Hopefully there won’t be any more posts like this for a long while. Fredrik Karlsson died recently, I guess in a snowmobile accident. I didn’t know much about him, but I guess he was on Sweden’s development team. As you might expect for someone on Sweden’s development team, he hadn’t quite made a huge splash in World Cup races, having never cracked the top 30 in a distance race, and he’d only done one WC sprint race.
But if you look at his results with FIS points, you can clearly see that while he was relatively old (~27) he had not “stalled out” in terms of improvement:
No major jumps in performance, just a very steady, consistent improvement. By last season, his median FIS point result in distance races was good enough to be one of the top 15 Swedish men:
| Name | YOB | Median FIS Point | Total Races |
| HELLNER Marcus | 1985 | 2.290 | 24 |
| OLSSON Johan | 1980 | 3.272 | 12 |
| RICKARDSSON Daniel | 1982 | 9.472 | 24 |
| SOEDERGREN Anders | 1977 | 11.392 | 17 |
| JOHNSSON Jimmi | 1985 | 17.912 | 7 |
| AHRLIN Jerry | 1978 | 18.116 | 7 |
| FREDRIKSSON Mathias | 1973 | 20.782 | 13 |
| ERIKSSON Jens | 1987 | 20.932 | 15 |
| NELSON Lars | 1985 | 22.024 | 25 |
| HALFVARSSON Calle | 1989 | 24.430 | 12 |
| JONSSON Fredrik | 1990 | 25.884 | 21 |
| ANDREASSON Rikard | 1979 | 26.552 | 10 |
| BRINK Joergen | 1974 | 27.410 | 10 |
| KARLSSON Fredrik | 1985 | 30.100 | 15 |
| OTTOSSON Markus | 1986 | 34.124 | 16 |
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