FasterSkier’s piece on Belarus over the weekend naturally got me thinking about their performances. As they note in that article, they’ve had some wild times, including the famous “lucky” silver medal by Leanid Karneyenka in 2007 thanks to an early start position and a freak snowstorm, and their mishap in the team sprint relay in […]
Tagged alexander lasutkin, belarus, leanid karneyenka, michail semenov, season preview, sergei dolidovich, World CupIn the same vein as my previous post following up on Spain’s WC prospects, the FasterSkier series next looked at Lithuania. I’m sometimes curious why some of the former Soviet republics aren’t better represented in cross country skiing. I imagine many of them have struggled economically since the breakup of the USSR and national sports […]
Tagged irina terentjeva, lithuania, ricardas panavas, season preview, vida venzene, World CupI love the annual series FasterSkier does profiling each nation that scored nation’s cup points in the days before the World Cup begins. Usually by the time they reach Norway and Russia, I’m actually less interested, but the first week or so is a fun ride through nations with tiny, little known programs. First up […]
Tagged johann muehlegg, laura orgue, season preview, spain, World CupI’ll be the first to admit that sprinting doesn’t get as much love here at Statistical Skier. Â To be honest, that’s probably my subconscious at work, as I have a stronger connection to distance events I suppose. Â But it’s not terribly fair, so here is some World Cup sprint qualification analysis for all you sprint […]
Tagged Analysis, bootstrapping, pace, qualification, R, SprintContinuing on from last time, we take a look at male long distance specialists. Recall I’m being all “fancy” here and using a fairly sophisticated modeling technique to identify skiers who tended to have better major international results at longer distances. If you’re familiar with any statistics, you can think of it as an extension […]
Tagged Distance, men, World CupIn alpine racing, that is! Fooled you, didn’t I? Like I said before, I’m not going to make a habit of posting about alpine racing, but since the season opener went fairly well for the US, I thought I might as well. So here are two race snapshot graphs, similar to those I’ve been making […]
Tagged alpine, World CupA commenter noted that it was interesting that Petra Majdic showed up as being “statistically significantly” better at longer distance races (as opposed to sprint races), although just barely. It turns out this is a good example of the statistical concept of leverage. Check out the following graph that compares skiers at each end of […]
Tagged distance specialists, petra majdic, therese johaug