As promised from last time, a quick look at some similar data broken down by race length. I’ve filtered out the occasional “strange” race length, to focus on just the standard 5, 10, 15, 30 and 50 kilometer distances. The metric is the same: the median number of skiers within a fixed percent of the […]
Tagged competitiveness, Distance, field strength, World CupI received an email recently asking about field strength for the men’s and women’s WC fields, particularly as it applies to mass start races. Lately we’ve seen the men’s field engage in a fair bit of pack skiing, whereas the women’s field strings out more quickly. First, I want to dispatch with a common bit […]
Tagged charlotte kalla, competitiveness, field strength, justyna kowalczyk, marit bjoergen, men vs women, therese johaug, World CupOn various occasions I have looked at FIS point race penalties, in a very general, roundabout way.  Most recently, I looked at whether the FIS points you get in a non-World Cup race accurately reflect what you would have scored if you had raced in a World Cup race. The answer appeared to be: kind of.  At […]
Tagged fis points, penalty, prediction, World CupThe title of this post has dramatically over-promised on the actual content. Â Sorry. I’ve talked a little before about race penalties. Â Since race penalties are specifically intended to adjust for the strength of the field, I thought it would interesting to think up some way to see how well they do that. Everything having to […]
Tagged Analysis, opa cup, scandinavian cup, World CupConventional wisdom (and probably a fair bit of physiology research) holds that going fast over short distances is a skill we tend to lose as we age. Â Are fast World Cup sprinters younger than fast distance skiers? Let’s look at the age distributions of top thirty racers in sprinting and distance races since the 2003-2004 […]
Tagged Age, Distance, SprintThe USST has expanded somewhat, adding several younger skiers. Acknowledging that FIS points are only a small piece of performance assessment, it has interested me that at various times USST staff have mentioned comparing skiers’ FIS points to medalists, or some other group of top skiers. So here are two graphs showing the younger US […]
Tagged cohort, fis points, men, performance, usst, women, youngIn a previous post I raised the question of whether biathletes might be more likely to shoot clean (i.e. hit all five targets) if they have just shot clean at their most recent trip through the shooting range. I left off with some numbers that suggested this was the case, but they were aggregated over […]
Tagged Analysis, biathlon, clutch, probability, shooting, World Cup