I’m going to run two quick posts looking in on some of the US’s top men and women in the development pipeline (all that really means is that I’ve mostly, but not completely, excluded some “obvious” US Ski Team members).
We can check in on how these folks are doing by using my cohort plots, which compare their FIS points vs. age to the FIS points vs age earned by skiers who went on to finish in the top ten in a WC/OWG/WSC event. That’s a fairly low bar of just one top ten finish, ever, since I want to emphasize that I’m trying to be as generous as possible here. The following two plots summarize a few of the top US women (click for full versions):
The blue lines are the median FIS points for each athlete, and the gray shaded regions show the equivalent range of values at that age across all athletes who went on to achieve a top ten result in a WC/WSC/OWG event. I think this mostly speaks for itself, but I wanted to draw attention to Joanne Reid. One aspect of plots like these is that it’s much easier to look like you’re “on the path” prior to age 22 or so, simply because the FIS point curve bends so steeply up when you go back that young. She’s one to watch, but the next two years, where the FIS point curve start to flatten out, will be the first real test to see if she can keep pace.
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