I was reading FIS’s interview with Japan’s Masako Ishida with interest, because I’ve really been rooting for her to pull off some strong results. In the interview, she mentions that some of her goals for next season include increasing her presence in the top 5, and in particular making the jump up to some podium […]
Tagged Analysis, classic, japan, masako ishida, World CupKikkan Randall, the reigning women’s World Cup sprint champion, obviously had a pretty darn good season last year. How does it stack up against some of the best sprint seasons put together since 2005-2006? The first thing that stood out to me is that if you rank the best women’s sprint seasons, Randall participated in […]
Tagged kikkan randall, Sprint, World CupBy request, we’re looking at how the length of World Cup sprints has changed over time. Specifically, since the length in time of the effort is really more meaningful than the length of the course in terms of distance, that’s what we’ll consider. So the following graph shows the average of the top five qualification […]
Tagged Sprint, times, trends, World CupSince I’m starting to accumulate a reasonable collection of heat times from World Cup sprint races, I thought it might be interesting to compare general trends between the few seasons I have data on. The biggest trends that you can typically see are the differences in tactics between the men and women. Generally what I’ve […]
Tagged heat times, Sprint, World CupTravel is a big issue for cross country skiers, particularly those of us living in North America. Â Flying back and forth to Europe can be both time consuming and exhausting for athletes. Â Obviously, this can have some serious effects on performance. Â Of course, this works both ways. Â Presumably it’s difficult for Europeans to travel to […]
Tagged europe, fis points, north america, travelIn a post last week I talked about how I felt that a single early season result wasn’t necessarily a great predictor of how someone will tend to ski (on average) during the rest of the season. I feel like most people would accept that this is, in principle, generally true. Just because you pop […]
Tagged fis points, juniors, qualification, WJCFollowing up from last time, we’re still discussing the recent USSA rule changes for qualifying for WJC/U23s. Now, it’s not like USSA has a ton of options here, but I would like to point out a few difficulties with pre-qualifying an athlete using only a single result. Being a stats guy, I always think about […]
Tagged criteria, development, qualification, ussa, WJC, WJC/U23