I received a request last week to look at sprinters who have had very good careers, but have never won a major race. I took a fairly simplistic route to this, and grabbed all the skiers who have never won a WC, OWG or WSC sprint event, and then simply calculated their career median result.
Obviously, some curation is necessary here, since you’re going to end up with lots of people who only did a handful of races. So what follows is sort of my subjective selection from among the people with very good median career results, but also with a healthy number of total starts. I tried to include a mix of men and women.
These aren’t in any particular order. All of these folks have a median career sprint result of 15th or better (i.e. at least half their sprint races are better than 15th), and as you can see from the graphs, they certainly weren’t (aren’t) slouches. But there’s always a bit of luck involved. And of course, many of these skiers have won other races, particularly team events. But I wasn’t expecting to see Pettersen here.
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