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{ Category Archives } Analysis

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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Points In Europe vs North America

If you hang around skiing in North America long enough you will eventually hear people talking about point differences between races in Europe and North America (or the US in particular). One of the most common forms of this is the complaint that penalties (and hence points) are artificially high in the US, compared to […]

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Jessie Diggins and Young Talent

Earlier this week I tweeted a little nugget I stumbled across: that Jessie Diggins now owns around half of all top 30 results for US skiers 21 years old or younger over the past two decades. In contrast, the most any single Norwegian contributes over the same time period is around 10% of all their […]

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Quantifying Differences In Average Speed Between Classic/Skating

I received an email recently from a reader who pointed out to me that Marit Bjørgen completed the 30k classic mass start in Oslo this season in 1:26:09.8, last year at World Championships Therese Johaug did the same course, mass start, skating in only 1:23:45.1, which is only a difference of about 2.8%. Surely, skating […]

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Some Notes On Marcus Hellner

Since I was pondering Marcus Hellner’s season just the other day, I thought I’d take a closer look at how his result tend to shift over the course of a season. He has struggled during the later parts of this season, but has that been true before in general? Here are his results in distance […]

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