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{ Author Archives }

Podium Development – Sprinting

As promised from last time, here we have the detailed development plots for sprinting. First the men: And the women:

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Development Patterns In Detail

As promised from last time, I’m going to show you the un-aggregated data from Tuesday’s plots. This means we’re going to have some big graphs, bigger than I typically think is useful, but no matter. I’ve plotted FIS points versus age for each of the male and female skiers with a podium result in a […]

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Development Questions

I happened to be thinking about visualizations of athlete development recently, and in the process cooked up the following graph: What I’ve done here is to take the podium finishers in major international events for the past five seasons and recorded each person’s age when they received their first (individual) WC/OWG/WSC start, when they scored […]

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Manuela Di Centa

A curious report surfaced a while back that included some doping allegations around Juha Mieto and Manuela Di Centa. I can’t say that I’d ever heard any rumors about either skier in the past. As with every other post I’ve done on a skier accused of doping, this look at their results data isn’t meant […]

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Scoring WC Points Is Far, Far Harder Today Than In 1983

This post is somewhat of a teaser trailer for the sorts of things we can do once we have a complete record of major international ski results stretching back to the 70’s. A natural and possibly controversial question is whether the World Cup field has become more or less competitive over time.  Intuitively, I think […]

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Sprint Performance By Length (Con’t)

Continuing on from last time, we’ll single out a handful of skiers who appear to do significantly better in shorter sprint courses. Same methodology as before led me to pluck out the following three skiers: In general, the effects in this direction tended to be weaker and less dramatic, even at the extreme ends of […]

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Sprint Course Length Effects

The notion of an athlete preferring distance races of a particular length is pretty familiar, but what about sprinting? The differences between a 0.8km and a 1.8km sprint course may not seem like much compared to the differences between a 15km and 30km race. But (while I’m not a physiology expert) it seems likely to […]

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