Statistical Skier

Continuing on from yesterday as promised, we have two rather large graphs showing the head-to-head results of some top US skiers on the domestic scene.  These graphs are, well, big and to be honest I’m not particularly proud of them.  I’ve been struggling with how to display the head-to-head results from a large number of pairs of skiers in an appealing way and quite frankly I haven’t had much luck.  This is the least bad option I’ve found so far.  Even so, it clearly won’t work for a truly large number of skiers.

In any case, here they are:

These may be a bit confusing at first, so let me explain.  You should read these by focusing on rows of panels.  For example, in the men’s graph we have a row of panels for Lars Flora.  Each of these panels displays his results versus the person in that column using the difference in percent back.  Red dots mean the person on the row won, blue means the person on the row lost to the person on the column.  So the large number of red dots in the Lars Flora row is good (for Flora).

It’s not the best, but you can at least scan along a row and get a sense for how often someone is winning versus a particular person.