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Most Improved: Men’s Sprint

Now we’ll finish up this series with the sprinters, starting with the most improved men. The methodology is simpler here, as we really only need to use finishing place as a metric (although we will still scale improvements so that, say, improving from 40th to 20th isn’t seen as a dramatically larger improvement than from […]

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How Continental Cup Winners Fare On The World Cup

I got an interesting question from a reader the other day that I though I’d follow up on: As you know, the winners of all the continental cups gets to start the World Cup season. There are also intermediate rankings during the season that allows the current continental cup leaders to join the WC’s. My […]

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Most Un-Improved: Women’s Distance

Last in the sequence of related posts covering distance events, the most un-improved women from this season: As always, you can click through for a slightly larger version. The Slovakian Prochazkova takes the cake here with what looks like a small set of somewhat mediocre results after two fairly strong seasons. The small number of […]

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Most Un-Improved: Men’s Distance

These are definitely less pleasant posts to write, but part of any season assessment should include what went wrong as well as what went right. Once again, you can refer to my initial post in this series for an explanation of the general methodology. That said, here’s the twelve men who took the biggest slide […]

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Most Improved: Women’s Distance

Moving on from last time to the most improved in women’s distance events…you can read that post for an explanation of the metrics I’m using, and the usual round of caveats. Here’s the top twelve: As before, you can click through for a slightly larger version. By these measures, Sweden’s Sofia Bleckur comes out on […]

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Most Improved: Men’s Distance

Let’s start wrapping up the 2011-2012 World Cup season, shall we? First, we’ll look at skiers who made the largest jumps, either up or down, compared to last year, beginning with the men’s distance events. As always, you get somewhat different lists of skiers as the “most improved” depending on what metric you use. My […]

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Dario Cologna’s Quietly Dominant Season

Cologna won the World Cup overall, but I always feel like he’s sort of in the background compared to other top skiing personalities. Doing well in the World Cup overall rewards not just speed, but showing up at tons of races and skiing fast. For instance, let’s check out his won/loss record versus the next […]

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