s post to follow later today…
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